Quiet Room - Lori Schiller [42]
And hallucinations? Another word that enraged me. Hallucinations meant that you were seeing something or hearing something that didn't really exist. But when I heard the Voices screaming at me, they were real. When the doctors and nurses challenged me, told me that I was out of reality, and hallucinating, I hated them. What made me the psychotic one? What about all those judgmental people? What made them the experts?
In fact, I knew they were trying to trick me, trying to torment me into madness. I knew they could read my mind and hear all that the Voices were saying about them. The doctors and nursing staff told me repeatedly that the Voices weren't real. But if they weren't real, then how did the staff know they were there? The staff told me over and over again that they couldn't read my mind either. But if they couldn't, then how did they know all about what the Voices were saying?
My tormenters were real. I didn't want people telling me they were false or unreal. I wanted help in making them go away. That's what they should have been doing. But since they weren't, I just wanted to get out of there, and fast. I was twenty-four years old, and it was time I got on with my life.
But how could I?
I didn't even know what my life was. The one I had left behind a thousand years ago didn't exist anymore. I didn't have a job. I didn't have an apartment. I didn't have friends. I didn't have a life.
It had been nearly a year since I had lived outside a hospital. I wasn't even sure how to do it anymore. I was used to having my life move with the rhythm of the hospital. Someone else had told me what to do and when to do it. Now that I was home, I didn't know exactly how to begin to make those decisions on my own. When I woke up in the morning, I just didn't know what to do with myself. Where was I supposed to go? What was I supposed to do? I found myself literally just standing around.
Because the medications made me at once lethargic and restless, I often just stood in one spot, moving my weight back and forth from one foot to another. I was taking so much medicine that I found it difficult even to smile. I walked around the house sluggishly, doing what I had to do like a robot.
Now that I was out, I wasn't sure how I was supposed to react to other people. In the hospital, I had had contact only with doctors and nurses, and with other patients. With the doctors and nurses, I was a patient. They would ask me questions, and I would answer them. The other patients were crazy. I had as little to do with them as possible. Outside the hospital were other normal people like me. But I couldn't figure out how to connect with them. I felt very awkward around people, even around Mom and Dad.
There was no one for me to hang out with. My old friends couldn't help me. I didn't really even want to see them. It hurt too much. When my old roommate Lori Winters came to visit me in the hospital, she looked like the Dove Soap girl, all slender and pretty with her clear peachy skin. I was so fat and ugly I could barely stand to be in the same room with her.
Everything had changed. Nothing was the same. Even my childhood plans with Gail Kobre. Ever since I could remember, we had planned to be each other's maids of honor when we married. We talked about it, laughed about it, planned what dresses we would wear, and who we would marry.
But on one of her visits to me in the hospital, Gail had some news for me. She and David were getting married in the spring. But I wasn't going to be her maid of honor. No one was sure if I would be out of the hospital in time. And no one thought I could handle it.
Well, I was out of the hospital in time. She was married in May, just over a month after I came out. And I was there in the audience with everyone else, not up near the chuppah by Gail where I belonged. After the ceremony, the photographer took a picture with Gail and me together. He caught a big smile on my face, but he didn't catch the Voices that were shrieking in my ears, nor