“I can’t think,” is what an elderly lady was saying over and over in the hospital that first time which I like to call the Big Blink. That is where I bit my tongue, literally, for hours before I fell into a state of catatonic slumber for a week, not able to remember a damn thing except the rolling lips of some old psychiatrist and a rib poke for my Dad, paybacks I imagine. Later, him sitting across from me smiling like a Cheshire Cat and with his sausage finger, my dad, quickly made a circle around his face with a slanted line through it to finish off a warning. My only thought being I was in trouble for seeing a face split on the big screen or was it my imagination? And yes it was confirmed that I indeed was in trouble because the bread I was rolling into dough balls, I had no intentions of eating.
Back home before the Big Blink all I wanted to do was let my friends in on the secret that this faceplant they were witnessing is how much I am going to eat during this lifetime and all they could muster was a long unfathomable….NO. But they would provide that which confuses those who observe others that deliberately put into themselves what they can tolerate for their own good before taking something that makes them crazy wanting to feel something.
Doctors thought of me a casualty to the effects of chemicals without knowing the truth or the lies and set me up for a lifetime of chemical romance with medication that does nothing for me but validates that something is never right and when it isn’t right the medicine can be blamed and dosages rearranged. Like a relationship that is born of necessity but becomes old before it gets better.
So it is true that over many years I found the right recipe and it is difficult to admit that some things are never quite right still. Good for me but also not so good that I still wonder if medicine is the answer and what would my life be like if I didn’t allow myself to be prescribed for so long.
Now I get along taking medicine consistently but it’s almost like I’m putting an invisible pill inside an invisible body by command of a transcendent mind. It seems like meds do nothing for nothing but obviously must do something. I know they must because I am irritable and anxious all the time and the only way to not feel that way is to shut up and keep moving because I’m not one to meditate on symptoms and side effects, although I should. And still I am quick to medicate.
I’m not sure that there is a cure for mental illness turned mental anguish. They say the answer is exercise and healthy eating habits. I sometimes feel like I’m walking on a treadmill and behind me is a hungry tiger just waiting for me to stop so he can eat well.
I did walk in place once and got busted for it. I must’ve been sweating hard, all elbows, gnawing on my tongue like you do when struggling to open a non-twist bottle cap. I was trying to walk faster and faster while cars whizzed by me honking as if to say “you’re going the wrong way.” You see, I was on the side of the expressway walking to Florida from my gasless vehicle, the on ramp about 150 yards behind it, and me struggling in place going nowhere ahead of it.
Imagine the scenario where someone is walking away from it all but hasn’t the capacity to realize not to give it their all at the beginning of the journey. One day they will need to harness the energy that made them want to explore in the first place and use it as a second wind.
What a scene this was that I couldn’t pull myself together enough to walk to the gas station for gas but instead I would ask the cop, who picked me up for not hitchhiking, to drive me to Florida. He instead tried to find my friends house on Magnolia Street but I couldn’t remember the address so I said it was 420 Magnolia. I was fortunate enough to have been picked up by the father of a young man who used to maybe randomly hang out at a house on 420 Freebird Lane more than once, so Dad was very sympathetic to my situation. I remember him being very gentle when he cross examined me asking why was I sitting the way I was with my face pressed against the protective glass and my hands flopped to the side, a shotgun two feet away making it difficult to pick up the pieces of a peaceful situation. Why couldn’t I answer simple questions like where I was headed and where had I been. It’s like asking a blind man how many fingers he himself is holding up. He knows the answer because he willed it. The difference is that the psychotic person can’t answer right because they think every entity besides themselves willed them to this spot.
So here I was confessing to insanity by trying to get to Florida a month early with no gas or ticket or acceleration. I was brought to a holding room with no windows or furniture where I just crumbled to the floor with exhaustion from walking in place for god knows how long before this angel of a man brought me here for my second hospital experience. This is where I would learn to walk again and what would be known to me as the Next Step.
Francis Erich McElroy 