Hope and Hysteria

The Psych Ward

Back when things were relatively normal, I wouldn't tell anyone about my depression, suicide attempts, and the strange feelings I would get at a young age. I fondly remember in my childhood of my years as a devoted misanthrope that had complete and utter disgust for my own species. I was, in many ways, an outsider to the community I was a part of, and since the community was a down-home type of cohesive, they didn't take kindly to strangers. As social games went, my frequent moving from place to place around Canada in my first few years of childhood didn't allow me to establish any real connections outside of my parents, until I was about six years old. The majority of the other people I would meet would be a mix of kind strangers and indifferent acquaintances. The way I saw the world was confined to a small box of about 30 people for eight straight years. By the fourth year, I had had enough of trying to socialize with many people. I isolated myself for what I believe to be my own good. I did not talk to many people because I was not someone favoured by many. I was a target to be picked on, I was an outsider and I was a victim of my own mental illness and my differences from the other people. During my years in high school, I saw similar behaviours, and still see the same behaviours still in university. Outside of school, which is mostly all I've known, I got a chance to meet people who have seen atrocities through space and time, including holocaust survivors and child soldiers. They all made me realize the same thing: human beings are tribal savages that only ever behave to fulfil their most basic needs and intellectual pursuits, acting the same as their ancestors from thousands of years ago. Human beings, to those who truly know what human beings are, are a mistake. All they will do is reach for a higher way of living but never catch it. They will be limited by their illogical instincts for more years to come, and I don't wish to see more atrocities committed against innocents. I would get into similar ramblings in my head, where I would ponder the bottomless pit of human stupidity and savagery, and be ashamed to belong to the same species.

I would try to kill myself because I couldn't bare being human, since inheriting the sins of my species would be a damnation in its own right without any promise or return on what I would sow. One time I was foolish enough to inform a crisis line of my intentions, my worldviews, and my thoughts. The responder had no idea what to say. I got frustrated and ended the conversation. A few minutes later I was informed my phone number was tracked by police and there were four cars at my house. I was on vacation at the time. I was made to stay in a psychiatric ward for about four days, where the first two were spent in a concrete cell which was monitored by night-vision video surveillance for 24 hours a day. The only things in my room were a blow-up mattress, and a steel toilet and sink bolted into a concrete floor. A suspicious looking drain was in the middle. There were no windows, only lights which I was allowed to shut on and off. There was a warning sign put outside the door of my cell, telling the nurses at the hospital that I was crazy and dangerous to them. My memories of being an outcast and 'not one of us' came flooding back to me. And so returned my misanthropy, along with my depression. Granted, I did try to hang myself with my laptop charger, and then was going to slit my throat since hanging was too slow.

I did some good research on where to cut, too. All that aside, my two days in the cell were mostly spent sleeping. I kept the lights off at all times. I hated everything, everyone for treating me like a pet, and myself for being so powerless and foolish to express myself to other humans, of course being too stupid to ever understand my point of view. When humans are scared of you, they will take your power away and treat you like a pet. I did not like how the world saw me, so I would spend my waking days crying uncontrollably in a corner. I was also bleeding through my hospital pants due to the open wounds from working up to slitting my throat. Boohoo. I had such a hatred for my species and the system I was trapped in that I would not speak to anyone at the hospital for two days. Having realized I had to play the game of being like the group, I acted normally and got out, jumped through the hoops that were put in front of me, and was released. The despair I felt in that cell will forever haunt me, and I believe it has fundamentally changed me for the rest of my life. I will never see human beings the same way again, knowing they don't see me as one of them.