Feeling my mind connect to my physical body creates a large sense of relief. What I just lived in my mind was just that, a dream. The experience is over now and no longer exists in this world. My subconscious will begins to bury the sharp vivid images and I will be able to carry on with my everyday life. When a nightmare happens in real life, your subconscious chooses what to bury deep below a conscious level. Only certain aspects are pushed aside for a while but most of the memory cannot be forgotten as easily as it could a dream.
Sitting there with the pill bottle, my mind raced, “What am I doing,” I thought. Unfortunately, my feelings and emotions had been bottled down for years now. These bottled up emotions were going to disappear with this bottle in my hand. As I feel this enormous chunk of pills flow down my throat, I notice my gag reflex kick in. “Gagging will not do the trick,” I told myself, “they are just pills.” As I looked at the empty bottle, my mind and willpower stopped and my morals kicked in. As I raced to my cell phone and phoned a friend, I realized that the situation was taken for my own hands.
In the distance, I heard the loud banging and realized that the louder the knock the less I wanted to open it. Eventually, those people will leave, my actions will fade away it will all be okay or rather all be normal again. The countless minutes kept passing and after I realized they were not going away. Not this time. My hands reached for the cold doorknob and barely turned, I could hear my heart in my ears while my physical body was getting sicker each moment.
The men’s loud voices began and the questions flew at me like sharp daggers. I began to feel faint as my father shook me asking what I had done. The police officer escorted him out of my sight, and I realized did not exist. The moment I open those doors to the change was the moment I shut my eyes. I did not open them once, I felt the safeness of the blackness behind my eye lids.
My mind created the illusion that no one was around. My ears merely played a game on me, if I cannot see it than I am not truly living it. I pretended to hear all of these noises. While my ears were available to hear incoming noise, my eyes stayed inactive with the process as well as my mouth. Questions after questions were thrown while my mouth did not want to catch them or simply produce answers for them. I was shivering, so my nerve endings were picking up on my signals my brain was sending them. While some senses chose not to respond others did, which must mean I am alive. My eyes and my mouth remained silent. I never liked the dark but this dark was good darkness. I was simply playing a show in my mind and once I open my eyes, it will all be gone.
That was when I realized I was mistaken, as I was slowly being picked up by what must have been strong men; I realized the imagination piece was false. I know I am physically being picked up due to the fact that I am no longer in my house. The security of my house, which my mother chose to leave, deserted while she left for Paris with her rich fiancé. My mind was no longer down with the games I wanted to play; I knew I was going nowhere safe.
As the sirens hit my eardrums hard, while my body felt the cold and unwelcoming stretcher beneath me. If I died, would I die on this stretcher my mind would question. While I lay there with my eyes closed and wondering what these people must have thought of me was the moment, I did not need my eyes to witness this. My eyes would do no good in this situation; strange men who knew little to nothing about me talked about me through an intercom. I was no longer able to hide in my shell, which took me so long to formulate over the years.
My shell was my safe place, where no one knew my thoughts and my growing depression, which took over my grandmothers and my own uncle’s lives. I would not let it get that far I would always say to myself. What is the point in telling anyone that each and everyday I wonder why I can not stay in bed, not due to the laziness I possessed but because there was simply no point in my mind. My tears that overflowed on my pillow each and every night, when my brother would come in and lie with me until they stopped. If my older brother did not think it was a big deal than why should anyone else. Little did I know, that my brother was just as confused as I was and was just as sad as me deep down. We comforted each other in our times of need; he would make me tea each and every night hoping it would subdue my feelings for the evening. Sometimes it worked but sometimes my brother picked up my wailing cries and he was signaled in like these officers were when they were called. My wailing and tears were not going to be secrets anymore, now everyone knew what I have been hiding for so many years. Now things my own parents did not know, these strange men knew. They knew exactly what my parents wished to know all these years of hiding away. These men could announce publically to a hospital “ a teenage girl age 16 attempted suicide.”
I hoped that the paramedics put a bucket next to me, as I began to gag. I am unsure if vomit was really produced or if my mind wanted a physical connection to the incident at hand. How could this have happened to me?
Then I realized I had put my father, who had experienced this from his own mother and brother, through the same pain he was accustomed to. I was the reason he was now crying beside me. My sorrows and pain were not alone, as I had thought.
Even with my eyes closed, I felt the bright lights beaming down on me sharply. I sensed nervousness with all of my unanswered questions. I heard the sirens louder than my own thoughts and I felt the movement of the ambulance beneath the stretcher I laid on.
While I was on the stretcher, I noticed the lack of movement I was capable of. My arms and legs were tied down and I was strapped in like an animal in a cage. This is what I envisioned a cage was like for a human, of course they were not going to throw me in a cage and haul me away from my old deceased life but rather throw me on a bed type thing and make it seem a little better than a cage.
As I was wheeled into the hospital, I felt people staring and whispering as I passed. The lights seemed brighter in here; I thought to myself “Should I open my eyes so that all of these inconsiderate people know I am not dead. The room was quiet and cold. The lights were bright and the voices were no longer murmurs but loud pronounced discussions.
My father was already in the room, answering question about me that I was capable of answering myself. My emotions raged as I realized that no matter how hard I try to get attention, it would always be given to someone else.
Boy was I wrong thinking that. My attention was coming and much more than I ever imagined but it was too late to turn around then. I was delivered to my first cage and there I would be until moved somewhere else. My own body and mind was placed into someone else’s hands.
My eyes slowly opened, quickly feeling bright lights and noticing many nurses surrounding me. On this note, I knew it was too late to shut my eyes again, no matter how hard I wanted to. The smell of the bleak white room was too typical and resembled many hospital rooms that I saw in movies.
Once my father left the room, I started answering all of his questions. Only one person was surrounding me for the first time in awhile, so I felt comfortable answering his personal questions. But little did I know while I was answering his questions, a nurse walked in and began to jab me with needles. The needles purpose was to keep me from getting more dehydrated. But unfortunately, now the nurse could hear this personal conversation.
After hours of being in this hospital, I realized I could go home after this visit but instead I was going to be put somewhere completely different then my home. I was going to go to a mental institution. I was going somewhere new now, I was being sent to a mental hospital in Virginia. No one asked if I wanted to go – but according to state law, I had to.
After long hours spent at the hospital, I was wheeled away on a stretcher and put into an ambulance, where my dreams ran wild as I slept. The ride felt like hours, even with my mind closed down for sleep. Those hours when you are asleep that typically feel fast, did not feel that way anymore. Once I arrived, still in my hospital gown, I was escorted up to the adolescent unit of Dominion Hospital. I lost my right to walk alone; taking your own life comes with way more consequences than I would have guessed.
My life before is over and now I am getting the treatment I need. No more hiding from the world but now it is all in plain sight. From just one impulsive act, my entire life has changed. Like those typical above the influence commercials we all have witnessed, those lessons given out to the public are true. No matter what each decision matters and can affect you or someone else. This decision I had made would do both, affect myself and everyone who cared for me.
This is what I imagined a cage to be like for a human but little did I know that there was cages that were bigger and filled with other humans just like you. That is a place where people go who do acts like mine. I am not the only one breaking out of a shell I tried so hard to formulate and make as indestructible as possible. I now knew I was not alone in this shell but it was full.
