imprisoned by your mind

right, so i read my articulate little brothers funny blog and thought i'd better add another embarassing attempt at wit and brilliance to my own... this is a bit of a description of my experience of mental health prac ( i'm a student nurse)

They say not to touch you ‘they are dangerous’ and I think, ‘I’d be violent to if noone ever held me, loved me, talked to me, respected me, if noone ever looked me in the eye’.

It breaks my heart the lack of love in this ward, we are like wardens, we wear duress alarms, carry the keys, control the food and cigarettes, and have an aggression response team on call 24/7. They practice 5 point holds and sedation.

Some of you won’t leave this place, some of you have been bounced in here from gaols, or by police, and now you are left at the mercy of the staff, social workers, nurses, psychiatrists, they have an order on you, the mental health act, you are confined, condemned, concealed from the public.

I wonder how it feels for you because I know that I am relieved to leave.

I am breezing into your life for two weeks, yet another peering student in a long line of sightsee’ers, achieving set objectives, psychopathologising you as you speak, do you know? you still talk to me, still allow me to listen to your tales, (those of you who still speak) You boast or mumble or grunt, some of you from a reality quite different from mine, but one I am willing to contemplate, and to discuss. I feel like a traitor listening to you and chatting and then going off to pathologise the things you tell me with such pride.

My heart hurts when I see you smile, when we can laugh at something, when you seem ok.

My heart hurts because I cannot hug you and yet I will run off to my friends to debrief and be held.

I hurt because I don’t know if I could be a nurse here, because I don’t know if I’d still feel this in five years.

one ending is skimping

So I keep falling out of the world of clocks… and into this other place, which is timeless and ever interesting, full of these jumping twisting alleyways which will take you anywhere you could imagine, to places you wish you were or had been, to parallel universes.

And you can travel by music, it contemplates lyrics and replays bits of your life to you in the comfort of your frozen self, caught up in the tiny veins of a leaf, or the blue blue blue of the sky, or a smell in the air.

And it grasps you by the hand and pulls you racing down this alleyway or that at the speed of kids on bikes, and there is not time to realise that you have missed your stop or an appointment, or the job interview that was going to change your life, but we smile and say sorry, and change tense erratically to help you believe we are not of sound mind and forget I ever met you.

Because the truth is the chance of a lifetime is not what i’m looking for. not at all.

I am looking for the track that ants follow, the secret to how flowers smell, for people who’s souls shine out through their eyes.

I am looking for adventures and dullness and anxiety and love.

I am looking for all the words of my book, for a skateboard and some bruises. For the contents of my rucksack, for a hand to hold for a month or two, and a beach to camp on for life.

And so.

(1)

Now you know. That I might not be telling what you would consider the truth, because I don’t think truth is what you say It is. And I don’t feel like all this is real, and I don’t believe it’s all there is.

I think there is life outside of our box of normal

And I am going to chase it .. on a whim.

(or; 2.)

I am sorry if I promised you something else, if you thought that we were on the same page. Because I have slipped of the page… and out of the book… and into the wind and the air and cold nights And I am going to learn all they have to teach me…

And maybe one day I will come back and tell you.

And maybe one day you will say I told you so.

And maybe we will never see each other again.

here we go...

yes yes, yet another person has flipped over belly up like a beached whale and given over to cyberspace.
what a depressing start.
but there you have it, this human like so many others has decided that it's idea's and thoughts and rants need a place to go, a place where others may stumble upon them and form opinions or find fault or just think gee, what a waste of time!
well yes, if you are trawling through blogs with names like 'seashells and the universe among other things' you are probably... almost definitely wasting your time, as am I.