I enter this place for my third program of three months in the same clinic. There’s this distinct smell in my room that makes my heart ache with nostalgia. It’s some kind of warm, earthy smell.
I hate this place, but at the same time, I’m madly in love with it.
The schedule isn’t as filled as it was in my first two times here. Covid restrictions ask that less patients be in a room at the same time, therefore fewer people get to have some therapy sessions each week.
It doesn’t bother me, though. I feel I need a lot more time alone right now. Maybe it’s the individual therapy sessions doing their magic. My assigned therapist is the chief of the ward. She can “poke” very well. Burst open bubbles of emotion and then be there to catch me and say all these things that show me just how much she understands.
How can someone that has had such a sheltered life understand my pain so well? I don’t know much about this woman. She has a horse, always wanted one and now she does have one. Two little children who make me jealous about the fact that I can’t be her son.
We’re doing some kind of trauma exposure therapy, by writing events that marked me on a long piece of parchment that represents the timeline of my life.
Every time I came to this clinic, there was a special patient that caught a liking to me. Without these patients I would’ve never gotten out of my shell, to start integrating and getting to know the other patients.
This time, the special patient is a young woman dressed in black all the time, that has ADHD and probably, as said by her, an Autism Spectrum Disorder. We keep going out to eat Curry Wurst and McDonald’s crap. The McDonald’s is very close to the clinic, so when I got a transfer of money from my parents, I started visiting it almost every evening.
My grandma died of brain cancer my first month in the clinic. A few days after, I ordered some 1cp-LSD and took a tab one afternoon and decided to go out on a walk.
And so, sitting on the grass under a tree that seemed to have been calling me, I realized that everything is being born, changing, and dying, all at the same time. I finally understood the poem “Do Not Stand At My Grave And Mourn”.
When I got up from my place, I realized that my ass was stained green with either grass or the duck shit from all the ducks walking around. I pulled some jelly that was almost melting in my pocket and ate it. Automatically started giggling and feeling mischevious.
It takes me a long while here to be able to open up. It felt as if… I only opened at the end of every therapy session and until the next one the week following, I would lose the trust again.
It was in this clinic that I learned how afraid I am of myself, but this one belongs in another post. I’m returning to this clinic in about four months, for yet another three months. And after that, I’ll probably come again, but I’d probably have to wait longer for a place.
I think this is the sanest psychiatric clinic I’ve ever been to. Everyone is lucid, maybe too lucid, maybe they’d like to be catatonic, living inside self-transforming dreams… At least I know that I would like that.
