My Girl Interrupted Years

 

I watched Girl, Interrupted last night. I cried a lot.

My girlfriend took me to see this movie in 1999, in San Francisco, when it hit theatres. Her motives were simple. She was always searching for any potential on screen lesbian action. She missed how relatable this film would be to me, how it would stir up my feelings about psych unit stays, especially my first one. Toward the end of high school, I spent 2 months inpatient. This was 10 years past the era of the movie, on a different sort of ward, but close enough. The movie patients were parts of me and parts of others I’d met along the way. My identification with the main character Susanna was so strong, so powerful. I had to tune it all out. I made myself turn away and then forget or at least suppress. Nobody around me would understand and my girlfriend didn’t have that as her focus. It wasn’t at all on her radar screen.

Recently I’ve been working in therapy on recognizing myself and being my own person. I’m fascinated with my newfound clarity and with rejection of being controlled and disregarded . Nobody has ever cared to realize what’s in my heart. Those I love enjoy me tending to them, but they don’t do it back. They suck me dry. It’s a shame, for them, and was for me until now. I’ve gone into self-appreciation mode and I’m gradually dropping the judgment always on my back, an invisible set of eyes in the corner of every room. I grew up with it and became used to its presence.

Last night, after therapy, I felt mundane, nothing roiling beneath the surface. Then I thought, I want to watch Girl, Interrupted. For me. I honestly didn’t expect my intense reaction and the lump in my chest that finally escaped into tears. I absolutely sobbed.

And I traveled back to those days, the late 1970s, when I was confused and lost and nobody noticed until I overdosed.

I was close to graduating high school then. I’d felt emptiness and depression and a disconnect, like I wasn’t in my body, like I wasn’t in the world, for most of my life. Then at age 16, this was horribly exacerbated. My dad died. My sister was forced to give up her baby, born out of teenage pregnancy. She’d presented a problem for my mom and stepdad in their battle for custody of my stepsister. It had to be swept under the rug. There was no place for me in all of that. I stuffed it all down until one day, like it was spring loaded, it flew out in a suicide attempt. I was hospitalized immediately.

Movies are dramas and need to be compelling to communicate and make a clear statement. Real life is different. But not completely.

As Susanna walked into the ward for the first time, taking it in, startled, unsure how she ended up in this place, I internally screamed, “Yes!” I was back in my own experience. Ah, memories, one might say, but not good ones. It’s frightening! Then there’s the other side, where I settled in so much so that it became a better home than mine.

I didn’t have any breakthroughs, not like Susanna did. Mine didn’t come until the past 6 months as I’ve adjusted meds properly and finally, oh my god, finally found a psychotherapist who does psychotherapy and isn’t weird about it or weird about his role. I feel what I call shifts in how I relate to myself and then to others. I tell him that I can’t put my finger on how therapy works, like it’s some kind of magic. Maybe I don’t need to try and capture the how part.

In my first hospitalization, I was the youngest on the unit. I was babied. I was told to eat because I wouldn’t, and that girls who starve themselves grow excess hair on their arms. I envied the patients who got meds, because I didn’t, and I figured maybe I wasn’t sick enough, and that got into a thing I carried around. We all smoked, in appointments, common areas, our rooms. I’d listen to the other women’s stories about what their lives were like. Sometimes I’d storm and rage and be locked into “the quiet room”. I liked being tucked away from my life, there in the hospital, but I didn’t make gains in my mental health.

I was discharged and caught up on my classes and graduated with my class.

 I didn’t know what to do. I went to a college that my mom picked, in driving distance, where she’d earned her master’s degree. But on day one, I went to some guy’s room to smoke pot, which made me paranoid, which made me run, run so far away. I didn’t return.

I still knew a couple of women from the psych unit, and we’d hang out, them dominating me, me submitting, never knowing one another in a profound way. We did drugs and shared self-harm techniques. It was sick. I wasn’t getting better. My follow up care was seeing my psychiatrist once a week to sit, smoke, and hide my feelings. And then he moved away to Florida.

I had some short-lived jobs. I had sexual encounters with both men and women that meant nothing and felt like nothing and went nowhere. I tried college again, but I just didn’t care about it.

I’m not even sure if I was a girl interrupted or a girl on a trajectory of repeated severe episodes of mental illness, destined to stay lost and wandering.

Except now I’m not so lost and I’m becoming grounded and maybe I’m interrupting all the despair and loneliness weighing that girl down for all of these decades.

I don’t cry easily. To have Susanna’s story reach me so deeply that it all poured out, no holding back, is rare, and so precious.