I discharged from the hospital today. I feel a lot better. When I was going through my long inpatient stay, “David” the staff member and I used to talk about The Two Percent. The Two Percent sucks. She and I have virtually nothing in common, and yet she hijacks my body and does and says really maladaptive things. Then I’m left to clean up the fallout. I’m worried she’ll kill me one day. I would say she was a totally separate personality, but I can remember what The Two Percent does, so I don’t think I qualify for Dissociative Identity Disorder. But it sucks because I (not The Two Percent) can’t control what happens when The Two Percent takes over.
Anyway. I am so behind in my classes but I’m dedicating this evening to working on processing my inpatient stay. These images are from the journal I kept while I was there. Some of them are a bit faded but I’m really writing this mostly for myself and I remember what I wrote.
This was just me writing down all my thoughts because there were too many of them. My grandma died in May of 2017 and I still cry about it. She was the only caretaker I’ve ever had that wasn’t limited by professional boundaries. Friends and peers are lovely but I want my freaking grandma back.
Recently in the car, a staff member at the group home asked me what I had done to make my family stop talking to me. He thought that there must be something I could do to get them back and I was just choosing not to do it. This implies that he thought I was okay with not having immediate family, since if I could get them back and I wasn’t doing it, then I would be choosing not to reconcile with my family. This was one of the major reasons The Two Percent wanted to die; it was a way of “proving” that I wasn’t okay with not having a family.
Discharge from the hospital I was at for 13.5 months was hard.
It was also hard to find out that Dr. X no longer worked there.
Basically all the staff at day treatment quit.
When I say I’m “afraid to traumatize friends,” what I mean is that I don’t want to call up a friend and tell them that I’m feeling suicidal because I don’t want to put that pressure on them. Realistically they would probably prefer that over finding out that I was dead, but it never seems like that in the moment.
Even though Dr. X will probably never know that I had to go back into inpatient, I felt like I had let him down by “relapsing.”
It’s harder for me to lose providers than it is for most people, because I don’t have a family. It feels like people come and go and absolutely nobody ever stays. Lots of people think they can relate to this but when I pressure them, they have some sort of family member or somebody who has been consistent. I have my turtle. I also have friends, but I’ve only known them for a few years and I worry that they’ll leave me eventually, too. Or else The Two Percent will push them away.
One time, I walked out of the house and commented to staff about how nice the weather was. He said that it was cold and asked me, “You don’t like the sun? I thought people of your complexion liked the sun!” It felt like he was saying that I was simple and lacking substance or depth because I was white. Things like this make it more difficult for me to break down cultural barriers between me and staff.
It turns out that I do get to say goodbye to day treatment staff tomorrow, but I was worried I’d be in the hospital until after they were gone.
I didn’t want to hurt the staff member from day treatment who had been there for me through this whole thing, which is probably the primary reason I didn’t kill myself. I also thought of Dr. X and the social worker from that hospitalization.
The woman in the second emergency room I was at said that I was suicidal at baseline, which I thought was unfair. I was telling her that I wasn’t at baseline and needed help. If I were suicidal at baseline, it would be very reasonable for me to kill myself because at that point, it would be a consistent desire to be dead and not an impulse that I could wait out.
I jump all around in this journal, obviously. But one time I was in the intake of one of many inpatient stays, and the person doing the intake “I…” was disgusted with me for being suicidal. I recently described the situation to somebody this way:
I once spoke to a psychotherapist (with whom I did not continue) who said during the intake that it was ridiculous that I had been diagnosed with a trauma disorder. “I’m from Africa,” he said, not even giving me enough credit to specify a country, “and we were poor!” He insisted that since he had been able to overcome the trauma of growing up poor in Africa, it was unreasonable that I had yet to overcome my trauma when, as he put it, “You’re from America! The greatest country on earth!”
~Me
I was really hurt by that and it has been a lot harder for me to talk about trauma with people from Africa since that happened, especially since I had quietly suspected all along that that’s what they were thinking. Now I worry that I’m generalizing and assuming what people are thinking without getting to know them first. Honestly, though, I’ve had enough negative experiences with group home staff here that I feel like I am giving them a chance and we still keep offending each other.
Eventually they did call and arrange a pickup for my turtle, so they didn’t actually end up failing me in that regard. I do worry about being hit with platitudes. I also can’t highlight enough the sentence that “I also generally feel like they don’t think I’m very smart and I’m afraid to lose whatever respect they do have for me.” Right now it’s 7:33pm and they’re mad that I don’t want to take meds that are supposed to be taken at bedtime. I don’t understand how it’s possible to expect an actual fully-grown adult to go to bed before 8pm. I have to fight them on this every single day. My boundary is that I don’t take bedtime meds until 8:30pm, which I feel is insanely early. But it’s not good enough for them. They treat me like I’m braindead and then they’re surprised when I don’t feel like they respect me and I don’t want to confide in them.
I worry that a consequence of having lapsed into The Two Percent is that I hurt the therapist from day treatment.
The prompts above are answered in the responses below. The numbers should line up; prompt #6 is answered by response #6, etc.
“A…” is the regional director for group homes and I feel like we have a good rapport. It obviously would be a very good thing if I could start to find this group home supportive, I just don’t know how to do it.
This page was very faded but it starts by saying, “It’s hard for me to challenge thoughts because a lot of them are true.” “K…” is my current outpatient therapist and “S…” was my social worker this week in the hospital. I really, honestly, do need to remember to ask somebody to advise me as to how to share my struggles with my friends without scaring them, because my friends are the most stable people in my life.
“Talk to [the therapist from day treatment] before he leaves.”
“B…” is the counselor from vocational rehab who I should definitely actually write to since they paid for my classes this semester so I need to keep them in the loop. They’ve also been good at being helpful and supportive, which I will need as I try to do two weeks’ worth of college work in the space of a few days.
Again, this page was hard to see. But I have a history of massively hyperfixating on to-do lists, much to my detriment. This is problematic because they really are necessary in life, but I get scared when I start them because in my life, they can get way out of hand.
I don’t remember how I happened across this video of “Down In The River To Pray,” but I was thinking of it in music group in the hospital. I noticed that most people in the mainstream (including in church services) use body language and facial expressions to show their emotion when participating in music. We sang different hymns from the Brandenberger family and we didn’t dress like they do and I was never anywhere near as musical as they are. But one thing we have in common is the stoicism with regard to music. I strongly suspect that the sisters in the video are feeling all kinds of emotions as they sing, but they don’t externalize them. This isn’t a bad thing; honestly it made me feel less alone because I can relate to them whereas the people around me always think I’m weird for standing stock still in concerts or wherever music is played.
The video:
On an entirely unrelated note, I was trying to think of other shortcomings in myself that would make it harder for me to relate to group home staff, and I remembered one. When I was teaching ESL, I worked in schools that had mostly white teachers serving mostly black and brown students. It’s confusing to me now when I’m the one being served, and I feel like it’s “wrong” for people coming from a background of less privilege to be helping me, when I’m the one who comes from more privilege. The residents of my group home are 100% white and the staff is 100% black. It’s like I’m in the antebellum South and they’re being exploited. It’s hard for me to ask them for things because I’m afraid it will look like I think they’re The Help or something.
This was literally my safety plan. Take a PRN, try to sleep it off, and if that doesn’t work then get myself into a locked unit. Nothing else seems to work because as crazy as it sounds, the suicidal person isn’t me!
I still think it’s a fair point that group home staff doesn’t seem to care as much about me as they do about protocol. I can’t remember if I’ve blogged about this before, but one time, I had been through a really stressful PCP appointment. I got there for a routine visit and my pulse was so high that they did an EKG on the spot, which came back sort of weird so they did blood labs and the doctor confirmed my phone number, “in case I need to call you emergently.” It was a stressful day, but a small side matter was that they changed my blood pressure medication. I brought back the paperwork from the doctor but the group home staff was beside themselves that I didn’t bring their special custom form for the doctor to sign, and they were going to have to fax it to him. Multiple group home staff members found me multiple times to complain about the exact same incident, as though by repeatedly complaining I could go back in time and bring their stupid form to the doctor for him to sign. Nobody asked if I was okay, even though they were looking at the appointment summary and could clearly see that it had been an eventful appointment. I felt like they couldn’t understand that even I have bad days and can’t always be perfect all them time. Then when I was in the emergency room last week, I called the group home to let them know I was there. “Oh my god,” the staff member said, and for an instant I thought he might be about to empathize with my situation, and how humiliating it was to have failed when I thought I was better, and I was dealing with all the emotions that accompany wanting to actually end one’s own life. “…You didn’t bring the form!” the staff member continued. I feel like they don’t actually care about me; they just care about their unique form which only says the exact same things that the appointment summary or discharge summary says anyway. The group home will blatantly ignore doctors’ orders if it isn’t presented in their unique form. Incidentally, the third time I went to the ER last week I brought the form, and the doctor said he didn’t understand it and wouldn’t fill it out.
Unrelatedly, I sometimes think that group home staff think I’m mean. I’ve always had a cold, surly demeanor when I feel threatened. I’m really not mean but I’ve been hurt by the individuals who work here enough times that I feel like I have to put up walls when I’m around them.
The group home had some sort of protocol that they had to have a meeting with me and the hospital’s social worker before I came home, so we managed to squeeze in a 15-minute meeting before my transportation arrived. A longer meeting would have been very useful, as anyone who’s made it this far could surmise. They insisted that the people who work at the group home do so because they just want to help people. I haven’t really gotten that vibe. I think they’re good-natured people, but they just needed jobs like everyone else in the country. Group homes are always hiring.
As an example, one time when I had just arrived, one of the other residents was running all around the house freaking out because he was dealing with paranoia and hallucinations.
“Is he okay?” I asked staff.
“Oh yeah, every day about this time he just goes crazy,” staff replied.
If they literally view people as “crazy,” it’s hard for me to believe that they specifically sought out a job to help “crazy” people. It seems more likely that they joined a field they were unfamiliar with because they needed to work.
This last part I wrote right after I got home. I walked in the door, trying to remember all the things I needed to do. I have a very poor working memory and I was rehearsing my lists so I could keep everything in my head until I could get up to my room to write it down. I also was embarrassed about having been hospitalized, nervous about interacting with group home staff because I’m supposed to find them supportive and I don’t and that makes me feel ashamed, and I really needed to pee. I came into the house, acknowledge the staff in their office, and tried to get upstairs and they got really mad. “We are people!” they demanded, and showed an example of the exuberant greeting that they thought they deserved. I had been in the house for less than a minute and I had already been accused of dehumanizing the staff. Fingers crossed I can make things go better from here.
