Wild Rose (MY ONLY 'FRIENDS' FROM THE PSYCH WARD "soap opera")

Dostoyevsky wrote that Hell is the inability to love. Among other things, my experiences with psychiatry and drugs, etc. would come to prove to me that the inability to truly love is indeed, at the very least, a type of hell or purgatory. But where this hell originates from is a mystery bequeathed to psychologists and writers to ponder and analyze; although the quality of this analysis is proportional to the writer's own level of evolution and enlightenment.

I was about 15 years old and his name was "Brent." I didn't meet him until I was released from the Adolescent Mental Health Assessment Centre and transferred to the Adolescent Mental Health Rehabilitation Program where we were allowed to go home every weekend. Another difference between this "new" place and the old one was that the doors weren't locked; pretty much anyone could walk in and out as they pleased. Visitors were much more common.

I had been diagnosed with selective mutism, (social and generalized) anxiety, and avoidant personality disorder. Maybe also some mild depression? Brent had been diagnosed with fetal alcohol syndrome (and who knows what, if anything, else). Sometimes I felt like his punching bag. Of course, I wasn't the only one he hit with his fists (mostly around the stomach area, if memory serves me right).

What's followed me around since then (if not before) is the feeling that people (if they think about me at all) think I'm the bad guy or villain (of the story); and that's not to say that I've never done bad things, but I've wondered why so many people have assumed the worst about me while judging me more harshly than others. Perhaps if they spoke to Dostoyevsky they would learn that we are all guilty, we are all to blame. Most people aren't as good (or innocent) as they (or others might) think.

For a time, Brent was my roommate. I don't remember everything he talked to me about, although he definitely had a mythic and narrative imagination, and if I were a better listener I could have preserved it for posterity. But what he couldn't express verbally he expressed with his fists or hands around my throat.

He was handsome, and it wasn't long before he developed a platonic friendship with a girl named "Anna" -- perhaps the closest thing he ever had to a girlfriend. Anna had red curly hair and was overweight. In reality, Brent would come to identify as a queer gay male who several years later would claim to have ovaries (and a regular period/menstruation?) and tell me that he wants to have a sex change while also asking me, "Why don't you want to have a sex change too?" As far as I know, he never had a sex change. And when (many more years later) I expressed my own feelings of gender confusion to him in the context of a Facebook conversation (perhaps with the question, "Do you think I should get a sex change?"), he didn't seem to think it was a good idea. Perhaps his bisexual boyfriend, Rich Wed-Sattam, temporarily influenced him in this direction (I'm assuming because Rich preferred women to men and/or wanted to be more heterosexual and considered Brent to be an effeminate and/or inferior male).

There was another young woman who I first met at the Adolescent Mental Health Assessment Center at the hospital. I'll call her Darla. She had been diagnosed with schizophrenia. Unfortunately, several years later, she killed herself. She was a beautiful young woman and Indigenous/First Nations Canadian. I remember the staff asking what our favorite song (at the time was). I don't remember what Darla said, perhaps because I'm too self-absorbed, but I remember what I said--"Beautiful" by Joydrop. I first heard that song at a cinema during the end credits of the movie Ginger Snaps II: Unleashed (Ginger Snaps 2).

After Darla was moved to the open-door facility (Adolescent Mental Health Rehab), Brent once sprinkled salt on her back while she was eating in the dining area/room. Another girl (I'll call her Zelea James), with orange hair and a penchant for ("exhibitionist") self-mutilation, who I was able to befriend, albeit temporarily, kind of made fun of Darla that one time (behind her back), saying something like, 'Well, if she's so stupid to let you do that...'

I don't know if Darla heard or noticed any of this or not. I didn't say anything. But when we were at the swimming pool and she told me that she had been diagnosed with schizophrenia I replied with something like, 'Well, that must mean you really need the medication.' Of course, over time, the medication (among other things) would make her gain weight and provoke (or at least not help her with) her suicidal depression.

I'm never going back there. At least one of the staff didn't seem to like me much, perhaps at least partially due to some things I wrote in a private notebook/diary about some of my fellow patients. Brent stole my notebook/diary and started reading it while he was temporarily crippled and sitting down in an armchair. He had asked me to bring him a cup of water, I think. When I got to him, he smiled and said, "Now I know." I ran away, walking fast, perhaps even running at times, until I got to the downtown public library and read fragments from a book about a young gay male who ended up dying from AIDS?

Why this piece never fully came together

I'd like to believe that this draft already does several things well: it has a strong voice, concrete memories, moral ambiguity, and recurring themes (loneliness, guilt, psychiatry, friendship, cruelty, sexuality, and self-understanding).

The main problem is that I never decided what kind of story this was supposed to be. At different times, I wanted it to be a memoir about adolescent psychiatry, a character portrait of Brent, a reflection on friendship and loneliness, an account of psychiatric harm, a meditation on guilt and innocence, and a social history of a particular place and time. Each of these possibilities pulls the narrative in a different direction.

The piece also suffers from a problem of scope. Brent appears at the beginning as the apparent center of the story, but the narrative gradually expands to include Anna, Darla, Zelea, the staff, psychiatry, sexuality, gender identity, suicide, Dostoyevsky, and my own later life. Many of these subjects are interesting in themselves, but together they compete for attention. The result is that no single narrative thread receives enough development to carry the entire work.

Another difficulty is emotional distance. Some memories remain vivid while others are fragmentary. There are events I can describe in detail, yet I still do not fully understand what they meant. Because of this, the story alternates between concrete scenes and broad philosophical reflections. Sometimes those reflections deepen the material; at other times they interrupt it.

I also struggle with the question of fairness. These were real people, many of whom suffered greatly. At least one is dead. Some may remember events differently than I do. I often find myself hesitating between honesty and caution. The more I try to avoid simplifying people into heroes or villains, the more difficult it becomes to shape the material into a conventional narrative.

Perhaps the deepest obstacle is that I still do not know what conclusion to draw from these experiences. Was this story about friendship, abuse, survival, loneliness, psychiatry, or the human need to be understood? I can identify individual moments, but I have not yet discovered the larger pattern that unites them. Until I do, the work remains less a finished story than a collection of memories orbiting a question that I have not yet learned how to answer.

Perhaps this piece contains enough material for a memoir chapter--or even a short book--but has not yet decided what its true subject is. The strongest emotional thread is not Brent, psychiatry, or even Darla's death. It's the recurring question that appears throughout the draft:

Why do people become villains in one another's stories, and how much responsibility does each person bear for the suffering that follows?

That question feels like the hidden center of the piece.