UP AND DOWN AND ALL AROUND
An account of institutional memory, treatment, and authorship under pressure.
I was scribbling on the walls again.
That is how they tell it.
Not writing. Not composing. Scribbling.
As if language itself had become a symptom.
As if the hand reaching for the wall was not the same hand that had reached for notebooks, margins, anything that would hold still long enough to take a line.
Dr. V was going to commit me again.
Again is the word that does the damage.
Again means they already have a story for you.
Again means you arrive pre-interpreted.
The file thickens before you speak.
Belmont, Massachusetts is scenic in a way that turns hostile when you are losing your freedom.
Trees. Stone walls. Quiet money.
Order everywhere except inside your skull.
Then the hospital.
A correction no one names.
McLean Hospital has the shape of a college campus.
Brick. Walkways. Green space.
It almost looks like a place you chose.
That is the trick.
Inside, I was furious in a way that had no clean target.
Not dramatic. Not theatrical.
A moral fury.
The kind that comes when something essential is being mishandled and no one in the room has the language to meet it.
Fluorescent calm.
Measured voices.
A clipboard between you and your own mind.
Dr. V said ECT was the only way.
The only way.
A hallway with one exit sign.
As if memory were expendable.
As if the mind were an appliance.
I told him to fuck off.
Not because defiance would save me.
Because something in me was still intact enough to recognize coercion when it spoke politely.
He upped the lithium.
At a certain point, medication stops feeling like help and starts feeling like weather.
It descends. It occupies.
My hands shook.
That part stays.
Hands are supposed to be loyal.
Hands write. Hands hold. Hands open the world.
When they start trembling under someone else’s plan, you understand how helpless a person can become while still standing.
Then the missing sections.
This is what no one emphasizes.
The theft.
People like to talk about intensity.
They do not talk about absence.
There are stretches I cannot retrieve.
I know the sequence, not the substance.
A bed. A ceiling. A corridor.
A paper cup. A signature that did not feel like consent.
A version of me moving through it.
Partly gone.
I woke up four weeks later in the Pavilion.
Four weeks is long enough to lose your own momentum.
Long enough for the world to continue without you.
People said I seemed better.
That word can be obscene.
Because yes, the meds begin to work.
The edges smooth. The temperature drops.
You become legible again.
There is a cost to that.
They call it stabilization.
It can feel like erasure with improved posture.
And then, almost perversely, when it works, I want to die.
Not because the pain is sharper.
Because the world is flatter.
The voltage that was tearing me apart was also connected to language, scale, conviction.
I am not romanticizing it.
I know the wreckage.
But the return to safety is not noble.
Often it is smaller.
And all the while I kept thinking:
why can’t they understand the poetry on the walls matters?
I know how that sounds.
I know the diagnosis hears grandiosity.
But experience is not clean.
Sometimes the line comes during the storm.
Sometimes the wall receives what the page cannot.
Madness does not cancel meaning.
The institution is built to identify threat, not beauty.
Not the places where the two overlap.
So they medicate.
They sedate.
They reassure.
A benzo.
ECT.
Memory taken again.
That phrase is the hardest:
yet again.
Not because I cannot survive it.
Because I return in pieces.
Returned by people who do not have to live in the house they are renovating.
You come back with gaps.
You come back slower.
You come back with tremor.
You come back to the same trees.
The same bench.
The same architecture of managed suffering.
And everyone wants gratitude because the crisis has passed.
Passing is not understanding.
I still think about the walls.
Not because I want to return.
Because I want to recover something that was mine before it became a case.
Some image.
Some sentence.
Some proof I was more than dosage and response.
Maybe that is what this is.
A retrieval attempt.
Not of the whole month. That is gone.
The benzo and the ECT saw to that.
But maybe a voice can cross where memory failed.
Maybe the page can hold what the wall held once.
Under worse conditions.
I was scribbling on the walls again.
That is how they tell it.
I am telling it differently.