Home from the hospital

It’s good to be home 🏠

Spoiler alert: I was hospitalized overnight this week. I’ll get more into it below, in From the Heart1, but for now all I will say is…it’s SO FREAKING GOOD to be home. So good. It’s Saturday morning as I write this, and I’m sitting in bed with my cat at my feet. All the little things I tend to overlook, take for granted, or hate about my home — the fact that my window faces another window; the twin bed; the messy corners; the cramped space; all of these things are bringing me joy and comfort today because they’re mine.

I am home. And it is good.

In today’s newsletter, you’ll find:

1. From the heart: reflections on a hospitalization

2. From the camera roll: a lot of Lizzie

3. From the page: this newsletter got too long so I’m skipping this section, lol

I hope you’ll stick around and read the rest of this missive; I hope you’ll tell your friends to subscribe or leave a comment or just feel some good things as a result of reading this. Love y’all!

From the heart 💗

Trigger warning: this section discusses suicidal ideation, depression, and a psych hospitalization.

Two weeks ago I was crying because I was graduating from VCFA. In the back of my mind, and for several weeks leading up to graduation, I had the faintest, tinkliest of worries. You see, in the years before I started at VCFA, I was hospitalized five times on various psych wards in different hospitals. All for the same reason: I was experiencing suicidal ideation and didn’t know where to turn for help.

Over my two years in the program, there were many moments where I experienced suicidal ideation. Many trigger points where, in the past, I might have checked into a hospital. My friends can attest to the fact that they were the recipients of more than one text that said something like, “I just want a break and the hospital is sounding real good right now.” But I held back because I knew a hospitalization, even if it only last about a week, would put a real wrinkle in my forward momentum with the program. I didn’t want to risk graduation2.

And so, over the months and weeks leading to graduation, I harbored this fear that without WCYA tethering me to life outside the hospital, I’d wind up back in one.

What I didn’t expect was to be admitted less than two weeks from graduation at the hands of a wellness check carried out by police and EMTs.

Let’s back up, shall we? Just a little bit, to Thursday morning, January 25th. I woke up and within like three minutes of consciousness I had an epiphany that’s long overdue. It occurred to me with finality and clarity that I can spend my whole life chasing literary success, career success, romantic love, you name it — and I’ll still be depressed. No call from my agent with good book news, literary award, beloved girlfriend, or friendship is going to save me from the highs and lows that come with my mental illness.

In the moment, this cast a pall of gloom and doom over me. What, I wondered, was the point? What was the fucking point of carrying on if I will always be depressed?3

So this thought shadowed me all day, until I reached a breaking point. I was actively suicidal in the sense that I felt I had no choice but to die and though I didn’t want to, I was in so much psychic agony I didn’t know if I could fight it. So I reached out via text to the suicide hotline, 988, hoping someone could help me.

A series of events happened from there that resulted in someone calling 911 to perform a wellness check on me. I didn’t know it was happening until about two minutes before the police rang my doorbell. When they arrived, I was still a little distraught, partly because of the suicidal ideation and partly because, well…the police were at my door.

They talked to me, the EMTs talked to me, and they told me I had to go to the hospital: not, they stressed, to be admitted, but to talk to a doctor who could discharge me once I made clear I was no longer actively suicidal.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t discharged that evening. I was admitted instead. It was honestly really terrible. Triggering because of past bad experiences I’ve had on psych wards, traumatizing in its own right (the beds had no pillows; the bathroom had no doors and the windows no curtains), and genuinely a hellish experience.

The one bright side is that, as so often happens with time and space from a very negative experience / emotion, I had some clarity regarding my earlier freakout over success not bringing me joy.

It occurred to me, as I hinted at in the footnotes, that life with depression is still worth living. Yes, it is hard to be plagued by darkness and low moods and thoughts of suicide. It is so incredibly hard, I don’t want to minimize that for myself or anyone else. Yes, I wish that a book deal or an award or a degree or a wife would cure me. But that’s not going to happen.

Instead, there is joy to be found in the moments that make up a life. I can strive and seek success in whatever field I am in, but I don’t have to achieve it to be well. It’s not going to make me well, so not achieving it? That isn’t going to keep me unwell.

There is freedom in that. Freedom in recognizing that the trappings of a successful life will neither fix nor break me. Freedom in de-shackling myself from the compulsion to be successful in the hopes of being saved.

I live with depression. That is something that will be true likely forever. I manage that depression with medication and therapy, and hopefully someday with a good diet and exercise and sunshine and whatnot. I find joy in my writing, my friends, my cat, my city, my jokes, my life. The depression and the joy live together inside of me, and sometimes one is stronger than the other, but that doesn’t mean the other is gone, nor does it mean I’m broken, weak, abnormal.

I simply am: a woman who is mentally ill and doing her best to survive it. To thrive within it.

I am lucky — so lucky — that I was already feeling better at the time of admission and was able to accurately and truthfully convince the doctors and social workers that I was no longer suicidal and was discharged early Friday afternoon. I am lucky to be at home today. I am lucky to be able to write again.

I am lucky to be alive. I will treasure that fact and that life to the best of my ability.

From the camera roll 📸

Alla prossima 👋

That’s all for this week. Keep the ongoing genocide in Gaza in mind — if you’re a kidlit person, there’s a letter advocating for a ceasefire that you can sign until EOD Jan. 28. Let’s keep calling our reps and letting them know what we want: a ceasefire followed by a free Palestine.

My love to all of you.

— Karis xoxo