The Nervous Breakdown: Purple House
lauren hoffman writes about her voluntary stay in a mental hospital. i love people who can talk about severe mental illness with a sense of humor. a few highlights:
I spent a lot of my stay latched on to semantics. I favored the nurses who asked, “Do I need to worry about you hurting yourself?” because I could say no without lying. Nope! Of course you don’t need to worry! You probably have much bigger things of your own to be worried about! It was, “Are you thinking about hurting yourself?” that required the lie.
and:
I trailed him and flirted with him mercilessly, asking All the Right Sensitive Questions and wheedling him out of dinner rolls. I may have actually batted my eyelashes at one point. It would seem, then, that while the nurses had taken my razor and my cell phone charger and set the showerhead at a level too low to hang from, they’d neglected to confiscate my pesky habit of trying to make the world a little less crushing by goading inappropriate men into falling in love with me.
Arguably more destructive.
and okay one more:
Another nurse, who I named the Nice Nurse by the same conventions, said to me at one point, “You seem like you’re very self-aware. That’s an important part of recovery.”
“Sure I am. But don’t you think that self-awareness is really just the gateway drug to self-hatred?”
pretty sure some of you need to read this.
