MHM Magazine

Issue 61 | 2022 | MENTAL HEALTH MATTERS | 45 MHM The fall HOW THE HELL DID I GET HERE? I am lying in a hospital ward, someone is softly crying in the bed next to me, an emptying of pain, the sound of deep, crushing despair. I feel pain, the worst pain ever. I feel for myself – I’m gone. Thoughts begin to rush into my misty, foggy brain. I struggle to reach and hold a whole thought. I just get fragments and they’re like shards of broken glass tearing through my being. I feel the pain of knowing what I did, how I tore the lives of loved ones to shreds. My heart pounds in my chest, burning tears flow from my swollen, raw eyes. Now I’m sobbing, curled up in a foetal position. I just want to die, this is just too much, I can’t do this. A nurse arrives and jabs a needle in my butt. I feel a rush of numbing, soothing drug, qui- etening my tortured mind so that I can forget and not care, because to remember and care consumes me with burning guilt and deep self-loathing. I’m awakened by the rage filled voice of my husband, “wake up!!!, tell me why you did this to me, how could you do this to our children. You have no conscience; you call yourself a Christian. You’re a fake,” he shouts. I just cry because he is so right. He tells me how much he loved me and how he has given me everything. “Why?” he demands, agony etched on his face. I have no answers. I cry so hard I make a noise; I sob because my heart is broken, and I don’t care what happens to me or what anyone thinks, I want to surrender all of me because everything is broken. The truth is I do care what peo- ple think, I always care - too much. My identity is and always has been, very much defined by what others think of me. My value determined by approval, having none for who I am. My sobbing brings nurses run- ning, my husband is told to leave and I’m given another jab, and sink into the bliss of nothingness. So it continues, when I am awake I cry, my soul bleeds in anguish and I want to die. I want to get away, from the tsunami I’ve caused, away from the recrimina- tions, judgements and above all the devastating pain I’ve caused and lives I’ve decimated. My days are filled with psychi- atric sessions, my husband hating me and hurting from my cruelness and me hating myself, my life and who I’ve become. I am a drugged- out zombie tormented by my own enemy, the corrupt me. The young lady in the next bed is crying again, because this must be hell, a place where the fallen, broken, judged and tormented are sent. I can’t get up and hold her, the drugs have sedated me, my muscles refuse to respond, but I know she needs to be held. I tell her to climb in my bed and I hold her. I feel her body shaking with the agony of being alive. We’re alive physically but dying inside. We’re two souls immersed in feeling the loss of self. A nurse BIPOLAR DISORDER RIDING THE WAVES AND DROWNING IN THE DEPTHS By Marianna Stais LIVING WITH...