Documenting my journey through the mental health system

I could not sleep today. I take the meds, I make a bedtime ritual, I try hot showers and meditation and even masturbation but today I could not sleep. When I finally did, I had terrible dreams. I take a medication, prazosin, for bad dreams but it can only do so much. Pills only pack so much power in the face of trauma.

I dreamed I was arrested for some terrible crime and brought before a judge and the world in chains. I dreamed I was sentenced to several lifetimes in a prison designed to keep you alive for those several lifetimes. They put me in a windowless, doorless cell and I languished for years, subsisting off the food they slid through a slit in the wall. I woke in a cold sweat, sucking in a choked breath and feeling relieved I was in my own bed and not lying on a cold concrete floor. I don’t even know what my terrible crime was supposed to have been.

I managed to fall back asleep a couple hours before I was going to be up getting ready for work. This is unusual for me, that close to the time I’m supposed to wake up and I usually just stay awake. In this round of dreams, I was back in the mental hospital. I dreamed I was trying to get out, to escape, just like I had in real life over the summer. I dreamed, vividly, being put back in restraints and screaming to be released. I dreamed I was crying and scared and angry too. The scene changed – I wasn’t strapped to a bed, I was locked in a little seclusion room. I looked out the window in the door, pounding on it, trying to get someone’s attention. There wasn’t anyone out there. But I couldn’t see out there, it was dark, it was like the seclusion room existed in its own universe and there was nothing outside the door. I wept bitterly, sliding down to sit on the floor. All the pain of a lifetime of heartbreak and despair filled me up, filled the little room, and pounding on the window and the door to attempt to get out got me nowhere. Just then, a woman came in the door and asked me if I was going to calm down because if I couldn’t, I would have to be kept locked up in the little room a much longer amount of time. “Please let me go,” I begged, trying to move past her through the doorway but she shoved me back onto the floor and slammed the door in my face. Right then, the window disappeared, the walls became solid black and I was trapped in a box, no entrance, no exit, no way in or out and I was going to be stuck in there forever…

I woke up again, crying, and sweating so hard I soaked my sheets. I was shaking and wishing I could take one of my Lorazepams for the anxiety but I had to start getting ready for work. I sat on the edge of my bed and ran a hand through my hair. I sucked on one of a few vape pens on my bedside table – a welcome if not quite healthy stress relief. “Jesus christ…” I muttered to myself and groaned. I didn’t want to go to work, the images of the preceding dreams still running through my head, cementing in memory. Some people quickly forget their dreams but I have never been like that.

Tonight, I was going to continue with, possibly wrap up, the story of last year’s two week psychiatric hospitalization. But after a sleepless day and disturbing, frightening dreams, I felt maybe writing them down and getting it out would be better? The next chapter is difficult because it’s about the complicated relationship I have with my mother. And I just don’t feel like getting into it right now.

I did not go to IOP on Monday. Today is Wednesday and I will go. Monday I called to let them know I would not be there. I had to have a morning off and I did it for sex. My testosterone levels are high and my libido is strong. On Monday after work I had a chance so I took it. Dr Black has noticed increased mania symptoms – less sleep, more energy, talking too much, etc – and for me, one of those symptoms is having a lot more sex. It’s not hard for me to get it. So she is having condoms sent to my apartment like any other medication. “Harm reduction,” as it’s called. They can’t stop me, I can’t even stop myself, but I could be safer, and I get that much.