It’s been another week from hell. My period finally came, which was a relief as I get terrible PMS. I was getting migraines all the time, felt breathless and weak, and had to cancel things I had on. There was one night I kept having shitty, fucked up dreams as well. In one I was being raped. Then in the dream I was left with stroke-like symptoms, slurred speech, a drooped face, and inability to walk. My dad called an ambulance in the dream but the healthcare system was so bloody negligent they wouldn’t send one, which is something I have sadly experienced in my waking life. No one would see how bad I was. In my dream my glasses came off and disintegrated and my mouth was full of metal bits. I tried to spit them out but I swallowed some. I woke up. Then when I finally managed to fall back to sleep again I had another nightmare. This time I dreamt that someone knocked on my front door at night. My dad went to open it but I told him not to.

“Who is it?” I asked the person outside.

“It’s your neighbour” a boy’s voice answered.

“What do you want?” I asked.

He told me the boy he’s with needs somewhere to hide.

“Go to the shops,” I told them, but they wouldn’t leave.

Then I noticed they had turned our power off. I told my dad to call the police. But before he could do anything the second boy had got into the house through the back door and was approaching us. He was holding my toy clown. I went to grab it off him but he then attacked me with it and I woke up, my heart racing. The dream was like something out of a horror movie! I don’t know how the fuck my mind comes up with this shit!

My emotions and sensitivity also seemed to be heightened. On Facebook this petition came up on my feed about factory farming. Through selective breeding and god knows what else they do to them, chickens are made to be big within 6 weeks which is unnaturally fast, just so they can keep up with the demand for chicken meat. This rapid growth impacts their hearts and lungs. They struggle to breathe and eventually are unable to walk either. They are also kept in crowded indoor pens which get no natural light. They get more room in an oven once they are dead. They have to breathe in faeces and ammonia. Eating chicken is terrible for the chickens, for the planet AND for people. There is a great video here revealing the suffering these sweet creatures go through, just for a quick KFC fix. I believe that dominos is the only fast food restaurant in Australia who has signed the Better Chicken Pledge.

I am already vegan and used to look after chickens on a farm. They are social beings with thoughts, emotions, personalities, and spirit. They have the capacity for self-control. They have a special spot in my heart. I was so angry at all the people who feed into their suffering that I felt like I couldn’t be friends with anyone who eats meat. I felt like writing a post on Facebook telling people who eat meat that they are selfish and unkind and if they’re still going to eat chicken after hearing the truth about the animal industry then they can unfriend me. We don’t live in fucking tribes anymore; there’s no need for us to continue eating meat. It was only a few decades ago that aboriginal people were considered animals. Now it is time for animals and trees to be considered equals to humans, not commodities. I still feel very strongly about this, even though I am no longer in PMS. I’m sorry if this offends my readers, but I don’t know how someone can be an empathetic person and love animals when they contribute to their suffering by eating factory farm meat. It saddens me that I only have two friends who are vegetarian or vegan. I have met the majority of my friends in mental health and neurodivergent groups, and I’m sick of mental health being all that I have in common with people. It has come to define my life. I want to make new friends who value and care about the same things as me, and who will take a stand against this horrible industry by not eating meat. I am realising I am so much more than my mental health issues.

When I got my period, my physical issues got a bit better, but my mental health remained terrible and I continue to feel incredibly angry. I felt motivated to change my life and get into some better patterns. I haven’t been on Facebook for a while as I need a break from it. People probably think I’m dead as the last post I wrote was saying I want to fucking kill myself. I want to go to bed earlier and wake up earlier, but that is even more difficult. One night I was up all night pacing around the house in a fit of rage, then blasting music as I bopped, danced and sung along. I think I became a bit hypomanic again. Music sounds like bliss in this state, both sad songs and happy. I listened to everything from “Sad Song” by We The Kings to “Lollypop (Candyman)” by Aqua. I wept to the song “May I” by Trading Yesterday, but in a good way. I felt everything so deeply. I fell asleep around sunrise, but then when I woke up I felt depressed as shit, like I was hung over. I don’t even drink alcohol, my mind just goes into party-mode at night and then I crash the next day.

I went into hibernation, staying away from social media and not returning people’s texts. There was one night I was stressed out so I left my house and walked and walked until I found myself a long way from my house. It was past midnight and I turned back and started heading home. I then heard a male’s voice behind me saying “hey!”, as though I was doing something wrong by walking at night. It freaked me out and I started thinking he was following me. I managed to get home safely; I think I was hearing things. I am terrified of people, which is why I like coming out at night when everyone is asleep, but I do get scared about running into someone else in the dark. Noises sound like voices. Trees in the distance look like shadowy figures.

The next day I went with a friend who is homeless to look at a house, even though I was feeling so low. We then went to a park and sat by the lake. I wasn’t expecting to swim, but it was a sunny day and the water wasn’t too cold, so I took my clothes off leaving only my underwear on and got in the lake. A few people gave me strange looks as no body ever swims in this lake, but I was going to live life to the fullest. Somehow my friend and I got onto the topic of lizards. I told my friend that when I was a kid I had three pet skink lizards. One hot day I forgot to fill their water tray and they died. It is something that haunts me to this day. My friend said he’d seen worse. He said when he was younger there was a lizard in his house. He was scared of the lizard, so his mum killed it with fly spray. I was so distressed to hear this, and couldn’t get the horrible image of this poor lizard dying a slow, painful death out of my head.

When I got home I had a shower and then went to bed early. I didn’t even have it in me to put my pyjamas on. I usually sit on the computer during the evening, but I feel it has become an unhealthy thing in my life so have been trying to abstain from it. But this left me with nothing to distract myself with, and as I lay there all these awful feelings which I’d been trying to avoid hit me. I couldn’t stop thinking about the poor lizards and all the animals suffering in this world. I also felt touch starved. I don’t think I was properly touched since I was a child, if ever. I really don’t remember. I think I had been disassociating from the painful deprivation but that night it hit me hard. I’m 31 and have never had a partner and I’ve only really been touched by abusive people. I’m sure anyone in my situation would be feeling the same. It made me want to cry and feel like I was going to die even. I don’t think that is an exaggeration as I’ve heard of research which shows this can reduce your life expectancy as much as being a heavy smoker.

On top of all the pain I was in, my nervous system feels like it’s on steroids. My head buzzes, my ears ring, my pulse pounds. It was just torture. So I decided that would be the night I would end it all. I didn’t want to suffer anymore. I didn’t want to be in a world where no one else gives a shit about animals and the planet. I was about to pack my tent and other things I’ve slowly been accumulating for a proper suicide attempt and drive to a park where I would put an end to this once and for all. I don’t know why, but I decided to call Lifeline. They then sent the cops to my house again. I knew the drill. I threw a few basic things in my bag which I would need at hospital, locked the door so they wouldn’t wake my dad up again, and met them outside. One of the cops said he’d been to my house three times before and I seemed pretty “baseline”. It was as though they no longer took me seriously anymore.

“Yes, it’s the same shit, it never fucking ends!” I told them. “I should just kill myself. It would be good for me and good for you as then you won’t have to bother with me anymore.”

The cops insisted on waking my dad up. I didn’t want them to drag him into this and started getting really agitated.

“You just want to dump the problem on my dad!” I told them, but they said that wasn’t what they intended to do. I tried to walk off but they grabbed me. I then refused to walk and sat down on the nature strip outside the house. One of the cops stayed with me and the other one went and banged on my front door. All the commotion woke our poor neighbour and her new born baby. Finally I said I would wake my dad up, as last time he said he’d rather be woken by me than a cop in his house.

I went to the front door, but hesitated for a while. I stood there trying to block the door but they kept on banging.

“I’ll never call Lifeline again!” I yelled. “You’re treating me like a child! You’re just making me even more stressed!”

In the end I went in and woke him up.

“The bloody cops are here,” I told him.

One of the cops had a chat with him at the back of the house while I sat in the arm chair, the only chair in the living room which doesn’t have stuff dumped all over it.

“I will end this, even if not tonight,” I muttered to the cop standing near me. I picked up a packet of my dad’s pills that was sitting on the coffee table and thought about taking it, but the cop grabbed it and threw it out of reach.

The cops didn’t think I met the criteria to drag me off to hospital, so made a phone call asking if a mental health triage person would speak with me. We had to wait a while for them to call back. Finally I spoke with a woman on the phone and we decided I would go to hospital. She said she’d send an ambulance, but it might be a bit of a wait. The cops stayed with me and mucked around on their phones until the ambulance arrived. I was then taken to hospital. We got there around 4am.

I had to wait about 45 minutes on the stretcher until I was given a bed in the emergency department. I was then just left there. Nurses just sit at the computers next to each curtained area typing god knows what and acting like you don’t exist. I just wanted to sleep, and asked the nurse for some temazepam. She said she’d organise that but never did and I got no sleep at all that night. I was getting a buzzing sensation in other parts of my body, probably from such a stressful evening.

At the crack of dawn all the bright lights come on and the emergency department becomes even noisier. I was sleep-deprived, distressed and in pain. All of a sudden, at around 8am, I came out of my curtained area and started screaming. Not angry screams but screams of despair. I can’t remember everything I said but I was going on about how I couldn’t take all the suffering in the world.

“Why, why, why, why, why????” I kept on repeating.

Suddenly the mental health triage lady appeared. The nurses got me back onto my bed and gave me some diazepam and an olanzapine wafer. I didn’t want to take the wafer as it is full of nasty chemicals, but I took the diazepam. I lay face down on my bed and cried. I was losing my ability to talk. Most mental health triage people seem to have no understanding of dissociation. She kept pressuring me to face her and respond but I couldn’t form a sentence. She then told me she was going to come back later when I was calmer.

By this point I no longer gave a fuck about the scene I was causing or how bizarre I was presenting. I empathised so much with the lizard my friend’s mum had killed that I felt like I WAS the lizard. The only way I could communicate was acting like a lizard. I slipped off my bed and lay on the floor. I then started crawling out into the corridor. The nurses were all trying to get me back to my bed.

“I have to get outside,” I said. “She’s sprayed me. I’m a lizard.”

I don’t know what they made of me. People tried to lift me up but my limbs were all floppy, which is what sometimes happens when I dissociate. There was one young female nurse who spoke to me kindly and touched me in a way that felt reassuring. She managed to get me back to the bed, and even to take an olanzapine wafer.

I lay on the bed a heap, and then started freaking out about the chemicals I had just ingested. I have been diagnosed with OCD and Orthorexia Nervosa and follow a clean, organic diet. I felt contaminated. Instead of calming me, the medication just added to my anxiety. I kept trying to make myself vomit but I couldn’t. The nurse gave me two knitted teddies which some elderly people had sewed for Red Cross and I ended up getting a bit of sleep, though it was not good sleep as the emergency department was so overwhelming. I wore my ear muffs but I wasn’t able to turn over as they are too bulky.

At 3pm the mental health triage nurse returned. She said I seemed calmer, even though I still felt like shit on the inside.

“I want to send you home,” she told me.

I couldn’t believe it. After all this, they were just going to drug me and send me on my merry way. They had done absolutely nothing to help me. I didn’t fight it at first, and told her I was getting sick of being there anyway. But I was actually really upset. I called my dad and my dad said he would come to the hospital and speak with her.

I sat on my bed getting more and more distressed. I called the private hospital I had been waiting to get into and asked where things were at with my referral. I told them I had deteriorated, was about to be sent home from the emergency department and wanted to kill myself. I was told no doctor had accepted my referral. No body in the ED came to check on me. Eventually I lost it. I stormed out into the corridor and started yelling and swearing and kicking things.

“I hate this hospital!” I screamed. “I hate the psych department and the way you treat psych patients!” I can’t remember what else I said.

Suddenly a whole lot of people and security swarmed around me.

“We don’t come to work to be abused,” an angry male staff member told me.

“Well I don’t come here asking for help just to be sent home!” I told him. “Fuck you! You dump sick people on the pavement outside! If I kill myself it’s on you!”

He didn’t know the meaning of the word abuse. I have seen and experienced some things in my life that most people probably couldn’t even imagine. A young girl getting angry about being discriminated against and rejected by a place that is meant to help her is far from abusive. As poet Kalen Dion writes, “someone begging for their humanity to be acknowledged can sound an awful lot like rage.”

“We will not tolerate this behaviour,” another staff member said. “You’re disturbing the other patients who have had heart attacks.”

Another women instructed security to escort me out of the hospital. I felt like I was being treated like a criminal, rather than a distressed, vulnerable patient. But then the mental health triage lady came and said she wanted to talk to me. We went back to my bed and she told me that she had spoken with my dad and arranged a 48-hour admission for me.

“You will have to accept whatever bed comes up and it will be for 48 hours only, including the time you’ve spent in the ED today,” she said sternly.

“I will not tolerate this behaviour and property damage. No matter what your diagnosis, it is unacceptable. Are you listening?”

I was crying and said I was very sorry. It was a moment that I am not proud of. I didn’t need to take out my anger on the emergency department nurses as they weren’t the ones deciding whether to give me an admission or not and some of them had been very kind to me. I’m still not entirely sure just how angry and threatening I was as I was very out of it. I have a graze on my foot, which I must have got kicking something. But I’m pretty sure I didn’t break anything. I still have a bad aftertaste from it all. I haven’t felt so much hatred and contempt from people in a long time.

I was drugged up with olanzapine as well as 10mg of diazepam. The mental health nurse demanded that I take the meds, showing no warmth. I held my hand out like I was a naughty child about to be whipped and she put four pills into my hand. I no longer felt cared for there. The medication left me pretty sedated and once I was given a room in the psych ward all I could do was lie in bed a heap. The nurse kept coming in asking for signatures and various things, which was super annoying given how sedated I was.

I was lucky to have got a quiet room which is not next to the common area, a road or the basketball court. It is still noisy here though. Today a woman sat outside my bedroom swearing and complaining all day. Apparently her toilet is blocked, and is full of her and her room mate’s shit which is making the room reek. The hospital won’t fix it as it’s a Saturday. I’m sure they could find an emergency plumber, but I guess they don’t want to spend the extra money on a psych patient. That’s how we’re treated, like shit. I hear a lot of chatter outside my room, even now at 12:15am. Patients also blast music. They swear and rage all the time in here and are not treated like I was treated when I expressed my anger in the emergency department. I’ve just been lying in bed most of the time as up until this evening when my dad finally dropped off my laptop I’ve had nothing to entertain myself with. Sometimes I drift off, then get confused about where I am. I also prefer to stay in my room as I hate being around other patients. I went to the nurse’s station this evening to collect my laptop and two male patients came up to me. One made no sense, prodded me and made me feel super uncomfortable. I see why they put females in a separate section now that only we can access using a swipe band.

I will be leaving tomorrow morning and have mixed feelings about it. The hospital stay has fixed nothing. My head still buzzes, animals are still being tortured, the world is still exactly the same. It’s shit being somewhere I know I’m not wanted. It’s shit having to beg for bread crumbs of care. I will finish this post with a music video: Ghosts by Thomas Newman. It makes me wonder, do we have the power to change ourselves and the world around us? If so, why don’t we do it?