Coming Undone by Terri White (bill gates books recommendations .TXT) 📕

Word is that she came in feeling tired and burnt out, signed some forms she hadn’t read properly, and before she could say ‘court order’ found herself being escorted up to the eighth floor. Stories like these are common – the woman who turned up in the emergency room suffering exhaustion, asking for someone to soothe the edges; the one who couldn’t sleep and wanted to be helped under. Who’d presented themselves to doctors and nurses on their very last nerve. Who’d been ‘tricked, duped’, into staying a night or maybe two – for a rest – and were now locked up in here with us, the mad ones, desperate to escape from the prison they’d found themselves in.

Everyone rolls their eyes as she rants and raves on the phone, clearly trying to ensure that her feelings reach the nurses, which may then reach the doctors.

‘They’ll just keep her in for longer,’ say the old hands. ‘She’d be better off just doing her three days and getting out.’

In the meantime, with the screaming stopped and her hearing not until tomorrow, she joins us for an art class. We sit around the square table in the art room – which is a room full of supplies nearest the locked double doors. There’s a pile of paper in the middle of the table, paints, charcoal, pencils and pens. We’re told to paint or draw whatever we feel. I paint a woman with almond eyes, towering bulbous hair and fire and darkness all around her. Her smile is a slash of red. The Screamer is talking softly to Jean, murmuring in her ear, softly drawing. Jean has been in the ward the longest. She’s in her sixties, her short grey hair curling at the nape of the neck. She wears sweatpants and a sweater, both grey. When she’s not in class, she walks the halls – one end to the other – over and over and over. She doesn’t so much walk as shuffle.

The sounds of her slippers move down the polished floor, moving at exactly the same speed and with the same rhythm, for hours. The sound of Jean shuffling soundtracks the day: behind the TV, behind the chatting staff, the patients sparring, is Jean. They say that she’s been here for several months, if not years. That either her husband died or left her or she never had one. That she has kids or none. That she only speaks when it’s absolutely necessary. When it’s necessary is during the colour therapy group.

‘What colour are you today?’ asks the group leader.

I say I’m red, feeling it’s violent and vivid but not anything alarming enough to add on any more days. Jean’s next. I wonder if she’ll answer at all. I realise that if she does it will be the first time I’ve heard her voice.

‘Jean?’ comes the prompt.

‘Black,’ she says. ‘Black.’

My heart breaks. I wonder what has made her so sad. So alone. Where the only life she feels able to live is one where she gets up every morning, showers, puts on the same clothes, puts on her socks, her slippers and shuffles inch by inch, step by step, up and down the hospital hallways. Where she doesn’t speak, breathe, utter a word for the majority of her day. Her thoughts, her fears, her regrets, every feeling, every emotion kept inside, under her skin and between her bones. Those things had to snake and swim inside her, in the gaps, but they never came out, she never gave voice to them. I think how lonely she must feel: here and out in the world at large. I try to picture her walking down the street, in Trader Joe’s, on the subway, but can only ever see her the same way: shuffling, sliding down the polished floor, hands stiff as boards by her sides.

Later, there’s scent class: a clutch of perfumes, of lotions and potions – the point, we’re told, is to connect us with our senses. A useful stop on the journey to self they are trying to help us on. We sit crowded around the table, lifting bottle necks and nozzles to our noses to inhale deeply. We have to use words to describe what we smell and how it makes us feel. I pick up a generic bottle and ramble something about ‘life’ and ‘energy’ and ‘lightness’, one eye on the member of staff patrolling the rec room. Because in every class, in every session, is a member of staff, clipboard rested against their gut, scribbling down what each of us are doing.

It’s why I get up, dress and join in every day. Not because I think scent class will change me or help me or make the tiniest dent in the madness infesting my mind – but because I want to get out.

Although even I almost say no to chair yoga. ‘Chair yoga?’ I ask.

‘Yep. So everyone can take part,’ says a member of staff.

I walk into the recreation room cum breakfast hall cum meeting room. A handful of the other patients are seated, waiting to start. I take an empty chair, offering weak smiles at my classmates that aren’t returned. The instructor starts talking us through simple positions and poses as we all stay seated in our plastic chairs. Everyone’s wearing their normal clothes. We sit, some of us panting, raising our arms above our head and then down to the floor in the most unathletic and inauthentic yoga class of all time.

The only one I go to willingly, speed in my step, is music group. Because as well as control over the television, and being able to watch films at the drop of a hat (though it is a stroke of luck that everyone else in the ward, male and female, seems only to want to watch Law and Order: SVU and Criminal Minds during TV time – they truly are the great unifiers), I desperately miss music. No phone and no computer means no music.

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