Journeys Within Journeys

As I continue to ponder Campbell’s stages of the hero’s journey, it has occured to me that while our life is one great heroic adventure – there are many many littler journeys within it,  kind of like those crazy russian dolls that all live inside each other, and each mini-journey has all the same basic stages.

Case in point (and I’m about to reveal a very personal story here…):  Two weeks ago I went to a brand new psychotherapist to finally get some treatment for major depressive espisodes I had been having.  While there, I had a bit of a mini-meltdown in her office, stuff that I had been keeping in for months suddenly came flooding out.  She asked me if I ever thought about suicide and my answer was, “I don’t know a thoughtful intelligent person on this planet that hasn’t at least thought about suicide.”   When she looked up from her pad, I could tell that she didn’t ‘get it’.   She asked me what “my plan” was – I told her I didn’t have one, that I wasn’t going to kill myself.  “Well you have to have thought about how you’d do it” she insisted, and pressed me until I told her how I would do it if I were in fact, suicidal (which I wasn’t).   At the end of our meeting, she told me that she wanted me to “see a psychiatrist immediately” and to go to an emergency room if necessary.  “Cool”, I thought, “she wants me to get some drugs”.  I wanted to get some drugs, too.  I really wasn’t feeling together at all.  This, I realized later, was the call to adventure.

After class that night, I walked over to the emergency room at St. Vincent’s, and had my friend Jen come meet me there for support.  When they finally saw me, I told the hospital people the same thing I had told the therapist, in the hope that they would concur that indeed, I needed some drugs to make me happy again.  When I asked the ER psychiatrist when I could get my drugs and go, she basically said, “oh, you’re not going anywhere.  We are going to keep you here for a few days”.   This was definitely not part of my plan!  I tried to explain that I was really fine and that I had a MAJOR site launch coming up at work on Monday (this was Thursday) and that there was NO WAY I could be out for even a day leading up to that.  They wouldn’t budge.  They told me it would be “unethical” to not have me committed.  I asked if I could see my friend Jen, and she came into my little area and I drew the curtain. “Keep a lookout” I said to her as I scrambled to get out of my gown and put on my clothes, “we’re getting the fuck out of here”.  Within seconds I was fully dressed, and she let me know when the “coast was clear” and we tried to make a brisk but subtle break for the back door.  We can’t have gotten 2 steps away before I heard “he’s heading for the back door”.  We ran.  I tried to throw an empty gurney in the path of the nurse that was pursuing me.  We made it 2 the automatic sliding doors that led to freedom and I saw my friend Jen disappear onto the sidewalk just as I felt 2 strong pairs of hands on each arm… I was caught.  I can’t remember if I was more disappointed by the knowledge that I would now be locked up in a mental ward for at least 3 days, or whether because I had almost gotten to wear the title of “escaped mental patient”, if only for a night.  In either case, this seems to me to be a clear example of refusal of the call.

The next day, I woke up on a tiny bed in a tiny room that smelled like cat pee mixed with formaldehyde.  They woke me up and made me go to breakfast in my humiliating gown, and I got to meet all my fellow inmates.  They were freaks.  They were scary.  Each one of them was a gargoyle guarding the first threshold.   I was NOT one of them.  So after breakfast I went back to my room and refused to come out.  I sealed myself in the belly of the whale.

Since I’m saving most of this story for when I have several days to sit down and think it through, I won’t write a novella here, but suffice it to say that the next 4 days was one load road of trials, between hostile nurses, indifferent doctors, and one downright evil social worker.   At first I only befriended the beautiful British model (woman as temptress) who was also in “by mistake” (although this was belied by the bandages on her wrists).    Eventually, however, I did start to come out of my shell and talk to the other patients, some of whom were severely mentally ill.  In fact, one (who introduced herself to me at “The Prince of Wales”) had electroshock therapy twice a week, and could never remember any past conversations you’d had with her.   But the more I got to know them, these people who I originally saw as “demons”, the more I began to appreciate how beautiful and kind many of them were.  Their illnesses, whether it was crack addiction or schizophrenia, seemed on superficial disabilities.  By my third day, I was so into talking to them that new incoming patients thought I worked there!  It was truly a transformative experience for me… an apotheosis, if you will.

Although there was no refusal of the return, per se, I did feel a twinge of sadness on the crossing of the return threshold on Tuesday.    The experience had been therapeutic for me, after all, but not in the way it was intended by the medical establishment.  I had spent 4 days in the company of people who all had lovely souls, but simply could not function in the world.  My compassion, I felt, had increased in the same way the Grinch’s heart grew on Christmas.  It was oddly hard to leave, and feel the sting of the cold NYC air on my face as I walked out the door onto 12th St.

Well, at least I’d gotten my drugs.

Tagged as: adventure, Hero(ine)s