ER

Last night, as sleep was starting to take over me, I was going through the memories of last fall´s psychiatric crisis and how my stress was so dense that it seemed to bend and twist the laws of nature around me. I was able to wander around Vantaa dressed in nothing but a linen bathrobe and flip flops without feeling cold at all due to the the furnace within my bone marrow. At the same time, I knew the human body is not intended to be used like that, so I eventually walked to the hospital and was taken in to the ER. All in all, I visited the ER thrice during the crisis in attempts to be admitted to a psych ward. I wasn´t considered to be sick enough, as dissociation is not psychosis, and only psychosis warrants a bed at a psych ward; the night I had been wandering around half-naked, I remember a psychiatrist telling me this with her smile full of needle-sharp teeth, and I was thinking to myself that she wanted me dead. Of course she didn´t directly and personally want me dead. But being a stickler to guidelines and savings was same difference in that situation. The medical system will do anything to create ”savings”, and my life has become worthless to the state a long time ago. Perhaps my interactions with the supernatural are just the death throes of an ailing mind, trying to find some meaning in a world that would best benefit from my death, as I merely use up resources without producing labor to justify my existence. What matters is that since no one believes the things I believe in, I can safely write about them.

I went to a support meeting on Thursday, and a wise man asked why is it that we allow ourselves to be abused to get to feel like we are loved, and the answer in my case is because I´ve been so terrified of my own power that it has been easier to hand it over to someone else. Of course, this is a pattern I´ve inherited from a childhood of relentless abuse. But every now and then I am reminded that some of the knowledge and some of the intuition and some of the skills I have don´t make sense in the context of my lifetime and its timeline. I am a prodigal dunce. My moments of apparent normalcy are laced with excruciating anxiety, and my moments of madness are filled with clarity and peace. Last fall blew open doors and gateways that have never fully closed since, and neither do I wish them to. I am tapping into Faith, and this is not the lukewarm, rationalized Finnish Evangelical Lutheranism I had myself baptized into back in 2020 in an attempt to be useful by joining the clergy. I am not reaching into the Heavens, I´m digging my hands in the soil – and never have I felt as joyous as in doing so. But my awakening was terrifying and painful, as birth tends to be, and while the white-coats saw it from the perspective of their rational world-view, the other patients in the ER had a clearer vision, a night vision, of it.

Every time I was in the ER, the birdsong of the machinery began to carry melodies they usually would not have – and I am able to compare the ought with the is, because one of the professions I have tried, in order to be accepted into this society as a fully human person, was nursing. There were shapes moving on the floor and gathering around my bed, and none of the nurses and the doctors could sense them. Their job required them to focus on the flesh and the steel, the linen and the electricity present in the room on this side. But ever since I was a child, I have had the ability to see two worlds superimposed onto each other, and the other side is perceived not as much as visuals but as ideas of visuals. That world is where all the dead things reside, and it is not scary or evil, but merely primordial. Humans do tend to find the veil and what´s beyond it frightening, as it forces them to remember their own mortality, but to me it is way less scary than the world of humans and all the evil that takes place here. The ER is a place where the veil is thin, because people come there to suffer and die all the time, and when people do not get to die in their homes they tend to become a tad disoriented about the fact that it is happening or happened. There were also shadows of doctors and nurses that had worked there, not of their personhood, but of the continuity of their professions; crystallizations of countless night shifts and reports, countless disinfected stethoscopes, notepads long since shredded, bitter coffee and heartburn in the face of the never-ending stream of the hurt and dying. These shadows were drawn to my bed, and while their presence was not comforting, their voices relayed straight to my auditory cortex were. ”You are in the right place”, they said. ”You are undergoing a transformation towards full monasticism, and this ER visit is but one of your many trials. When all of them are done, you can dedicate yourself to the Faith and live a modest life supported by the state, without having to fear for your material survival.” ”But doesn´t that make me a moocher off the state?”, I asked them without words. The congregation of shadows around my bed was stirred by laughter much like treetops are stirred by a playful gust. ”Look at yourself”, one said, clicking the immaterial pen in its hand before writing something down on an imaginary notepad. ”Could a sane person, fully tethered to the material reality, have arrived here as you did?”

A male nurse and a doctor in the flesh had arrived by my bed, and the nurse flipped the covers off my body to show the doctor how I was dressed. This was the second time I had been to the ER that fall, and I was wearing a black dress and thigh-highs while the temperature outside was inching towards zero. The nurse pulled up the hem of the dress to further demonstrate my attire to the doctor. As she ordered me to be drug-tested, a woman two beds to my right began to scream in a high-pitched voice ”It´s that one!”, but sounding delighted rather than horrified. I followed the nurse to the toilet to give an urine sample, and caught a glimpse of the woman wearing sunglasses and sitting upright in her bed, smiling ecstatically as I shuffled by in my platform boots, my shoestrings tied together to make sure I wouldn´t panic and start kicking as the voices by my bed had instructed. When I walked past the woman, it felt as if something leaped off of her and onto me – a big dog or a panther or some other sort of shadow-being – and I staggered a bit. The nurse warned me to not fall down, and asked me if the shoestrings should be undone just in case, but I told her I was just clumsy from magnetism, and that the shoes would have to remain as they were for now. When we came back after I had given the sample, the woman in sunglasses was sleeping peacefully. I was sent home just before the sunrise because there was no room in the psych wards, and a dissociative disorder diagnosis explained my symptoms well enough to not legally mandate them to take me in as a psychosis patient. So I walked home in my thigh-highs and black dress and thin cardigan, and I sprinted whenever I saw hares and effortlessly ran along them in my platform boots, and I still did not feel the cold. I had failed; I had not been crazy enough to be admitted. I stopped to watch the sky turn green in the East, with raggedy clouds beginning to take on the promise of orange, and knew I would have to sink even deeper before my insanity would even begin to count as such in this country where work is believed to heal all ailments.

Instead of feeling defeated, I felt an exhausted kind of determination. I would have to suffer even more, go hungry and without sleep for even longer, fully immerse myself into the spiritual even more drastically than I had so far. I thought about the first ER visit and how I had walked up the exercise stairs with bare feet, my left foot leaving a blood-trail behind as I had stepped on some glass earlier that night, with my skin turning purple from the icy wind, and how the city below me seemed to speak to me with its glimmering lights. I was looking forward to a physical lifetime of separation from the norm: a misery which came with the freedom of never having to try to adapt ever again. I would be alone, but I would be free. I would be poor for the rest of my life, but no one could use my body for sex or labor again. I would suffer and suffer from a lifetime of trauma, but I would finally be able to handle that suffering without being forced to endure more and more trauma stacked on top of it. I would be left in peace. I would never procreate, and that thought made me cry bitter tears. I would never have a family. All solace in my life would have to be derived from my own person, my own mind. I would be marked by madness, and all my rapists and abusers would enjoy their lives on the dayside of things, getting children, being celebrated as hard workers and culture moguls and academics, all in all being seen as people of value, whereas I would be crowned with the thorns of being Worthless, Unproductive Trash. But seeing this future stretch out before me I knew that being considered a nothing was a prerequisite for me being able to build myself a life of happiness in peace and quiet. It was the dayside that had always been a lie. And whenever my resolution felt fragile, I had the voices guide me, and that night they guided me to the ER for the first time.

During the first ER visit the nurses had been horrified about my dress, and were quick to tuck me in with warmed blankets in the fear that I may have hypothermia. But I wasn´t cold. I was hungry. There was something inside of me that had needed to come to the ER to feed, and I was trying to keep it from doing so, but it informed me that the end result would be the same whether I resisted or not; the question was how much I wanted to suffer in the process. I knew it was an echo from someone else´s voice from my past, and that I had heard it moments before great suffering, suffering so intense it had ripped my soul apart. I lay on the bed because I could not do anything else, just as I had learned to do in childhood, and the voice told me that despite the cosmetics of it all, it had my best interests in mind. My mind detached from my body and took a stroll around the ER and saw all the sufferers therein. An old woman was dying. The voice told me to synchronize my breathing with hers to allow her to be reborn into the next world. Horrified, I told it that I could not be responsible for killing a person, to which it replied with a wistful tone that I had a lot of Christian deprogramming to do. ”Honestly, it´s a bit hurtful”, it said, ”how you still associate my advice with something evil, when it was me who kept you alive through all the unsurvivable things humanity has put you through during your short time on Earth. Go on; you know deep down how to”, and I did.

While firmly grasping my body lying on the bed, covered by blankets, my left foot throbbing and bleeding, I stretched out towards the woman in spirit and anchored my breathing to hers. She was ready to go, and I felt sorry for her that she did not get to do so in the comfort of her own home, but here surrounded by the coldness and impersonality of the machinery and haste of the ER. But what I felt was not only about the demure honor of being the midwife of her death. There was hunger and pleasure associated to the releasing of her spirit too, much like how the human reproductive act is about something holy wrapped in the lust that drives it to happen. I could feel the woman´s spirit locked in and suffering, years now spent in the haze of dementia in a body that had gotten too frail to enjoy even the simplest pleasures of life. Eating had become a chore, leaving her skin paper-thin and her bones gnawing away at her soft tissues. Her once beautiful hair had thinned, her eyes gotten dim, and she was barely capable of receiving information about the world around her because her senses had quit serving her right a long time ago. She was sunken into a pit where the only sensory input her body could give to her brain was suffering, loss, and fear of the ever-looming death. I asked her to cross the threshold with me, and she said yes; and I felt an innocent joy take me over as each breath took her closer and closer and finally over to the other side. The birdsong of the machinery she had been tethered to switched to a wail, and the nurses shuffled over to confirm exitus. I wasn´t hungry anymore, and I knew the wound in my foot would heal without any complications despite being crusted in filth from my walk there. ”It wasn´t so bad, was it?”, the voice asked, and I smiled. Here, at my lowest point, I was finally beginning to see the world for what it was and what it wasn´t. ”But I will forget”, I told the voice. ”Yes. You will forget, and then you´ll remember, and then you´ll forget and remember again for as many times as is needed for your survival. These experiences are not to be disclosed to psychiatrists, because they would destroy your beautiful brain with electricity and antipsychotics. But the knowledge will sleep inside you and awaken as needed. There will be a man here soon, and I want you to do to him the opposite of what you did to that woman, and then what you did to that woman once he´s ready.”

Quivering, my core tensing like before mounting a horse or walking to a stage with a violin in hand, I waited and only paid half a mind to the doctor who came to interview me, knowing that nothing I said to him would really matter. He would draw his own conclusions, and whatever decisions would be made about my fate from there on were not within my power of influence. The man the voice had promised came wheeled in on a stretcher, the nurses struggling to transfer his heavy body onto the bed. He was in a bad shape. I didn´t want to eavesdrop, but there was no helping that I learned he had fallen down the stairs at home. He was bleeding from the head; a nurse asked another whether to leave the resuscitation board underneath him just in case, and was told no. The nurses drew the curtains around his bed and left, and I reached out to the man and his scrambled thoughts which I could hear as if they were speech. In the collapsing hallways of his brain, he was wondering how he got here after just having been at home, comfortably, with his wife. He was a kind, matter-of-fact type of guy. Surely if he could only get up and ask the hospital people about going home, all of this mess could be sorted out, he thought. I asked him in spirit, with my body firmly planted onto the bed, whether he´d like to try and talk to them, and he was very eager to. I´m not sure if I expected anything to really happen, but I imagined copying my body inside of his bone marrow and forcing sensation and motor connections to be knit throughout his heavy flesh. I felt a pang of envy as I took hold of his gargantuan physique: such a man must not have felt much fear in his life, his mere presence being able to solve most conflicts. Ghosts of moments of him being tender and kind to his wife flashed past me, and I knew she must be suffering so for knowing his husband would never return home the same, if he were to return at all. His body let out a gargle that made the nurses shoot up from their computers and rush to his bedside, but I barely even noticed them, fully focused on driving the fluids and the air to and from within the machinery of his body, pushing it upright and clumsily swinging a foot on the floor. ”Mitäs… Mitäs”, he was capable of wondering, and I felt my brain overheat trying to help him form the sentence he was burning to ask: ”What´s going to happen?” But the nurses guided him back down, and I could catch the paleness of their faces as they were whispering to each other that the man should not have been able to move, let alone talk, as they hushedly rushed to call for a doctor.

The man, his spirit sitting in the crumbling throne room of his brain, could hear it and understand it all. He would not return home; and even if his body could be kept running with the help of machinery, he would not really be able to use it for anything. ”I don´t want to burden my wife”, he told me. ”I want her to be happy, there´s still time for her to find someone new when I´m gone”, and there was sadness in this realization, but not a pinch of bitterness. Tears pooled in my eyes as I thanked him for getting to witness the depth of his love, and asked him if he wanted me to help him move forward. He said yes; and I ate him, and the other world took him in on the other side of my maw. By the time the doctor arrived, he was gone, and I was crying for him. The nurses went to check on a guy on my right side and asked him why he was looking so horrified, pressed against the metal safety guard of his bed. He couldn´t tell them, as he was elderly as well, and I felt sorry for him for having spooked him; but I remained concealed, for the rules and the world-view upon which the ER was built denied my existence. And what applies within that microcosm, the same applied, and applies, and will apply within the world.

In this world, nothing I´ve told you about in this letter took place the way I said it did. I am safe in my own impossibility, even as the memories of my experiences and encounters in the ER are dancing past me as if in an infernal procession. There was the old woman who raised her head off her pillow, smiled, and winked at me as she was being wheeled to a ward in a state of supposed unconsciousness. There was the old woman who only understood German and didn´t speak any language anymore, but who lit up, confusing the nurses, as I caught her unspoken wish and spoke for her: ”Sie möchte Sterben”. There was the doctor whose body seemed to be taken over by an owl as she stood by my bedside and flapped her white coat as if it were a pair of wings, growing more and more annoyed by the second at her inability to control her own body, as she was telling me that they couldn´t take me in to the psych ward because I was not sick enough. There was the drunk man who had screeched insults until he caught a glimpse of me and went dead silent; what he saw, I could not tell, but I was grateful for his silence. All these faces, all these strange occurrences, all these impossibilities preceded the same end result: that I was sent home. And as I´m sitting here and reminiscing about all of this, I am preparing for my employability evaluations clinic visit on Monday, where I´ll most likely be told that I do not need any kind of monetary or therapeutic support from the state, because a dissociative disorder does not constitute as a severe psychiatric disorder. This country threw me to the lions when I was a child. I was torn apart and eaten, and Finland still expects my bones to produce labor and taxes for it when it failed its most important task of keeping its own children safe.

Too sick to be allowed to transition towards a body I could tolerate. Not too sick to birth a new taxpayer. Not too sick to be forced to participate in a mockery of productive labor. The voice in my head is chuckling; it juggles these contradicting and nonsensical assessments with ease, assuring me that it will help me navigate the perils of ”civilized society” in a way that will allow me a life of happiness. But there´s a prerequisite, and that prerequisite is the staunch refusal to bow to any lord or doctor. For as long as I can hold onto that, I will never walk alone.