Pills
The first pill does not exist.
My body communicates through aches of violence, through hot shivers, through bursts of grief. Doctor says my anxiety is normal for a thirteen-year-old. Doctor says try folding laundry, that basic chores relieve her stress. I stare out the murky window of her office as she calls my parents in from the lobby, longing for stressed, for a concept as solid and defined.
She says: Come back and see me if you have any more problems.
I nod. I know then that I am the problem, and that although I can see her, she cannot see me.
/
The second pill comes a year later, a week into hospitalization for an eating disorder.
A pill that starts with a ‘V’, a Roman five jutting out of the label. Brandished with bold ink, a firm and immobile alphabet. Not approved for use in children. I am no longer a kid. I am a patient, a lab rat. I do not eat. This pill, requiring calories, proves useless. To coax me to food, they place me in social isolation. Reality drifts away from me. Vivid images, drawn far off on a string, replaced by a pale world, a sphere of delusion. I see new truths, new shadows that shift in my darkness. I tell the doctor that I am seeing things, hearing things, and she prescribes:
/
The third pill.
I believe I am fictional. She believes I am psychotic, schizoaffective. Her pill is a response to her thoughts, not my own. I bear the consequences. See shapes of dead things, strewn about in my vision, strewn in my isolated pocket of the world. I touch the dead nothings and realize: A pill can be a loaded gun. A pill, a guillotine, a square noose, a white coffin. A pill can change the shape of your thoughts, infect you like capitalism has infected the universe, letting us buy stars and adopt distant whales in the ocean. With all my corpses, I buy into the idea that the pills will save me. Fifteen years old, and I have more faith in the pills than myself. My body, like a pill, full of powder, full of intention.
/
The fourth pill is a question: Where is the psychosis coming from?
The answer
(isolation)
is not a choice.
She tries bipolar, places me on an SSRI. For a mind with a mood disorder, this triggers a plummet into a sparkling stage of mania. A test run. The pill sits in my stomach like a firestarter, turning my body electric. Soon, I fly. I stir and scream, lash out. I believe I am invisible. I cling to the wall and close my eyes, convinced that I am unseen, unknown. This is the safest I have ever felt, the highest, the strongest. The hospital staff call the doctor, and she tells them to stop the medication, to stop right away, to void my prescription. I cry because I want this to last, this charged desperation, energetic and alive. Insanity like this is a different flavor than the insanity of isolation.
This insanity is warm, connective—my words melt out of me in strings of gold.
/
The fifth pill comes five months later, in a different hospital.
Free of isolation, but not the aftershocks. This hospital, treating my delusions, despite not knowing the root, not receiving documentation of my separation from the prior one. The fifth pill is an antipsychotic. The doctor assigns this to me as I explain my disconnect from reality, my beliefs that the world is unreal, my fear of the dead things strung around me. He does not know what is wrong, not yet, but the pill, like an I.V., will keep me alive as he diagnoses. Will keep me alive. Will keep me.
I take the fifth pill and the pill takes me. My limbs fill with hot lava, with lead paint. My hands are full of rocks. I cannot write. My fingers shake when I journal. I complain of the symptoms, and I find out it’s normal, at first, to feel your body betraying you, draining of life. For your hands to become earthquakes, to ripple and tremor. They cannot diagnose me (thoughtdisorderschizophreniabipolartwo) but I slip further into destruction, so they write a script for:
/
The sixth pill.
Pushes me underwater. Presses me into unconsciousness. Tiredness like I have never known. My body is no longer mine. My thoughts grow mushy, then nonexistent. I fall asleep on the floor of the unit for hours, curled into myself like a pinkie mouse. Days pass with no motion, no memories. Suspended in the oil inside of those plastic capsules. Not a thought disorder, not bipolar two. More.
My mind no longer holds the answers to their questions. Frozen, missing. Thoughts, jetting off into the snowbank of white matter, the gray dissolving. My inpatient therapist stops liking me, not paid to talk to a corpse. They give me a second therapist, who is kind but frightened of me, then a third. He sits with me while I sleep, while I stare into nothing. He sees me, and he knows I am not here. My insurance agents bid on me like those deep ocean whales, sinking into the massive deep, waiting to be claimed by a person who might save the brief light in me, trickling into dusk.
/
The sixth pill joins hands with the fifth pill.
Swallow, and disappear. Like a magic act. Unconscious, alive. No one tries to wake me. A partial coma, marked by brief pockets of lucidity, moments where the air touches my lungs. Swallow, and disappear. Where I go, nobody knows.
/
The seventh pill romances the former two, joins them in bed.
They all grip on to one another and encircle me, this triad of medications. This trinity of psychotropia. The nurse gives me the seventh pill, coupled with its friends. A third wheel. She smiles as if I am a sweepstakes winner. “That’s the new one,” she says. As if it isn’t obvious.
Maybe it isn’t. Pills are pills, and they are all that is left of me. Childproof caps on all my cognitions. The med splicer, splitting my chemicals apart, reminding me that I am not a person, only symptoms, only chemicals, replaced every seven hours like dead cells. Crack my bones, and see—nothing but powder.
/
The eighth pill is a lullaby.
I am on four pills and I cannot see straight, cannot feel my body anymore. My thoughts come from no direction but outward, dead and gone inside of me, nothing generative left. Doctor says all my thoughts are rotten, that my brain is dying of lies. Institutionalization has robbed me of clarity. But his pills, his pills. His pills perform a psychotropic lobotomy, sending me into the vortex at the bottom of the orange bottles. Where I go—
/
The ninth pill and the tenth pill and the eleventh pill are placeholders.
They are iron gloves, wrapped around my throat. They are tools to disarm me, turning my body off so that I cannot see dead things anymore, cannot see anything. They are haunting and possessive, gripped onto my soul, draining my emotion from my body like hot sap, scalding me on the way out. I know this is going to kill me, but I do not know when—nobody knows. Do not handle me, do not hold me. I could burst at any moment.
/
The twelfth pill is an interruption. A catalyst.
One afternoon, I break awake through the weight of all the pills, savor the feeling of lucidity, of the world coming back to life. I feel new to earth. I am awake enough to read, and, in the hospital’s English classroom, I absorb a story about a woman whose house is surrounded by roses, whose husband is upstairs, sleeping. About an awful smell. The nurse comes to deliver my afternoon medication and I look at him, suddenly amazed by the realness of my body, the clarity of my thoughts.
No. I don’t want to.
Please, he says.
As if it’s his life, his death, the story he won’t get to finish.
Go get my doctor.
(I find out the ending. The husband is dead.)
The doctor arrives, already in a state of mourning. I tell him I won’t take the pills anymore. It feels like filing for divorce. He cycles through stages of grief: concern, frustration, acceptance. He tries to talk me back into the relationship between me and the bottles, yet I am decided. No more questions, no more coffins, no more sleeping.
We’re going to have to do a med wash, he says.
Med wash. This sounds relieving, as if I am going to rinse all the proof of the prior year away. Or maybe it will be a psychotropic spectacle, a means of showering one with their losses. Pelt me with pills bottles, stone me to death.
/
No new pills. Wash me away.
I come alive. I sing, cry, celebrate. I become.
A year has passed since I entered the first hospital. Caught in the December coldness, alive in the freeze of the city I grew up in. I spend days in my pajamas, awake, manic, hanging paper ornaments on the unit tree, singing karaoke with fellow patients, basketball in the fenced-in yard at sunset. This is life, rarer than ever. During Christmas, I play Clue with a ten-year-old orphan, exchange gifts with a thirteen-year-old who wants to replace her face with someone else’s. That spark plug, that firestarter, roars in me again. Still, while I am real, everything else remains suspended in the amber of delusion, sticky and untouchable.
A month into my celebration, three days after New Year’s, the doctor says I’ve been approved for a long-term placement elsewhere. That they’ll get my medication right, that they’ll find out what is needed to keep my brain on a steady track. I am scared, but hopeful. This will heal me. This will bring the world anew.
/
No new pills. All new rules.
This center, carceral, intense. Rules are bountiful, and punishment is swift. Isolation, damned to a desk in the corner of the building. I have survived one round of isolation, and I am unsure I can survive two. I am terrified, yet, upon observing the grinning faces that greet me in each group, I realize that terror is not allowed here. Not without retribution.
The doctor meets with me on the first day. He is older than my prior doctor, generations of graying hair between the two. He smiles. He reads me a poem, something about an island, about a rose. He tells me he is going to test me and diagnose me, that he will pinpoint the exact cause of my turmoil, that we are going to take my medicine slow. I trust him. I trust him because we are not supposed to trust ourselves, something that is made clear to us from the jump.
That night, I dream of the center—the whole place, consumed in flames, melting to the ground in a fit of ash.
/
No new pills. Not yet.
I fill out a test sheet of symptoms, longer than any standardized test I’ve ever completed. I put on a show in the inkblot test, tell the doctor I see a butterfly, a shark, a donkey walking up a hill. The rest of the day is managed, strict. School, then groups, run by us, juggling each other’s trauma with no guiding points. We bully one another; the staff bullies us. No sleeping during group, not here (isolation). No cussing (isolation). No standing (process paper). The banned list grows.
Here, our rights are tied to levels. Go up a level, you can drink coffee with breakfast. Go down a level, you can’t go outside. Go up a level, you can run the bingo group. Go down a level, you can’t speak to certain peers. The environment, one of deprivation, of the next loss. Patients lose glitter, lose singing (no one wants to hear your voices), lose books, lose the right to sleep in a bed, lose snacks, lose free access to the bathroom, lose films, lose showers, lose personal property, lose their voices. Loses, rarely regained with any kindness.
Everyone can punish us. The techs, the therapists, the doctors, the teachers. And they do.
/
Pills thirteen and fourteen come within two weeks.
The doctor sits me in his office, explains my diagnoses. Explains that he is using his executive judgement, despite the fact that the majority cannot be diagnosed until after I am eighteen. He offers me two pills of solution. I take them that night at the nurse’s station—tongue up, tongue down, poof. Gone, another chemical cocktail. I wait for these pills to make me comatose, the way the other twelve did. Tiredness rocks my body within minutes. They send us to bed. I sleep so deeply that I dream of nothing, dream not of death, not of confinement. No nightmares tonight.
When I awake, my brain is silent. My anxiety doesn’t pull through me like a wire. The thoughts that rattled and thrummed in my brain fall quiet. I weep. Weep for relief. Relief, despite the entrapment, despite the sharp pains that roll through my body at the staff’s footsteps, despite the girls damned to the desks in the hallway. Here, everyone is on their own. Everyone for themselves.
/
Pill thirteen, pill fourteen, the anxieties remain gone.
Only new thoughts strum on through time, gooey strings of seconds, melted together, looping into themselves. My mind: stabilized. My body, encased in a shifting atmosphere, in a cult of control. Despite my newfound balance, they do not send me home. They keep me, continue to wash me of my personality. The therapist calls us liars, call us manipulators, when we cry. The staff ignore our panic, force us to keep one another at arm’s length. No touching, no saying I love you, no calling anyone a friend. They strip us of our language, of emotion, of our personalities, of our queerness. Our autonomy dissolves. My thoughts, like my pills, are prescribed.
The pills no longer wipe my mind. The people do.
/
Pill thirteen and fourteen are saving my life. I’m thankful, and I cannot stand this.
I cannot stand gratitude in a place domineered by coercion, a place of occasional indulgences and swift punishments. I take my pills and a girl is damned to a desk for saying a curse word. I take my pills and another tears her arms apart, sleeps on a mattress on the floor. I take my pills and the head nurse, a cradle Evangelical, leaves AA worksheets in all our chairs. I take my pills and the core staff show us a film full of burning bodies, a “teaching experience.” I take my pills and they threaten to take our voices, to separate us, berating us with psychological torment. The rules grow more specific, more pointed. No personhood is allowed to slip through the cracks. They thrive on our helplessness, this injected terror. Behavioral modification, they claim, has a ninety-percent success rate.
We take our pills and go missing. Tucked away in this pocket of time. Targets, objects, children. All the same.
I take my pills and my thoughts quiet. I no longer know if it is the meds or the programming. We cannot think without permission. Cannot move without raising our hands. Our bodies are not our bodies; our minds are not our minds. Crack me open and see.
/
(I keep coming back to winter.
In my mind, back, back, back to winter. To the months of pills. Missing this, coldly.
The spring green haunts the yard outside of the center.
We cannot see the grass. We are bound to our chairs, listening to the rubber heat of the staff’s shoes on the tile, turning our backpacks out to search for a missing pair of scissors. We will never leave the unit again, the nurse says, never again. I believe her. I believe her, because a lack of faith means a lack of family visits, a lack of calls home, a lack of privileges. A girl sleeps on her mattress on the floor that night. She has slept on the floor for two weeks. Her pills, her programming: watch her flounder. Spend the day in isolation. I watch her and I know she is an extension of all of us and I know she is dying in there, up in her head. I wonder if they’d get away with killing us, with lighting the whole place on fire.
I now realize that when they say privileges, they mean rights.
I realize that my diagnosis mirrors everyone else’s diagnosis.
I realize that my pills are the same pills that everyone else is taking.)
/
Pills thirteen and fourteen are afterthoughts, now. Parts of me, parts of nowhere.
We have not been allowed to speak freely for two months. No recreational conversation. Silence outside of groups. My heart is full of rage, full of hot ink, but my mind is full of kindness, full of survival niceties to keep me safe with the staff. I do not want to become a target. I long to write but I know my words will be stolen, read and bastardized in my faux therapy sessions. I collect unspoken words in a net in my mind. Catch the syllables in the stares of my peers.
Our words, gone. The loss immobilizes me, breath by breath.
My mind, now prismatic—rare parts of me remain.
The pills slip in, slip out.
/
Pills thirteen, fourteen, have their five-month anniversary.
The thoughts have not resumed. Neither has our ability to speak.
I front do-goodedness, euphoric pleasing, as I am wiped. Brainwashing splits our minds apart. Pulls our identities out of us in threads. Spools us into ourselves. Encourages adaptability, Stockholm Syndrome, trust in the tormentors. One girl attempts to escape the coercion with a sprint into the field, with a rock against her skull. She bleeds in isolation, holding a rag to her head. Two girls follow her lead. The rest of us consider this quietly, afraid they might X-Ray our thoughts, put us on punishment, too. Our souls, full of doubt, full of rocks. Smash us open.
Crack my bones, and see—nothing but powder.
/
My brain is a pill; recovery, a placebo.
I will discharge soon. Empty, thoughtless. Full of hot air, dark matter. Voiceless.
Give me the sun. Give me the summer. To be free is enough.
/
Pills thirteen, fourteen, follow me home.
After discharge, the world becomes rare and illegal. The pills take the chemical pain, but I struggle to speak, and I feel their rules on my skin like brands. I cannot deprogram. I see their faces everywhere. The girl on the mattress. Hear the Southern lilt of the nurse’s voice: Never leave the unit again. Their bodies haunt me. Their skeletons overlap with my own. There is no pill to fix the terror, no capsule to pull the oil out of me. No longer powder, but oil—thick, staining, heavy.
Institutionalization leaves a residue behind, a filmy layer over life. I view everything through this kaleidoscope of fractures, pale colors of things past. I take my pills, fear my pills, resent my pills. Institution becomes a blob in my brain, a dark shadow to be avoided. It makes trips to doctor’s offices unbearable. Hospitals, too. Libraries, large stores, retirement homes. The dark cloud of institutions swallows new things every day. It chases after itself.
And still, this is remission. Doubting my words. Kissing the sun. Touching the spring green, owning my body, my voice. This emptiness. These new thoughts, thoughts of trauma and want, emerging like breaching whales. My pills, morning and night, like the sun rising and falling. Swallow, a magic act. Sometimes, at their voices, their chasing voices, I pull into myself. I refold my dreams to their edges. Swallow, and disappear. Where I go, nobody knows.
Piper Gourley
Piper Gourley is a professional ghostwriter from Houston, Texas, and a recent graduate of the University of Houston, where they studied fiction. Their work has been published in Glassworks Magazine, Interlochen Review, Michigan Quarterly Review: Mixtape, The Sun Magazine, and more. As a ghostwriter, they have published over 650 creative works across the web. They are a two-time recipient of the Bryan Lawrence Prize for Nonfiction. They will be pursuing their MFA in Creative Writing at Chapman University in Fall of 2021.