We spent about a month being together but not really being together. I would sleep with him whenever he wanted; partly because I craved closeness and partly because I thought it would make him love me (sidenote: having sex with a guy who doesn’t love you will not make him love you). The awful thing about the sex during that month was that he refused to kiss me. It seemed like his way of reminding me that he hadn’t ‘decided’ yet. Like a sexual disclaimer: you can’t get mad at me for sleeping with you because I made it clear with the no-kissing thing that it was just sex.
He called me, really drunk one night at 3am, and told me that he missed me and just wanted to be with me. He came to my house, said he was an idiot for ever letting me go, and then passed out on my bed. I spent the night physically holding his arms around me, nuzzling my head into his drunken, snoring face. Something in me knew that in the morning he would take it back, and I just wanted to be held before it was over, even if I had to hold his arms there myself. In the morning, he took it back.
A few weeks later he admitted that he’d been seeing a girl from work, and now she was leaving her boyfriend so they could be together. Oh, and he’d also finally decided that he definitely wasn’t in love with me. I let out a scream of pain down the phone that shocked even me. I’d had no idea my body could make a sound like that. He told me it was unfair of me to be angry, since technically he had broken up with me over a month ago. And technically that was true. But it was a shitty technicality. A technicality that I knew was going to come back and haunt me every time I remembered he had been willing to put his dick in me, but refused to kiss me.
I was alone again, and it was my fault. Luka had been selfish, definitely, but I had also pushed him away with my craziness and panic attacks and trust issues and cutting and suicidal thoughts and crying and memories.
I couldn’t imagine ever finding one person in my life who wouldn’t leave. All I wanted was to swallow every pill I could find and die, which had become my usual go-to plan at that point. But I decided to try something different that day. I knew I wanted to die because I wanted the pain to stop, so maybe if I got the pain to stop, I wouldn’t have to die. I sat on my bed, a pile of pills on the doona in front of me, and instead of picking them up and swallowing them, I called my sister and told her I was suicidal. I told her I needed help. I told her that I was thinking about death and I wanted it to stop, and I was worried that if it didn’t stop soon I would try it again.
She came and picked me up. I was in my pyjamas and could barely move. I was panicking and hysterical. She took me to the emergency room, where we waited for hours. A fairly exasperated nurse assessed me.
‘So, what’s the problem?’
I could hardly speak. ‘Um, I’m feeling really suicidal, and I’m worried about what I’ll do.’
‘What was that? Can you speak up?’ she snapped, getting distracted by something going on in another room.
‘I’m, um, suicidal.’
‘But you haven’t attempted?’
I didn’t quite know how to answer that question. This was getting too hard. All I wanted to do was go home and swallow a bunch of pills and go to sleep forever. ‘Well, I have before, but not today.’
‘So you didn’t feel bad enough this time that you decided to go through with it today?’
‘Well, no, I did. It’s just, I’m worried about what I’ll do, so I thought this time I’d try to reach out before I did anything.’
‘Right.’ She looked bored. ‘Have you made specific plans, have you thought about exactly how you’d do it?’
I hate that question. Every time you admit to a medical professional that you’re depressed or suicidal, they ask you if you’ve made ‘specific plans’. Like it’s a dinner reservation and they want to know if you’re serious about turning up. I think the idea is that if you haven’t made specific plans, you’re not really going to go through with it. Which is bullshit. Let me tell you something: any person who feels suicidal enough that they go and talk to someone about it has made specific fucking plans. People reach out because they’re told time and time again that that’s what they should do. Then they get asked about ‘specifics’ in a way that always seems accusatory. Like if you had a plan, you would have just gone through with it and you wouldn’t be here clogging up the ER.
‘Yes,’ I mumbled.
‘What?’ she said again. ‘Speak up.’
I could barely get my voice above a whimper. Also, it’s humiliating to have to tell someone who looks like they’re itching to go to lunch some of the most private thoughts you’ve ever had.
‘Um, pills. I was going to take pills.’
‘What pills?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said, tears welling in my eyes. ‘Just whatever I could find.’
She was writing on my chart and not looking at me. She told me they were going to give me a letter to give to my psychiatrist, and send me home with some Valium. I started to panic.
‘Wait, what? No. I need help. I need to stay here.’
‘I think you just need a little something to calm you down, and as long as there’s someone with you, there’s no reason you can’t go home. We’ll have someone from mental health services call you in a few days to see how you’re doing.’
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Finally, for the first time ever, I had done what I was supposed to do – instead of taking the pills, I had reached out to someone who took me to the hospital. And now the hospital was sending me home. With more pills.
I mustered every bit of strength I had in my chaotic brain. ‘No,’ I said, as assertively as I could manage, considering I was wearing pyjamas at lunchtime. ‘If you send me home, I will kill myself. I need to stay here.’
She sighed. ‘Are you threatening to kill yourself unless we admit you?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’m afraid of what I’ll do if I go home.’
‘You’re afraid, or you’ll actually do it?’
I couldn’t believe I was playing this game of verbal chicken with someone I desperately needed help from.
‘I’ll actually do it,’ I said.
‘Fine,’ she said before getting up and walking out of the room.
About an hour later, I was admitted into an emergency mental-health bed for an overnight stay. The next day, I was discharged. They didn’t think I needed to be moved to the longterm facility because I ‘hadn’t actually attempted’.
I got in a taxi, went home, found every pill in the house and took them all. These weren’t just headache tablets. This was everything. Everything in my flatmate’s room. Everything in my room. Everything in the bathroom. Everything in the kitchen. My head felt like it was on fire. Then, nothing.
I woke up in the emergency room, tubes coming out of a million different places and my two best friends standing over me. ‘Hey, crazy lady,’ Tonz said, smiling. I loved that I had the kind of friends who would make inappropriate jokes while I was lying in a hospital bed. ‘Bad day?’ We all burst out laughing.
Apparently my sister had been worried when I was discharged earlier that day. She called my flatmate and my best friend Jacob, who found me unconscious on my flatmate’s bed. They called an ambulance and I was rushed to hospital.
‘Was it because of Luka?’ Jacob asked me, when Tonz was in the bathroom.
‘No. I don’t know. Not really. I’m just sick of feeling like I want to die. It’s all I think about. I can’t turn my brain off. I really need help.’
‘They’re going to help you now, sweetie,’ he said, looking determined. I fell back asleep.
In the morning, I was told I was going to be discharged with a note to my psychiatrist and some Valium. I was too defeated to fight back, but Jacob wasn’t. You just try and argue with a bitchy gay – you’ll never win. Jacob was not leaving that hospital unless he knew I was going to be admitted somewhere, long term. He demanded to see whoever was in charge, and a big Eastern European doctor with a very seedy moustache and a booming voice came to meet us about
an hour later. I’m fairly certain he was some kind of epic porn star in his homeland.
‘Leesin,’ he said. ‘We have mental ward here. But eet’s not what she wants, trust me. These people are crazy. They feenger-paint in there. Do you want to just sit around feenger-painting?’
‘Rosie is suicidal,’ Jacob snapped. ‘She has said that if she goes home, she will try to kill herself again. She doesn’t give a fuck about being with people who finger-paint. She just needs help. I can’t believe that she’s reaching out and nobody is willing to help her. Surely there’s a duty of care issue, if you send her home and she dies? In fact, I’d like to see you write it in the chart – “Rosie has said if we send her home she will kill herself.” Write that down.’
The moustache porn doctor looked at me. ‘Have you thought of speceefic plan?’
‘Of course she’s thought of a specific fucking plan,’ Jacob said. ‘Last night she took over a hundred pills. How’s that for a plan? She needs help.’
‘Fine,’ the doc said, throwing his arms up in the air like he’d just lost at Bingo. ‘We will admit her. I’m telling you, though, she will hate it.’
Jacob saved my life that day. If he hadn’t been there, I would have given up and gone home, and I hate to think what I would have done. When up against Australia’s shitty public mental-health system, never underestimate the power of having a very sassy gay man on your side. He was not going to stop until that possibly-once-a-porn-star doctor gave me a bed.
And what a bed it was. An ER nurse took me over to the separate mental hospital. It was about a five-minute walk away, fenced off with barbed wire. The doors were locked, and security checked us as we walked in. I was taken to the room that I would stay in for the next few weeks. Everything was suicide-proof. There was nowhere you could hang anything. The windows were made of two layers of glass, so that the blinds could sit between them and not be touched. There were no knobs on any of the drawers, cupboards or doors.
I sat on the tiny, single hospital bed for a while and took a long, deep breath. I was safe. I couldn’t hurt myself here. For the first time in days, I started to feel calm.
I quietly ventured out to the main area to see what I had signed up for (and to possibly get in on that finger-painting, if it really was a thing). It was pretty grim. I’d describe the decor as ‘suicide-proof nursing home chic’. There was a main common area, with a tiny TV. Next to that was the nurses’ station and the kitchen, our only access to which was via a window that food came out of. The yard outside was basically just some grass and a table and chairs. It was surrounded by a very ominous looking, very high fence.
The toilets were . . . well, have you ever tried going to the toilet at a train station? Imagine that, but if the toilet was used exclusively by mentally ill people. In the first one I entered, I found shit smeared on the walls. The others all smelled like they’d recently had smeared shit cleaned from the walls.
Then there were the patients. I think the majority of them were homeless, and I actually saw one of them begging on George Street in Sydney a few years later. One man had just had some serious brain surgery, which had left him with a shaved head and a mammoth scar. With no clothes and no possessions, he had to walk around wearing hospital-issued pyjamas, and, thanks to the surgery, everything he did was in slow motion. I once timed him take over five minutes to lift his hand, scratch his face, then put his hand back down again. There were two pretty rough women who I think had been transferred there from some nightmarish rehab–prison hybrid. They were epic and horrifying, and if they weren’t calling each other ‘fuckin’ cunts’, they were looking for someone else to go after. One guy walked around with a tampon in his mouth, which I could never quite work out, although given how little I understood periods when I first got them, I’m surprised I had never tried that myself. Then, of course, there was PK, the man who insisted on walking around wearing nothing but his bedsheet as a toga.
I mostly kept to myself, except at mealtimes, which were terrifying. The dinner line was competitive, usually with the rough ‘cunt’ ladies leading the charge. It was like a school canteen but with sixty mentally ill adults hustling for a bigger portion of gravy. More than a few fights broke out in that line, probably because a lot of those people had been having to hustle for food for a very long time. I gladly took last position every night, even if it did mean I got the dodgy, overcooked end piece of lamb. I would rather eat dry meat than get stabbed with a fork.
I spent virtually my entire first week sleeping. Public mental-health care isn’t exactly hands on: you are basically just plonked in a locked building to stop you from being harmful either to yourself, or to others. The plan to help you stops there. Every few days, I would see a psychiatrist for five minutes to make sure my medication was right, and that was it. The rest of the time I could watch the tiny TV, ‘feenger-paint’ or sit in the garden and watch the rough ladies yell ‘cunt’ at each other. That’s about it. I preferred (partly out of terror, but mostly out of the need to be alone) to stay in my room. Where I slept and slept and slept and slept. A nurse would sometimes come in and wake me to give me a pill, then I would go back to sleep.
After that first week of sleep, my brain felt less chaotic. I started to stay up all night writing. Writing journals, writing letters to Luka that I would never send. Writing obsessively, page after page after page, trying to figure out exactly how I ended up in a mental ward at the age of twenty-four.
I thought a lot about why I had relied so much on Josh and Luka to get me through. I thought about the kind of person I had imagined I would be when I grew up. All those Oscars speeches I used to give in my room, all those incredible goals I was sure I was going to achieve. I had never pictured a man in any of that. Why had I now become so desperate to be loved that I tried to kill myself when I got dumped?
My writing sessions became very self-indulgent and existential. There was lots of staring out the window, sighing deeply and trying to collect my thoughts. I didn’t keep any of those pages, but I’m sure I’d cringe if I looked at them now. It’d be like seeing a high-school book covered in pictures of Justin Timberlake back when his hair looked like two-minute noodles.
But all that feverish, stream-of-consciousness word vomit did lead me to realise one thing: there was a lot of trauma from my past that I needed to deal with, and nobody could deal with it but me. I needed to learn how to be alone. I needed to learn how to be my own hero.
I needed to stop waiting for a man to fly in and save me. I needed to stop pretending I was cool enough to take drugs in club bathrooms. I needed to roll up my sleeves, get to work on my mental health, and fly in and save my own damn self.
So, after three and a half weeks in the mental institution (most of which I spent trying not to get killed in the dinner line), I got out of bed, brushed my hair and told them I wanted to leave. I was going to conquer life! I was going to be like Winona Ryder at the end of that movie where she was nuts! I was going to be like any female character who finds herself at the end of any feel-good movie! I was going to get my damn shit together!
Then I spent the next three years hiding in my room, slowly gaining ninety kilos. Whoops.
You will watch your mum attempt suicide, and realise that she’s the only one who understands you.
‘Mummy?’
That was all I needed to say for her to snap into action. She booked me on a flight, using her very limited cash, to go and stay with her and her boyfriend in Dubbo. She explained things the way they needed to be explained to someone who’s beyond hysterical.
‘Rosanna. You need to get out of bed, darling. You need to pack a bag with some clothes. How long has it been since you’ve had a shower? Okay, you need to take a shower. Your plane leaves in four hours, so as soon as you’re ready, call a taxi and go to the airport. But you can’t leave any later than 2pm. When you get to Dubbo, get into a taxi and go to the address that I text you. It’s going to be alright, darling. You can stay here as long as you need. Wha
t do you feel like for dinner? Rick wants to cook you something special.’
Just like when I was little, something about her calling me ‘darling’ calmed me down. My mum was always the last person I called for any kind of help with, well, anything. She was usually drunk or belligerent or just wanted to bitch about how one of my sisters had come over and eaten all her cabanossi. But after spending almost a month in a mental home, even I just needed my mummy.
And she understood that. She was the only person in my life who understood what I was going through. She understood what it felt like to have your brain insist that death is the only option, then to wake up the next day and have your brain laugh at you and say, ‘Lol, jokes, you fucking nutcase.’ She was the only person who understood that I was incapable of being an adult right then. That I could barely get out of bed, let alone book a flight. That even having to speak was like trying to force my body to lift an anvil. My mum knew that the dishes piled next to my bed couldn’t be washed. She knew that I couldn’t just ‘go for a run’. She knew that my body was stone, and my mind was trying to eat itself.
My mum knew all of that because she’d been there herself, so many times. She knew that all I needed was to be taken care of, because that’s all she’d wanted, so many times in the past. I needed my mummy, and my mummy finally felt like she was in a position to help.
I got on the plane to Dubbo.
She came to the door in her dressing gown, and pulled me into a warm hug. I just wanted to suck every inch of her in and never let go. Apparently, when I was a baby, I would scream like a freaking banshee unless my mum was holding me. Nobody else could stop the crying. It probably had something to do with the fact that she took off when I was a few weeks old to party with her friends in Sydney, and would take off sporadically after that. I think I was a baby genius – even then I knew her presence was never going to be guaranteed, so when she was around, I insisted on being held, damn it.
The Anti-Cool Girl Page 16