Though we couldn’t leave the ward until we’d earned to wear our shoe laces again, and the problems of the news-worthy world looked like dreams in someone else’s pig tail and Candy Land bouncing head, the adult troubles of the world resembled either an afterschool program for babies or a Wizard of Oz play put on by 3^rd graders.

It’s not that we didn’t care about what was happening beyond the breakproof glass and padded safe rooms of the impatient psychiatric unit, but that the news seemed to be a way of teaching others to forget that what’s newsworthy begins with someone with a mental health issue.

We hated all attempts to dismiss deep-rooted problems for ones that could be all wrapped up in 24 hours. We were the gatekeepers of the truth, the givers of real life, and the writers of true love.

When we were ignored, it was because the world wasn’t brave enough to be sick and begin the radical process of deep acceptance and self-compassion.  

Yeah, at 16 I did think about killing myself, and manipulative snake that I am, I even think I told a girlfriend I’d do it if she didn’t stick around, a ploy her psychiatrist father had relayed to my own father, who then asked a guidance counselor family friend to come over and accompany me to my aforementioned vacation spot in Concord, New Hampshire.

Being admitted against my will was stupid and dumb and impatient counseling was for crazy people, not us.

Leaning back in a chair in the smoking room at the hospital and burning up one of my father’s Lucky Strikes, so proud I was of the fact that it had no filter, even though it made me cough in my sleep and smell like a back alley behind a restaurant.

They’d all get what was coming to them, unvarnished and too raw to be palatable. That was the plan. But what a mask I had on then. Even when I took one off there was another mask under it.

When I threw up at night in my private bathroom I saw my face in the toilet water covered in colors even I couldn’t understand, like a frat buddy had had fun with me in my drunken sleep. But I looked savage and intimidating, and that was the point.

Each insult I hurled at others I thought were smarter and dumber than me made me feel like I was being evacuated from a self that was so angry it could have burned itself down. Tragic flaw that I was, I was too strong and too secure behind a piss-stained idea of power and a door stop pushed under backwards for my own good.

Though I’d have preferred to walk on the crowded classrooms of my youth like a Kaiju on top of a miniature Tokyo, or a Jason Vorhees down a hallway that’s always fast enough to get around the back of you, they made a healer out of me instead.

What flies and hits us aren’t our punches or insults or catastrophic comments meant to call the cavalry, but our difficult feelings that, like geese approaching, get louder and more beautiful the closer they get to us.