This box room of despair, where the walls are like sponges, soak up the desperate wails of fellow prisoners. The relentless injustices recounted reverberate like violent echoes through the corridors, bleak despite the bright glib platitudes screaming wellness and recovery behind plastic-glass noticeboards. Domed mirrors track our moves; the panoptical arrangement empty of watchers except for those enclosed in their fish-bowl office, attached to phones and computers, hammering out notes about that which they cannot know. For they never ask and wait. They ask, of course, of course they ask: how are you? But they do not wait for the answer before moving onto the next room, rattling keys and shouting “checks” as they pound on doors. There is one window in my box-room and that is in the door. No air circulates only recycled distress.
They do not enquire, as a dear friend does, “how is your heart, soldier?”. For we are all soldiers here — battling or training or mediating with entities that others may not see. That they may not witness as anything but sickness. Meaning is not chased down, meaning is irrelevant, shoved to the bottom of the pile under British National Formularies, and badly written reports of behaviours and misdemeanours. Such as absconding from the place you are being held against your will, as if that is anything but the epitome of sanity. There is no Stockholm Syndrome in me.
I sit, tight as a bud clasping a bee, looking gentle, asking for as little as possible, hoping to go unmarked, unseen, to give nothing away. I am trying to hold on to the core of my being without submitting to psychiatric biddings. There are undoing’s, unravelling’s, outbursts, because you can only hold your breath for so long. There may have been a chair thrown at a wall, a leg broken clean off, but no one hurt. They forgave me that. But I am hoop-jumping, playing the game, ticking boxes, though not fully engaging. I don’t talk to my fellow patients, I am porous, you see. I feel things deeply and without fences I am penetrated, invaded upon, colonised, hijacked from the inside. And then where do I have to go but out of my skin, or to sear my skin so that it thickens enough to contain me like a fortress? No, I don’t mix.