Green is the New Black

Upon entry we are tested for Covid, strip searched, and given green johnnies to wear while our clothes are put in the dryer to kill off potential bed bugs. The new girls are always in green. They match the sheets on our thin mattresses where we sleep in preparation of the days repeating themselves. Green is the new black is our inside joke, but no one laughs. We wait for the doctor, a masked man with a deep voice, to grant us freedom, because that matters more than why we first came. There is no help. There is no kindness. This is a state-run psychiatric hospital.

Some of us get dressed. Or wear the same thing for days or weeks. It doesn’t matter. During morning meeting they ask us to set a goal for the day. The staff write down our answers, but these goals are never addressed. There is no follow-up to see what we’ve achieved by pacing the long hallway, watching t.v. in the common room, lying in bed, staring at the ceiling without thinking at all. My goal becomes to be compliant.

We are the trapped women, deemed a threat to ourselves, or maybe everyone else. We are screaming inside in an environment where any outbursts are quickly contained and controlled. Here, it’s paying time for the horrible things we did or might have done if left to our own vices. We climb the walls and share our paranoia in secret whispers. “Don’t let them give you those pills,” says the one who believes she has the power to disappear. I refrain from telling her there’s no way out. Instantly I want out. Always I want out. When I panic they give me Klonopin, and increase it to tame me.

I can’t shake off an encompassing and paralyzing sadness. A breakdown. Maybe the coronavirus didn’t get me, but quarantine did. A call to the suicide hotline. Trips to two different ERs. Then sectioned and held until a bed opened up at an inpatient facility. This is where I am processed through a system that feels more like a factory than a therapeutic setting. There was no plan to kill myself. But I was losing myself in quarantine lonesomeness.

*****

I thought I needed a break. It was really like I needed to freeze time so I could think straight. Time goes by, but I’m not a part of it. I worry about my son when I can’t reach him. He’s grown up now and feels far away. We had a fight the last time we talked. I call him everyday without realizing I’m calling his old number, leaving messages that most likely a stranger listens to and deletes. I make so many unanswered calls and miss him so much. We haven’t seen each other in almost a year. It’s been a tough year.

My boyfriend Slim drove me to the hospital and said he wasn’t upset, or at least he didn’t act like he was. Am I allowed to lose my mind? Will you still love me? We haven’t kissed since the coronavirus outbreak. I don’t know if not kissing is affecting us. It must be, right? It’s how lovers like us live. I don’t leave the house, and we don’t kiss. I worry about his daughter who lives with us and quarantines with me. Sometimes she tells me she feels like she can’t breathe. The lockdown lifestyle is heavy, and not having an end date is hard for a seventeen year old. She misses everyone. And now I am among the missing.

I call my son’s wrong number again. We’ve never gone this long without talking. The worst-case scenarios haunt me. I don’t want to be okay if things aren’t okay.

I start to have compound panic attacks. I can’t breathe. I gasp for air. I’m given a pill that I don’t want to take. Everything is wrong. I can’t breathe. I’m gasping for air. I don’t know what’s wrong. No one will help me find out what’s wrong. I swallow the pill and sit on the floor.

*****

I thought I needed an antidepressant, but they haven’t prescribed one. The doctors, with their brief visits, never ask what’s wrong or how I got here. It doesn’t matter. The word “committed” has been replaced by “sectioned.” I answer their questions, but there’s no time for my story. Like the others, my story means nothing. Our lives, the ones we’ve been removed from, come out when the women talk over card games or as we color. I struggle to stay in the lines. This is a mess. I almost make friends, but not really. Everyone’s off course in a different spot. And like the women around me, once here, I can’t understand how I got here. An unanswered cry.

The staff has no favorites. Everyone is dehumanized equally. We are homeless. Rich. Educated in the schools or on the streets. Old and young. Broken dreams and pasts. Or maybe we thought the world needed to be set on fire so we dropped the match. We are the women who question ourselves to the core, women under a newfound insanity, gnawing at our centers, checked on every fifteen minutes in the dysfunctional mental health system. A slip from reality for the mentally fragile and the mentally ill.

*****

I’ve been walking with a cane for many years, but most of the time I can get by without it inside my apartment. There have been occasional missteps where I bang into the wall or grab something to avoid falling. I’m kind of stable with unpredictable balance. I brought my cane to the hospital, but since it could be used as a weapon it gets locked up. It can look like I’m drunk when I walk, I tell staff. They offer me a walker. For some reason, this is not a potential weapon. I pass, and they tell me there are railings along the main hallway. There are, but I try not to use them.

By the time the doctor comes around it’s days later. This is not a therapy session. He latches on a unit restriction if I refuse to use a walker. I’m in bed. He hasn’t asked me to walk, or checked my balance. This is when I learn that nothing I say here is going to matter. He leaves without listening to me.

I chase after him. I feel pretty stable. He should see this. He should listen to me.

“I feel like you’re discriminating against me because I have MS.”

He pulls me into the nearest calm-down room, a small space with no windows.

I say it again. “Watch me walk. Look, I’m okay without the walker.” I tell him I know my limits. Restricting me like this isn't fair. I don’t mention that I’ve only showered once because I can’t get my hand around the bar. The shower head is high and doesn't come down. Naked. Wet. Cold. The water barely reaches me when I sit, and the ground is slippery when I stand. Even supervised it doesn’t feel like a good idea.

“I feel like you’re discriminating against me,” the doctor says back.

This makes no sense. Nothing makes sense. Before I can say anything he leaves the room and walks away quickly.

The next day a fall-risk sign goes up on my door. It’s bright red, and I feel embarrassed. The staff switches my room, but no one bothers to remove the sign. It remains on the wrong door for the entire time I’m here.

There is a locked box by the phones labeled “Human Rights Violations.” I want to write something. The staff is waiting for it. I’m concerned about any backlash. From the beginning I’ve been concerned about any prolonged stay. It looks like there’s a piece of paper in there. It’s not mine. I wonder who sees these when we rat out mistreatment and discrimination. I witness reasons for other women to drop in complaints. Maybe the papers just sit there. That would make the most sense.

*****

There’s a woman my age who cries often over a boyfriend. He calls a lot, too. She gets more calls from the outside than I do. She comes into group and sits next to me. The groups are superficial and stupid. We’re supposed to keep an empty chair between us, but we don’t right now. We’ve got masks on, and she needs someone to listen. While we’re talking the room becomes a forest. We talk about trees. Are we now trees? I think that would be a problem for me.

I grab her hand and get her to stand with me. I’m a dancing tree, I yell out, and my audience doesn’t flinch. I have no audience, nor do I want one. I want to want again. I sway and twirl the best I can. The two of us become dancing trees, the ones that don’t get rooted.

Men and walkers suck.

*****

I’ve been here over a week and have had no therapy. Someone stops by, but I can’t say for sure she is a therapist. She asks questions followed by long silences after I answer each one. She seems to wonder if I became mentally ill because of the MS or if I always had mental health challenges. We don’t talk about if I would kill myself or how I would do it.

I exist in the shadows of a nervous breakdown, fearing I have no control over myself. At any second I could behave differently. What’s happening to me? The woman at the suicide hotline thought I was having a panic attack. It seems like a long-standing panic attack. My baseline is sick with anxiety.

I say nothing about this and never see this possible therapist again.

*****

My belongings are locked behind the staff gate. My bag of prescription drugs disappears and the staff will say I never brought it. I’m crazy, right? It doesn’t matter what I say. I will breakdown over this. Have I not questioned myself enough? Why try and force me to doubt myself? The staff all doubt me. In the end, no one wishes me well. I’m defeated and I don’t know how to fight this.

I cry and get angry. I’m sick and missing a bag full of medication. I feel like it could be difficult to replace all those pills, but that’s not the point. I’m angry because no one tries to help me or the other women. Something is wrong. The system. Us. The staff. Green johnnies and disappearing pills. I need to scream, cry, and demand I’m not crazy. I do. I’m looked at like a circus animal and spoken to in a monotone voice. I can’t stop. No one cares. I don’t know how long I yell. Another patient is in the doorway. She yells out in my defense. She shakes in anger. The staff tell her to step back. She’ll get in trouble if she doesn’t stop. I can’t let that happen. These battles aren’t fair. I go to her and cry into her shoulder. The staff says we can’t be that close. When he takes a step toward us, she puts out her finger. He stops and she holds me tight. This is our goodbye.

*****

The answers are not inside us. They’re not here either. Here, we are crazy and the staff writes up notes for our charts. It’s just a waste of time.

Some of the staff have their own stories about living hard and then turning it around. They think this will make us relate to them or something. It will never go so far as to make us equals. Not here. Ever. It feels like they’re babysitters pretending to be prison guards. Maybe they’re a little bit of both. They don’t know what to do with the women like me, sentenced to their care and having a really hard time.

*****

The bedroom windows are frosted glass except at the very top. No one tries to look out of them until the night it snows. Through the portion of clear glass we can see the storm hitting. Outside looks so normal and far away. My roommate watches the last big snowstorm of the season in awe. She looks happy. This is the first time I see someone happy.

She looks happy again when I see her in the morning.

Put out your hands, she tells me.

I put my hands out and she fills them with snow. Snow, she says. I think I want to be happy. I squeeze the snow in my hands until it melts. Cold and melting. Just like us. We were all someone before we snapped and did something we would never do. I press my cold hands against my cheeks. I’m not sure how to come back.

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Andrea Gregory holds an MFA from the University of Massachusetts Boston. Her fiction has appeared in The Sun and Consequence Magazine, with a story forthcoming in North Dakota Quarterly. She is a former journalist and world traveler, having spent time reporting from the Balkans after the wars. Her work from the Balkans has appeared in Transitions Online (TOL), Balkan Insight, The Christian Science Monitor, and other places. She holds a BS in journalism from Emerson College. Her journalism career ended when she came down with multiple sclerosis, but life has a way of calling writers back to their roots.