All That Is Bitter and Sweet_ A Memoir - Ashley Judd [123]
On the screened-in back porch, I met Jake, a wonderfully furry gray-and-black tomcat who would become my dearest friend and closest companion. I stood at a painted wooden box, looking into the dark back garden that sloped toward a creek, and paused, unsure what to write about what I felt.
My sister walked me to my room. To my forlorn dismay, I had not been put in a room with her (it turned out Cam was the campus softie). And because of the number of clients at the moment, I ended up in a four-person room, totally alone. We stood in the large, plain room, adorned only with two sets of bunk beds and a few chests of drawers, and my big sister gave me “the hug”: the wonderful, nurturing, motherly, all-embracing hug she gives so very, very well. I was cracking, I was coming undone. She said as she held me, “Let it all go.” I didn’t know what “it” was, but I had come far enough in one week to know that I had a lot of “it.” She put me in bed, tucked me in, and walked out the door.
I had chosen the top bunk, and my eyes looked around wildly as I struggled to find purchase, a way to reason things out, to make sense of the cauldron of emotion and the baffling new setting. I saw the only decoration in the room, a paper plate hanging on the wall with a cross made out of glitter stuck to glue.
Lord have mercy, I was in the loony bin.
I stared at it. I wondered about the woman who had made it, if she, like me, had been in pain, and if in this strange place she had found peace. I wondered if someday I might look back on it in my mind’s eye, recalling it with fondness. In retrospect, I identify those thoughts as part of my strong will to survive, my earnest yearning to heal, and my nascent hope, despite how bad I felt.
Thus began the loneliest walk of my life. The first nights in treatment are excruciating, and clients often declare they’ve had miraculous spiritual experiences and spontaneous healing transformations that send them right out the door and back into their lives before completing a full week. This, I understand. Boy, do I understand. In spite of being unconditionally loved and accepted, and supported by a talented treatment team who often worked around the clock, I was in the most acute emotional pain of my life, at a baseline of deeply grieved loneliness with surges of near panic and wretched anxiety.
I didn’t sleep much. The techs would check on us at intervals throughout the night, for a variety of reasons. My sleep was so tortured that every time one entered the room, it sent adrenaline rippling through my system. A tech rises early at Shades: Blood pressure is taken, on certain days of the week clients are weighed, meds are dispensed. (In the beginning, they detox clients off all but the most essential meds, to see, often for the first time in a client’s life, what they are really dealing with, what their actual baseline mood is. So many folks are misdiagnosed, meds misprescribed, meds dosed improperly. Many of the medical conditions codependents deal with are induced by emotional stress, and substance abusers often withhold so much information from health care providers that one can’t always blame them for putting patients on stuff that they either don’t need or is actually dangerous for them.) I found the routine exhausting and was relieved that I was initially on “no exercise,” which is standard for a client’s first ten days.
My first full day in the center was a Saturday, and my free fall into aching loneliness accelerated. With reduced staff and less structure, I felt the quiet around the facility as nothing less than a vacancy in my own soul. The clients went on an outing, which both my sister and I did