Nowhere but Up by Pattie Mallette, with A. J. Gregory Page A

I couldn’t handle it. And I didn’t know what to do with the pain.
    I saw my mother soften a bit. And after we sat in silence for a few seconds, she made a shocking admission. “Stuff happened to me too, when I was young.” She didn’t say much after that. She didn’t need to.
    I don’t think either one of us knew what to do at that point.
    It was Mom who broke the silence. “I’m taking you to the hospital. We’re going to get you help.”

CHAPTER
Six
    I am troubled
    I feel empty
    I don’t know what I want
    Comfort, love and mostly attention
    I have a wall built around my heart
    I am worried
    I am sad
    And I’m filled with regret
    Regret for not saying no
    When I was little
    When I was curious
    And when I was hopeful
    I wrote this poem on May 20, 1992, the day before I was admitted to Stratford General Hospital.
    The evidence that I needed help was there all along. Silent cries. Acting out. Rebellion. All signs I was fighting for attention, for someone to stop and listen and tell me I mattered. Like so many others, I suffered in silence, unsure of how to claw my way out of the pit of despair and into light. The only way I knew how was to kill myself.
    It hadn’t been the first time I’d wanted to do so. Almost two years earlier to the day, I had written in my journal, “I’m so depressed lately. I’m always crying, and I’ve thought about suicide a couple of times but I doubt I’d ever get enough stupidness to do it.” I guess I’d finally found the “stupidness.”
    Nothing happens overnight. I buckled under the combined pressures of the sexual abuse, deep childhood wounds, and simply being a teenager. The latter is hard enough. When you’re a teenager, you are tangled in a web of hormonal mayhem. The roller coaster begins when puberty hits. So many things are happening. Mood swings show up. You’re trying to figure out your identity on shaky ground. You get squashed in the frustrating place between being a child and being an adult.
    Add to that whatever emotional and mental issues have followed you around since you were younger. If you don’t resolve them, or at least work on digging out the roots of your problems, they just grow deeper. And you act out progressively worse as time goes on.
    In this state it’s easy to fall into abusing drugs and alcohol. It’s how I numbed my pain. It also made my emotional condition worse and contributed to my severe mood swings. My highs were really high and my lows were extremely low. I was emotionally unstable, unable to find equilibrium. Being in a temperamental relationship didn’t help matters.

    I didn’t protest my mom’s suggestion of going to the hospital; a part of me felt I had to go. I was just embarrassed. A cloud of shame hung over my head, ready to burst. I knew where I would stay: the psych ward. The stigma of the “crazy” floor started whispering seductively in my ear.
    You’re crazy, Pattie.
    Who’s going to love you now?
    What kind of girl finds herself in the crazy hospital?
    When my mom signed the consent forms, the self-condemnation grew louder, making it almost impossible to convince myself that I wasn’t crazy or stupid, that I was just a girl with a broken heart who needed some help. So I let go. I gave up. The last bit of faith and hope I’d clung to had been destroyed.
    I was a patient for nineteen days, much longer than I would have guessed. I want to get one thing straight, though. The psych ward was nothing like it’s often portrayed in the movies. The floor wasn’t a human zoo overrun with patients soiling their pants and being chased by orderlies. I didn’t see people in zombie-like trances aimlessly walking the hallways, talking to ghosts. And I didn’t come across violent patients who needed to be contained in straitjackets to keep them from tearing up the TV room. The ward was actually quiet. And sad.
    My roommate was there because she tried to kill herself by taking a bunch of pills. She seemed normal,