Bared Teeth 5: Restraints

Come As You Are by Viesia

In the state hospital where I lived for a year, they used the straitjacket, but they called it a “safety coat.” I guess they felt the need to sugarcoat its reality since we were children. I was only in a safety coat once, and I didn’t feel the least bit coated in safety or sugar. Tied up in a strange contraption of canvas and wood, the canvas rough against my skin, I lay on three planks of wood. One plank ran along my breastbone. My arms rested along the tops of the other two planks that jammed up against the sides of my breasts. I realized that a “safety coat” was not designed to be a comfortable experience for someone like me, whose body possesses breasts.

In the mental health world, the use of restraints is justified

 

Bared Teeth 4: Shared Humanity and Dehumanization

Before my hospitalizations, my mother, father, and stepfather all wanted to help me, but didn’t know how.

Euphoria, by Viesia

Neither my family nor I knew what was wrong with me. In the hospital we began to figure out what was wrong with me, and what could be done to help me. I needed the kind of help only a mental hospital could provide.

I appreciated my need to be locked up. I knew that only the hospital could keep me alive. In Gaebler Children’s Center 3 East kidspeak, I was “locked up and fucked up.” Aware of the threat I posed to my self, I realized a certain amount of my autonomy would need to be sacrificed in interest of my own safety. Unfortunately, sometimes the hospital dehumanized me for no valid reason, instead of out of the necessity of keeping me alive.

 

Bared Teeth 3: Empathy and Expertise

I understand why people sometimes snarl at a helping hand. I’ve snarled at helping hands. Like the time my father advised me to be silent and breathe deep for a few minutes to calm myself.

Furious, I exploded, “I’m way past the point where deep breathing will help me.”

 

Bared Teeth 2: The Dangers of My Empathy

Pagan Ritual, by Viesia

In the hospital, my empathy was not restricted to being an emotional ability. My empathy was my physical reality. My sense of being separate from other people and my ability to separate myself from them was haphazard at best, for I didn’t possess any personal boundaries separating me from others. The specters of anonymous children would possess me. Pacing, I’d pretend to be hurt children who lurk abandoned in society’s dark, hidden places. In acts of creative possession, empathic transference, I would experience myself literally crying other people’s tears, feeling their emotions, their pain, within my body. Like I was lending them my body to express what they didn’t have the faculties to express. When I felt the other kids in the hospital inside of me, my experience of empathic transference, or creative possession, was especially intense.

 

Athena, Ophelia

When I was nine I dressed up as Athena for

Halloween. My mother helped me make my

Costume; a short white robe worn over

Long johns, my laurel wreath

Some greenery tied with a

White headband around my

Bobbed dark hair.

We wrapped a

Garbage can lid with tinfoil for my

Shield, removed an old broom from its

Stick and wrapped its edge with

Tin foil for my spear. I tied a kerchief around my

Knee as a raffish trademark. As my school

Paraded down Broadway I struck

 

Whirlpool of Axes

I attack the paper with black

Slashes that

Spiral down like the

Whirlpool of axes that I

Fell through as my

Alter ego Medusa

Escaping hell

Masquerading as heaven—the

Sick joke of the cosmos

The whirlwind of axes

Chopped me up as

Medusa

Leaving me in

 

Bared Teeth 1: Telling Our Stories

My first impression of Molly; a girl lying in repose on the floor, her light brown hair cascading messy and free around her sprawled out body. She looks up at me through drowsy eyes, her gaze soft and blue. She tells me that if you want to be warm on 3 East, you lie on the floor. She invites me to touch the heated floor. I crouch down to feel its warmth. The perky staff woman escorting me chirps that she’s 12 like me.

 

PursePhone (Who is Persephone?)

Back in the days when I thought

Persephone was pronounced

PursePhone at least I had a

Sense of her personality—she was a

Valley girl who was like so totally

Lost like without her oh my God

Purse and phone.