It has been recommended to me to account for my last manic episode. I need something to come back to in the future where I forget where I've been. Hopefully never again.
I did a terrible job of documenting my first issues in Los Angeles. The stress of striking out on my own as well as trying to handle my taxes and student loans became a heavy mental load. Before Halloween that year I had started to experience mild psychosis my father didn't know what to do with me at the time and sent me to live in central Texas with my mother.
I was very depressed out here for almost a year. Then I got into the state mental health service MHMR and started to really turn things around as I acclimated to the humid days and the zero tolerance life. There aren't many good jokes in the heart of Texas. In time I became so comfortable that I made the mistake of weaning myself off of my daily medication. First it was a small change. As time went on I took less and less until eventually I had stopped altogether around a year later.
Come mothers day of 2014 I was acting out again. I didn't have a grasp of what was going on because my mother also suffers from the same disorder and had a short relapse only a few months before. I fancied myself a master manipulator or magician. And have since scattered my belongings in all corners of our house. At the peak of that experience my father made the call to have me on emergency detention. I was apprehended by the local police and spent ten terrible days without psychiatric treatment in the ER of the local branch of Metroplex hospital.
The days there were terrible. I could hardly trust anyone and was on 24 hour surveillance. Initially I was testing my own limits but with time ended up testing every shift nurse in that system. I remember avoiding medication at metroplex and thinking that my life would come to an end if they were to poison me to get me to sleep. I don't remember many details except the cold nights and losing a bunch of weight under delusion that I was a kung-fu master of some kind. The hospital staff was very dismissive and not trusting. I couldn't tell whether it was my ego or others around me who seemed like deflated caricatures of people who I was familiar with. Pardon the ramble but those ten days were the worst experience in a hospital that I have ever seen and now I only have the medical bills to show for it. I still try and forget some of those terrible times on the state hospital waiting list. Within a week I was moved up from the 40th position on the waiting list to the second. On the last day I was finally able to eat and brush my own teeth without supervision. I was then moved to the state hospital ASH.
Ironically I'd been wanting to visit Austin considering the time that I had spent in central Texas already. I'm a musician and I found a lot of peace in the strange people that are from around there who worked at ASH. For my first week and a half there I maintained the super-soldier mentality and displayed my martial arts almost on a daily basis. I endured many hallucinations in order to maintain control but still had to be put down between fights of the female aspects of what angrycrow was capable of and the peace of ben Nix. I was once asked if I thought there was a coincidence that my best friend from college and I were both diagnosed with mental disorders. If you combine our technical knowledge with the trying times that most adults our age suffer with I would say no. We're a stressed generation in trying times and we're fast approaching leadership roles in communities who set their minds on the great american dream. I know I'm getting out there and lofty. But I strongly believe that my experience was mostly based on defining freedom for myself. Nothing defines freedom better than being arrested and thrown into a hospital system against your will just before mothers day. Having to get permission to use the restroom. Living where the suicidal people are in the same room as the homicidal. I have been verbally abused and physically threatened by the wild animals in SSFAPS ward at ASH too many times to recall. And so I have to close this chapter. Despite my behavior without the medication and me foolishly second guessing a veteran doctor. I have more a sense of what freedom can be if I keep myself in check. This experience has given me as much creative material as it has nightmares. I only wish I could remember every bloody detail that would keep me from entering the halls of the haunted hospital ever again. Between ASH and Metroplex I was reborn as a more free man with an even greater respect for the fine line between genius and insanity. I think I'll be back for other accounts of this experience. But I'm glad I have the freedom to put it here in the first place.
