The hospital felt colder than the bitter air outside.
Erin, the front desk receptionist, led me down a narrow hall with only an occasional door to a windowless office. I’d just parted with my mom, knowing I’d see her again but fearing how long it would be. They confiscated all connections to the outer world effective until further notice. I couldn’t turn back now. Or, if I did, I’d be more likely to be trapped even longer. The walls were a pale-yellow color reminiscent of mucus, increasing the nausea I already felt. The lighting above strained my eyes, so I focused on the carpet. I can’t really remember what color the carpet was, even though I was staring at it the entire time we marched back. I rubbed my eyes and forehead and clutched onto my paper bag for dear life. It held the few belongings I’d be allowed to take:
Five shirts (One had Stitch from Lilo and Stitch on it; another had the word Brothers on the front from a web series, the rest were shirts from school events and clubs)
Five pairs of underwear (all boxers, plus two sports bras that I needed to conceal my uncomfortably large chest)
One pair of socks (they gave us a second pair that were non-skid socks)
One pair of day pants (I brought a pair of khakis that I wore almost every day)
One pair of sleep pants (a pair of joggers that later got taken away because they had strings in it)
One pair of shoes with no laces (I walked barefoot a lot)
One book (A Dog’s Purpose by W. Bruce Cameron)
One comfort item (A stuffed elephant that used to be my partner’s as a child)
All other items were put in another bag and locked away from me and from anyone else until they released me.
*****
My mom gave me this giant container of Tylenol before I went off to college; it was originally a 500-pill bottle but had shrunk slightly before she handed it down. I’m pretty sure my grandparents originally owned it. Tylenol harms your liver, so they decided it was best to retire the little white tablets. But to a shiny, new college student, medicine was all the same. This stuff is for a headache; that stuff is for stomachaches and cramps; this one is for when you can’t sleep; all of them had the dark shadows of addiction and overdose lurking just behind it. The months leading up to my hospitalization, I used to pour deadly amounts of it into my cupped hands. I’d stare at my overflowing palm and the little white tablets; I just wanted to imagine what it would be like to swallow all of them and peacefully drift off into the dark.
I had signs of clinically defined depression since I was probably fourteen, but I think I could always feel that darkness inside me even younger. As a kid, I pictured myself in the hospital a lot. I always wondered what would happen if I got in a horrible accident. My thoughts would wander to the telephone pole next to the slim, country road. What if I cut the wheel all the way over in the direction of the pole? What if I jumped out of the car right now? What if I took all these Tylenol? What if I biked into the side of that car? What if I let the match shrink down to my fingertips? How would people react? Would they miss me? Would they come visit me?
It wasn’t until I turned fourteen that it became much bigger than a lingering thought. I met with my first psychiatrist, Jennifer, halfway through my junior year of high school. She diagnosed me with major depressive disorder and later, generalized anxiety disorder, two abusive relationships I couldn’t leave. I was the cookie cutter teenager who felt like the whole world was against them. To a psychiatrist, I was probably a standard patient; but I felt like I was the only one on this planet that felt sadness before. People and peers and school posters assured me I wasn’t alone and that everyone went through a rough time like this. It didn’t change the lonely echo in my head. Even after finally speaking up in my junior year of high school, I still lied to my parents, friends, therapists, psychiatrists, even myself. I wanted to have the sense that I was getting better even though the worst was yet to come.
I convinced myself I was in the essence of recovery. I made everyone convinced I was fine, that this was fine. But it wasn’t. Everything inside was rotting away slowly. My body tried to warn me. I never slept through the night. I gained weight. My skin broke out. I got sick almost every month. I ignored it all. “My body’s just changing,” I said. “I’m just growing up, this is normal.” None of it felt normal though. All I could focus on was the sad. I wonder sometimes if I would’ve survived much longer if I didn’t act when I did.
Then, on Halloween 2016, it all imploded on me. I was in the middle of my first semester of culinary school, drowning in misery, homework, tests, and blasé chefs who treated us “like the real world would treat us”. I called my mom, four hours away from me, admitting my lack of being okay and that I needed her now. She dropped everything she was doing and rescued me. Without revealing all my demons, I just said I felt like I couldn’t function on a day to day basis. I was missing class all the time. I laid in my bed for hours without doing anything. I gave that bottle of pills to my best friend so I wouldn’t be tempted to use them. She didn’t know that last part though. I was too afraid it would break her. We waited out to see if the sad spell I was in would lift.
It didn’t. We went to the ER on November 2nd and waited for three hours to talk to someone who would perform a psychological evaluation. The scoring was on a scale of 1 to 30. I don’t know the actual technical terms, but 1 was the mentally healthiest, and 30 was immediate hospitalization. I was a fifteen. The woman said that it was my choice to make. My choice. Mine.
Mine.
****
Erin and I maneuvered the labyrinth of hallways and reached a set of double doors. Erin pressed her lanyard with her ID against a black sensor on the wall, triggering a green light and a quick, piercing beep. She pushed her way through the heavy doors and gestured me to move ahead into the great beyond.
The area we entered was spacious; yet, I felt myself wrapped tight and making myself smaller. There was one area that natural light came in through a skylight in the dead center of the ceiling. Since it was nighttime, it just let in more darkness. The rest of the room had a fluorescent glow that felt clinical. All the colors were pale, dull pastels, mostly that mucus yellow. Right near the double doors, drawings from what I assumed were previous patients covered the entire wall. Many of them were coloring sheets of various animals, nature scenes, and patterns.
My eyes caught sight of two people wandering around the strangely shaped corridors. One was a woman who appeared severely terrified or upset. Her energy was innately uneasy, making me feel even more afraid to settle in this new place. She wore a towel around her freshly washed hair, sweatpants, a pullover sweater, and blue non-slip socks. She was talking to the nurse about not being able to sleep. I could feel her fragility from across the room. I wished I could give her a hug, both for her and for me. Another was just a man who kept walking around, staring at seemingly nothing. He felt like a spirit in purgatory, lost in thought and in his physical being.
In the center of the irregularly shaped space was a perfectly circular desk where three nurses sat, sorting paperwork, answering and making phone calls. All three had a weathered look from working so late. Despite their miserable appearance, when I entered, the one closest to the double doors looked up and greeted me with a warm smile.
“Hi there!” she said.
“Hi,” I said, trying to break into an equally happy grin. Erin followed behind me quickly.
“Donna, this is our new patient, but they’d like to be called Jace. It’ll say something different on their chart,” Erin said to her.
“Oh, okay. No problem then!” Donna replied. “Let me just get everything put together.”
“Alright sweetheart,” Erin began, looking at me, “this is where I go back. Good luck to you.”
She made it sound like I was going off to war. Though, I guess that wasn’t too far off if my brain was the enemy and I was the soldier.
I sat down in an elementary school-style plastic chair, waiting for further instruction. The rest of the night blended together like different colors of paint bleeding on a canvas. I mostly recall Donna and another one of the Messy Hair Unhappy Nurses poked and prodded me with their hands and their words.
Donna took my blood pressure and pulse.
“Do you have a history of mental illness in your family?”
They led me down the left hallway into a bedroom.
“Do you have any serious medical problems we should be aware of?”
Messy Hair Unhappy Nurse gently felt up my arms, my legs, my sides, my back, making sure I didn’t smuggle in any weapons, drugs, shoelaces, or other banned items.
“I need you to take off your pants and moon me really quick.”
They took an inventory of my medical life, particularly anything involving my mind.
“So, you’re a girl that wants to be a guy?” Donna asked me. “We’ve never had a person like that here.”
There were about eight rooms in each wing, with two people in each one. Luckily, as per request, I got a room by myself. Normally, they wouldn’t be able to take requests like that. But being a transgender man who still looked a whole lot like a woman made it grueling to socialize with other people, let alone live in the same space as them.
My room had loud white lights. There were two beds in the room, one small desk with no chair, a bathroom (the only thing that made it private was a frail white curtain), and a vanity with no cabinets or doors. The walls were a dull tan color. The one closest to my bed had pictures on it drawn with crayons and racing thoughts. I wondered where the artist was now, if they were still where I am now, or if they were a multi-billionaire CEO of Google. I wondered if I would draw things too.
My bed was not a regular mattress. It was similar plastic-type padding that they have on the exam tables in doctor’s offices. Even my pillow was made of the material. The sheets and pillowcases masked the texture against my skin, but I still felt its inflexible nature. I had to fight to find comfort, coddling, something to nurture my delicate state. Even when I did settle, the trauma of the past 24 hours finally reached my system. I began to sob silently until I drifted asleep.
* * *
I spent twelve days at Clarion Psychiatric Center. I’d be lying if I said I remembered everything, but even a year later, it feels freshly raw in my brain.
I remember that you had to get to the phone as early as possible, because there’s only two for 30 people, and Chris is almost definitely on the phone with his girlfriend. Ellen is also probably on the phone with her husband bitching him out about not planning a trip to Disney World for the grandkids. I mostly called my moms and my partner, but I also called some friends whose numbers I scribbled down quickly before entering the facility.
I remember a story that another patient told me about the writing utensils we were given. Once (long before I arrived there), a patient tried to stab a nurse with a pen. So, instead of pencils and regular pens, we used “flex” pens that were bendy and could barely be manipulated to actually write legibly.
I remember Ellen. She was 77 years old and had been in Clarion multiple times. She was a “201”, which means she was forcefully admitted. Most people were 201’s, but myself and a few others were “302’s”, which meant you admitted yourself to the unit. That made things a lot easier in there, because your recovery felt more in your control. You were taken more seriously. I guess it’s a really biased perspective of it, because some people don’t have the ability to acknowledge their pain. I remember one day, we had a group talking session. We did a lot of those in there. I can’t remember the topic, but someone else was telling an emotional story. I remember looking over and seeing Ellen silently crying. It was one of the saddest images I’ve ever witnessed.
I remember Robbie. He was an older man, maybe 60’s or 70’s. He always wore a black leather jacket. He had his nails painted black. He liked to color and he talked about his childhood a lot. He talked about being on the slide and the swing. He also loved classic rock. He loved to sing along to it and play air guitar. I could feel his passion as he’d belt out to “Dream On” by Aerosmith.
I remember Jessie. She was a recovering heroin addict. She used cigarettes as her outlet. We had several smoke breaks throughout the day where we got to go outside and, if we desired, smoke a cigarette. I woke up every morning to Jessie yelling “SMOKE BREAK!” before the sun was even peeking on the edge of the horizon.
I remember the smoke breaks. Smoke breaks were the only opportunities for any of us to go outside. There was a courtyard in the center of the building with mostly dead grass, a couple trees, and picnic tables that the rain and weather had warped over time. I didn’t smoke, but I went out during every smoke break just to feel that cool air, the breeze, the little bit of nature they let us have there.
I remember Kara. She was the frail woman from my first night there. She had been in a horrific car wreck, suffering from severe brain damage. My first day there, she told us all her story of the crash, how her daughter and her daughter’s boyfriend were hitting her as she was driving. Many of us cried as she told us. She cried even more. She barely spoke otherwise. But by the time I was leaving, she was friends with everyone in the unit.
I remember Gary. He had OCD. He was always freshly groomed, hair combed over, beard freshly trimmed. Like a cookie cutter version of himself. Whenever there was a hand sanitizer dispenser in the room, he used it. He smiled and waved at everyone he walked past. I became very close with him in my twelve days.
I remember Shawn. He was there for almost 2 months. He was tall and lanky. He had dirty blonde hair including a patchy beard over his cystic acne. He had severe anxiety and phobias. He had a phobia of apples. He told me with complete sincerity how he was afraid that all his teeth would fall out if he bit into one. He also had terrible insomnia. Everything about him was severe and sharp except his voice. He was so soft spoken, so kind, so gentle and fragile. He apologized for everything he did, even when nothing bad happened. He was a writer, like me. He wrote beautifully vivid poetry. The night before Shawn was discharged, we sat in the hallway with a couple other friends of ours and talked for hours. We talked about funny things and sad things, happy things and weird things. We all laughed and smiled. I’m still friends with Shawn today.
I remember the day before I was scheduled to leave, all of my regular group of friends had already been released. I sat with new people, those who just began their journey. I saw myself in them and assured them that there was so much beyond this first day.
I remember drawing a lot of lotus flowers while I was in the hospital. I have at least a dozen in the journal they gave me. They started off very sporadic and unplanned. They had no exact pattern or message. It just became the outlet for my thoughts and desire to create. By day twelve, I had mastered the drawing of them. I learned not to plan them out. A month after being released, I got a tattoo of one of my lotus flowers on my right upper arm to always remember how much this place had changed me.
By the time day twelve came around, I had grown so comfortable in the world I lived in. I was excited to be with family again but feared the comfort this womb-like place offered. It was inescapable yet offered everything I’d need. I had food, a bed with blankets, friends, a phone to call loved ones, a pen, and paper. It provided a sense of purpose, order. Wake up, eat breakfast, participate in activities, get a mid-morning snack, spend some time in my room, and so on every day. What else would I need? Did I need anything else? Would I be okay with living a more complex life? I miss it sometimes.
That’s why you can so quickly feel relief in those psychiatric centers. Everything you need is right there. Whatever you need to get better, you get. You can eat as much as you want, cry, scream, dance, play board games, color, write, talk, call family and friends, visit them on the weekends. There’s no judgement, no telling you to “just push through it”. They give you all the tools to build yourself back up. But, there’s a catch: you have to build yourself. When you leave the hospital, all of those resources are still there for you, but you don’t always have someone there to reach for it. I have to work every day to reach for that nurturing aid if needed.
You can spend as long as you needed in those places. They’re meant as centers for healing and recovery for you specifically. And the truth is, some people need more help than others. I got what I needed in twelve days, but others will spend months getting the tools together to thrive in the real world. Other people will always be accessible for help, but it’s up to you. You are your own superhero. You create your own story. You can survive this and then thrive. You can do this.
I can do this.
Sincerely, Your Friendly Neighborhood Transman 