Dear, Cruel World
an excerpt

The night the bugs came in, Melissa was the one who saved me. I’d gone to bed at eight in my pink pajamas, said my prayers, and pulled the yellow chenille bedspread up to my chin. I had a hard time sleeping. I was too hot, and the June bugs were loud outside the window. From downstairs, I heard the front door open and shut and I knew that Dad was home. I got up and padded downstairs. “What are you doing down here, Janie?” Melissa asked. Her hands were on her hips. “Just getting a glass of water,” I said. “Well get it and go back to bed,” she said. I went into the kitchen. I got a glass of water. On my way back through the living room, Daddy asked me to count to ten in French. When I did, he smiled and kissed me. I went back to my room and noticed how much hotter and darker it was than the big airy living room downstairs. I took off my pajamas and climbed into bed. I’d have to put them back on tomorrow before Mama saw me, but right now it was just too hot to wear them. I turned my pillow over so I could put my cheek on the cool side of the case. At some point I fell asleep. When I woke up there were bugs all over me, crawling over my hands and arms and legs. I screamed, and jumped up, trying to shake them off. The light went on. More of them flew at me from every corner of the room. They were large, like cockroaches, and light brown and had wings. Mama screamed from the doorway and Daddy said, “What the hell is that?” But Melissa ran straight in, grabbed me by the hand and pulled me out to the hallway so she could beat them off me with a t-shirt. I cried and screamed and she got them all off me, then took me to the bathroom to give me a bath. We went downstairs and she cuddled me while Daddy took the broom upstairs to rid my room of bugs. When he came down, he said there was a hole in the window screen. They must have gotten in that way. I didn’t want to go back to my bedroom, so Melissa took me to hers, and cuddled me down to sleep in her bed.

***

Another memory from this hospital: they want me to talk about my sister in group, and I don’t want to. It feels like it is dishonoring her if I mention her to Frank, who talks excitedly about his manic cycles and how he cycles twice a day, and Pam, who says nothing. Pam is scheduled for ECT—electro-convulsive therapy. She hasn’t said anything in the whole time I’ve been here, but she understands when you talk to her. She can nod her head. Also in this group: Miss Doringo, who used to be a substitute teacher at my high school. She was so crabby we loved to trick her. No way am I going to talk about Melissa in a group that includes Miss Doringo.
Harry, my therapist, talks to me about it. “You’ve got to share, Jane,” he says. “It’s how we help each other heal.”
I tell him no way. I tell him I’ll share with him, but not with a bunch of mentally ill people who can’t even cope with the basic tasks of living.
“Why do you think you’re in here Jane?” he says, not too gently. He has a point. I’m in here because I can’t cope, or have decided I can’t. In the end it’s the same thing.
“I’m not trying to say I’m better than they are,” I say, even though in fact, I do believe I’m better than they are. At least when I’m 20 I do. Now, at the doorway of middle age, I have more compassion and understanding. I also have less faith that anyone makes it through life without being wounded. I think if I were sitting now in front of Harry or Jason or anyone else that I trusted in the hospital I’d see them differently, as flawed human beings. And I might see the group of patients as people who’d been through the wringer enough that they could probably understand my pain, or at least the outlines of it.
But at 20, I believed, yes, that I was better than most people. Smarter. Deeper. My pain was special to me. I had a sister who had killed herself, an alcoholic mother, and I’d been raped. I couldn’t imagine that anyone had it worse than I did. Which just meant that I wasn’t listening in group as well as not talking.
But my whole point in bringing all this up: in the hospital I found a new spiritual direction. Jason started bringing me books about zen meditation; someone else left a copy of Richard Bach’s Illusions in the patient room, and all of a sudden I had the sense that maybe there was something more. Not just a point to living, an end game. But multiple points in the process of living. It made sense to me then. And that’s when I started truly meditating, first on my separateness and then on my connection with others.