Better Living Through Modern Chemistry: Thorazine Dreams and Halcion Hell

I am running down the street in a bright orange sweater and a billowy skirt blowing in the wind. The dim streetlight is the only thing illuminating the dark corners I am heading down. I am chasing the CIA van that is monitoring and sensoring my biological rhythms I can hear people following me. I can see small shadows in the bushes, creeping around the corners… I am terrified.

Suddenly, my sister and her friend Paige ran out into the cold night to take me back into the house. They are putting me to bed while there is a loud party downstairs with lots of yelling, and loud partying. I can’t go to sleep, all I can think about is the mission. The mission is in my head like the maggots and snakes that have already infiltrated in the few weeks before..

I am telling my sister and Paige about the mission, I think that maybe they will believe me. They promise to keep it a secret. My sister looks worried, and I now realize I am in deep trouble. I realize she is probably going to tell my parents about what I told her. I realize that they probably don’t believe me, no one could. I look down at the card sent in the mail that had the address of where I was supposed to go. A vacant house close by, where I will be safe. I am putting the card in my turquoise purse and restlessly fidgeting with my hands. My legs are writhing. I’m nervous, agitated, and I can’t go to sleep.

I am getting up in the middle of the night to make important phone calls to alert my friend that the mission is coming soon. I see small radar sensors like beams radiating through the kitchen that are supposed to monitor where I am. I jump, I wriggle, I writhe through the beams to head back upstairs.

It is finally morning. I had spent all night awake. As we walk out on the street, my sister Emily walks over to the other side of the car and begins to unlock the door. I panic, I don’t want to go home. I decide to make a mad dash for the woods, I’m running as fast as I can. I’m running until my heart can beat no faster, and my legs cannot muster up any more energy. The leaves whip against my face as I run through the dense forest. Sharp rocks jut up from all angles and upturned logs blockade my path. Twigs and thorns scrape my exposed legs. I run with the nervous, manic energy that I have and let nothing stand in my way. Slowly I am numbed to the whips and the scrapes and the tortures of the forest. My mind is my only pain. My thoughts became so frightened, scared, and paranoid that I feel the maggots again. I am having thoughts of the mission, when it is going to start, the house that I am supposed to go to, and I know that is imminent, pressing, and very important that I follow the clues that are given to me.

The maggots in my brain begin to infest all areas and my distress and anguish only mount by this feeling of sheer torture. They are small and very fast, they are everywhere, they fill every dendrite and synapse in my mind. They do not let me rest, ever. I can’t even go to sleep because of the maggots. They fester and spawn and grow and multipy at magnanimous rates. My brain itches, an internal rash of the mind that I cannot rid myself of. This is an itch that I can’t scratch, I can never reach. Being intangible, I cannot even explain it. It is a silent, invisible, itch of the mind that will not go away, it persists night and day, just like my thoughts about the mission.

My brain is festering with ideas and plots and plans and I feel that the maggots are eating away at the very core of my being that holds everything together. I feel like I am falling apart, right then and there. Unlike my heart, which is a physical entity, I cannot pin down these thoughts, or try to manage them. No doctor or scientist can see them either, only I can hear and see and feel these private thoughts. I wish I had an open flesh wound.

I run faster, harder, going deeper and deeper into the muddy forest. My breathing has become exhausted, I can hear my heart literally leaping out of my chest. I lose both my shoes in the mud and keep on running in my bare feet. My soles become bloody and battered with the rocks and the hard pieces of wood that lie in my path. I do not know where I am going, for the first time in a long time I have no sense of direction. I have no idea what I am going to do because I have no destination in mind, only to escape from my sister at this very moment. But I know I need to get to my final destination, the house. I clutch my bag with me that has the card in it, and I hope I do not lose it. I’m running away from everything: my parents, my sister, mainly from my mind. But no matter how fast I run or how much physical pain I am going through, my mental state is more painful. My thoughts start hurting like so many needles. My thoughts hurt, they ache, they kill me inside. My head is literally bleeding from the inside out. If only there was some tangible, visible evidence of the pain and confusion I qm going through, then someone would understand. I long for this. I long for someone to understand my plight, my individuality, to understand the mission. To know who I am and where I am supposed to be. Nobody seems to know. I was beginning to realize that I am the only one who could save myself. I had reached the point where I no longer felt like saving myself.

I am hearing them. I start hearing the crunching in the woods behind me. I am catching glimpses of dark hair, sunglasses, black suits. I know it is the CIA. I see binoculars and machines in the distance. I think I even see a gun. I am so frightened I don’t know what to do, I run even faster. Are they going to catch up to me? I know they want me to go on the mission, but I’m so confused. What do they want from me? Why won’t they just take me to where I’m supposed to be? Why are they confusing me? I thought they were my allies, but now they are making me claustrophobic. I just want to get to the house, because I know whomever sent me that letter in the mail was giving me a clue as to my next step. I am not supposed to be here. I suddenly realize that I’m in the wrong place at the wrong time. Maybe I’m messing up some plot that they have to prove their mind power over such a frail girl like me. Maybe they will kill me. I run faster.

For the first time I want everything to be silent once again. I want the camera to turn off, the lights to go dim, and the people following me to go away. My only fate this morning is in my own hands, and I took it upon myself to change it. I am miserable. I don’t know what to do, what anyone wants of me. I’m running not knowing why, and I don’t know exactly why, but I’m scared of the people chasing me with their guns and machines.

My numbed skin begins to regain sensation and I feel itchy all over, the leaves whipping against me seem to counteract the irritation. But inside, my mind is still imploding with horror. The maggots begin to eat away at my very core of consciousness, my safety zone. My mind is no longer a source of escape from a world which I can not control in the world, but now it seems as if I want to jump out of my own skin and my brain. I want escape. I can’t stop even for a cigarette, or itch my legs and arms. I am running with visions of a clear lake that I can submerge myself into and drown myself and my tortures away. A place where I can hide from the intruders, from the intelligence. Contradicting ideas of the intelligence are fighting in my mind.

Are they helping or hindering me? Are they going to tell me what to do, or just keep on tormenting me with their monitoring and sensoring?

Suddenly, I fall upon a clearing. A vast, open space with no trees. At first, I feel that I have finally found the clear lake that I had been dreaming of. It turns out to be a thick, black, swamp of mud. I am running into it with the strength and fury of all my anguish. I fall deep into the mud. I salvage my soul and surrender it to the viscous substance. I sink deeper and deeper into the mud. I lie in its cool, calming, dirty purity. I allowed it to seep into every orifice of my body, covering my entire being. Coated with this thick black mud, I feel at peace. The mud is smooth, it is filled with no debris. It is as pure as anything I have ever seen before, and it looks so black, as I would imagine hell to be. I feel serenity and security. The mud begins to ooze into my mouth and down my throat. The mud is cool and wet. It is slippery and smooth, like a snake. It feels like the snakes in my mind, slithering into every lobe, every cortex, every cell, and taking them over. The snakes and maggots have grown to such high numbers now that I feel contaminated. I feel like I need my head cut open and exposed, and for all of these intruders to be cleaned out of my head. This feeling is becoming too much. I have a suicidal longing, a desire for an end, this mission is not happening soon enough, and the intelligence are coming too close, I was becoming claustrophobic in their presence.

Somehow, this mud sliding all over me felt calming in comparison to the prickliness and anguish in my mind. I want to go. I want release. I want to end it all, right then and there. I can’t take it any longer. The pain of living is not remedied by anything else. What is there to stay for? My ideas of greatness are not coming to fruition. I am beginning to lose faith. It has been months now that this has been going on, and no sign of the mission starting, only the paper that lies by the edge of the swamp. Only the one address written in Kelly green on a white piece of parchment paper. Only I know. I close my eyes and sink deeper into this black, beautiful hell. This is how it all started. This is when my insanity began.

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9 years later....





After all is said and done I choose to not remain silent. Damages have been made, friendships have been lost, money has been spent, years have gone by. I still can’t forget. I wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat and have memories of nine years ago to the day. I remember smells, sights, sounds, the stench of insanity. I will never forget the times when life was not worth living, the pain of it all was driving me to desolation, to a hell I never thought existed. When your parents tell you now it is “water under the bridge”, better yet to just forget about it, be done with it. When everyone asks you “when are you going to move on with your life? When are you going to get over it?” When people are constantly telling you to shut up about it once and for all, that by remembering it is just going to make it “come alive” again, it throws me into the arms of reminiscing. How can I forget it? How can I forget experiences so detrimental to my soul and intrinsic to my being that they have shaped and molded whom I am for the rest of my life? These memories and experiences put me on a path for life that will be forever changed, not to ever be forgotten, a path, a trail that no one else has walked. Just me. It is my own path, and I am choosing to make it the way I want. A bit desolate and soddy here and there, but in the end, straight and beautiful, never ending, leading the way for others… for others to tread down, to understand, through my narrative.

To hell with every person that doesn’t want to listen to memories of a bad time in my past, a horror that I can never rid myself of, a realistic truth that everyone wants to deny. My parents throw away my medical documents, they are embarrassed of what I write and show people and tell people. I am an embarrassment to my family, a black scar on their perfect white marble wall in their atrium. They don’t want me to make them look foolish, question their genetic code, question their parenting skills, who would want me as a daughter? And if they did, they would want to forget, repress, deny everything that has ever happened to me… but in so doing that would be forgetting and losing everything that I am. That is me, that is my heart, my soul, my being. How can you erase your own daughter, part of your family, someone you created? I won’t let them. I won’t let anyone erase me. I’m not going to remain silent for the rest of my life. I will not. I choose not to. Let me be, let me live, let me be honest, and let me tell my story once and for all…. So after all the medical documents from all the different hospitals have been shredded and hauled away to rustle in the wind of some landfill and the drugs have lost their effect, the memories have been put away, and the scenery has turned back to one of a normal existence, I refuse to forget, I will by my own sheer determination bring back that which should not ever be forgotten, the will to survive, the sheer determination to live when everything is telling you not to. When the world says “fuck off” and “go to hell”, and you keep on persevering. Where does that come from? I ask myself every day, but today, anew, I will start the first chapter of my memories…


9 years earlier......

I’m alone in a room. A room that had become my new existence ever since the big security men, who had now and then been just a blur of navy blue and gold badges strapped me down to this god forsaken cot and tied all of my appendages with straps of leather and metal hooks and belts. The sheer agony of not being able to move any one tendon, muscle, or finger, besides my pinky, left me in such a state of frustration that I had given up. My screams had been so horrifying, and the look on my face and the writhing of my body had become such a horror to all the other inmates on the ward, that they had covered the small barbed window on the metal door into my room. I couldn’t see much, just could arch my head back enough to see the white piece of paper taped to the door, so that so many others were spared the sight of my agony.

Minutes became hours, hours became days, days became nights, and it all became a week. Or two. Or three. Only one man came in to ask me if I wanted breakfast now or later. I didn’t eat much. He had to feed me, because if I got any of the plastic cutlery in my hands I might have just gone nuts. The thought of pain was so pleasureful, that I thought drawing blood might actually make me feel something for the first time in a long time. The sheer pain of cutting my skin might allow me to feel a tendon, a muscle, a writhing of a spasm in my body, something akin to the pain in my mind.

I saw things all the time. I heard churchbells coming out of the adjacent bathroom and dove’s wings above my head. What was God trying to tell me? I surely knew it was some religious signal that I was the next messiah, I saw matt standing next to me, hidden in the wall… I saw the devil’s eyes above me, hidden in the red light of the camera whose omnipotent presence was beginning to take on a frightening life of its own. I wondered who was watching me, what were they thinking? Where they taking notes on my contortions and spasms and screaming. Was their sound on the camera? Could they even hear my screams? Or was it all in vain. Was I just another loony girl locked up in a ward again, in the same room where so many other screaming girls had lost their voices and couldn’t even hear themselves anymore. But now it was me. It was my turn. It was my turn for the security to watch. I was just another crazy girl locked up in a padded room in a psychiatric ward in a hospital. How many have been here before me? How many were to come? Do they remember? As the thorazine injection was plugged into my veins every now and then, my memories become a blur. I no longer see the faces over my person, I no longer see the food remnants on the window sill. I forget. The thorazine takes over, blottos my mind, my emotions, makes me still, takes the strength right out of my bones, down to the marrow. I am emotionaless and blank, I fall into a deep trance, not a sleep. With this horror and these thoughts sleep is not possible as any man knows it. It is an unconscious tremor of the mind, a faint lapse in memory, suddenly to be overpowered by anxiety, mania, and restlessness. My mind would never let me rest…


From an early age, I knew I was a little bit different, I was sensitive, volatile, and moody. Later in my life, I began to experience these traits at much more toxic levels. When I was 19, all of this toxicity culminated into my first psychotic episode. I have bipolar disorder. I was diagnosed in the summer of 1999 at Oregon Health and Sciences University, where I spent 7 weeks of my life as a committed patient. Time after time they tried different medications with me, but it seemed as if nothing would bring me down from my manic episode with psychotic features. Bipolar I as described in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-IV describes a manic episode in full, and details how the mania can become so florid as to take on psychotic proportions. People with this disorder often have paranoia, such as I experienced, delusions of grandeur, and suffer from visual or auditory hallucinations, all of which I experienced.

It wasn’t until 2 months later as an outpatient at St. Vincent’s Medical Center that I met my psychiatrist Robert Von Brenchen, M.D. We were taking our rounds leaving group therapy to talk with a psychiatrist about our medications. Robert listened to me so carefully, and listened to all of my magical thoughts and delusions. He took notes very quickly and gently listened to my rapid speech and racing ideas. He pulled out a prescription pad and wrote a prescription for the drug which eventually saved my life. It was an older anti-psychotic, a drug that nobody had tried on me before. Something that maybe only this man would have thought of. By that night I could sleep without the voices and the monsters in the dark.

One day I will write a book about my experiences over the last nine years of my life. I will describe the ups and downs, the good times and the bad, and through it all, the people that stuck by my side. I am now stabilized on five different medications, medications which have made my life worth living again. Medications that without I would not be able to go to school, keep a job, have a relationship, or participate in life the same way that others do. I would not function without the assistance of these medications. I have come to accept that my disorder is biochemical in nature, it is not due to the psychological renderings of my parents or my childhood. It is not due to my frailty of spirit, my sensitive nature, or even my own incapacities and weaknesses. Mental illness is not due to a weakness, defect, or personal disposition. It is chemical, biological, and needs to be treated medically and psychiatrically if one is to get better, which I did.

I am now able to pirouette on one foot and stand tall and graceful. I am now able to exist without visual or auditory hallucinations. I am now able to control my ups and downs, my mania and my depressions, and to live life comfortably. I am no longer just at a biological fault to fall into a state of despair from which I never want to wake up from. I no longer want to anesthetize my life away by overdosing on drugs or alcohol. I now can live life as myself, the way I have always wanted to be, the way I was meant to be if I didn’t have this chemical imbalance. Finally, with the help of medications and science and doctors. I can live my life just as I want to live it . . . as myself.