March 22, 2016 - A locked door

March 22, 2016
7 PM

Surrey Memorial Hospital
Emergency Room
Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services
I have worked hard in the past four years to break these habits, these protective behaviors that have kept me in my own private dungeon. For a while I could see the outside world, the possibilities, a future that even I may have been able to find but right now, tonight, in this place I must face the fact that I have failed. I am once again in a dungeon but this one is far more literal than the one I once built from fear. 
There is a door beside me I am not allowed to go through.

Twenty feet away from me is a man strapped to a bed. The police were just in here with him taking a deposition, ensuring his safety or any number of other reasons. All I know is that he is not well.

Neither is the man sitting beside me. He seems off, something within him is making him act a little different: not quite right. He is not at ease.

Neither am I.

Across the room is another young man, a cut or sore on his face. In his hand is a Tim Horton's coffee, a traditional double-double no doubt. He is reclined in his chair, half covered by a blanket. His demeanor is that of nearly any twenty year old man lounging on a Sunday afternoon watching his favorite football team play. He is at ease and as much as I can his level of comfort rather than this anxiety I am feeling, there is an underlying thought.

I don't want to be that comfortable here.

I am in the mental health and substance abuse zone of the Surrey Memorial Hospital.Dr Khan, my psychiatrist sent me here after three minutes in my session with him. I broke down immediately after starting to talk to him and he saw I needed more help than a fifteen minute session could provide. The first thing I realized when I asked for help during my first breakdown was that if you are no longer thinking rationally, then you need to let someone else do the thinking for a while. You have to make the decision to hand off all your choices, all your responsibilities and trust the people around you. 

But it doesn't mean I have to like what they decide. I despise asking for help. It makes me feel weak. It makes me feel pathetic, deserving of the ridicule I hear from myself everyday. It makes me feel inhuman, reduced to a specimen in a lab experiment or a virtual creature in one of those Tamagotchies that the kids used to play with.

I feel like I'm in a ten year old's palm, as they feed, train and clean up after me, to see how long they can keep me alive, deserving of no more happiness of respect than the cursor blinking before me as I write this.

I can think of a thousand places I'd rather be, finding comfort. I can also think of another thousand places I'd rather be that would make me very uncomfortable. Think of the worst, grossest most disgusting they made contestants do on the TV show Fear Factor and I'd rather do that. OK, maybe not having to drink the donkey semen, but just a maybe.