southern bella ciao

Weird Liminal Space

So, I'm back on campus for a week or two to move my stuff out and get started with my mental health treatment. It's been snowing hard today, and many people are arriving later than expected. The campus was eerily quiet today, save for the friend I saw for lunch. Hardly anyone was in the dining hall at peak lunch hour. Combined with the endless cold fog, dreary skies, and thick snow which mutes everything, it feels a bit like I'm in a Silent Hill set piece. Yes, it's a weird liminal space.

It'll be difficult to feel like I belong when everyone is back on campus. I'll be one of the few people not taking any classes, not participating in clubs, and not being allowed into university spaces. It kind of feels like the world is moving on without me while I'm trapped in a glass cage that I put myself in. Well, that's the nature of mental illness! It's supremely easy to hide and supremely capable of fucking your life up. Yippee. I think getting a diagnosis would probably help; right now I just feel like I'm going insane.

Getting treatment has been a process that has altogether been far too involved and far too confusing, but at least things are happening. My first IOP fell through because it's way too expensive even on insurance, so I'm holding out hope that my second option is better. I think the annoying thing is that I've had to be the person who has figured out and coordinated practically everything—neither the school nor my parents have really helped plan or get anything in place. It's kind of frustrating that this is the case. I'm lucky in that I'm still capable of functioning on a basic level, enough to fill out forms and stuff at least, but it's easy to see how this could quickly become a disaster if I was doing worse. It seems a bit irresponsible of the university to not provide at least a rough outline of how things should go, or some additional assistance for struggling students, but maybe it also seemed like I didn't need that much help.

The thing that's been most annoying is that as my mental health crisis has unfolded these past few months, I've gotten glimpses into how shitty the US healthcare system can be. My family was charged several hundred dollars for my hospital stay last year, and that was for a five-minute ambulance ride and a single night stay in an awful room with minimal accommodations. Why? It'd have been better, cheaper, and less stressful if someone had Ubered me to a local hotel and given me some OTC nausea medication. Instead I got a sleepless night in a windowless room with the fluorescent lights turned permanently on, all the while vomiting uncontrollably every twenty minutes. Pure misery for several hundred dollars. Why? The healthcare system here is already squeezing my family for as much money as they can; I can't imagine how awful it must be if my family didn't have decent insurance and the means to ensure I can get the treatment I need.

A lot of my journal posts wind up being depressing rants, but there are things I'm actually looking forward to or happy about. Shoutout to my therapist for getting me to talk about them today.

#journal