Thursday, May 20, 2004
Unsanitory
In today's news : Public anger as government calls mentally ill "mad".
Laugh. Quite possibly the first time anybody has ever gotten in trouble for calling a pointy digging implement a spade.
Madness - societal label, or true entity?
I don't know.
I know that I've sat across from someone and looked into the cold, hard rationality in his eyes, as his calm voice washed over my stunned consciousness... his quiet, mild little manner as the thunderclap words passed unassumingly by, and pulled myself back from the brink of empathy with a jolt. This... I do not want to understand. Even if it feels... easy. This is ugly.
And then I remember sitting across from a small, emaciated teenaged girl more prone to fits of silence than speech, with her legs drawn up and hugged close to her breast, me in my white coat, she in her pyjamas as all around us the daily sounds of "insane" people going about their lives murmured on. And I understood, and wondered - why is she here? Who had the... madness... to label her deviant? She deserves protection and healing. Not this... casting adrift in a sea of darkness.
And then I remember drifting slowly, and dreamily, ever deeper as the drone of the sit-down ward-round happened somewhere nearby, and glancing at the wall in a desperate bid to stay awake... and the strange pool of hallucinogenic colours that started speckling into existence, and refused to vanish as I pulled myself awake in a hurry. And wondering for an instant - can't they see it too?
Before catching myself, and willing it to pass, before the vague shapes in it began to take form.
I have been here for too long.
Laugh. Quite possibly the first time anybody has ever gotten in trouble for calling a pointy digging implement a spade.
Madness - societal label, or true entity?
I don't know.
I know that I've sat across from someone and looked into the cold, hard rationality in his eyes, as his calm voice washed over my stunned consciousness... his quiet, mild little manner as the thunderclap words passed unassumingly by, and pulled myself back from the brink of empathy with a jolt. This... I do not want to understand. Even if it feels... easy. This is ugly.
And then I remember sitting across from a small, emaciated teenaged girl more prone to fits of silence than speech, with her legs drawn up and hugged close to her breast, me in my white coat, she in her pyjamas as all around us the daily sounds of "insane" people going about their lives murmured on. And I understood, and wondered - why is she here? Who had the... madness... to label her deviant? She deserves protection and healing. Not this... casting adrift in a sea of darkness.
And then I remember drifting slowly, and dreamily, ever deeper as the drone of the sit-down ward-round happened somewhere nearby, and glancing at the wall in a desperate bid to stay awake... and the strange pool of hallucinogenic colours that started speckling into existence, and refused to vanish as I pulled myself awake in a hurry. And wondering for an instant - can't they see it too?
Before catching myself, and willing it to pass, before the vague shapes in it began to take form.
I have been here for too long.
