Just in case anyone was curious, I’ll Keep Coming by Low Roar is my personal anthem song (though Introdiction by Scroobius Pip, All Eyes On Me by Bo Burnham, Achilles Come Down by Gang of Youths and Mars by Yungblud are also up there, I sorta have a hard time choosing favourites haha).

The song saved my sanity once, in a hospital up North, along with the male nurse who let me keep the cord to my headphones despite them being a ‘choking hazard’.

It took 3,499 words to avoid having to go to court to get my freedom back. I had committed no crime. I cried reading the words in front of the shrink who was impressed that David Castle had been my psychiatrist in Melbourne. Not soon enough though to avoid being medicated against my will via injection. I cried then too. The nurse almost did also. They supplied no medication nor adequate support for the withdrawal. That was the second time I tried to kill myself. Waking up to a room full of projectile vomit is sh*thouse, I tell you. My throat burned raw and I hallucinated for days, alone. I couldn’t be fu*ked to clean the sheets so I tossed everything in the shower, left it there for over a week, and slept on the couch under the towels a couple mates had left days earlier when their car ran out of gas and they’d needed to stay the night at mine.

…another woman in hospital had woken up to her stalker sodomizing her. The doctors didn’t believe her, so she got committed. But from inside she was able to arrange the documentation from her regular Dr that provided evidence of the Co2 poisoning that he’d used to sedate her. Once she got out she found another of his victims and, last I heard, they were organizing a court case against him.

…anyway.

…It’s a great fu*king song.

(aprox 35 min read)

I’m still not entirely certain what happened. My mind snapped about a week ago but it was a long time coming. Almost 35 years long, to be honest.

There are still conversations I need to have with my lover (the only one who witnessed it happen as it occurred in the privacy of our home) to fill in the gaps, but one thing I do know is that what happened felt like some higher power was flicking the switch of my awareness/consciousness on and off at ever increasing intervals. I know I didn’t try to hurt myself and I didn’t try to hurt anyone else, but I must have been making less and less sense to Dags (the aforementioned lover) because it eventually got bad enough that he broke one of the only promises I ever made him make to me, which was that he would never call mental health services on me.

I realize now you cannot have ultimatums in a relationship, however well-intentioned. I’ve forgiven him for breaking his promise, and I hope he understands that.

I’d never stayed in a mental health institution before. (I was briefly and voluntarily enrolled in a program back in Newfoundland in my early twenties when I felt I was close to suicide but that just hooked me up with a psychiatrist and some meds that I only stayed on for a very brief time). I realize now it was always my greatest fear, largely because I didn’t believe in myself enough to have faith I could ever get out again once in. Happily, in that as well, I was wrong.  Continue reading →