It’s hard to think properly when your legs and arms are strapped down to a gurney. All the control I used have; gone. It didn’t feel good to be this way, but at this moment, it only felt like it was going to get bad. Real bad.
They wouldn’t even let me walk, I felt completely impotent and deprived of the use of my own body, but I guess that’s what I get for abusing it after all these years. Like a child who gets their toy taken away from them when they can’t treat the nice things they have properly. They were taking my body away from me.

It was well past midnight and I was exhausted, arriving at this place really made it sink in. I seriously was really messed up. For the most part it was dark, there were a couple of lights still on, but is late and everyone was already asleep. I was wheeled into an examination room where a less than friendly women stood greeting me with a stiff smile. She wore a white medical coat with her hair tied up tightly in a ponytail and an awful shade of dark purple lipstick. Don’t ask me who she was trying to impress at a mental hospital at one in the morning, I wouldn’t be able to answer that question appropriately.

“Take off your gown,” the women tells me, not even asking if I felt comfortable standing half nude in front of a stranger. She raised her eyebrows at me as if she were waiting and getting more and more impatient by the millisecond. I wasn’t in the mood to put up a fight anymore and she looked more than willing to sedate me so I complied with her for the sake of both of time.

I watched as she littered marks in ink all over the body outlined on her sheet of paper, she was replicating the marks that were all over mine. Documenting every little nick and cut that were on my legs and arms. The way she looked at my body made me feel subordinate… less than a human. I mean, I suppose I don’t act human so it makes perfect sense to not be treated like one.

It felt like no time had passed since the time I had arrived to when they had escorted me to my room that I would be occupying for the next fortnight. I try out the bed and I couldn’t get comfortable, there was no possible way. It was too cold, the bed was made of some thin plastic covered cotton bag that was a horrible excuse for a mattress and all it did was make noise when I moved, not to mention the uncomfortable stare I was getting from the nurse who had to watch me all night while I slept. I wish she would just shut the damn door because the lights were still on in the hallway and it was shining directly at my face. I didn’t expect to get much sleep tonight here anyways so I just kept counting the tiles on the ceiling over and over and over again. There were fortyeight.

I watched the sun grow and spill through the blinds, I didn’t get a wink of sleep last night. Could be due to the fact that I was in the looney bin…  well that couldn’t be the case. It wasn’t like I heard girls crying in the middle of the night or heard yelling from down the hall saying that someone had just found out that she has cat ears distracting me from my counting, that definitely couldn’t be right. 

It just so happened to be six in the morning to be exact, what an ungodly hour, I knew this because one of the nurse has so graciously woke the whole hall up and told us to make our beds before gathering in the community room. With my door open, I could easily see what the nurse had talked about. It was across the hall from my room with windows so I could see what was inside.

I tried to stall for as long as I could, I watched as a flock of girls made their way into the room. I couldn’t help that my heart was literally beating so hard that my chest felt like it was going to tear. My hands quickly turned into fist, my nails dug into my skin and my hands clenched so tight that my knuckles began look like they had lost their pigment and turned white. “Jesus, if you’re here, please hold my hand right now” I thought.

I sucked in a deep breath, holding it as I walked to the doorway looking down both sides of the hall before taking my first steps into what maybe be potentially the most revelatory and confronting moment of my life. 

Folding my arms across my chest, involuntarily closing myself off right of the bat, I had to drag myself across that hall into the damn community room. Shaking hands were covered by my posture and I was met by at least a dozen pair of eyes as they all sat comfortably on the couches that lined the perimeters of the room. Reluctantly, I took a couch that was unoccupied.

Seems like I was the last one to arrive because the nurses had already started to do their rounds and take our vitals, our blood pressure, pulse, etc. It wasn’t a hidden fact that all the girls were staring at me, I felt insecure even though they didn’t seem to be judging me. I mean, I’m in no position to judge them because, we were all here because there is something wrong with us and need help. Desperately.

But, it wouldn’t take long before these girls to get the answers they were curious about because one of the head nurses began ‘daily goals’. Each girl told the head nurse, who they had nicknamed Taco, their goals they planned to achieve for the day and then the goal they hope to achieve before they leave the clinic.

There was a positive flow circulating the room, but even that didn’t inspire me to think of any on the spot.

Everyone else seemed comfortable and had at least one new thing to conquer that day, but I still had some many things that just needed to be addressed, I didn’t even know where to begin. And when they got to me, I didn’t say anything… Because, well, I didn’t have much to say.

Looking down at her clipboard, “Jennifer? Is that right?” Taco asked me and I nodded, “Do you have a goal?” She asked me, too sickly sweet.

I didn’t say anything.

“The less you say, the longer you stay.” A girl with dark hair sitting next to me whispered, so quiet that I’m sure no one could make out what she said.

“Do want me to come back to you?” Taco asked and I shook my head no again.

Reluctantly, she never came back to me and went right into first activity of the morning. We would be doing a short journal entry before breakfast as we were waiting for the boys wing to finish. Taco hands me a black and white marbled journal and I peered around seeing all the girls get straight to business.

I looked at the notebook like a foreign object, flipping the pages around like there would be something to find but it was just blank. I didn’t want to write, what would I even write about? My feelings? Last time I wrong my feelings it landed me here. But it seems like everyone else had something to say about something because damn, if they wrote any faster, surely sparks would fly. Hey, I’m surprised their papers didn’t catch fire. On the other hand, my page was ice cold.

Even when we had run up all the time, I still had a blank page at the end of it. But the girls were getting impatient and they all were ready to eat breakfast. I for one was feeling nauseous at the thought of food that I didn’t know exactly what was in it and I had feeling I wasn’t going to have much of a say in the matter because it turned out they were all too well informed about me and what I do, needless to say I wasn’t leaving without an empty plate.
You wouldn’t think eating pancakes for breakfast would be a tantalizing task but I couldn’t help wanting to spit it out. Every. Single. Bit of it. I didn’t know how many carbs were in these… or calories? I bet the sugar in these are through the roof. All I wanted to do was get this s*** food out of my stomach, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to.

When I got back to my room I felt uneasy and unsettled. I was sitting down at my desk and for the first time I took at look at what it had to say. It had messages carved deep into the wood, mutilated by sharp objects that seem to come from something other than the tip of a pencil and that scared me. It was pretty much  impossible to have anything that can cause harm to you, I was lucky enough to have a pencil. No pens… no pants with strings, no shoelaces, there were a lot of restrictions. I guess if you’re desperate enough you could use your own nails… but that just didn’t seem like it would work well enough to make marks that deep.

I’M LOST
I CAN’T RUN FROM MYSELF ANYMORE
I CAN HEAR SATANS VOICE
I USE TO BE NORMAL
F*** THIS HELL HOLE

“And I thought I crazy…” I whispered to myself discreetly letting my finger tips drag across the crevasses of the wood, “but maybe I am…”

I took my journal out and laid it on top of my desk that was covered in profanities, with pencil between my fingers I wrote “Day one…I thought I was okay. I.Was.Wrong.”