Upon Leaving the Psych Ward

In the year 2016, I became extremely anxious when I realized that 1) I really had no idea what was going on with anything in the world ever at all; 2) that I did not know what I thought about what was going on and mostly was just repeating other people's opinions; and, in particular, 3) that I did not even know what I already did know, since most of my knowledge was made of assumptions that I couldn't even notice, let alone name, let alone evaluate for their correctness — maybe everything I thought I believed rested on some insubstantial premise that was entirely false! This felt very worrying. I planned an ambitious (a vast understatement, mathematically speaking) project to correct this sad state of affairs, in which I would read every major textbook in every subject, and would then compare all of the things I learned to all of the things I had ever experienced, evaluating and judging each set of data until I had formed my own, original, logically sound set of opinions based on fact. Finally, I would present my findings in a series of essays. Surprisingly, I never started this project.

It eluded me year after year. It kept being delayed, first by periods of unemployment, low wages, student debt, family conflict, the pandemic, then by work: working long hours, getting stressed by work, getting depressed because of the stress, clocking in but just not working for three months because of the depression, resigning because of the shame, finding a new job because of the resignation, and, at last, starting the new job, attending two weeks, and then finally, as I was (surprisingly) surprised to witness, having a mental breakdown, quitting the new job, and going to inpatient psychiatry. 

It can be good to realize that, in some ways, you're totally mad. That your mind is a highly unreliable computer run on weak electrical signals snaking through hamburger, and is as prone to error as a conversation between two ham radio operators discussing Hegel through a hurricane. And that is why, despite your best efforts, you can't work right now. All of the stressful mental burdens you've accumulated over a decade (for instance, the burden to evaluate all of human knowledge personally) can be suddenly dropped at the feet of the nurse politely asking you how you're doing today. The human brain has that characteristic tendency to attribute all of its behaviors to the ego, the deliberate-feeling part of you that you flatter yourself as thinking and making choices when really, as the strange post-hoc rationalizations of amnesiacs and dementia patients show, it is just a pushy PR rep bullshitting about why you're doing everything you're doing after you've already done it. Going to a psych ward clarifies this. You need help to control your own brain. And that can help you finally come to important realizations, such as, you are never going to learn everything — if you could even just learn a little about your own behavior patterns, so you could be a little kinder to everyone, you'd be lucky. 

Leaving the hospital is like graduating from school: your experience of time suddenly shifts from one that is focused on each single moment, in which a day seems to last a year, to one in which the years present themselves in front of you overwhelmingly, inestimably sized and unapproachable, like mountains in the distance. The only way to hold on through the experience is to stitch each day, piece by piece, to the body of the quilt. In light of my new relationship with time and of my strained but (begrudgingly) accepting relationship with my own mind, I have conceived a new essay project. The only rules are consistency and gentleness. I will write one piece, five hundred words at most, every other week, in which I will weigh in unreliably on a variety of topics that are not my business for no purpose other than my own satisfaction. I'll make them as interesting as I can.

Crazies as in crazy quilt, crazy paving: fragments, pieced together.