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Kintsugi

I was recently discharged from the hospital from an infection that caused my brain to swell. It was pressing so hard against my skull that it was causing breaks in my mental faculties.

I’ve never had that before. My logic has always been sound. My eccentricities have always been within reason. My sense of self has always been complete.

Not anymore.

I’ll start writing about my battle for mental health. Kintsugi is fitting, the Japanese art form of mending broken pottery with gold. My mind is still broken, I do not still recognize the man in the mirror. I am scared of him. But together, we mend.

Messy

Life is filled with good days and bad days. That’s what makes recovery both challenging and incredibly vexing for someone who needs stability. But the inevitability of inconsistency, and accepting that as the one constant, is part of the journey to healing.

The world is a fucked up place right now. The pandemic, politics, wars, fires, hurricanes, abuse of power, marginalization of minorities – these are things I can be aware of and advocate for, but cannot change single handedly. So live with it but choose not to let it run my life. What I can change is focusing on my health and taking active steps to nurture my physical and emotional injuries. Continue to grow and mature as a productive member of society, to be better than I was yesterday. I want to focus on the positive outcomes I can control and not dwell on the things that I can’t.

Enough

Today my husband said, “you parked wrong”. And unexpectedly, the weight of all my insecurities and insignificance crushed me like a soda can on a metal press. I locked the bathroom door and collapsed on the cold tile floor and started heaving.

You see, we are temporarily staying at my father-in-law’s house, at the end of a cul-de-sac, and apparently one is supposed to park in the same direction as traffic on the street, and I had parked wrong.

We are in this house because I lost my job. Because I was sick. Because I got a disease. Because I was violently sexually assaulted on what was supposed to be a fun excursion that morphed into this current nightmare. I was… am… broken. Physically, I am fine. Mentally, I am so far from fine that I can’t see the horizon ahead of me, just darkness.

I have lost all sense of self. I do not know who this person is, staring at me from the mirror. I used to know him, and love him because he was so afraid that no one would love a short, Asian gay boy. So I nurtured him with books, music, art, food, languages, and love. The journey to self love was filled with rough climbs, hard unpaved roads, and blistering hate. But I made it. I got to the end of it. I was happy with the company I kept in the moments that I was alone. I am enough.

But now I am just lost. I don’t know who this person is. And I don’t like him.

Voices

As the fog clears from my mind, I begin remembering and unpacking very painful memories of how broken I truly was.

Part of standard operating procedure for inpatient admissions reporting brain trauma, a psychiatric evaluation is conducted, often in isolated wards with other true psychiatric patients. The ward I was in, like many psychiatric wards around the world, was unpleasant. The nurses were tired and overburdened, and being around seniors who stared, screamed, or urinated on the hallways – was traumatizing. I didn’t realize I was one of them for the briefest of moments, crying constantly to have my husband by my side. I was released to a private room in less than 24 hours. But that was an eternity to me.

Psychiatry cleared me quickly. Asked all the routine questions: do I want to harm myself, do I want to harm others, am I seeing invisible people, do I hear voices in my head…

And while I said “no” every time, and thinking I was being truthful, I’ve started to recall repressed memories that proved I was not.

I imagined reading emails from my direct reports (psychically of course), I had entire, full-blown conversations with a roomful of nurses in my head, some Filipino, some Latino, practicing my Spanish. While crying in the middle of the night because I was so thankful for my husband, I heard them whisper in my ear that they had video they could send me of my declaration of my love. I had nurses whispering in my ear that I should lick the pillow because I shouldn’t waste cocaine, a top priority.

Under the Baker Act – I was not allowed electronic devices or means of communication with the outside world. The stories I would have told would have been hilarious, I would have given 2007 Britney a run for her money.

Today, the voices are gone. Only the hurt remains.

Fear

I’ve always learned to live with fear and how to paradoxically not be afraid of it.

Growing up in the Kingdom, it was a constant state of terror from the mutawa, the Islamic religious police who ran the city of Riyadh with unflinching hands, always on the lookout for women inappropriately wearing their abaya, reminders of prayer times, and looking for any inappropriate contact between males and females, which was totally fine by me, as I flew under the radar, spreading my rainbows.

But I learned early that fear could be useful, if treated with the right mindset. It kept me safe, as long as I didn’t live under its tyranny.

Today, the man in the mirror gives me fear. I’m afraid of who he has become, this man I don’t recognize. I don’t know when he will fracture again. Since the hospitalization in November, he has been very imbalanced, causing pain to people around him. I should stop talking about him in the third person lest you confuse me for Sybil (although there may just be an 8-year old inside me just yet.)

I was very imbalanced. I displayed extremely unusual behavior that still troubles me to this day. I caused pain and confusion to the people I love. I put a gargantuan strain on my husband’s patience. I have unknowingly hurt myself and people around me. I don’t have the words to apologize to everyone.

I am afraid to forgive myself.