Waiting for Godot

It's been a while. It's been an adventure. It'll give me fodder for some new entries, but I have to figure out how to present them. When the line between reality and illusion are blurred, it's hard to come across as sane and rational. Our society puts too much stock in the real, solid, here and now.

I was in the hospital for a few days last June because my medication was out of whack and threw me for a loop. It was a quick hospitalization and I'm glad, because that hospital didn't have any resources to help someone who found themselves admitted to a mental health ward. It was a glorified holding tank. It was extremely difficult to sit there and watch people who had resigned themselves to an institutionalized life. I wanted to change things, I wanted to make help available to these people. It's hard to see people give up. It was difficult to see the preteens with cuts head to toe. It was difficult to listen to the woman who claimed that Jesus had sent her a message she had to share with others.

Because who am I to claim that she doesn't?

Because this is what's real to her. Who am I to doubt her reality?

People are scared of mental illness. I think they're scared because it reminds them of their own fragile grasp on "reality". It reminds them that they too can fall. And what is reality, anyway? Reality is subjective - don't we all create our own reality? My reality is not your reality. Your reality is not your best friend's reality. Who are we to judge each others' reality?

Your reality is your own. And some realities are different than yours. Some are much different. People are scared of different, because they think different is messy, something that smudges their neat little lives.

Those three days I was in the hospital, the only thing that happened was a volunteer came in to make cookies with us. After the cookies were finished and cooling on the table and everyone else had left to go back to their sitting and waiting (for Godot?) the volunteer started doing the dishes. When I moved to help her, she motioned to the table and said "Oh, there's some papers over there, you can just colour."

I stood still for a moment. Then I said, "Oh, no - I'll help you do the dishes." And I did. And I asked her questions like what she was doing in school and her recent marriage and I talked about my own educational goals.

And I hope I made her just a little bit uncomfortable to find out that people on the mental health unit do not need to "just colour". People on the mental health unit are people. They're not incapable.

People on the mental health unit are me.

People on the mental health unit are you.

What do you think?