From Psych Ward to Grad School

Dear Reader,

I have made it back to the classroom! I’m not really sure how, but I am here. Despite fitting into a sea of identical Macbooks, stickered-up water bottles, and grad school dishevelment, I feel like the most obvious, prominent imposter. Surely they can see that I don’t belong? Surely they can see what has happened to me? Do they know? Yet this is a big moment, right? I haven’t been able to ‘feel’ it yet, but I think it must be. I have tried to absorb how enormous it is, and perhaps feel some form of satisfaction or pride, but my mind still isn’t there yet. And that is okay (#RadicalAcceptance). I logically know, though, that this is a big deal and that I should be proud of it. I never expected to be back, (and at times I never wanted to be back), but here I am, in the classroom. Given that I haven’t wanted to be alive for much of the year, and for most of today, I still wonder if this might just be the greatest achievement of my life. It is tempered by my constant suicide/self-harm ideation, but I think it means something. I hope to find meaning in it one day.

Cambridge is pretty and also pretty historic. George Washington and the American Army was here, once.

I had quite a few sessions of ECT while in the psychiatric unit at McLean, and whilst I think it helped, it was (and is) not a cost-free treatment. It affected my memory and made me cognitively slower, contributed to my medication-induced brain fog, and I’m confident that it didn’t exactly help my…