my experience in a Malaysian psych ward
in the psych ward, there are lots of rules.
no photos, not even if your visitors took them. no cellphones, no electronics, except maybe a watch. no other clothes except the hot pink ones given to you by the hospital. if you were wearing a hoodie, the strings would have to be taken off. probably so you wouldn’t try to strangle yourself, or others. same reason there are no mirrors, no shoelaces, no pens. you had pencils and colour pencils during occupational therapy though, where you would learn how to colour, make sandwiches, dance and play word games. i won one of the word games.
in a sense, i won a whole lot more.
i’ve been thinking of what to write about this last crazy week at UM’s psych ward. i don’t know what i want to remember, or what i want to forget. i want to remember the patients coming to rub my shoulders when i was sobbing in bed. i want to remember the kind nurses who calmed me down when i didn’t understand why my blood kept having to be taken, or why they had to check my pressure all the time. i want to remember the little girl who came up to me and said ‘jangan nangis’ when i was spacing out after my doctor told me news i didn’t want to hear.
but do i really want to remember it all? do i want to remember the lady who talked to herself, calling all of us stupid bitches who stole her oxygen? do i want to remember sneakily helping a girl out of her restrains because the nurses had tied her down too tight? do i want to remember pulling my thin blankets closer to myself at two in the morning when a patient couldn’t stop screaming in her sleep?
visiting hours in the hospital are 3–7pm, so i spent a lot of my mornings journaling. but i couldn’t bring myself to finish anything i started to write, because there was this heaviness on me. i felt bad being in the psych ward. i felt bad watching my family cry as they sent me to the hospital. i felt bad having people visit, having people know that i was in for wanting to take my life, and not know what to say. but who can blame them? what do you say to someone who’s so suicidal that she thought -no, she knew– that the hospital was her last resort? i’ve been out for a few days and nobody really wants to talk about it. even i don’t know how to.
but i know that i need to. every day, my doctor gave me homework. what do you think you’re good at? what do you live for? why do you have such low self-worth? i realised that i had so many answers that i got from our feel-good culture of slapping on a smile and saying that it gets better. i thought that because i knew i was a wretched sinner, God forbid i thought i was worth anything. i thought the doctors knew nothing about my faith, my culture, my 24 years’ worth of lies that i had been relishing in.
when i said that i had to live up to people’s expectations of me, my doctor played the God card. if we’re all sinners then why do you want to please everyone? shouldn’t you be focused on God? and i was stuck. my list of things to live for had three shabby points; my list of things to die for was a long piece of paper and a suicide note i had to throw away. you realise that when you’re alone in the hospital for hours and hours, that what you’d thought about yourself has been wrong. and that was a painful realisation.
i made friends. a lot of them older, a lot of them having been to the hospital more than once. they would ask me what my name was (just natashya, not ira), why i was there (suicidal ideation), what i had (bipolar disorder) and why i wanted to do it (because life was worthless/i was worthless/nobody understood/i was lost/lost/lost). the crazy thing is that most of us were there for the same reason but how these ladies tried to lift me up in my pain despite their own was beyond me. they told me how i had so much life to live. that i was young. that as long as the voices weren’t telling me to do it, that i didn’t have to tell myself to do it. they told me that suicide was so, so silly. and if anyone on the outside told me that, i probably wouldn’t listen. but here were my sweet sisters, my suicidal sorority who have lived lives far crazier than mine, and they were still here.
i am still here.
as scary as the psych ward is and as much as i pray to never go back, it’s healed me in a way that no altar call and no 3am conversation can. waking up at 6.30am to get my blood pressure taken and going to sleep at 8pm after the nurses drugged me up taught me to take care of myself. telling the lady at the counter ‘saya ada niat bunuh diri’ and being wheeled into the ward four hours later, my family telling me to not be scared, taught me that i am so very cared for. being called out from zumba class because my family has come to visit taught me that the little things in life add up. watching old ladies reading their bibles, or qurans, or looking at their little pictures of buddha early in the morning taught my faith to rise in the little prayers that i whispered to God before i went to sleep at night.
i wanted to write a more structured story. about how i stopped taking my medication and went down, down, down until i ended up here. about how they did a pregnancy test (why) and a drug test (why) (nvm i know why) and about how i regretted my decision to admit myself the minute i got out of the lift. but my story is not about what i did, or what happened, although i will definitely remember these things for life. but my story is about who i’ve become. the last thing i thought i would do is come out stronger on the other side. at the point of admitting myself, all i wanted to do was sleep, and never wake up. but i woke up. and i did my homework. danced to hindustani music. talked to my doctors, my nurses, the patients; my friends.
i won. the death that had held me for so long eventually realised that she was not welcome anymore. in her place was life- a life that i had been waiting for ever since i first wrote ‘i want to die’ in my journals when i was 12. when i got out, i was excited to walk outside of the ward where we couldn’t cross the red line that stood between us and the outside world. i was excited to eat, even though i’m the heaviest i’ve ever been. i was excited to text people (ok maybe not bc i had like 500 messages but you get the point).
what’s crazy is that i still am. today i’m sick in bed and it might be because i’m allergic to my new medicine, so i’ve been sick for like a week. and i’m home alone. the old me would have loved to destroy herself. but i don’t think i want to anymore. i don’t think i want to die anymore, and i don’t think i want to spend my days waiting for them to end. there is so much life to live. it took a week at the psych ward to figure that out, but it was worth it. so, so worth it.
there was this one patient. could never figure out her age. she had two names for herself, and at least three mothers, all of which were indian celebrities. said her mom had killed herself one day, and was waiting for her the next. the point is, every day she said she went around telling the patients ‘saya menang! hari ini, saya keluar hospital’, and she never did. the day i got out, i saw her getting zipped up in a denim jacket, with fresh new clothes on. she was getting out after months!
and i figured… if she had so much hope. i probably could too. and i probably will for the rest of my life.
