What Even Is Harmony

I looked at the time on my phone: 9:45. I was maybe the fifth patient to arrive to the hospital, only by a matter of moments. An hour ago I had seen two people walk closely ahead of me on the footpath, knowing exactly where they were going, but decided there was no point in speeding up and leapfrogging them in the queue. I would be seen as a matter of course, in a matter, of course, with no matter for what I was planning with my day. It was presumed I only served their, the doctors’, the hospital’s, the state’s wanting of assurance I was in rude health, or at least not in a dangerous decline.1

Everyone in the waiting room seemed resigned, mostly to the waiting. They’d long ago resigned to themselves. I thumbed through my phone, eager for the spark in a tweet or forum post that would speak to me.2 Those extant messages, more real than the voices I heard, were still less embodied. The someone who wrote it might exist, most certainly did exist, but their relationship to me wasn’t even one of distance. The voices I once heard were immediate, I recalled. Those voices, unlike what I saw on my phone, were parts of me, aspects of me I couldn’t bring to bear on my living. The words, videos, gifs I looked over offered no real connection and even if I reached out to their creator anything I said would only amount to abstruse annoyance. Those people all had lives, all had confidence, and I didn’t know them enough to guess at how they, too, might drain from themselves. That there could be a sucking beneath their footsteps, beneath their thumb-touch, beneath the words they assuredly sent out to the world.

I laughed. No-one in the waiting room turned to look at me. Someone coughed. My smile stopped.3 I was giving more credence to the invisible lives of the people most capable of fitting themselves into an acceptable order or even an acceptable disorder of the world, for however much of a world a stream of endless asides, cries and calls to action were in a simulacrum. I laughed because I knew I was anything but acceptable. I couldn’t possess even a moment of their relationship with life’s seeming systems.4 I was happy with that. For all my thoughts, those few months prior, about how I was vile I didn’t realise that the world couldn’t see into my mind to understand the despair I brought to their idyllic concept of a societal equilibrium. Balanced up, for some, balanced down, for others. I couldn’t even affect the balance of myself. All I could do was fuck around, jumping off the see-saw that tilted me wherever it desired, climbing slowly back up again as my health was regained, to walk it like a balance beam, to dazzle myself awake with the occasional awareness of the glee in daring close to the edge only not to fall. I couldn’t fall far, only a twist of luck would see my lying injured, or worse. If I was ever to be seen, in all my playing myself, it would be through night-time dreams when my entwining contortions could be dismissed as an apparent conceit. The world wasn’t a playground, but if it was I only went to it, unseeing, unknowing, in the pitch-black of the night.5

I rolled a cigarette, and finished, flicked the loose strands of fine-cut shag off the coat resting over my knees. Leaving the waiting room I looked towards the receptionist who ignored my gaze. I never knew if she would tell the doctor I had gone outside for a smoke should my name be called. I could be smoking beneath the eaves, thirty feet from the doctor, them standing tall and commanding, or small and gracefully assured but still speaking quietly as they asked for the patient to rise and join them, and it would be presumed I’d fucked off, my name written down in the ever-expanding list of psychiatric deserters.

Taking a long drag I wondered if the doctor would ask about my smoking. Within a few days of attending the day hospital, right after what happened to me, I gave up cigarettes. It was the easiest thing I’d done. The battle against the nicotine withdrawal was a confirmation to me that pain was good. It was a true reflection of my natural struggle. A few weeks after finishing up with the day hospital, back in the rotation of attending clinic appointments every month, cigarettes returned to me, the dedicated smoker. The smoker who identifies as a smoker. The smoker who gets every joy from escaping the interrogatory pressure of sitting among people with no clue of how fucking clueless they are.6 Me—the smoker—leaving for a few moments outside in the quiet, reconnecting with the sparse clues I can slowly collect on my half-clued-in self. Slowly regaining the energy to accept everyone was equally fucking clueless but most had a hint of knowing they could occasionally bring to the fore with the right encouragement and setting: with the occasional bit of peace like a cigarette in a rain blanketed doorway.

I stubbed my cigarette out, crushed it with my foot. There was no ashtray seeing as the hospital had banned smoking on its premises in 2014.7 I walked back and saw a doctor standing at the door to the waiting room, who looked at me and said, “Natalie? This way, please.”

I sat into my chair as he leaned back into his, before a window that overlooked a little grass courtyard with a happy big bush planted stout in the middle, offering hospital accepted peace for no-one to enjoy. I couldn’t help but compare myself to him, compare myself with him. He wore a creamy-rusted-check shirt, dark blue-grey paints and brown suede loafers. His beard was full and trimmed as professionally as his medical station. His hair was short and brown but long enough to run his hand through it. He did run his hand through it: I congratulated myself.8 His eyes were full, almost violent in vigour, and mine were wide. He was controlled and calm. I wanted to be cared-for by him.9

My wanting of his care made me aware of how I looked. Me with a yellow peasant blouse, long since passed-by in fashion, made of a now worn cotton material, crumpled and lined from where my arms pressed tightly, holding against myself.10 My jeans were thin, unwashed, ripped from wear rather than style, just in places you wouldn’t normally see. I wore comfortable trainers stained from my long walks through the fields near my parents’ home just a few weeks ago. I was comfortable in my clothes but in that instant bodily comfort left me. I was glad I had at the least put on mascara.

“How have you been keeping?” he asked. I tried to convince myself he was asking me the person more than me the taint of sickness.

I smiled. “Very well,” I said. The very well was only ever in comparison to me at not-very-well. Me as the fallen tide, the revealed, kelp lined shore. Disgusting, treacherous, walkers slipping and falling. Me exposed but I was happy to be exposed to him, with his thick brown hair and his eyes deep as the earth. It helped me feel better.

He began to read over my file. “You were in the day-hospital a month ago?” he asked.

“Three months,” I said. “I feel like I’ve come a long way.”

“What do you remember of it?” he asked.

“Enough to know how bad I was,” I said. “How frantic I was.”

“And how are you now?”

“I’m trying to get things back together. I have a meeting with an agency about going back to school, or finding a course to do. Eventually to get a job.”

He smiled. He didn’t write anything into the loose, lined page he had taken out and set next to him on the desk. “What do you want to study?”

“I have a computer science degree, already. It wasn’t for me. The big business, its atmosphere. The way people treated everything as though their opinion and their understanding of technology, or languages, or coding was absolutely superior.” I was making excuses. I just couldn’t handle it. I didn’t like it either, but that was only a minor complaint.

“I can see how that could be off-putting,” he said. “Are you doing anything on your own? You could make an app.”11

I didn’t want to tell him how I had destroyed two computers while I had been mad. Installing software to hide my identity from people stalking me, not knowing what I had installed, then breaking hardware as I tried to remove hard drives with everything of myself being copied by the malware tricked onto them. Malware I was fooled into accepting. I was afraid of seeing what damage I had wrought, with the basic black cases I’d ripped apart sitting in a corner of my bedroom, cables hanging lose, power supplies sparked and blown, RAM unplugged because even short term memory was dangerous.12

I had chosen something else to do. A passion more personal to me and more reflective of my own journey as a soft-fleshed person and not the cold precision of on and off, right and wrong, and the people I knew whose ever-present desire was to always be correct. I felt always wrong, or at least out-of-line. “I’ve been journaling,” I said. “A friend said it helped her, so I’ve been keeping track of what’s going through my mind. What my day-to-day is, what my hopes are.” I hadn’t seen Niamh since that night. Our time had slipped away finding me striking out and her at peace in my memory.

“What are your hopes?” he asked.

“I’m not quite sure,” I said. I laughed. “To try and find a course, something that works for me. To get back into something that brings me purpose. It can’t be a strain. I need to ease into it. I know how dangerous stress is to me.”

“How’s your social life?” he asked, without looking up from the few words he was writing on the sheet of paper. I was forced to imagine my world with people like him in it. I couldn’t. There was a disparity that made me feel like a child, unaware and unknowing, and him full, mature, adult.

“I see people most days, at most every few days.” That I only went to the pub and saw whoever happened to be there was the truth I didn’t reveal. The lie was from my fear of imposing myself on the people I had known, on the people I had met during my time recovering madly in the day hospital. I was a completely different person, changed now by my settling of health, and I didn’t want to look at them and face up to the person I had been. “I’m treating all this as a fresh start,” I said. “An opportunity to work my way back into the life I want.”

“That’s good,” he said. “Can you tell me what medications you’re taking?”

I listed them off, then he went through the rattle of questioning that seemingly has to be asked. Are you hearing any voices? Any thoughts of killing yourself, hurting yourself, hurting others? All no. Nothing like that. Just normal everyday thoughts of packing it all in and throwing someone out a window.

As we finished up he told me my medication seemed to be working well, which I agreed with, and that I should continue with how it was.

“When do you want your next appointment for?” he asked, as his last question.

“I’ve been coming every month,” I said.

“Is that what you want?”

I blanked with the initial shock that he had given me a choice, not knowing if such care should be left in my hands. Surely that was his decision, his need to keep watch over me. I was caught between feeling well and knowing that all could change in a moment. Between wanting to be around people like him, people who showed consideration, but not being supervised in all my life by doctors.

“How about we say three months?” he said.

I smiled. “That’s perfect.” Three months was my routine before I’d had the episode. Three months was near-enough to good health. The doctor, someone the same age as me, with the kind of life I’d never have for myself, responsibility, a mortgage, a loving partner, people who trust him and people who he loves and trusts, felt I was as well as I could get.

As I walked out to the receptionist, contented at at having being deemed returned to my typical state, the swell of comfort from being considered stable-enough changed to an ill-ease that this was my life. Appointments, every three months. Pills, every day. Injections, every twelve weeks. That people like him, kind as he seemed, were the arbiter of my nearing-wellness. I stood by the plexiglass window to the office and thought how I was an underworld, the sewerage in a system that wants to reclaim me. It was the type of thought that would set on my skin, set into my body and at the worst of myself hold me. At just above the worst of myself, at the base of my recovery it would force me to act in immediate rejection, to wrestle away from its grip with no care for where that brought me. Instead of that I told the receptionist I was to be seen in three months and acknowledged the feeling of waste as I stood calm and waiting for the printer to spool out the date. Instead of fighting the thought I accepted it as a part of my fear. I settled with it without reasoning with it.

I tucked my next-appointment-letter into my bag, and walked to the bus stop that would bring to the café where I’d wait until my meeting with the educational-advisor. The ill-ease in my thoughts was naturally overturned with the simple act of the bus taking me onwards.

More coming soon...

Index - Part 2 Chapter 2