The elusive Seattle summer begins to warm the days, inevitably, expectedly. The world laughs in flowers – all the sidewalks and banks are full of lush, red and pink tulips, with the fluttering honey bougainvillea vines that creep over whitewashed walls, there are clutches of golden magnolia, of violets and hydrangeas so bright they look painted. These are what I like to call ‘room temperature days’, when the weather is so perfect you can feel the gentle breeze against your skin, neither too hot nor too cold. The sun smiles through the big French windows, inviting us outside, to stir out of our beds, to play tennis in the backyard, to go biking through the emerald parks, and drink our tea iced.
They call us clients, and I dislike this. They should call us what we really are – mental patients, prisoners, burdens, criminals.
Around the house, we lay in various positions, like cats, yawning in the random heatwave. The Clinic has a complicated layout. Light blue halls stretch out in every direction, with no rhyme or reason, a tangled mess of architecture. Some lead to common areas, to the nurses’ station, to the bay of bedrooms, to little reading nooks, to the large white dining table that took the center of the house. Patients are draped lazily over the cushy, navy blue armchairs and sofas, on various devices, phones, tablets, computers, and of course the TV that was blaring as loudly as usual. There’s no AC in our rooms, so almost everyone has crawled out of the heated nest of our beds. The doors around the common areas are open, letting in splashes of sunshine on the maple wood floors. Everyone is complaining, yawning, dozing off, grumbling, like alligators sharing a pond. I like it when we’re all out here. It’s nice to see people in the living rooms that would otherwise be empty and desolate. It’s too hot to fight about the TV, so Alec, who sits in the same armchair all day every day, so much so that it looks like he grew there, has control of the remote, as usual. His taste in movies isn’t bad, but a bit too gory and loud for my liking.
Like many things, including when we can have coffee, get meds, do laundry, or go to sleep, are all decided by some mysterious entity called the Administration. Called Admin for short, like ‘we can’t give you pancakes for breakfast anymore, Admin said so’, or ‘Admin said you can’t look at YouTube on the house computers’. I feel bad for the people in the house who don’t have computers, or even phones. I didn’t even know there existed adult humans out there without phones, no matter how shitty it was. I had seen homeless people in India with phones, just lying on a blanket, tapping away on some jailbroken Android. This was especially cruel because I wasn’t allowed to have one then. I told my parents, ‘I have less technology than A HOMELESS PERSON’. When I moved back to America in 11th grade, I was given a tiny iPhone 5, which I loved with all my heart, way after new iPhones kept coming out. I remember there was a time, during pujas in India, when my aunt and uncle who live in Chicago came to visit, and one of them had the iPhone 5 and I looked at it in amazement, what a beautiful piece of technology– so thin but heavy at the same time, it’s shaped like it’s meant to fit in your hand. It was my first time seeing a touchscreen phone. We were still living in the world of flip phones and the BlackBerrys with the keyboard buttons.
Unfortunately, I’m making headway in therapy.
I must be, because this is the longest I’ve gone without being hospitalized – an impressive feat given my frequent flyer status at psych wards across the country. I’ve started gaining weight, taking on shape, no longer a sickly creature with no curves. I’ve been mandated to eat three meals a day, no matter how much I protested and kicked. The staff eyes my plates and jots down notes for my therapist to review. After each meal, I’m made to sit in the nursing station with them for an hour so I can’t go to the bathroom, despite never having made myself puke after a meal. Losing skinny privilege sucked, sucked real bad, but I had to comply if I didn’t want to be shipped off to an eating disorders ward.
As the weather turns colder and rainier, my medications finally settle into the raw edge of my consciousness. Having been on almost every antipsychotic out there, and none of them making any real difference in symptoms, the doctor finally lands on Clozaril. There’s a reason it took almost ten years to get here. Clozaril is a beastly drug – it belongs in the atypical antipsychotics class and comes with such a long list of horrendous side effects that it’s usually a last-resort treatment. It destroys the immune system, slows down the thyroid, fucks up the bowel, induces seizures, causes muscle spasms, wrecks your cardiovascular health, the list goes on. To be prescribed Clozaril, the doctor has to take blood draws every week, along with vital signs, neurological exams, and urine samples.
I hate it, but it’s working. It feels like I’ve finally emerged after being underwater for years. The voices and creeping phantoms recede, leaving behind claw marks on my flesh. The cocktail of meds I take, the handfuls of colorful pills, they take me by the back of my neck and keep me pinned in this reality. The fog that comes with antipsychotics is just something I have to get used to, there’s nothing really to be done. It’s better than the psych ward, I have to tell myself, over and over again.
There are two kinds of mentally ill people in this world. Those who find refuge in the psych ward, and those who hate it with every molecule of their being. I belong to the second camp. It might have something to do with the type of mental illness. Some people say the hospital gives them structure, takes care of them when everything is too overwhelming, that safety is paramount. For us psychotics, being locked up with our demons and visions and screams is like not being allowed to scratch an itch that is driving you insane. It’s just you and the voices. If I can’t carry out the commands being transmitted to me, the punishment is world-ending. I bang my head against the padded walls, shriek and cry, tackle nurses to grab their keys, overturn trashcans, climb up over the nursing station partition, and fling my tomatoes at the shadows.
Unfortunately, the depression that had set in since being laid off from my dream job in Manhattan is not chemically treatable, and really rears its head as the psychosis recedes. It snakes itself around my throat, choking me, pinning me down on the bed, exhaustion setting into the very marrow of my bones. I spend most of the day in bed, sometimes stirring out to drink coffee, scrolling endlessly on my phone, watching the sun rise and set in red splendor, unable to feel its warmth. I’m too weary to even burn myself with my lighter anymore, and my therapist, mistakenly, takes this as a win. I don’t tell her I’ve started taking copious amounts of cough medicine to battle the depression that feels like it’s eating away at my very soul. And being in the suburbs, away from the city life certainly doesn’t help. The nausea of existence hangs around my room in a sickening fog, showing itself in the dark, bleeding, charcoal drawings I scribble on the backs of the pages of homework they hand out.
I fling myself on my therapist’s couch in despair, ignoring her reassurances that career isn’t everything. Career is EVERYTHING, I scream at her. My feeble attempts at picking up graphic design work here and there isn’t enough. I need the office, I need ambition to feel sane. I refuse to rot my life away on the couch in front of a TV like everyone around me. It’s unacceptable. My parents have been badgering me to further my English degree to get a PhD. I can’t think of anything I want less. But I do want off the sinking ship that is the creative field, in light of AI destroying everything in its path. I hate the technocrats with all my being, only taking solace in knowing that they’ll end up in the same place as all tyrants – in the ash heap of history.
There’s no point in working till I get the schizophrenia under control, so I do the only reasonable thing left to do: go back to school. I revive my adolescent dream of being an economist and start up school at MIT’s Economics master’s program. It’s online, but it gives my days meaning, structure, a safe way to tread water till I’m ready to jump back out into the world. The work is hard, fiercely, terribly hard. I discover that MIT lives up to its reputation. I spend my days writing code, taking lecture notes, solving multivariable calculus problems, running regression analyses, cleaning data sets, and dissecting public policy implications through the various labs MIT runs around the world. It’s honest, grueling work.
It’s enough. For now.
Schizoposting 
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