The Door Girl, Part 30

She mailed me her journal after my stay at the psych ward. Maybe it was to help me understand. Maybe it was to remind me that she was still alive despite the absence of me. Maybe it was to hurt me. I don’t know why she sent it, but as I read the entries, my heart ached for her. My mother was not a monster, but she was mentally ill. My mother did the best she could and the best she could was all she had to give.

July 2, 1974

The thing is, I’m happiest when I’m not me. When I escape and hide behind whatever I can. I guess I never learned that lesson—to be a big girl and face my problems. I think what gets people is the monotony of the everyday. I wake up, make coffee, take care of my child, set my timer for fifteen minute increments just to make it through to bedtime. And during those fifteen minute increments, I feel lost. I don’t know what to do with myself that has any value. And so I sleep. I get high. I drink. I break things. And after, I feel so bad that Junie has witnessed yet another breakdown, but I can’t help the madness. It’s clawing at me to get out and all I know to do is shatter glass.

The Door Girl, Part 28

Words are like flowers; when you put them together properly, you can create a work of art.

        I used them to escape the jail I had created for myself. I used them like a dying man pushes his morphine button. They were my escape—my pain killers, and I used them in large quantities.

        Bleeding to death by ink is a fantastic thing. The pain, the fear, the voices and the shadows where they lurk--it all gets washed away with a  pen in my hand.

        It was difficult to write on anything at the mental hospital because writing utensils were seen as weapons (again, understandable). So they gave me short, stubby pencils like you use at the library. But I took it anyway because it calmed me more than the Ativan I begged for.

        I wrote my way to crazy. And that is to say, I wrote my way to sanity. Yes, restored mental health. Which fully includes the crazy and the ugly. Those are the parts that make us beautiful and evolve in to more lovely human beings.

        I wrote until I realized that life is never as black and white as it looks on paper, even though I had hand-crafted every detail. For the first time, I realized that I was in control of everything and nothing. I was invincible with all the fragility of a flower.