Since We Last Spoke
Alright, so things didn’t go so hot after my last post. I necked a bottle of champagne on the hotel room balcony, went down to the lobby bar and had two rums, went back upstairs and got in an argument with the missus. She got mad back at me. Words were exchanged and then I had a breakdown. I started crying, wailing, yelling. Screaming that I don’t know what to do. Just stress really. A stress-induced meltdown. Someone called hotel security on me. I was out on the deck sobbing at the time, and my wife told the hotel manager and security guards that showed up at our door that I was grieving because my grandmother passed recently. My grandmother did pass recently, but that was not the primary reason I was crashing out on the hotel balcony. After I came down out of whatever episode that was, my wife suggested that I get a psych evaluation at the hospital where she works when we get back home. Sure, I have OCD and I’m on meds for that, but clearly there’s something else going on with me. After a meltdown like that I wasn’t going to protest about getting reevaluated.
I just want to chill at this point. Being and feeling that out of control is frightening. The level of rage that boils out of me scares me. It scares my wife. It scares my kid. I need to take better care of myself, be kinder to myself. But I also wish we lived in a world where the response to a mental health crisis isn’t to send security guards to your door. Like what were they going to do? Probably not de-escalate things. My wife says that if I’m going to have a mental health crisis, she’d rather have me do it in the US than in Jamaica. She’s Jamaican, so I’ll take her word for it. I don’t know what would have happened if I had ended up interacting with those hotel staff in that state, but probably nothing good. Which is not to say that mental health issues are dealt with gracefully in America. We have all seen the news stories of people in mental distress being killed by cops. It’s like shooting someone with a broken leg because they’re making too much of a scene with their agony. Society does not look favourably on people in psychiatric distress. People don’t want to see that. This shit makes you a pariah. An untouchable. The stigma is real, regardless of the social media mental health awareness campaigns. See how compassionate people are when you feel the flames of your mental illness start to engulf you. People tell you to calm down, and if that doesn’t work then they send in people to subdue you, or you get kicked out of spaces. Excluded. Isolated. Even when you’re not in the throes of a mental health crisis, see how kindly the world takes to people with invisible disabilities. Even other people with invisible disabilities can be cunts. I guess if you can’t see it, you can’t have compassion for it.
I need to get my shit together for myself, my wife, my kid, my friends, my family, but also so I don’t end up dead, in the clink, or 5150’d.