Quiet Room - Lori Schiller [120]
So I began to devote my energy to building one. I used every tool they offered me at day hospital. I met with a counselor, usually every week, and together we worked on an elaborate goal sheet.
I had trouble articulating myself verbally in sessions with the other patients and counselors so I practiced giving one piece of feedback per session, and kept up with my writing, which was a helpful form of self-expression. If I overloaded myself with activities and became too stressed, then I set specific hours for each activity and worked on not obsessively exceeding those limits. If I heard the Voices lurking in the background or if the temptation, to follow them back into their world became too strong, I fought them any way I could. I would listen to my Walkman, talk to my friends, take a shower, take a walk, ask for help.
I had been isolated for so long I had to work hard at reconnecting. I was still paranoid, fearful of people, down on myself for my perceived failures. I set myself the goal of deliberately thinking good thoughts about myself, and of checking with other people if I thought they were angry with me.
I had been out of the world for so long that I had no network of friends to fall back on. So onto my goal sheet it went: I will initiate two telephone calls each week to someone outside my family. I also joined the other patients in a social group, going out to eat, going to the movies, going to the beach. I had to practice all over again what it meant to go out and have fun.
For years someone else had taken the responsibility for managing my life. My medications were doled out four times a day. My meals were ready at regular hours. The only money I was responsible for was the pocket money my father gave me. If I was going to make it on my own, I had to relearn how to do things on my own. I got the job as meal planner at the halfway house. I learned how to plan meals and shop. I learned how to put aluminum foil in the bottom of a pan when cooking steak or chicken to make cleaning up easier. I learned how to budget, and to plan how I was going to spend my money. I relearned how to balance a checkbook, something that had once been easy for me. I began to learn how to structure my time myself, without depending on the hospital's routine of medication times and meetings to rule my life. When I arrived at day hospital I was given a pocket calender and began to write down all my appointments and obligations. I even began to take responsibility for my medications for myself. Starting with one day's medications, and gradually working up by adding a day at a time, I learned at Search for Change how to count-out the doses into a multi-compartment box the size of a fat paperback I carry, and to remember to take them religiously four times a day.
The responsibility was scary. Before every big change, I found myself growing anxious. I was afraid of failure, afraid of finding out that I could not do a task, afraid of each step that took me further away from the security of the hospital. But I also reveled in my accomplishments. I was taking big steps back toward having a life of my own.
To my great delight, too, my weight began to drop. It had begun dropping in my last months in the hospital, from 170 to 166 to 164 … slowly, steadily, a pound at a time, the layers of fat that had encased the old me began to fall off. Lower and lower my weight dropped—160 to 158 to 155 to 150, to 147 to 143. By my thirty-first birthday, less than six months after I had left the hospital, I was under 140 pounds. Out shopping with my mother one day, I bumped into someone. When I turned around to apologize, I realized it was a mirror.
I didn't recognize the stranger looking back.
At first, I was very self-conscious about approaching my old friends. They had all gone on to accomplish such impressive things. They had good jobs, nice families. It was like they were the grown-ups and I was still a little kid. I felt inferior to them, and afraid they would scorn me. When I overcame my fears and called them, I discovered that, although our lives