Frustration

I have been warned time and again to always be careful not to get too comfortable during inpatient treatment. That people can learn to love being in hospital, and either lengthen their stay unnecessarily or constantly seek to return to one; by either consciously or unconsciously sabotaging their mental health or not putting in the work needed to get better. I can see that for some people, having little or no responsibility for yourself could be appealing. Or perhaps the hospital environment is simply more pleasant or less distressing than their home environment.

This is not the case for me. I am a control freak, textbook BPD with co-morbid eating disorder. Ask my boyfriend, I'm a pain in the ass, and when I am depressed it gets even worse - I try and counter my out of control emotional state by micro managing everything else I possibly can, spontaneous does not exist in my little bubble. But in hospital, I am bound by the rules and timetables of the ward. When I eat, wash, walk, talk - it's all controlled by someone else. Hell, I can't even have a cup of coffee outside of the designated warm beverage times. And let me tell you, it is a long wait from 5am to 8.30am when you can finally clasp a hot cup of roasted bean glory. But, there is a reason I am here, I recognise this. The systems they have in place here are likely tried and tested and are for the benefit of the patients.

Knowing this makes it no less irritating to one such as myself. This post probably seems entirely pointless at this point, stop withering on about it Lisa. But right now, and for the last 60 minutes, I should be doing some work in order to get into a particular mindset for the impending unpleasantness that is breakfast. But I can't. Because I have run out of plastic pockets to put my worksheets into as I read them. And I have only a handful of pages left in my journal, which I have taken to clutching to my chest at all times, like some sort of scribble safety blanket. As I am confined to the ward, I cannot get to the coffee shop and buy and new journal; let alone somewhere for plastic pockets. I can ask my boyfriend to procure these items and bring them to me on Wednesday but by then there will be multiple pages needed to be sheathed and I'll be left with loose A4 pages to write on. Which is wrong, the pages of a journal must be bound together in one notebook. They must be sequential, not loose and fool hardy; likely at any moment to slip from between the pages that hold it.

So I decided to stop staring at the nearly full diary and four remaining plastic pockets, and blog instead. Hoping to pull my mind back from the spiralling abyss and refocus. At least for long enough to get through breakfast. All these words are here, in cyber space, just so that I can step away from a ludacris stationary conundrum and cry over a bowl of muesli.

I might not like hospitals, and the loss of freedom that goes with them, but it's possible I might need them.