I made a quick detour from Mary Wilson’s autobiography so that I could start and finish “Postcards from the Edge”, which took about two days. My sister and I have seen the movie version so many times on TV but we recently went to see it on the big screen. After that, I felt it was finally time to get my hands on Carrie Fisher’s actual novel. Her humor and writing style remind me of Nora Ephron’s “Heartburn”, another book I had to get after seeing the movie so many times. The book is very different from the film. It has less of the mother and way more of the drug clinic she had to check into and her fellow patients. So as I was reading it, memories of my own time in Holliswood’s adolescent unit started coming back.
Someone recently told me that the idea of marriage and kids seems good on some days but not on others. My response was a strange one. In my attempt to emphasize that married/kids life can in fact be a good one, and to acknowledge that stressful times isn't just reserved for parents, husbands, and wives, I said something like, “well, even before I became married with kids I didn’t always have it easy.” I knew it was a weird way to put it even as I was sending the text, but I didn't know how else to say it. Because even though now my life is intensely about bringing and keeping food on the table, responsible for the well-being of others in a more direct way, what I dealt with before was in a way, harder.
When I recall Holliswood there are certain things I remember more than others. I don't remember the psychiatrist much now anymore, except for his all-brown jacket, hair, mustache, and glasses. I remember being given the Inkblot Rorschach test but I no longer remember what the shapes looked like or what I said I thought they looked like. One night in the living room lounge, “The Breakfast Club” was playing, a film about five teenagers that came out when I was a child and now I was seeing it again as a teenager.
“Hey, that’s like us!” we said even though it was the difference of mid 80’s and early 90’s. We joked that their Saturday morning detention was a shorter version of us being confined to Holliswood. Years later I saw the movie “28 days”. I've been wanting to see it again if just to see more films about people having to check into places like that against their will but getting better in the process; kind of like coming of age. I guess “Girl, Interrupted” is another example of this.
I remember in the mornings our group had to state our feelings in one word, and if the word we chose to say was less than positive, we were to explain and justify on why. I don't think we always told the truth on that though.
I remember the ambulance taking me from St. John’s Hospital to Holliswood, catching a view of raindrops pounding against the rear window, moving along the highway, a day that I would've normally been in school or cutting it, reasoning with myself, “in a way, this is good, at least now my problem is in the light and is going to be dealt with, it’s no longer a secret”.
Tonight I learned my dad held a big ugly secret about what happened to him as a child, and kept it to himself for more than fifty years, not even revealed in his tell-all autobiography. It was something that was dragged out of him over the phone from his sister this weekend. If it weren’t for that call, he still would've kept it inside. And aside from writing, I imagine all the smoking, drinking, and getting high has been the various toxic ways he’s been able to cope.
When I took the Writing Our Lives workshop a couple years ago, the one where I met Jennifer, who encouraged me to start this blog in the first place, I remember assuring Vanessa, head of the workshop, that my flashbacks don’t surprise or pain me much because I’m so used to their attacks. I like to think that that’s mostly true but my time in Holliswood and what led me there is hard to dig into. But so far in this blog, a blog that started out with no particular aim, seems to dance around this central theme; my will to live and move on, times when I wanted to die, and others who feel low enough to want the same. I feel my inner voice tugging at me saying. “Go ahead, write what you want, be as varied as you like, but it’s gonna come back to when you took the most drastic measures to end your life. Until you write more of that, you can’t move on.”
Even though my time in Holliswood was brief (about 28 days actually), what caused me to end up there in the first place is a lot for me to look into. Like with my dad; the actual incident was a blip on the radar, but the effects it had were long-lasting.
I remember wanting out of Holliswood, wanting to feel good, be good and embrace life instead of skirting it. I see these memories are gonna come back. Well, I'm here to make sense of them and gain all the insight, to have more fuel for my children when they go through their own tumult and pain. Because life gives us those things no matter where we’re from. But there are also ways to heal, and overcome, and thrive. And here I am, making room for all this.
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