There is no real glory in institutionalization; there’s no grand dramatic accomplishment from being locked up in a room smaller than a prison cell (although the bed is nicer.) One doesn’t learn anything from the other patients that they couldn’t pick up from a few minutes next to the homeless guy who offers to sing an out-of-key tune for a quarter. There is no depressive reality to be exposed and you can find better meals in the dumpster behind that bagel joint down the street.

Upon my induction, I found myself in a non-offensively painted room with non-offensive magazines wearing non-offensive, mandatory scrubs. I was driven to this madness of mine from an intense and despairing loneliness and yet I only had a few minutes of human contact each day.

On Mondays we had group therapy. This is the only time I was aware of the other patients apart from the occasional nighttime shrieking. The helpless, the truly insane, earnestly bought into the meaningless self-help bullshit the doctors claimed would help us, but the rest of us knew the truth. We knew there was no saving us.

We were the lost, the forgotten, the hopefully hopeless, the optimistically miserable. We knew that this life was reserved for people like us and we filled our roles beautifully. There were no breathing techniques to soothe us, no amount of writing in diaries could make our worries diminish. The world needed people like us to remind them that there were more sides to the coin. People need to see the bandages on our wrists, the scars on our necks and the looks in our eyes.

We were considered hopeful by the doctors on account we haven’t lost all touch with reality yet. We were able to function in society and that is what mattered the most on paper. We could fool the nurses and doctors into thinking we were no longer at risk during our three minute exposures to the staff. Soon enough, I lied my way out of my beige cell and back onto the streets, pretending to be proud of the time I spent in the loony bin.