On December 5 of 2023, my maternal grandmother-- my bubbie-- passed away after years of struggling through dementia. She was my first grandparent to pass away. I know I'm lucky to have all of my grandparents around for as long as they were, but it didn't make the grief any easier. At the same time, I was finishing up my first semester in an expressive arts therapy program that had so much potential and yet so much was going so wrong.
In October of 2023, Hamas massacred hundreds of innocent people and took hundreds more hostage. And it was not easy, to say the least, to be a Jewish woman who loved Israel in a radically liberal graduate school space. People I considered my best friends blocked me on social media because I posted condemning Hamas (it wasn't even pro-Israel stuff-- it was literally just anti-Hamas!). I lost friends, I felt distant from my classmates, and I kept pushing.
I should've taken a break, I see that now. My mental health was in the toilet, and still, I tried to smile and put on a happy face. I was up late every night finishing papers about mental health diagnosis and treatments that I morally disagreed with. I was reliving trauma from high school, a time when doctors wrote me off with more medications as I suffered in silence.
In March of 2024 (so recent and yet a lifetime ago), I was put on a 5150 hold. I was hospitalized for the first time, and honestly, I'm impressed that this is the first time, that it took this long. I believe at some point I was put on a 5250 hold, and was forced to stay longer than 72 hours, because the paperwork was messy and I had dissociated so intensely I could not speak.
It was a horrible time in my life, but I made it through, and I know that I am stronger because of it. I have coping tools now, I have set boundaries and made difficult decisions (including withdrawing from that graduate program). I have healed more in the past almost two years than I had in the decade preceding it.
I believe it's important to speak about these things, these causes of intense shame, to give light to others. I was unwell, and being hospitalized made everything worse. It is a place for people in crisis, and it is not friendly to neurodivergent patients. If you can avoid it, for yourself or for a loved one, I recommend doing literally anything else. But it is a real thing that happens to so many people stuck in the throws of mental illness, who feel there is no way out. Sometimes, it is what has to be done.
