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 by the rationale that they are necessary to keep people from hurting themselves or others.In the private hospital where I had stayed previously, the staff chained kids to the beds to keep them “safe.” The chains were called four-point restraints. I remember being strapped face up with padded chains looped through the rings attached to the bed frame. The first point was for my left wrist, the second point for my right, the third for my left ankle and the fourth for my right. When I strained and writhed my butt and hips, thighs and torso off the bed, I discovered there was a fifth point, where they kept my waist secured to the bed. I couldn’t see the chains beneath the leather padding covering them, but I knew they were there. If there were locks and keys, so there must also be chains.

Compared with the safety coat, I found four points to be humane. I must have, because I was willing to go into four points. When I was threatened with the safety coat I always did whatever was necessary to capitulate to the staff.

The time I enjoyed the most in four points was when the staff left the key in the arm lock. They followed their usual procedure of releasing me from restraints, unlocking an arm and a leg and then letting me stew unsupervised in the other two points for ten minutes. This time I unlocked myself. Then I strutted up and down the hall, flinging the keys in circles over my head, laughing in glee and exclaiming, “Forgot something.”

One time in four points I decided to prove that you could hurt yourself while in mechanical restraints. I gnawed at my arm in the one place my teeth could reach, till I broke through my skin and tasted blood. The staff shrugged when they saw what I was doing. They seemed to feel that biting myself in the arm was as an activity that I felt I needed to do, and they resigned themselves to it. I upset them more when I raised my hips off the bed. I found their lack of concern strange. My self-inflicted wound wasn’t considered bad enough to warrant concern. The scars from the marks my teeth made on my skin are visible now, more than 15 years later.

Examples of behavior that appropriately got me restrained included repeatedly banging my head against a wall, and putting my hands around my neck and squeezing. One time they put me into four points when I refused to stop tearing the clothes I wore to shreds. They wrapped me in a sheet and used the fifth point to ensure that the sheet stayed on.

With one glaring exception, the staff at the private hospital restrained themselves and used physical and mechanical restraints on kids when the kids were exhibiting unsafe behavior. At the state hospital, kids sometimes got restrained when they behavior annoyed the staff.

The one appalling exception at the private hospital was the time that the infuriated head nurse ordered a five-year-old girl to be put into four points because the girl had dared to call the nurse a fucking bitch. In response to the concerns that other staff people raised about whether it was safe to use four points on a child so young, I heard her snap, “Just do it. Adjust the straps to fit her.” And they did. She was in charge.

On my unit, “3 East,” at the state hospital, we were all pubescent kids ranging in age from 11 to 14. Many of the others shared an ineffectual method of resisting physical restraint. To me, they seemed to put more energy into screaming “get the fuck off me, get the fuck off me!” than in struggling with the restraints. Quickly and with ease the staff would tackle them, hold them down and ask them if they were willing to “contract for safety.”

]]> http://lipstickwarrior.wordpress.com/2009/10/15/bared-teeth-5-restraints/feed/ 0 viesiajanina vn-come-as-you-are082 http://lipstickwarrior.wordpress.com/2009/10/15/bared-teeth-4-shared-humanity-and-dehumanization/ http://lipstickwarrior.wordpress.com/2009/10/15/bared-teeth-4-shared-humanity-and-dehumanization/#comments Thu, 15 Oct 2009 17:46:37 +0000 viesiajanina http://lipstickwarrior.wordpress.com/?p=65 ]]> 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.

In the hospital, clinical language and attitudes facilitated an us-versus-them divide between hospitalized children and the staff who worked with us on a day-to-day basis. We children regarded these staffpeople as amorphous and interchangeable. We interacted with them and reacted towards them as if their individuality had been submerged into their role as staff, unless, that is, the staffperson decided to temper their professional role with a human warmth that was more compassionate for all of us, staff included. I was always happy when a staffperson, instead of treating me as a breathing, walking pathology seething with weird symptoms and bizarre behavioral patterns, treated me as a human and I got to treat them like they were human in return. I treasured those rare occasions when our encounters and communications transcended our roles and we related to each other as people aware of our shared humanity. You can’t dehumanize someone else without dehumanizing yourself.

But mutual dehumanization was the unfortunate modus operandi in the hospital. Overall, one staff person wasn’t all that different from another. They had power and authority, we didn’t. Their point of view had validity, ours didn’t. They physically restrained us when we were “out-of-control” or used mechanical restraints as a disciplinary method of controlling us. A distinction was made between physical restraints, when the staff held kids down, and mechanical restraints, devices the staff used to restrain kids for long periods of time.

]]> http://lipstickwarrior.wordpress.com/2009/10/15/bared-teeth-4-shared-humanity-and-dehumanization/feed/ 0 viesiajanina vn-euphoria033 http://lipstickwarrior.wordpress.com/2009/10/15/62/ http://lipstickwarrior.wordpress.com/2009/10/15/62/#comments Thu, 15 Oct 2009 17:42:41 +0000 viesiajanina http://lipstickwarrior.wordpress.com/2009/10/15/62/ ]]> 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.”

I hated it every time someone who wanted to be there for me but didn’t understand me or my pain tried to help me, and made me feel worse. Have you ever snarled at helping hands? Why?

Sometimes people are under extreme duress, in such pain that the help of a well-meaning person who doesn’t not know what they are doing, can do more harm than good. Sometimes empathy needs to be accompanied by expertise and knowledge. This was something I instinctively knew, even as my ideals wished it wasn’t that way.

I knew I couldn’t help Molly, a girl I knew in the hospital when I was 12. In the middle of a conversation with me she started cowering, pleading “please, don’t hurt me!” over and over. But it wasn’t like she was afraid of me, begging me. It was like she was repeating something on a loop. I tried to reassure her that I wouldn’t hurt her. No response. No awareness of me being there. It felt like she was no longer present and inhabiting the same time and place as me. Like something had possessed her and turned her into a zombie. I realized this was beyond my scope, so I ran into the hall and told the nearest staff person that something was wrong with Molly. I didn’t have a clue, but something was wrong, and they needed to go help her. They did help her. Afterwards they reassured me, told me that because she suffered from post-traumatic stress, she had flashbacks and relived bad memories.

Mostly, the same staff that so pitilessly restrained her whenever she acted out, would gently talk her out of a flashback and offer her comfort at her most vulnerable. But sometimes because she experienced so many of them, they would in a brusque manner verbally shake her back to the normal time and place of 3 East. Expertise delivered without empathy or compassion is cold. It usually doesn’t feel good to receive, and doesn’t always help.

Empathy and expertise belong together.

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.My experiences of creative possession manifested in two forms: through my imagination in daydreaming and pacing; and in trying to write down my empathic impressions of the other kids in the hospital as a tribute to how much they moved me. In daydreaming and pacing I expressed the motions of emotions; losing myself in channeling and flowing with their stories, in touch with the creative collective unconscious. It was only in my conscious self that my motions and emotions became alienated and estranged from each other. When I consciously tried to write down their stories, I couldn’t. Sobbing, I’d have hysterics on paper. The flood of what I was trying to express overwhelmed me.

Even now, although finally being able to express this liberates and exhilarates me; I still have a hard time finding the proper words to describe my experiences with empathy and its dangers. At my therapist’s direction, I drew back from my empathy, restrained myself to feeling my own emotions, and crying my own tears. I had to step away from my empathy, because I couldn’t feel another’s pain and stay safe and grounded within my self. I lost something valuable when I stopped being able to connect with others in deep empathy. Yet the rich taste, of what I partook in when I lost myself in deep empathy, lingers in my mouth to be nibbled at, chewed on. And slowly digested.

]]> http://lipstickwarrior.wordpress.com/2009/10/15/bared-teeth-2-the-dangers-of-my-empathy/feed/ 0 viesiajanina vn-pagan-ritual-baredteeth2-11-30-082 http://lipstickwarrior.wordpress.com/2009/10/15/57/ http://lipstickwarrior.wordpress.com/2009/10/15/57/#comments Thu, 15 Oct 2009 17:34:47 +0000 viesiajanina http://lipstickwarrior.wordpress.com/?p=57 ]]> 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

Warrior poses, leaping out at the

Spectators, spearing with one arm,

Raising my shield with the other for I hadn’t

Lashed my anger against myself yet.

When I was ten I broke my arm

Falling from a log in summer camp.

Arm in cast I could no longer be

Active, I could no longer outrun

Depression. For Halloween I wore a

Romantic black gown and

Languished as Ophelia, too

Sapped of drive to hand out flowers though I

Wanted to, and did so in my

Imagination. The next year I was too

Depressed to dress up as anyone.

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

Pieces, in pieces like the Italian

Futurist Umberto Boccioni’s

Painting where

Splintering shards ooze,

Bounce about in

Tones of blue, an

Alienated chord, a

Melancholy staccato

Heard underwater, its

Crash and boom muffled.

Blue explosion frozen,

Frozen in exploding,

Frozen in pieces

As Medusa, I

Regenerated my

Cut flesh my

Dead cells I

Reformed myself around

Broken glass—its

Jagged edges part of my

Body resilient,

Stronger than the

Sharp reminders of

That which cut me to pieces.

As Medusa I’m a

Creature more

Fluid than solid. I

Glory in the

Snakes living

Undulating

Writhing in my

Bloodstreams,

Coiled snakes

Ready to

Burst out of my

Skin to

Protect me

Whenever I feel

Threatened.

My second impression of her; she hunches down on all fours and pretends to be a dog. Pounding her arms against the floor, one after the other, dragging her legs along in their wake like a sleigh. Her taut arms— a futile attempt to hold at bay the intense turmoil raging inside her— fuels the coiled tension of her body. Her movements resemble neither a dog’s walk nor the crawl of a small child, but a strange hybrid of both. Human in form, her body bristles with the savage energy of a rabid dog. Baring her teeth, she barks, growls, howls and snarls at the world.

Fifteen years later, driven to make my image of her visible, I draw her barking with colored pencils. I exaggerate the feral way she bares her teeth, by drawing with dried blood red her bared teeth and snarling mouth larger than scale so they dominate her face. I depict her nostrils flaring purple against the silver of her skin, the slap of her bronze ponytail against her shoulder. With two swipes of gold I continue the hostile jut of her nose into her eyebrows. Not drawing a line to separate her legs molds them together into a single entity. I draw her tensed arms forcing her dried blood-red body taut.

I rotate her neck forward, tilting it away from the profile view of her body. I turn her face towards the viewer, challenging them to look into her eyes and face her pain and rage. The blue of her eyes possess no black in their centers: they drown you in the tortured laser streams of their glare like Queen Arsinoe of Ptolemaic Egypt, who invited her enemies to a party that she herself did not attend, then released torrents of water to drown her guests.

On 3 East, I looked Molly in the eye and faced her pain and anger. The torrents of agony streaming from her eyes submerged me, filled me with the need to express in my art what she could only express by pretending to be a dog. When I look at my depiction of what she came to symbolize for me, it acts as a catalyst for me to express it.

Even at 12, my foremost self-identification was as an artist and writer. Many of the kids I encountered in the hospital became my muses. Throughout my adolescence and young adulthood, I felt that when I wrote the story of my hospitalization, I was also articulating their experiences. That as an artist and writer I had the grave responsibility to tell the stories of the children who weren’t allowed to be children, because their childhood and innocence had been stolen from them. I needed to express the anguish of the sacrificed kids I knew in the hospital. And that was among the reasons why I, granddaughter of a survivor, ended up in the hospital with my empathy and my artist/writer personae

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.

Then mother corrected my

Pronunciation obliterating that image.

I no longer had any idea of

Who she was all I could do was

Wonder who is Persephone?

I’m disturbed by how in the Greek myths she’s only

Defined by her relationship with others.

Persephone the individual is so

Lightly sketched she’s barely visible and not in any

Detail; a mama’s girl who liked to

Pick wildflowers while walking

Barefoot in mountain meadows. Then the

Ground drops from under Persephone’s

Feet and she falls down, down, down into the

Underworld her pretty flowers clutched to her

Breast-Hades catches her.

“Rape as a form of initiation”

One book written by a woman described it.

Initiation into what? Brutality?

Patriarchy? Power Politics? That this isn’t a

Women’s World? That if you don’t

Separate willingly from your mother

You’ll be taken by force on the sly?

Am I a Persephone?

Yes I fell into the

Underworld, but I insist on defining

Myself. And the ground didn’t

Suddenly drop from underneath me. I

Skirted the edge of my

Whirlpool of axes for

Years trying to resist the

Pull of the void that

Lurked inside, my

Seething imagination conjured up

Magnetic forces to draw me down—a

Sissy God controlled by his

Proud-to-be-the-Wicked-Witch mommy—a

Child fury who wanted to

Destroy the Gods—a girl protected by

Snakes living inside her—a

Prophetess that nobody

Wanted to believe—till I was

Living in the underworld, where no

Rapist waited to catch me

Persephone becomes even more of a

Blank as Hades half-a-year wife

So she sweet-talked Hades into allowing

Orpheus to find Eurydice, but was her

Voice always soft-toned and pleasantly pitched

Or did she throw fits and get passionate?

Yeah she ate those pomegranate seeds

But did she know what she was doing?

Did she purposely split herself

Giving one half of herself to her

Husband and the other half to her mother?

The myth says Hades tricked her.

Maybe she just got hungry?