Problems

by Jade Sharma

  This place is for teaching you about structure. Everyone knows structure helps.

  You get used to the routine. You yawn ten minutes before lights out. You wake up ten minutes before the nurse comes in to wake you up. Your stomach growls right before the lunch tray comes.

  You hardly ever see your shrink, a fresh-faced young guy with black hair and retro eyeglasses. He is supposed to check in with you once a day, but it’s more like every two or three days. You wonder what his cock is like. You have been with enough men to know that no matter what someone looks like, they are capable of being a total freak. He is intelligent. You can tell by the eyes. How some people, like the nurses, have eyes that are dull, just dull and glazed over, like nothing is happening behind them. But the shrink’s eyes are contemplative. You wonder what it might feel like to get on your knees and unzip his pants, to feel his hand resting on your head as you take him in your mouth. How he would sigh. You miss making people feel good. Time is so slow. It hasn’t been that long. It feels like forever. It’s been nine days.

  You tell him how you were married once and had your shit together. You tell him all you have to do is finish your thesis and then you will have a master’s and maybe could teach. You tell him you’ve been keeping a journal. You tell him the divorce was for the best. You don’t know why you keep lying. Sometimes you tell him you’re a liar, but he never questions what you say.

  When your mother visits, you just end up fighting. You try and fail to explain, without screaming, how awful this place is. She says it’s good for you to be here. You tell her she has no idea what the fuck she’s talking about. This place is not good for anyone. She’s never known what was good for you because she doesn’t know you. She has an imaginary daughter she has mistaken you for. How could you be someone you aren’t? She cries, and you feel horrible.

  That is the only time she visits. Over the phone, she tells you it’s difficult finding someone to drive her. You ask her why she brought you to DC if she wasn’t going to visit. If you were in New York then at least your friends could have visited. You tell her this is all bullshit anyway; you weren’t even trying to hurt yourself. “I take a few extra Xanaxes because I can’t sleep, and you lock me in a fucking nut house!”

  “I’m doing the best I can!”

  “Yeah, and my husband divorces me. Did you ever think of coming and staying with me like a normal mother would have instead of telling me to get over it? You don’t understand what it’s like. You don’t just get over something like that!”

  “There were needles in that apartment. You think I’m an idiot! You think I don’t know you had that guy staying there?”

  You hang up the phone because you don’t know what to say.

  You wake up feeling shitty and take your meds and take a piss with the door open. Some of the nurses turn their heads, but some of them look right at you. You don’t care if they look anymore. Then you go to the morning meeting. The nurse asks to speak to you privately.

  “You need to wear a bra.”

  “Why? There are only women here.”

  “It’s part of the rules to dress appropriately.”

  “But what difference does it make?”

  “You’re refusing to comply with the rules,” she says, looking down at a clipboard.

  “No. Jesus, I’m just trying to figure out what the point is.”

  “Go back to your room and put on a bra, or you’re not getting any points for the day.”

  You want to say, “Go ahead.” But you’ve learned it’s not worth it. You know when you’re beat. And in this place you’re always going to be the loser. The nurse gets to go home and drink coffee and read books however she wants to. She has a life that is progressing. She gets to be outside. She gets to eat when she feels like eating, sleep when she feels like sleeping. Your life is on pause.

  The meds must be doing their magic because you don’t feel emotions that strongly. You don’t cry every night. You stop getting so angry. Thoughts come and register but nothing overwhelms you. There is this weird optimism, and you have no idea what is generating it or where it comes from. It must be the Prozac—a little pill that makes you feel stupidly happy about absolutely nothing.

  You spend all of the free time one morning writing a letter to Ogden. You tell him everything. It’s kind of nice to write something longhand. You brought a laptop but aren’t allowed to touch it because it has a camera. They don’t want anyone’s privacy to be violated. They don’t give you your books because you’re supposed to engage with people.

  If you ever had any hope that this might not be a total waste of time, you don’t anymore.

  There is a young woman who attacked her mother with a knife. There is a woman who lost her kid to cancer and never talks. She’s obviously in some kind of shock. There is a girl who thinks you’re the funniest person in the ward. She’s pretty dumb.

  Sometimes it feels like you are being punished, and the real program is to make you so miserable that you don’t try to use or off yourself again because you may fail and have to come back.

  That’s pretty much the lesson you take away: next time kill yourself properly, or don’t try.

  You have group therapy sessions every morning. You have to go around the room and say how you feel. You can’t say, “Fine.” “Fine” is not a feeling word. They have a chart with feeling words beneath faces expressing the feelings. Scan the chart. Anxious? Optimistic? Enraged? Excited? What is there to be excited about in a place where each day is exactly the same? They probably increase your meds if you say that.

  Sometimes you cry and beg the nurses to let you go out and take a walk. Will you please just take me for a walk?

  You see people freak the fuck out. One time someone screams at you. Not words. A black girl with hair so short she doesn’t look like a girl stands right in front of you and screams her head off, and you stand there staring, wondering what to do. She could kill you. But then the men in white come and take her away. It doesn’t seem right to lock a human up for being sick, but you can no longer muster a sense of outrage.

  There is an attractive man who comes with a woman wearing unflattering clothes; they tell us to write poetry. You plagiarize a Counting Crows song and everyone is impressed.

  There is a lot of therapy: group therapy, art therapy, writing therapy, the dreaded music therapy. Some people get into that shit. Some people paint with a fury, or draw maniacally and with great concentration. For a solid hour this one girl takes a piece of white paper and makes it dark black. She uses black crayons and writes with a little-kid scrawl, over and over, and when she finishes, she looks somewhat satisfied, and then she picks up another piece of white paper.

  I earn enough points to check out the collected works of Robert Lowell. “I am a thorazined fixture / in the immovable square-cushioned chairs / we preoccupy for seconds like migrant birds.”

  I call Ogden from the pay phone, but he doesn’t pick up. He never picks up. I would bet money he was staring at the number and hitting “Ignore.” I would ignore me too. In the message, I try to sound just broken enough for him to care, but also together enough so he isn’t scared I will go batshit crazy on him.

  On visiting day, everyone has visitors but me. It’s not like I wanted to see my mother, but not having visitors is annoying. Just sitting there trying to read while overhearing parents trying to force small talk. Keisha’s cousins have bright sneakers and sneak in food: candy and chicken and soda. The nurses never come in during visiting hours.

  Ogden calls. He tells me he’s glad I’m getting help. He says he knows it must suck. He says he’s proud of me. He gives me some perspective. This is only a stop. Life will go on. I ask him if he misses me, and he says, “Sure.” I can tell he wants to get off the phone. It always feels like there is this meter ticking that runs out before I’m done telling him what I want.

  When I get off the phone, I feel sadder than I did before I spoke to him. I looked forward to things like phone calls, and now the
call came and went and it wasn’t much of anything. I try to call him back, but it goes straight to voicemail. Seven minutes is the exact amount of time he will allow you to waste with your bullshit.

  He approached friendship like it was something to check off the list. Call Maya in the loony bin. Take out the garbage.

  Some of these broken women talk in whispers about changing their lives. Some of them act all tough and defiant. They are young, and I want to tell them there is no one they are rebelling against.

  Keisha writes like a school kid. She is trying to write a letter to a judge to get her daughter back. I sit down at her desk and take out a piece of paper. Her daughter was taken away because someone called Child Protective Services when Keisha’s boyfriend was slinging weed out of their apartment, but he’s gone now. Keisha tells me she’s been clean and sober for five years. She couldn’t take living without her kid, though, so one night she got in a fight with her mother and threw a bottle and then used the shards to slice her arm open. I can’t imagine her doing this. She seems like the type to eat and lie around on the couch, like she lies around in bed here, just looking at magazines. They get on her for not showering, but she says she likes baths.

  I’ve never seen her cry. I’ve seen everyone else cry. I have heard her laugh. She has a great laugh.

  I offer to write the letter for her. I spend days on it. I write it and revise it a million times. It feels good to be useful.

  Give me new problems. I’m tired of the same old problems.

  Why can’t someone interest me in my own life?

  She tells me I wrote an awesome letter. It makes me feel good to see her smile and look like she has something to be excited about. I wish I could do more. She shows me pictures of a little girl with ribbons in her hair. This, she tells me, is the only reason she has for living.

  Keisha and I stay up in the dark. She tells me about how her uncle had molested her. I feel like I can help her. I talk to her about getting her GED. I say I can tutor her.

  There is liberation in being in a loony bin. There isn’t anything else to fear. Hello, bottom, nice to meet you. Sometimes it feels exactly right. When there is a tray of food in front of me, I eat it. I wear boring, clean clothes. I listen more than I talk. I let the structure lead me through the day. I don’t use my brain. I don’t focus on my emotions. I am a blank slate. Everything begins here. And if I get to read a book, it will be a good day. To be able to lie in bed with my bare feet swaying.

  I don’t want the nurses and the doctors to know, but in my head, I begin to make plans. I want to go back to school. I want to do everything exactly right. It isn’t fear of coming back here so much as I don’t want my life to stop again. No more time-outs.

  At night I get used to screams just as I got used to sirens in the city; the noise registers but fails to alarm anymore.

  I no longer feel that crazy sense of empathy every time I hear the metal door to the quiet room close, primarily because I’ve witnessed enough insane temper tantrums that made me want to throw people in there myself. How hard is it to shut the fuck up while people are trying to sleep?

  At least I left everyone alone. At least I was quiet when I was doing my dying.

  Sometimes a tiny little scream rises inside me, and I muffle it with a pillow. I tell myself I have to be the sane one in here. I have to fold my clothes. I have to shower every morning. I have to put all my books in alphabetical order, be steady, and act like all of this is very much beneath me. No, I am not crazy. My secret fantasy is not about the day I can have my own fucking bathroom where I cut up my arms as much as want.

  The woman who lost her son. I have to act like she doesn’t have all the reason in the world to be fucking nuts.

  After three weeks, they let me go home for a weekend.

  My aunt and my mother pick me up. My aunt says, “Look at you. You’ve lost weight since I’ve seen you. You look like a boy.”

  I just shake my head. Then she grabs my wrist and says, “What did you do?” Her face changes from a smirk to a nasty look of disapproval. “You know your mother cried?” She doesn’t seem to care about the nurse sitting right across from us, who looks up as my aunt’s voice rises. I understand the way people view this: me fucking with my mom.

  The weekend consists of going to different relatives’ houses, eating a lot of food, and lying about all the positive things I’m excited about. I talk about finishing my thesis. I talk about getting my PHD. Everybody is so encouraging; I almost kind of start believing in this future too. Nobody brings up Peter. Do they think it’s not a big deal, or is it because they think it’s too big a deal?

  Back on the ward, more of the same. They finally tell me that in a few weeks, I’ll be released. I don’t feel like I’m ready.

  I’m not sure why they are releasing me. It’s been almost two months. I stopped trying to get points long ago. I feel comfortable in the routine. I no longer lie in bed wide-awake all night crying. I have stopped thinking of ways to torture my mother forever for putting me in a psychiatric ward. Each morning I look forward to breakfast and then breeze through group therapy (which is more like taking attendance in elementary school than actual therapy), sometimes offering a story from my childhood but mostly letting other people talk. I tried and failed to start a journal, but I enjoy reading again and love the hour before dinner. The nurses are no longer evil bitches controlling my life; they’re part of the background, daily annoyances I’ve learned to put up with. I have started hating the patients who won’t fall in line. I look at them in the same way I remember other patients had looked at me, like, “It isn’t that hard. Just shut up, and do what you’re told.”

  What would life on the outside be like? Fear. Dread. I’ve been a mouse in a cage. A girl taking a time-out. I don’t trust myself. The world and the men and the drugs. The way the whole day would be free, not broken up into mindless activities for me to navigate. I could start out slowly: doing my laundry, keeping my room clean, writing at night, making myself part of the world again. I would look back at this as the nasty ending to a bad patch. I would make myself breakfast. I would make my bed. I would talk to my mother daily. I would go to job interviews. I would spend a few hours a day working on my thesis at the coffee shop. I would be one of those women at the coffee shop, sipping a coffee, laptop open, looking serious and productive. I would take meds every day that would keep me steady, and have a quiet, simple life. Or I wouldn’t. I would get out and just fuck everything up again. I run my hand against the wall. Keisha laughs at something in a magazine. The bed suddenly feels comfortable, and I curl up in a fetal position. Dear world, I’m sorry, but I don’t know if I will ever be the kind of person who can live with you.

  * * *

  Back in the city, I listen to Lou Reed. I write, drink tons of coffee. I stay up all night because I don’t need sleep, don’t need food. All the weight I put on at the nut house has fallen off me. Not long after I came back, I got lonely, and now Elizabeth’s friend Val stays at my place. He gave me two hundred bucks. He said he would give me a hundred a week but is full of excuses and barely pays me. But he does clean and that’s nice.

  After a while, I stop taking my antidepressants because they make it so I can’t come. What’s more depressing than that?

  My mind races. My body is shrinking. I walk to the train. Hear the National Geographic narrator, Human beings do not procreate as much as other species, but their ability to use tools and adapt to their environments, coupled with their long lives, make them one of the worst types of existing infestations. It’s nearly impossible to get rid of them. Look at this one here; he’s made a nest out of a bench other humans have made for sitting. Look at this one mama human with her two little chicks, all clothed in the feathers of dead birds to keep warm during the winter months. Humans have a slight fur covering their entire bodies, long silky hair on the tops of their heads and around their pubis. They sustain themselves on animal protein from the farms they house to grow and breed their prey.


  Mania is fucking amazing. I talk forever.

  I go on craigslist to get another date.

  The john dresses like a hipster and claims to be a musician. He’s cool. Maybe in his forties. I am three hours late, and he doesn’t even care. “I had to see how that movie Flight ended,” I explain. He laughs. We go walk around. As a way of checking him out, I had suggested getting something to eat. He says there’s a twenty-four-hour diner nearby, but I feel good about him, so we go back to his place. It’s the first apartment in the city I’ve been to with wall-to-wall carpeting.

  “I feel like we’re in a hotel somewhere in the Midwest.”

  “Ouch!” he says, pouring a glass of wine.

  “Oh my god!”

  “What?”

  “We have the same towels!” I realize that I come off way too excited about this.

  “Target?”

  “Yup.”

  He sits down next to me, and we talk forever. We talk about how BBC shows are better than American TV. We talk about how in England they don’t feel the need for every character to look like a model; the actors there look like real people. We talk about how he’s never been married or lived with anyone. He talks about how unfair it would be to have a girlfriend when he’s always on the road. We talk about moving all the time and being an army brat. I like him. It feels easy.

  Is it awful or not that a dude who pays me for sex is easier and more enjoyable than any date I’ve been on?