A Balancing Trick

I remember the needle in my arse. I remember two huge men pinning me face down on the floor of Accident and Emergency and the injection administered brutally into my bare buttock. I remember my mum crying in the background, "This is what they do. This is how they do it!"

She was horrified. As a younger adult she had witnessed her mother suffering similar procedures. I remember my brother's eyes. They were wet with tears as he tried to explain to me that if I didn't drink the cup of water with the medication skulking at the bottom, a form would be signed and I'd be in the care of the state, locked away like a criminal.

I remember the second time it happened. I was on the ward by this point and mum had left me for the first time since we had arrived at the hospital that morning. I was refusing to swallow the pill again, running away from the nurses, 'Getting Upset.' I was pinned down on my bed in my room and injected straight into oblivion. I also remember the therapist three years later describing this invasive trauma as a form of rape.

I don't remember the depressions. For months at a time Churchill's big black dog comes to visit and I don't remember. He lies in bed with me at night and I absorb his essence into my soul unable to wash the smell off. Instead it rubs off on everyone I meet. Eyes half closed to the world, facial muscles paralysed from disuse, I don't remember hope, anticipation, joy or meaning. I don't remember having anything to say, any reason to leave the house or see anyone. The smell of the big black dog shackled to my person is so overpowering it is anti-social. We're not welcome anywhere. We don't fit in so we hide for most of the day and all night under the covers dreaming of the past. The future is unforeseeable, it holds nothing.

I wait for the balance. Medication rules my life; pills dictate my ups, relieve my downs, they even control my weight. They send me to sleep, wake me up, calm me down and somehow rebalance the imbalance of chemicals in my brain. Rebalance the imbalance. Rebalance the imbalance. Rebalance the imbalance.