Freedom of Sketch

Art Therapy

I am the last straggler to enter the room where we're supposed to have "Art Therapy." Everyone immediately dominates the large, round table in the middle, forcing me to pick a seat between a girl with scabby arms and one so lost in a medication fog that she looks like a wax statue. The art therapist, a young man with his hair tied back in a short ponytail, hands out sheets of printer paper with lines drawn down the middle of them. Over the first section are the words, "My Before", and over the second are, "My After".

The art therapist presents us with plastic tubs of used crayons, colored pencils worn down to nubs, dried-out magic markers, the shredded remains of magazines, and glue sticks. The scents that waft up take me back to kindergarten, a nonthreatening world with a longer leash than this one. I remember holding my scissors wrong; the teacher drew a smiley face on my thumb to remind me to keep my thumb up whenever holding scissors. Daniel was the New Kid. He loved animals and fossils, and collected rocks he found to be interesting. Lizzie was still living on the west coast; we weren't aware of her existence yet, not until a couple of years later.

"You distracted?" breathes a voice in my ear. I jump. The art therapist backs away a step, holding up his hands. "Sorry about that. Everything okay?"

No, everything is not okay. I'm locked in a kindergarten jail where everyone wears pretend smiles and hands out false hope like chocolates, presenting rainbows of pills to girls who have lost themselves and aren't ready to be found. Talk, talk, talk; blah blah blah: as if words could stop a girl from opening her flesh or starving it away.

I sink my chin into my hands as the man leans around me, explaining the assignment: draw your old life, the "disordered" one, then draw your new life, in which you "commit to recovery". He smells of mint and stale cigarettes. I wonder what kind of life he led that made him decide to become an art therapist. I look at him through my hair.

"What's your name?" he asks. "Mine's Nate."

I hold up my wrist and show him my identity printed neatly on my bracelet.

"'Shiloh,'" he ponders, "yeah, I think I heard about you in report. You're the artist, right?" Even on the outside, I had a difficult time responding to this. I didn't see myself as having some title; I was just a girl who made art. Now, I wear the label like a brand in the middle of my forehead. It's a word that causes a primal anxiety, rather than its previous discomfort. I shrug. "Not anymore."

Nate crouches down at my side and hands me a sharpened lead pencil. "You can never stop being an artist. For some people, it's a means of survival."

"My team thinks it's a sickness."

"Try to draw more positive things. Put the darkness behind you. Draw a new future for a new you."

"I don't want to be a 'new me'. I'm fine just the way I am."

Nate stares at me hard. "Are you?" He sets the pencil in front of me. I want to break it in half, take the eraser end, and scrub my skin off, leaving the raw stickiness behind like a fresh-peeled fruit. But I'm not like the other girls in here. I am sane. I have self-control.

Finally, he leaves me alone. As the patients around me chirp like parakeets, words and laughter tumbling around and on top of one another like marbles, I flip my paper to the blank side, pick up my pencil, and begin sketching. At first I draw just a skeleton of a mysterious creature, hulking over its own shadow. But then the creature's teeth march out of the pencil's lead in rows, and the beast becomes darker, more sadistic. It grows claws. Spikes roll down its curved back.

The scabby-armed girl gives my drawing a sideways look, shakes her head, and delves deeper into the assignment. I start drawing people. Tiny, helpless, huddled together beneath the monster's hungry maw. What comes next for them is the inevitable.

***

I didn't expect us to have a show-and-tell session afterward, so when I hold up my paper, an uncomfortable silence blooms inside the room. Violet breaks into harsh laughter. "Girl, you're gonna get put on more pills drawing shit like that," she says. "Get time added to your sentence."

Nate interrupts. "Shiloh, what does your picture say about you and your state of mind?"

Me: "You're the professional. Aren't you the one who's supposed to figure that out?"

"Okay," he answers smoothly, "I see the mind of someone who feels like there's something they can't run away from. You feel trapped, consumed by something very painful and very powerful. But it's not just you. You drew others." He rubs his chin and points. "Somewhere, deep down inside, you know you're not alone."

"Deep," I say, crumpling up my drawing and tossing it into the paper bag that serves as a garbage container. I scrape my chair back and leave the room.

***

During my next meeting with Dr. Fox and Meredith, who is the social worker assigned to my case, the two of them bear down on me for being "uncooperative" and "resistant to treatment". Apparently Nate fished my drawing out of the paper bag and gave it to my psychiatrist, who has been keeping it in my file.

I rhythmically kick at the floor with the toe of my sock. I keep my arms folded across my chest, my head low.

"We can't watch you every second of every day," Dr. Fox says, "so that's why we have other staff. And if you don't think our other staff report your behavior to us, then you're very mistaken."

Meredith's voice is gentler. "Shiloh, can you explain what you were feeling when you drew that picture in Art Therapy?"

"I don't know," I say at first. I try to remember how Nate described it. "I guess trapped. Consumed. But not alone."

"In what way do you feel 'trapped'?"

"I'm in here, aren't I?" I answer, irritable.

Dr. Fox: "But it's good that you recognize that you're not alone."

"Mutual imprisonment helps develop lasting relationships," I croon in a sugar-coated tone, remembering that exact thought I had on my first day.

Meredith leans back with a frown. Dr. Fox sighs deeply and closes my chart. You're not helping yourself, they say. You won't be discharged with an attitude like this. We're here to guide you, not to fight with you.

***

But the next time we have Art Therapy, I draw something similar, even though Nate takes me aside to tell me that it's making some of the other patients anxious. The week after that, I do it again. My treatment team takes "necessary steps" and pulls me out of Art Therapy, then gives me an extra dose of "Anger Management", a dead hour I use to doze off on the Lounge couch.