When I try to remember my past and hospitalization, i seem to remember,
again and again, every time I got released from the hospitals.  I remember Walking out.
Out of that dark dim hell where there is no joy and nobody dreams and beauty and magic are madness
where insult is treatment and blood tests are punishments, in windowless dark rooms
I just remember the vision  of myself walking out of the hospital about ten times  and it was
Freedom at the very purest form.  being released from a psych ward into bright sunlight is a
kind of heavenly, magical feeling.  Freedom is exhilarating i just remember the sunlight how dim my eyes would become whenever I was hospitalized-- there was no sunlight in the hospitals...
and seeing the light of sunshine on a warm afternoon....or a winter sunset....or a dewy may morning.
I would get my things, get into my car or my parents' car, and... Drive Away!  Freedom is hard to explain.
So all these weeks everything you ever did was stupid and crazy and shameful and low and wrong...suddenly when you get released into the world, it's like starting over again and you learn to appreciate the simple things in life like sunlight and fast food and cell phones and cars.  I am incredibly grateful for my freedom now, and am terrified beyond comprehension of being comitted ever again.  My heart has been broken in those places beyond sane treatment and I was tortured, time after time, and when I was released, I just remember stepping into the bright sunlight and feeling the word, "Hallelujah!" Then slowly adjusting to this rediscovered freedom of being a citizen... you don't likely realize how lucky citizens are to have freedoms that people outside of hospitals have.
When you are in a Psychiatric hospital, you "have no soul" and you have no rights to your own body.
You have no rights over your own mind, your soul-- any opinions are ignored if not punished.  There was so much pain in these hospitals, people dying, and i met the nicest people i ever met were fellow psychiatric patients.  I made countless friends and knowing they are still out there somewhere.... that is so wonderful of a feeling to me, that all the people I lvoed and knew are by now Freed from the overrule of the mind, body and soul.  Psychiatric hospitals tell you you have Zero Rights.  Zero rights over your body.  I have been tortured physically and I remember being naked and covered in suction cups attatched to a computer for hours, that was probably the most painful and humiliated feeling, it was traumatizing.  I don't know why they would do that to patients ever time they were re-committed, but I think it is like just To Break The Patients' Hearts.  Anyway, they broke mine during those hours,
and i got used to going through it every time i was recommitted.  It was a hell.  I had no rights and no choice as to whether they were going to do to my body and whatever they wanted to do to my body, they could.... we were daily force-fed, and asked what percentage we ate at every meal...there were people in the hospitals who had cancer and were being treated for cancer against their will.  One man in there with me told me he had Stomach Cancer and that He had five weeks expected to live.  I couldn't help being afraid of him, and I'm sure he died there after I got out....he was being fed through a tube and a tube in his stomach, and he would look at me, and smile, or smoke a cigerette, and I tried to comfort him.
I tried to comfort everybody.  I was always a good samaritan, and I'm friendly and kind, and so I would make friends immediately that evach time i was committed, within a day I would always be on a first-name/nickname friendships with these fellow patients, out of pure desparation.  I remember translating a Bible written in Spanish, translating it for my fellow patients, and showing them where to find "Proverbios" etc.  The patients and I would pray together.  We Smokked together.  We Cried together. We had relationships, one of my boyfriends, Kevin, I had met in a psychiatroc ward.  We talked to each other after we were released, on the phone....and dated, and had alot of great sex.  We dated for years.  He was a beautiful 35-year old veteran of the Iraq War and he was considered dangerous, He Had "Post-traumatic Stress Disorder" and was a loved friend i still know him, i am still able to contact him.  I love him.
In Jesus' Name,
Amen!