Common threads

On creativity and mental collapse.

Several months ago, I was hospitalized for postpartum depression. I’d recently been taken off a medication that had carried me through two pregnancies, but taken too much in return.

I felt dull around the edges. Like I was watching life happen from just outside the frame. And now, my brain was a muscle pulled too tight, racked with zaps that came in flashes like a buffering feed.

The hospitalization happened suddenly. To notify work, I scratched out my email password in pencil with a note for my husband to pass on (no electronics, pens, or drawstring pants were allowed in the ward). “I hope I can still speak at that conference next week,” I murmured.

The attendant who took me to my room gestured to where my roommate was asleep. “Esther* could use a friend. You seem nice.”

Esther had catatonia and a sweet smile that curved to the right. She refused her medication, convinced that her brother’s chemotherapy treatment had caused his death. At night, the nurses would come in and hold her down to sedate her. The first time I heard her speak was when she shouted, “no!”

Esther hardly ate and slept in her shoes. She wore hand-me-down clothing from the staff, including a “Black Girl Magic” shirt that she, a Hasidic Jewish girl from upstate New York, loved. Two other patients from the Hasidic community took her under their care, sharing leftover food and lending her shampoo (the hospital-issued stuff never seemed to get your hair clean). She sobbed for an entire afternoon when they left.

Being on the ward was like living with a constant, low-frequency hum, and it wasn’t just the two TVs on opposite sides of the floor, always on, with one remote shared between them.

The days were desultory. The coffee was watered-down decaf. It was hard to concentrate. I needed the analog equivalent of a scroll, so I asked my husband to bring me a stack of coffee table books from home. One of them was The Creative Pragmatist by Amy Smilovic.

Along with the books, my family also brought me some drawstring-less pants: a barrel-leg pair picked up from Uniqlo. (I passed them along when I left.) I had recently donated or consigned most of my wardrobe, feeling like nothing truly fit. Not just in the physical sense, but in terms of who I’d become. Is this going-out dress giving “mom guilt”? Do these pants have stretch so I can get down on the floor and stay there?

Amy’s big green book full of style principles gave some order to my dysregulated world. I started reading it out loud to Esther at night. The first time I ever heard her speak more than a word was when she told me she liked the color pink. She grabbed a pencil and drew an outline of a girl wearing a t-shirt with a large daisy motif.

Sometimes, I would come back to the room and find the book had migrated from my bed over to Esther’s, where she was curled up poring over Amy’s sketches and doodling her own.

One evening, during group time, a patient named John* noticed us flipping through the book. “I’m kind of famous on YouTube,” he said.

Inexplicably, YouTube was permitted on the ward’s TV. We confirmed it was true. John was a multi-hyphenate musician, illustrator and designer. He grabbed a pencil and spun up an original creation: exaggerated shoulders, a nipped waist, rendered in delightfully wild strokes. One of my biggest regrets is not keeping his and Esther’s drawings (it was too painful).

“Don’t get too close to John,” an attendant warned me later. “He broke a nurse’s nose.” I had bruises on my arms from banging them against my apartment walls. Another patient, Jody*, had a self-inflicted gash across her throat and was headed to Rikers next.

John left the ward two days later. A few days after that, so did I.

This isn’t a story about healing through creativity. I’m still working on that, which is why I’m here (along with the meds and therapy). John’s stay on the ward was his third time. Esther eventually stopped talking and retreated back into herself. When I called from home, she refused to come to the phone.

Consuming is a shared reference. TV shows. Books. That old Don McLean song one of the ladies on the ward loved.

Creating, on the other hand, is a shared experience. Some experiences are hard to let go of—but sometimes we have to. That’s one of the things I learned that week.

As always, thanks for reading.

*Names have been changed