Docile, p.16
Docile, page 16
Suddenly, I threw down my mop, disgusted with this meandering train of thoughts. All I did these days was chew over myself and my life—how self-absorbed and revolting! Socrates said an unexamined life wasn’t worth living, but I couldn’t agree; it was possible to scrutinize to the point of ineffectualness. I wanted the endless pondering and pain to end, and pain—we all knew—was existence. I bolted up, grabbed the container of Ambien, and went into the kitchen.
At the table, I emptied the pills. They formed quite the mound. Seeing the mound, I choked up. Again, I considered the people closest to me. I was always begging Umma to see past the externalities to my essential nature, but she kept denying who I was, and the ultimate pain was that it was she herself who had made me—I was her golem. As for Nate, the few black balls of chaos in his otherwise monkish existence I’d scribbled there myself. His own mother had died when all she wanted was to live. That was the way with living things, I marveled, they fought so they could live. But I had long ceased thinking life was an objective good. I did not want to fight anymore.
I laid my head down next to the pills and tried to sob, tried to emit some true emotion from my depleted body, but there was nothing left from me to wring. I slammed my fist weakly down on the table. A pill rolled and fell to the floor. I crawled into bed.
Listening to the rain outside, I reflected on the many years I’d spent fighting and struggling against myself. Somehow I knew the fatigue threaded back to the first chapter of my life, the one written mostly by my parents. I could blame and resent them, but in the end, was I not complicit? What was the word that described it all best—“resilience” or “cowardice”? In the corner of my eye, I saw the Virgin Mary statue holding out her arms but nothing was in them, her foot on the snake’s head, crushing the evil of the world. I wished I could stand unloved—by my family, by society—and not be destroyed, but I’d never been able to locate that possibility. Even here in grad school, while the other students disputed, every word was another brick laid high on the wall between their search and mine. Theirs was an intellectual journey in which they began whole and would end enriched, but mine commenced from an enfeebled state and the process was somehow primitive because it was fundamentally existential, nearly religious—the search for why I had done what I had done in my life. What was I looking for? Something I wasn’t sure existed that would render everything with meaning. I had attempted so many things in order to belong to myself—searching for a home at Princeton, then leaving it, trying to find a simple life in Korea, answering my parents’ sacrifices by embracing law school and now graduate school (the compromise!)—and this constant unsuccessful push to authenticate my true self had left me exhausted.
Was I afraid? Yes, I was afraid. When I was gone, the pain of the world would incrementally dip for a moment, with the loss of me. Nate would be better off and could find someone more suitable. The hundreds of instances I’d wished for death came roiling back, fatiguing in their sameness—my senior year in high school, more times than I could count in college—and always, I had saved myself with the help of others who had been able to locate in my life some worth when I could not. Now I was alone and had to do that calculation myself. I was where I’d once dreamed I’d belonged, and nothing fundamentally had changed.
I couldn’t wait until tomorrow, so I put the phone down and laid the Virgin Mary beside me on my pillow. Because I lived alone and had nothing of any value, no extensive preparations had to be made. I threw back all the pills with a sip of water, and with the world carrying on outside, I closed my eyes.
3.
MANY EONS LATER, I WOKE up alone in a room.
The place was spare like a dorm, with a twin bed and a wooden dresser. I wore a hospital shift and had slept without a blanket. No wonder I had been so cold. Slowly, I recalled the emergency room the night before. This wasn’t a dream then, and I was in a new place.
Hearing movement outside, I poked my head out the door.
“Where am I?” I asked a nurse carrying a tray of waters. Zombies in pajamas shuffled past.
“The STU,” the nurse replied, not stopping. “The Short Term Unit.” It took me a second to register what she said because she pronounced “the STU” like “the Stew.” In the hallway, which stunk a little like old stew, a sign read, “McLean Hospital, Belmont, Massachusetts.”
Belmont—a monied enclave west of Cambridge where Harvard professors lived. Not an IV or blinking machine in sight. A nurses’ station was encased in glass, and below it, the leather couch I’d shivered on earlier in the night. A nurse dispensed medication in paper cups. One by one, the zombies threw back their pills, cracked opened their mouths, lifted their tongues at the nurse.
I had seen enough movies, read enough books, and I knew enough to be afraid.
* * *
I was sitting in the breakfast room, morosely staring into my cereal, when I was called to see the doctor.
“When can I leave?” I demanded.
“This is a psychiatric hospital, not a prison,” she said. “You can leave when you are ready, but it’s likely you are not.” She paused. “You do realize you tried to kill yourself last night.” I flinched.
She said she was going to prescribe an antidepressant called Wellbutrin XL. “We’ll double it after we see how well you tolerate it. I’m also going to prescribe Seroquel. Its sedative quality will help you sleep.”
More drugs. Because I hadn’t been able to fix myself.
* * *
When I saw Nate that morning in the Stew, I thought, There, I’ve gone and done it; he’ll have those circles under his eyes forever.
On a couch near my room, I held on to him, crying for as long as I could, but really the dry, choking sobs came from my throat, not my soul. Inside, I had crossed over, onto the plane of death: I was dead, yet this body continued to announce I was alive. Some of the buildings at Peabody Terrace were high. Couldn’t I have considered flinging myself off one of those? Say you shoot yourself, or slit your wrists, but you botched it? Then people will know because you’ve got a hole in your chest or bandages up to your elbows. When you take pills but you live, all the scars are inside.
Under my hands I felt Nate’s shoulders, the shoulders I’d fallen in love with. I read the swell of his triceps and scapula, the angel’s wing below the shoulder, and under my fingers I wanted this rock to shake, but he would not.
“Why don’t you stay at my place instead of Jamie’s?” I asked once I pulled away.
“He doesn’t mind. I’ll go over to your place this afternoon and make sure everything is okay.”
“Sorry you have to take care of me.” Sorry you have to take care of everyone.
“Don’t worry about me. I want you to worry about yourself.”
“What am I going to tell the people at school? Spring break’s almost over. I wish I could just say I broke my leg.”
Nate looked down at his hands. They were strong, masculine hands, which welded circuits, coded software, and climbed mountains. He had small, precise handwriting and did his work in pen, as if he had no need for an eraser because he never made mistakes. I had imagined scientists and mathematicians were like artists, preferring pencils, but maybe artists didn’t mind mistakes. “What happened last night was worse than breaking your leg,” he said quietly. “I spent the whole night looking for you. I didn’t know where they took you after the emergency room.”
I asked how he knew what had happened.
“I called your phone when the paramedics were there,” he said.
Nate fished my phone out of his coat pocket. I checked the dialed calls. University Health Services, 2:01 a.m. I had called the line in my stupor. “I took some pills and I’m awake now. She said I’d be asleep. The doctor said to take care of the sleep,” I remembered telling the operator.
Visiting hours were over, and Nate promised he’d be back soon. “Do you want me to bring you anything?”
“Maybe some decent food. The scrambled eggs are runny here.”
* * *
I never had to eat the food in the Stew because Nate brought me every meal. Despite consuming a lot of Tex-Mex covered in sour cream and cheese, I shed weight. Wellbutrin was an upper and gave me the shakes. Sometimes, in the middle of group therapy or while mindlessly peering into the television in the common area, I woke up inside a multisecond mental glitch as though I had been rebooted after freezing. I was afraid to call this what it seemed to be—a seizure—and did not mention it to the aides or therapists, who did not appear to notice. I just knew I felt alert for the first time in months—the seizures the price for energy—and I considered myself nearly fixed.
About a week in, the weather started improving, and I received clearance to walk the hospital grounds. I held Nate’s hand and tried to imagine this was a romantic stroll instead of my first reprieve from the Stew. The hour outside was raw, the many days of precipitation having frozen the grass under our feet.
“How are you feeling?” he asked.
“I’m getting there,” I said. My brain was coming back online. The true test would be when I returned to school.
“But you’re still not sleeping.”
“I just need sleep for energy. I have lots of energy now.”
“Don’t rush out of here, Hyeseung. These problems don’t disappear in a week.”
“I’ll talk to the doctor. But I think the fatigue from the mono is completely gone thanks to the meds, and if I had been depressed, it was because I couldn’t work.” I took my hand, which shook, from his and shoved it in my coat pocket.
When I did end up speaking to the doctor, I tried to show I was cured. Again, I avoided telling her about the electrical storms during which I lost my sense of time and space.
“I need to go back to school,” I declared.
“You’re not taking the Seroquel anymore?”
“It makes me slow. I don’t have anxiety anyway. I just need energy.”
“Are you sleeping?”
“Not much,” I lied.
I imagined McLean felt pressure to stabilize admitted students as quickly as possible, promptly returning them to their elite universities, whose U.S. News & World Report rankings would be tarnished by psychiatric stays. But all the doctor said was, “Let’s give it a few more days.”
My hands were shaking so bad.
4.
SOMEONE VERY SAD ARRIVED. SOMEONE sad and beautiful. She lay in her bed in the room across from mine. Her door was ajar and though it was the bleakest hour of night, all the lights were on. After I’d observed her for a while, she began to remind me of my Virgin Mary statue, or, rather, what it looked like when it had been on my pillow next to me. Her arms straight at the elbows and her body a plank, the lady stared into the ceiling.
No. Now I saw why she reminded me of the statue.
The woman didn’t move.
* * *
The statue lady never made it to group therapy, which was dominated by the alpha female of the unit, a woman named Kaitlinn who led the smokers outside between sessions. In an accent betraying her upbringing on the Mystic, Kaitlinn “tawked” with a directness so compelling it made me ashamed to sit in the same room with her. What was someone as strong as her doing playing Sylvia Plath in a place like the Stew?
“We don’t have mental illness in my family. Alcoholism, yes. Mental illness, no,” Kaitlinn said one day in group. And yet, a month ago, she’d fallen on the kitchen floor in the middle of doing the dishes, clapping her sudsy fists against her chest. “I swore up and down in the ER that it was a heart attack.” It had to be physical, she said, or her entire identity would falter. Instead, the doctor told her she’d suffered a panic attack. When Kaitlinn shared her family’s reaction, I began to cry, the feeling of emotional constipation finally letting loose within me. Outside, it rained, and inside the room, tears.
I began to understand two things. First, that what was happening was not existential and up to me, but rather an outcropping of mental illness. And second, that my mother, a nurse, must have had some inkling of what was wrong when she had taken me to see the counselor in high school. Could she have staved this off if she had faced it? And now, years later, Umma was far away, and who was my family but Nate, whom I was destroying.
I held my legs to my chest and rocked myself, trying to mother myself.
* * *
A few days later, a new patient came on the ward. When I saw Jean June’s name on the dry-erase board, I immediately knew her real name was Jin Joon and that she was Korean. Even before meeting her I guessed she was exactly like me, and I worried.
Jean June Park, or Park Jin Joon, was small and round and it turned out we didn’t look much alike, but I resented her anyway, while wanting to reach out to her. It was hard when you had two Asian females in the room—you automatically got averaged. Like most of us, she’d been admitted in the middle of the night and hadn’t gotten a chance to pack. At morning check-in she wore her baggy jeans under a hospital gown along with the standard-issue Doc Martens of the ostensibly rebellious.
The morning meeting began. The moderator asked what our goals were for the day. Jean June raised her hand, which meant I raised mine by the Law of Asian Averages, and I wanted to kill her.
“What kind of goal should we have?” Jean June wanted to know.
* * *
Actually, it didn’t happen like that. Jean June was timid and withdrawn. I was awake and had more energy than I’d had in half a year, so that night I went looking for her room. As I poked around the hallways, I hummed my excess energy away.
“I’m a sophomore at MIT, but I’m originally from El Paso,” she said.
The two nonwhite girls in the Stew both happened to be Korean American Texans? Or Texan Korean Americans? Either way, it was a mouthful.
I wasn’t surprised MIT brought her here right away. I had read about an in loco parentis case at the university involving a Korean American student named Elizabeth Shin who immolated herself in her dorm room. She’d been from West Orange, New Jersey, not far from my friend Francis Park’s hometown. Elizabeth was a poet at heart. But as an engineer at an engineering school, she was forced to fill her life with numbers, not feelings. The day after a visit from her parents, the fire alarms in Elizabeth’s room in Random Hall went off; she’d lit herself on fire. All that Asian rage directed not at the world who hates you but at yourself. She died, and her parents sued MIT.
That’s why Jean June hadn’t been given time to return to her dorm room and had to wear her jeans and Docs every day in the Stew. She told me her life story. Parents: dry cleaners, no college. Socioeconomic class: middle. Religion: Christian. Problem: she didn’t feel right at MIT. There was this sense there was something else in the world for her. There’d been a party in El Paso when she had gotten into MIT. The whole Korean community had come to wish her well, to say we are counting on you. For the cameras she’d smiled, but not with her eyes. The whole weight of the world was on her shoulders, and she straddled two cultures.
What was a Colossus in Doc Martens to do?
5.
I WAS IN BED AFTER dinner, my arms folded under my head as I stared across the hall. The statue lady had moved from her earlier position and was out of bed and on her knees in child’s pose. Jean June crawled into the room and tried to help the lady up, cooing at her. A nurse came in and shooed Jean June away. “You’re not supposed to be in other patients’ rooms.” Jean June said she was just trying to help, but the nurse scowled. The statue lady didn’t move. “You’ll ruin your knees,” the nurse admonished her.
But I didn’t think the statue lady cared.
* * *
In a tiny room in the hospital, I underwent a battery of tests administered by a doctor. I still loved crushing tests, and surprised myself at how fast I could repeat backward the string of numbers she read aloud. Was I a Beautiful Mind? I was mentally high-fiving myself when she asked, like an afterthought, about my depression and suicide plan. I sobered up. Something about the doctor, who was young and white, made me hesitate. I told her I had had mono and couldn’t work when I’d gotten depressed.
Her eyes were on her clipboard.
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
“I have to give you a diagnosis,” she said.
“Well, what is it?”
“Dysthymia.”
“What’s that?”
“Mild depression.”
So I guess this wasn’t an IQ test.
* * *
“You’ve been quiet. Why are you here?”
I looked up from my lap, where I had been counting my shaking fingers. Kaitlinn stared straight at me.
There had been a lull, and when the therapist lost the thread, Kaitlinn found another. She sat across from me in the square. Between our chairs was ten feet of floor, an ocean. Now the talkative alpha I didn’t want to believe belonged here, challenged me.
The therapist jumped in. “You don’t have to share if you don’t want to.”
I shrugged. I had been sitting in that chair for nearly two weeks without contributing anything. Maybe that had been unfair.
When I started speaking, I looked only at Kaitlinn. At first, the story was some wisps in the air. If it had been a bird, it would have been a small, ugly thing, but nonetheless it sprouted wings and, for a moment, flew.
I told her I’d grown up an outsider in Texas. Living as an object of easy racism in America as well as a voiceless golem in my family led me to do things to myself in order to survive and succeed—but succeed just enough. With every achievement, there was an invisible barter: Princeton for one piece of myself, Harvard for another. My mother said I ought to get over this illness as well as these qualms about the direction of my life. She loved me, but it never felt what I wanted was worth listening to because she was too busy trying to shape me in her image, to love me if and only if and on condition. Complicity in this low valuation of myself led me to attempt the ultimate act of self-erasure—suicide.
