Psychiatric ward

I will never forget the day everything collapsed.

My cat fell from the fourth-floor window, and with him, the rest of my sanity crashed too. I spent the entire night awake - fear, guilt, pure desperation eating me alive. I thought he’d need an expensive surgery, so I spent those hours searching for jobs with my heart beating in my throat, like saving him and saving myself were the same thing.

I arrived at the clinic destroyed: heart racing, hands trembling, rage and despair tangled together, four months without treating my borderline disorder. I was mistreated, I snapped back, and in the middle of all that chaos I grabbed the blister packs in my bag and swallowed everything. Dizzy, blurry, falling apart. I called my boyfriend, tried to wait for the Uber, but my body was already giving out. I fainted inside the car. I got home unconscious. The hospital is just a distant blur in my mind. I only remember waking up the next day with the awful news that I was going to be hospitalized. “Voluntary.” For my own protection.

A lie.

I ended up staying inside for ten days because I couldn’t request my own discharge, even though I had entered voluntarily. My parents disagreed with letting me go. And walking into that place was like entering hell through the front door. Screaming, the stench of confinement, women wandering naked through the rooms, completely lost. I fell into that hole like someone being swallowed whole. I slept for two entire days — only waking up to swallow medication — until they finally removed me from the restricted ward.

The “normal” ward was worse. A space meant for 30 women packed with nearly 80. Bodies everywhere. They put me on the floor of the cafeteria, on a thin mattress I had to share with two other patients. We became friends because there was no other choice. It was either bond… or lose what little was left of my mind. I was ashamed to ask anything, ashamed to even exist in that place. The social worker never told my parents about the visiting days. I was admitted on a Wednesday, and the visit was on Sunday — except they didn’t show up because nobody bothered to inform them. That day, I felt abandoned and forgotten. I tried calling, but every call went straight to voicemail. Days trapped. Days believing no one would ever come for me.

And at night… the terror.

People walking. Crying. Screaming.

I didn’t sleep. I was genuinely afraid of dying.

I didn’t trust anyone. Not a soul. Everyone there seemed thrown in like animals, and the staff treated us like garbage - impatient, cold, distant, without a trace of love for their work. The worst part was when the staff went to sleep and we were left with no supervision. Anyone deep in a psychotic break could have come after me. Every second felt like survival.

And this is only the beginning.

I have so much more to tell.

So much more to open up.

So much more to pour out.

But that…

that comes next.