A Narrow Bridge

Awakened by an unknown sound, I lie in bed, too frightened to open my eyes. Is it now or is it then? Which bed is this and what year? The room is bright with light—this I know, even through closed eyes—but why? Am I back on 7E or in restraints? No. I can move; there is no soreness, there is no pain. Still, I can't seem to remember what brought me here or why the staff left the lights locked on. What did I do? What moment preceded this? Maybe I was simply afraid to sleep in all that dark. Perhaps I just asked Ellen... Ellen, I said, Ellen, would you please leave on the light? When I open my eyes, I see that I'm in my bedroom, at home. There are no screens, no tiles, no fluorescent lights. Everything is soft in this room—or else it's sharp. Paintings framed behind glass hang from the walls. Pens, scissors, and safety pins sit in my top desk drawer. An extra set of car keys is in the drawer by my bed. I am here, at home, comfortable. I was the one who left the lights on. I was the one. Because from time to time, nighttime reverts to the way it was, then. Who in my life today would understand if I told them that sometimes I miss the hard cubicle which was my room more than four decades ago? How can I explain the goodness of the thin-mattressed bed with its unyielding metal frame, or even the worn leather cuffs of restraints that held me safe? How do I explain that sometimes it feels good to know that panic and rage can do no harm? Today my life is rich in almost every good thing. Still, on those rare occasions when I cut across the university campus to get to the other side of town, a painful mix of jealousy and sadness wells up inside. The bulk of my education took place in an institution of a different sort. When I first entered college. I loved my classes, and I loved the freedom. It was difficult to imagine returning home for the summer. The summer itself was worse than I expected. I found myself engaged in terrible family fights over little things and big. This wasn’t so atypical but for some reason, that summer, they shook me to the core. A few weeks into sophomore year, at the age of eighteen, I left school abruptly in a state of terror and confusion. I did not expect to return. Frankly, I expected nothing at all. The problem wasn’t just that one summer. It would be closer to the truth to say that for a long time, nothing had been right. Things had become less and less right by the year. There were signs of course: the ever more frequent 'fading out,' the cuts to the fingers, the arms, and the hidden places; the collection of pills to be used at some future date; and the loss—in slow increments—of any ability to believe in the future. Yet somehow, my first year at college had led me to believe that those troubles were over. It had been a time of ease and challenge, gloriously free of disturbing thoughts. I made friends easily and did well in my classes. I laughed a lot, got involved in politics, and did many of the same weird things my new friends did. After the summer, everything changed. When I returned to school, my ability to think, to feel, to hope, were all extinguished. I couldn't eat or sleep or sit through an entire class. I spent my evenings running from one place to the next. When I pretended to read, nothing made sense. I brought my pills back to school with me; they were my insurance against having to live an unbearable life. I did try to signal for help: requests made to the necessary adults, my mother, grandmother, the dean, my academic advisor, and the weekly visits with a kindly but distant doctor. I thought it was clear that I was in crisis, but either no one knew what to do, or they thought it would pass. And then I gave up. Late one night, I poured the hundreds of pills onto my bed and prepared to take them. Frightened, I poured them back into their wrinkled brown paper bag and walked over to the home of a psychology professor whom I trusted on account of his blue jeans and long ponytail. I handed him the bag and sat down in his living room. I remember very little about that night except it was long, and listening to a record of Bob Dylan singing over and over again, "It's a hard, hard, hard, hard—it's a hard rain's a'gonna fall..." In the morning, the psychology professor drove me over to my psychiatrist's office. The doctor, standing against his door, told me I could voluntarily accompany him to the university's medical center or he'd be forced to have me committed to the state hospital. We then drove to the medical center where they emptied my purse, took away everything sharp, and put me on tranquillizers. A few days later, my mother came and got me. If we spoke about the preceding events, I don't remember. Nor do I recall the flight back, or the days spent waiting for a bed in the hospital to open. I met twice with the man who would be my doctor for the next seven years. I didn't like him at all. Mostly, I remember the bone cracking rush of dread feelings, periodically hushed by stronger and stronger doses of medication. By the end of the week, I was a patient in the hospital where, off and on, I'd spend the next four years of my life.