Girl, Interrupted: List 3

"Should I put the call through?"
Lisa waved her arm dismissively. "Nah," she said.

To open a window, a staff person had to unlock the security screen, which was a thick impregnable mesh on a steel frame, then lift the heavy unbreakable-glass-paned window, then shut and relock the security screen.

She was tall and had tapered legs and arms. She looked a lot like Lisa, though she was fair. They both had lean long haunches and flexible joints.

They had a special language: regression, acting out, hostility, withdrawal, indulging in behavior.

Jerry was willowy and worried.

"Good morning. It has been decided that you were compulsively promiscuous. Would you like to tell me about that?"

The rest of us traipsed off day after day to exhume the past.

The rest of us traipsed off day after day to exhume the past.

They couldn't grant or rescind privileges, help us get rid of smelly roommates, stop aides from pestering us.

The only power they had was the power to dope us up. Thorazine, Stelazine, Mellaril, Librium, Valium: the therapists' friends. The resident could put us on that stuff too, in an "acute" situation.

If Dr. Wick was a disguised boarding-school matron, Mrs. McWeeney was an undisguised prison matron.

Now and then there was an influx of student nurses. They were migratory, passing through our hospital on their way to operating rooms and cardiac-care units.

They followed real nurses around in a flock, asking questions and getting underfoot. "Oh, that Tiffany! She sticks to me like a barnacle," the nurses would complain.

They shared apartments and had boyfriends and talked about clothes. We wanted to protect them so that they could go on living these lives. They were our proxies.

Fantasies don't include repercussions. We were safe in our expensive, well-appointed hospital, locked up with our rages and rebellions.

The world was about to flip, the meek were about to inherit the earth or, more precisely, wrest it from the strong, and we, the meekest and weakest, would be heirs to the vast estate of all that had been denied us.

It was true that they did tie you down and put something in your mouth when you had shock, to stop you from biting your tongue during the convulsion.

Our privacy, our liberty, our dignity: All of this was gone and we were stripped down to the bare bones of our selves.
Naked, we needed protection, and the hospital protected us. Of course, the hospital had stripped us naked in the first place—but that just underscored its obligation to shelter us.

Our families. The prevailing wisdom was that they were the reason we were in there, yet they were utterly absent from our hospital lives.

We all liked Torrey, because she had a noble bearing.

Every few months Torrey's parents flew from Mexico to Boston to harangue her.

She was crazy, she had driven them crazy, she was malingering, they couldn't afford it, and so forth.

It occurred to me that my palm looked like a monkey's palm. The crinkle of the three lines running across it and the way my fingers curled in seemed simian to me.

Or perhaps those weren't bones but tendons? I poked one; it was resilient, so probably it was a tendon.

Where were my bones? I put my hand in my mouth and bit it, to see if I crunched down on something hard. Everything slid away from me. There were nerves; there were blood vessels; there were tendons: All these things were slippery and elusive.

She talked about wanting to cut herself to see whether she would bleed to prove to herself that she was a real person. She mentioned she would like to see an X-ray of herself to see if she has any bones or anything inside. The precipitating event for this episode of depersonalisation is still not clear.

The dentist was tall, sullen, and dirty, with speckles of blood on his lab coat...

"Abscess," he said. "I'll take it right out."

Who could imagine a life so circumscribed that it excluded honey?

Sallow, bald early, and with pale pouches under his eyes, he wasn't anybody I wanted to sleep with.

"It's the psyche!" I said. I was excited. "See, the station wagon is the ego, sturdy and reliable, and the sedan is the superego, because it's how you want to present yourself, powerful and impressive, and the sports car is the id—it's the id because it's irrepressible and fast and dangerous and maybe a little forbidden."

It was shortly after this that he began badgering me to go into analysis.
"We aren't getting anywhere," he'd say. "I think analysis is in order."

He'd flattered me—he understood me well enough to know I craved flattery—and in gratitude, I acquiesced.

When Melvin said Yes without a questioning intonation, he meant No.

"It's like a neurosis," I said. I was making this up. "Like when you're angry, and that's the real thing, and what shows is you're afraid of dogs biting you. Because really what you want is to bite everybody. You know?"