‘Explore the gulf between the stupefying reality of things that happen, at the moment they happen, and, years later, the strange unreality in which the things that happened are enveloped.’ Annie Ernaux, A Girl’s Story, p. 143
‘I’ve got to tell you I often talk as if you were both me and you and a third person, another person too. I do this to subsume my desire to tell everything in confusion but as if it were public.’
Bernadette Mayer, 'The Desires of Mothers to Please Others' in Letters, p. 26
‘You sounded so vulnerable because you said things so transparently, like a letter to everyone.’
Ibid., p. 122
‘I can’t imagine when we get older, very much older I’d hope, and we will be writing to each other without knowing if the other will live long enough to receive the letter in the mail’
Ibid., p. 92
'The root of ‘thoughts’ (channelled through ‘thinking’) is emotional experience – thoughts that come as emotions (feeling states) which themselves contain knowledge about the world (and the suffering the world imposes)...'
Gail Lewis, ‘Whose Movement is it anyway?’ https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/whose-movement-is-it-anyway
‘Think the biggest obstacle when we were trying everything we could to avoid them sectioning last year was the fact that language had completely broken down – seems they decide to section when they can't hold a back and forth with the person they're talking to, because there’s no way of knowing whether anything is being comprehended. Ofc this rationale of needing to evidence comprehension, insight, etc. as the (necessary legal/supposedly neutral) system for determining when to section is flawed and feels awful in the moment – especially because I felt we were able to communicate with each other throughout, whether verbally or through some other means. I just explain it here to make sense of how they reacted last time, and to see how else we could navigate if we ever needed to again.’
KB
*
Everything was so opaque, one thing opening up only when you reach crisis point or beyond. The Listening Place offered when already suicidal, ceramics offered for free for rehabilitation for a set period of time, now I want to go back but I’d have to pay. No one knew when I’d be getting out of hospital, he just got a call one day to say she’ll be going home tomorrow probably. There was someone in my room, a Canadian with post-partum depression made me so angry, her questioning invasive, another woman always wearing dark glasses always on the phone, told me bisexuals always have mental health problems take Kate Middleton for example. And the Polish woman who I only saw at mealtimes and started sitting opposite, she’d stayed thin, knew that hospital makes you put on weight and took the soup where I took the meal with rice and peas, gave my gravity blanket away then missed it but wouldn’t take it back, had already proposed to the same girl, who I thought was maybe anorexic and who I told I could take with me to Venice. I wasn’t going to Venice. I had also been planning to fly to New York, got as far as emailing three people and making plans to stay but never making the booking, received a call from Texas I think it was and suddenly felt scared – who had my number there? Obi took photos of us the second time I proposed and we exchanged paper rings. I stayed high a long time, sedated all the while by diazepam, lithium, olanzapine. Now I think they put me on olanzapine because it doesn’t interact the way aripiprazole does with diazepam. Was it when the dose was wrong that I lay down on the floor and saw dancers with twirling skirts on the ceiling. Tried to cut my wrist with a plastic knife by drawing a cross through my circular tattoo. I had thought the pills they gave me at Homerton Hospital were suicide pills. Someone was going to commit suicide I was convinced. I was also convinced that the police were going to come to the door – I was scared at any sound of housemates coming or going, started sleeping downstairs on the living room floor on a pile of blankets, felt safer down there with fewer books with spines to make associations between.
Words, memories, fantasies, fears, were vastly more readily available and ripe for recombination, patterning, attempted relation. I thought they’d be screening Lulu Sanchez’s Bathroom Sluts (1991) at the Castle Cinema. I thought there was someone tied to the roof of MayDay Rooms, and that there was a bomb plot.
Maisi I met sat crouched in the smoking area – I took up vaping Dinner Lady hospital issue brown sticks because deep breaths help to calm you down. Also bought something kiwi flavoured when I was finally allowed out for an hour or so with company. I met with Maisi when we were both out of hospital, thought I might see Imogen too who constantly made Spotify playlists from all the songs that came to our minds and that we danced to. DJ Sally was the name we gave to one of the staff members who would put on a lot of Lauryn Hill. Carolina was a law student. She had long red hair, Italian, and would wear her hospital nightgown showing her butt out the back, and a pair of Doc Martens for marching through the dining area. She barely ate. She wrote notes on paper about people thinking they were God, and about other patients wanting to have sex with her.
Before my admission, before sectioning, I kept saying, ‘consensus reality?’ But things still got super confusing. And when I woke up I literally didn’t know if I was dead or alive, where I was. I’d been taken in the night to Mile End hospital, in a security van with a cage in front of me, two hench mean men had been standing ready at the door, as if I were a danger. Why had we had to wait in that tiny room until the small hours? It was literally starting to drive the other two mad, seem to remember knocks at the door and expecting friends, seem to remember distrusting the rainbow lanyards, seem to remember trying to open the office doors, and being given numbered options to choose from but them not making sense, or feeling them as an attempt being made to catch me out.
Music therapy. We each took turns and Susan was there, who would always carry a bible which I started reading too, interested in everything. She asked me how my brother was and I said he’s not my brother he’s my boyfriend. Anyway music therapy also involved coloured ribbons and taking turns, stepping into the centre of a circle, stepping back, being respectful, moving felt good. There were other people there for political reasons, one of whom got out quickly, I think she’d been at a protest. We did some drawings at the table together and she didn’t want hers so I asked if I could keep it. Britney was always in so much pain, always wearing hospital issue pyjamas, always asking for different meds than she was allowed, getting angry at mealtimes. I shrunk my jeans in the dryer but also put on weight enough that these largest trousers no longer fit. I’m starting to care less.
I forget the cockney with Irish heritage woman’s name, grey hair in a bowl cut, a brilliant dancer, so into her moves, getting angry in a flash and given meds to calm that down.* She was always talking about her family, seemed like some of them were to blame for her ending up there, and her grandson looked just like her, the same eyes. Another woman was homeless, and the most racist things would come out of her mouth. I got angry at her and her anger fired back, she started insulting me as well whereas Kulsuma taught me about Allah and about Kun Faya Kun, shared her blackseed oil which she said would be good for Britney’s forehead scar. I initially thought the men downstairs playing football were in some way spying on me. I’d make sounds from my window to them, so they’d know I was watching them too. I thought Glenn in the office was a cop, thin Tottenham Hotspur supporter who sometimes gave out meds although he wasn’t supposed to. I thought Richard was a cop too and called him Under Armour after his t-shirt. He would give me his Evening Standard crossword to finish in the morning, I was often the first one up always wanting breakfast but there was so little of that on offer, instant coffee and untoasted bread. I started asking for my room to be locked behind me, also moved rooms several times, three times at least. I started going to the corridor toilet facing forwards, and was grateful for the rooms I got with an ensuite shower and toilet too, had to take care not to flood them. I wasn’t allowed the eczema cream I had been prescribed by my doctor before – they doled out tiny paper pots of doublebase or similar instead. I showered often for something to do, maybe twice a day, remembered being at the Priory and not being allowed to shut my bedroom door, on a one-to-one they didn’t have the staff on Roman Ward for.
On waking up the first morning I tore up a newspaper and arranged it into an arrow trying to make a pathway out. And poured coffee into the bedroom sink which blocked it and then it looked like a face because the taps are two big circles above the gaping mouth of the basin. A nurse named Nicola was annoyed and got a plunger, took ages pumping up and down to little avail, loads of hair in the sink I think. I’d be annoyed too, they were all overworked I think. I spoke in French to the staff who could parce que ça fait ralentir mes pensées.
In an email I’m embarrassed about: ‘it must be International Surrealism season’.
Diffused and no arrest – update from Clapton Square.
I get tattoos (friendship, time and revolution; say no to fear; distrust feelings of transcendence), I like the pressurised burn, book acupuncture in the hope it’ll help me sleep.
Sometimes you cannot go any further
Fields of dandelions, puddles metres wide
Helicopter contains hell and cops, he said. There’s little you can do about an aural hallucination that hovers up above. But make it land.
There was never enough distance
between times of day and days
and weeks and weeks
and months and months and years
My hands looked red before me
Impossibility choked because what was there to do now
How to know which parts of lives can go unlived
and which
will draw a knot
around the neck
‘Don’t break down, break out’ was the title of a symposium to which we contributed a video performance that made most of the collective unhappy, or is that too strong, dissatisfied
How many breakdowns will it take to make the message
Clear as water, clear as soup
Is this denial and if not why the tears
ripping words on which the image was based
Music downstairs why can’t I listen to music anymore
Can I imagine a self outside of this?
Do you have an idea of why it happened? she asked
Spat at in the face, newly fascinating wrist, outdoor sex
Unadorned I said, like a diary — the book that brought the topic up again
was also written, said a friend, like a case
*I’ve since remembered her name was Jack.
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