Foulweather Friends

It is six minutes to twelve when I arrive at the psychiatric outpatient clinic.

It is almost mid-December. The florist at the end of my street is selling clusters of scarlet candles and the golden stars have taken their annual position atop the local lampposts, but the weather is unseasonably mild today. I’ve changed back into short boots and a lighter coat and am grateful for my decision to go scarfless as I take my place in the queue at reception. They don’t bother to stick my health insurance card in the reader, but wave me through to the waiting room. The multilingual sign sports seasonal sprigs of holly at each corner.

By now I’m in the privileged position of being able to drop by this place every couple of months for a quick chat and a refill of my meds. Where my head was once a hopeless mess of scrambled hardware – spikes I would use on myself, padlocks that had sprung open without warning – these days it’s mere maintenance, nothing more drastic than an occasional tightening of a couple of my loose screws. I got my (hopefully short) absence signed off on by the team’s deputy manager before I left work. My boss is off sick today – something I can’t help but be grateful for, though I wish her no harm. Annual review time is coming up, and although she’s outwardly been very understanding of my situation, nobody likes to be perceived as weak.

Christmas always brings traffic to the clinic. I can understand that, what with the shortening hours of daylight and the way work and financial pressures always ramp up towards the end of the year. In summer I sometimes have the waiting room to myself, but today all of the seats are full. Their occupants ignore each other politely, some thumbing nervily through their phones, others staring blankly into space. One woman’s trainered foot vibrates vigorously on the opposite thigh, making her entire body shake. I look past them all through the window that faces the courtyard.  

It’s funny (funny strange, not funny humorous) how much power that single piece of dividing glass holds. Being on this side, the clinic side, marks you out as someone who (however begrudgingly) has chosen to live. That side, however, the one with the benches and the uniform lawns and the ornamental rocks, is captivity. Nobody is out there today, but I don’t need to see them to remember it myself – pacing the well-worn circle like a wild animal, triangulating the doctors’ upstairs window and the gate barring me from the outside world and wondering how hard it would be to scale it, how far I could get before they caught me. Wondering if they would. And not knowing which was worse: being out there or being in here. Years later I still don’t like to think about it. A video unexpectedly popped up on my TikTok a while ago – some girl’s video diary of being on the same psych ward, snapshots of white lunch trays and medicine cups – and I closed the app immediately. It’s strange. Sometimes I can talk about it quite candidly, like it’s fiction, like it’s something that happened to someone else. Other times it’s just too real and I can’t look at it head-on; I have to skirt around the edges of it, a slumbering monster in a dark forest.

One of the most soul-destroying things about being dangerously mentally ill is how alone you feel. On the ward, there was never any danger of that. The bedrooms were double-occupancy (except for those first couple of nights when they didn’t think I could cope with that). You’re forced to lay yourself bare when you’re at your most vulnerable – and much as I hate to admit it, it probably helps. We were forever being dragged outside to bang drums, toss beanbags, name five things we could see, smell and touch.

My first roommate was Charlotte. She was a soft-spoken meteorology student with long blonde hair and cuddly toys on her bed and a weakness for Ritter Sport chocolate. We went for walks around the hospital grounds sometimes, talking about superficial things; she would gently correct my German, but not unless I asked. One day we were coerced outside to throw soft balls at each other and catch them on Velcro pads in full view of passing nurses. Dazed and medicated, I was beyond embarrassment, lumbering and awkward, but Charlotte moved with fragile and balletic grace, diminutive in thick scarves and leggings. I never quite found out what her problems were, but I knew that she had been here long enough to complete two fabric face masks with elastic ear loops in art class, plus a ceramic bowl. I also knew that talking to her parents on the phone made her anxious. When she left the room for these calls, her face as set as one condemned to the gallows, I would curl up in the window seat and stare at her motivational posters, all carefully hand-lettered in bright felt tip pen: NEVER GIVE UP. YOU ARE STRONGER THAN YOU KNOW. BE THE SUNSHINE IN SOMEONE ELSE’S CLOUD. We ordered pizza and played card games the last night she was in the clinic, as though it was some strange jailhouse birthday party with a random assortment of guests: elderly, young, parents, singletons, gay, straight, foreigners, Germans, first-time prisoners and repeat offenders.

My next roommate was wheeled in on a gurney. When she regained consciousness, she cut my attempts at small talk short. I don’t blame her. Subject to longstanding depression that nothing seemed to lift, not even six lengthy residential stays’ worth of daily shock treatments, she was the veteran of all veterans. I soon realised there would be no more sunshine in this room, and that the darkness surrounding her would drag me in and engulf me, undoing all my fragile progress, if I let it. That realisation, coupled with the screams at night, made it clear to me that my old life was now safer than my new reality. It was time for me to leave.

We did meet a couple of times on the outside – not the electroshock girl, I mean me and Charlotte, me and Kai, and one time me and Charlotte and Kai all together. We’d go for long walks and talk about how it felt to reintegrate, to recalibrate to normal life. I remember how we promised to stay in touch, but knew in our heart of hearts that we wouldn’t, and that that was probably for the best. We’d each served our purpose, and our relationship, borne of necessity rather than choice, was complete. Any extra time spent in the company of my partners in misfortune, my foulweather friends, would probably only have reopened old wounds on all sides, rehashed memories we would rather forget. That doesn’t stop me wondering about them sometimes, though. Did Charlotte ever finish her degree and mend her relationship with her family? Did Kai ever find happiness, or at least enough of a break in his depression to find life worth living again?

I muse in silence until my name is called.

My doctor is young, attractive (am I allowed to think that?) and married (wedding band glinting on his finger) with at least one child. I only know this because he once took an emergency call from the nursery during my session. Today we’re both wearing masks: him due to winter COVID protocol and me because I have a slight cold.

“How have you been?” he asks me, taking a fresh sheet of paper.

“Fine, thanks,” I say, and I mean it. The only slight grey cloud on my horizon (wispy, barely there) is a mild sense of panic on public transport in the Christmas rush, which used to plague me during my worst times – a self-consciousness, an oppression, as though strangers were staring at me as I struggled for breath. It’s something I recognise as a relic from back then, the bad old days, but am trying not to entertain. After all, I still have to get to places – I’m flying home for Christmas on Saturday – and it actually doesn’t affect me at all when I’m being crushed half to death at a rock concert. Headphones and a podcast on the commute and I’m pretty much okay.

The doctor says it doesn’t sound severe enough to be a phobia or panic disorder, and I should just keep doing what I’m doing. I agree. The sides of his mask rise as he smiles at me. He rolls over to the computer to bring up the calendar and type in my next appointment. There’s nothing but a couple of biro squiggles on his piece of paper.

They’ve decorated for Christmas since I came here last, and there’s a bowl of mystery treats on the reception desk as I come forward to collect my prescription, each individually packaged. By now it’s breaktime, and my doctor vanishes into the lunchroom, clicking his tongue absentmindedly. As the receptionist leans over the printer, I snaffle one of the brightly-wrapped bags, marked only “Frohe Weihnachten”, because why not. Today, I like myself enough to believe I deserve it.

“Und das Rezept,” the receptionist says, handing me the little pink sheet.

“Vielen Dank,” I say, and then I’m out and unmasked in the December day, walking briskly, breathing in deep lungfuls of the crisp winter air that is clean and fresh and full of possibilities.