through europe

 

 

Notes:

 

7 days is the standard monitoring duration before they determine the course of treatment for the patient.

 

Description of the unit.

 

Lift> Hallway> Reception> Decompression/ Containment/ Screening> Main eating area and table tennis table> Kitchen to left> Laundry room to the right> Shared toilet> TV room to the right, off the main eating area> Quiet room on left> Followed by art room>Medication room on right> Followed by assessment room> Shower on same side> At end of hallway of all the rooms is the reception that faces you as you walk through these rooms. To the left of the reception are the female rooms and to the right is a sofa, waiting area followed by the mens rooms. On the right of the hallway is a unisex shower/ toilet and then the dorm rooms start, at the end of the corridor of the mens ward is the staff room. Most of the shouting comes from the women’s side.

 

Day 1, Friday Night. 8 pm.

 

Beyond the point of  “can’t remember” the initial reaction was one of horror and a combination of regret and humiliation, then followed by the immediate “how am I going to get through this?” through to “how can I get out of here?” The ward looks like a cross between a youth club and a cheap toy town jail (lots of plastic-y yellow and blue) with perspex windows, which had faded and been scratched, so barely any natural light came through and on top of that, they had been masticed/ siliconed into the frames so that they couldn’t be opened. Natural light and fresh air were largely absent and in retrospect it was like a vivarium- the patients being the reptiles.

 

The first person I met was Jimmy, who had aspergers disease and had told my friend Steve, who was visiting, that he liked to smash things up. At first he was extremely difficult to get on with, he wouldn’t shut up, in fact he couldn't shut up for five minutes and on his last day I bet him £50 that he couldn't shut up for 10 minutes- he made it to 10 seconds, maybe 5. Licking his lips, looking around, sitting on his hands, fidgeting in the quiet room, asking what do you do in a quiet room.

 

The cell was the place that I intended to spend most of my time. The place was an observation ward and the doors had an observation window with a curtain so that the nurses could check if you were ok, also the door handles were basically a scooped out hole to put your hand in and there were no attachments or places to tie ropes on doors so people can hang themselves off the door handles. The intrusion of the nurses was pretty irritating, like getting woken up in the middle of the night with a torch being flashed in your face. Also the sinks were like a homogenous single mould where no screw heads or plumbing were made accessible. There was air conditioning on all the time, so that it was perpetually cold, and a wafer thin synthetic blanket and one sheet to keep you warm. One was inclined to spend as much time in the room as possible because it meant not talking to anyone and thinking about the things that had happened before.

 

Anyway, the first day, was when I was discharged and Steve came to visit and arrived right at the time that was happening, so we walked with the nurse to the observation ward. Beyond going through all the security decompression chambers and being greeted by a friendly ward manager, I think Steve, like myself, was shocked. It was like a really crude and grubby drawing of One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest; no romantic depictions of characters, no quality of space and it took quite a while for me to work out that the ward was a deterrent as well as a rehabilitation unit, even if we were both thinking it at the time. There was a There were meeting rooms and quiet rooms where you could go, although Jimmy liked to walk into the quiet room and chat to people that were reading or meeting their friends and family. Anyway, Day 1 was spent talking to Steve about the Tour de France in the quiet room. He left about 8.30 and I went back to my room, listened to some music, unpacked the carrier bag that contained a Cormac McCarthy book and a get well soon card drawn by a friend and tried to go to sleep.

 

As soon as you thought about sleeping, there seemed to be some conspiracy (joke) about not being able to sleep. For me, all I wanted to do was to sleep and to forget stuff. Medication was made available at 9.30 am and 10 pm, which meant the patients on medication, which was pretty much everyone, excluding myself, would get rowdy and argumentative. In fact most of the arguments happened during the daily rituals. Like in the hospital, any thought of sleeping should be abandoned. It was something that you had to take when you could as any pattern (outside of 12am to 6am) would be disrupted by either alarms, patients kicking off, some Nigerian nurses shouting, or a torch being shone in your face. Anyway, one of the patients kicked off that night and I remember hearing this woman’s voice shouting “Idiots! You’re fucking idiots! Fuck off, idiot!” over and over. She seemed oblivious to anything else that was being said to her. “Fuck off! Fuck off!”

 

Day 2. Saturday.

 

I like to get up early, with the sun. It’s the quietest and stillest part of the day and there’s always that apprehension and desperation to make the most of the peace before people arrive. I like the world when it’s asleep, you know that people are in a regressive, passive state and any negativity towards the everyday is both absent and dormant. I would like to think that negativity dissolves as a person falls asleep- or at least externally to the reader of such ideas- as internally, privately, most of us are aware that sleeping is not always a bed of roses.

 

The bathroom was something else to behold. A massive bath, almost a jacuzzi, made out of a solid block of stone; a kind of granite that couldn't have been granite. There was probably bloodied tissues and bandages on the floor which weren’t mine and the toilet seat didn’t have a seat- probably for some security reason- and so was covered in someone else’s piss. On the sink, there were numerous emptied sachets of shampoo, shower gel, toothpaste and toothbrushes and no bin anywhere. The bath itself was stained with that usual grayish line of scum around the rim, where the last person, who must have been filthy, hadn’t bothered to rinse it away and so I had to clean that filthy toilet before I could have a bath, which I don’t remember bothering me that much.

 

I have been in the same clothes for five days, sporting the latest fashion in hospital gowns. The cryptic open-back straight-jacket “robes” that catch you and drag you back when you’re in bed, always adjusting yourself trying to get out of the thing. Pajamas. Anyway, I came in in some black cut off jeans and flip flops and a black tee shirt and I was going to have to wear those clothes for another seven days. It never occurred to ask any of my visitors to bring some clothes but I wasn’t really bothered about my appearance.

 

Breakfast was like what I thought jail must be like. The people, the rituals, the behavior. Certain people sticking together and certain people sitting alone, most people avoiding eye contact or making it in staccato like bursts, flickering or up, down, up, down, side to side. In fact most things in that place appears like it is in bursts, the peace or the ruckus that follows when someone can’t go for a cigarette, or has their favorite cereal, or a particular type of jam or bread. If you can’t be indifferent about stuff then you’re going to get sucked in. The staff always maintained that it wasn’t a hotel or the Priory and I agreed with them, I couldn't care, it was ok. People weren’t dying of malnutrition and even though I had busted my liver and kidneys irreparably from the amount of paracetamol I had taken I wasn’t complaining about not getting enough iron, or roughage, or water without medication in it, or vitamins. It all tasted quite unappetizing and that wasn’t why I was in there. Food is weird when you’re ambivalent about it, you feel like an animal more. I liked J’s attitude towards dinner: “I’ll have everything!” everyday, every dinner.

 

I made my first friend at breakfast. He was called R and was from Croydon and studied chemistry at a good London university and seemed really smart, his family were Indian and he was really too young-20- to be inside for being an alcoholic (I think he said that he was an alcoholic) and, like me, for overdosing, so we had something in common straight away. He knew pretty much everything about the medication he was on and also how to make paracetamol and other stuff. I really liked him because he was relaxed and friendly and not intrusive but also really respectful towards lots of things. I think I was more saddened when he told me how much he got bullied by some other guys at college, that made him turn to drinking really pretty heavily- like drinking a bottle of whisky in 20 minutes, rather than the actual acts that made him hurt himself. Anyway, we both got it out of the way like everyone else does when they say: “what are you in for?” I suppose it’s not that surprising when incarcerated people are put together in a space that they ask each other how they got in there, what led them to such a shitty place and state of affairs. It gives a social definition and for the really nasty people, a better sense of who to abuse, or what they can away with, which became more apparent the more time you spend there and the more shit you have to put up with. Extortion is rife in incarceration.

 

Anyway, I spent the morning playing table tennis with him (everyone there was pretty good at table tennis, in fact, they could have made it into an academy) and some other stuff happened that I can’t remember. Nothing bad or traumatic happened that I am repressing but similarly, I am in no hurry to recollect. In fact the only other thing that happened that day besides listening to J talking all the time, was the entrance of another J in the middle of the night. I remember him covered in blood, skinny, pale and mute, had a few tats- and who looked dodgy (he also looked a bit like Mean Machine Angel from 2000 AD, for those who know).

 

That was also the night when the woman who had cancer, who was from Nigeria- who was also in on her own volition- kicked off again for the third time that night. She was shouting, calling everybody “idiot” and telling them to fuck off, shouting that she was going to change the world and that we were all sinners and she was going to educate us- and then telling everyone to fuck off again. I want to make clear that she wasn’t mad, that she was in a very deep grief and everyone bent over backwards to respect that and every time someone did that she shoved it back in their face. I didn’t like her for many reasons, firstly the fundamentalist Christianity, which I dislike on so many levels, secondly, I hate loud, shouty people who are inconsiderate and who think the world revolves around them, thirdly, I do not like being called an idiot by an idiot; so the last thing I was just as bad as her, really. The thing that pissed me off the most was her assumption that her grief took precedence over everyone else’s because it was cancer, that there was supposed to be some invisible hierarchy of suffering that we were supposed to know about. Anyway after listening to her abuse everyone and everything for a couple of hours I told her to shut up, which she didn’t like and which didn’t deter her in the least from continuing to rant and rave and so had to listen to music until one in the morning. I know that is a weakness on my behalf, that it is judgemental, half bad, half something else. I guess I just don’t give a shit.

 

Day Three. Sunday.

 

Can’t remember breakfast, remember talking to R and playing table tennis, which is where I met the crazy and ace XX, a Chinese bank worker for Abbey National. XX was/ is mad but in a great way. In many ways all she needed was to be given a hug and to be complemented, to be told she looked nice that day and to laugh and for people to listen to her. Most of those things don’t happen in real life to strangers and they didn’t happen that much in the unit but I really liked her and so did R and we both made a big effort to be friends with her. She liked to make clothes out of her NHS bed linen and  the time when I first met her was playing table tennis with her (after desperately twitching by the table, commenting on the game and her table tennis tutor) and she was dressed in a sarong made from her curtains with huge chunky platforms and an NHS pajama top. She actually looked cool as fuck and I don’t know why she was in there other than the glaringly obvious fact that she was unfortunately suffering from mental health issues, had trouble communicating what was really on her mind in such an excited way and also the medication that she was on was really having a bad effect on her moods.

 

I suppose when you take away the events that eventuate in a person being admitted into a psychiatric ward then of course you look at them in their socially acceptable, normative sense outside of the trauma to try and think of them in the everyday sense, doing their shopping, getting on the bus, all of those things, which is saddening. Similarly some people in the unit have severe conditions- not events- and for them everything is different, even if you are told otherwise. You look at everyone the same and the event is the menace- to the patient.

 

I think I went into the art room to look at peoples work, staff included. It was pretty amazing, even the religious poems scrawled all over the place, or the illiteracy, which I have a soft spot for anyway. There was also another nice quiet girl in there called J and it was pretty tough working out what she was talking about half of the time; semi cryptic, oblique references and quick off the cuff quips. Things either mumbled or off at at a tangent if one were inclined to use another maths term. She was bruised on her face and her arms and shoulders, I think and she told me she used to be a model and an athlete, which made sense because you could tell she used to have a good figure but she looked like someone had beaten her up quite badly and something had deeply traumatized her. I didn’t want to judge her, like when someone said she was a prostitute. Anyway, I spent an hour drawing her, with J chatting away. It was really nice. After they had left I got a newspaper and looked for something to draw that would take me a while and all I could find was this picture of a horse with its jockey in its stable. I just drew the horse as I’d had it with people and didn’t want to draw people, or think about people.

 

I think dodgy J knocked on my door later on asking me for some money for his watch, so he could get some fags on the 5 o’clock shop run. It’s not nice when patients pull back the curtain on your observation window when you’re trying to get away from them and then harassing you for shit and it pissed me off, especially as he was trying to extort and see if there was anything of interest in the room. It’s bad enough when the nurses do it when you’re asleep; when patients do it, you can’t help but get raggy with them. Try explaining privacy to this guy, though. “Aw, come on man, just look after me watch (shaking his wrist), just until later. I’ll square up later.” I nearly, nearly, lent him two quid.

From that moment on he was always asking for something, or trying to get something- and not just from me.

There was also the conversation with the ward manager and I asked him how was I going to get out of there, that I couldn't handle it and didn’t want to be in there any longer- that I’d rather take my chances with the outside world, which in retrospect seems ridiculous now, writing this, because some things haven’t changed and other things won’t change. We talked about lots of stuff, I tried convincing him I was going to be alright, telling him about the story of a Sudanese mechanic who said: “Everyday in Sudan is a struggle but you might as well spend your life asleep if you don’t want to struggle- but nothing will come to you if you do that.” Something I read in hospital that stuck with me- expectancy, that it was not necessarily wrong to expect a reward for working hard and, for many, it is natural. I talked about my parents, how I had let them down, broke down in tears, refused medication for the millionth time and resigned myself to the situation and went to bed. This was the day I started to read Gabriel Garcia Marquez’100 Years of Solitude; the first piece of fiction in 10 years that I have read and a piece of writing that silenced everything I hated about fiction and was another thing that I clung onto in there. I remember crying on the first page; the analogy of the boulders on the waterfront looking like prehistoric eggs reminding me of something. Fucking metaphors.

Sunday was when chatty J was discharged. It was like a farewell do, or when a child goes on a camping holiday. He was getting transferred to another ward and kept talking about how horny he was, whether they had any fit nurses, which of the nurses he wanted to fuck to then which of the patients he wanted to fuck. “I Can’t help it, I’m just really, really horny.” “I just wanna fuck”. He kept grabbing his crutch and jangling it about and looking out of the window and just generally fidgeting or hopping about. Girls at clubs didn’t talk to him because he just couldn't shut up and everyone looked really sad when he said he couldn't really go to clubs anyway as he got beaten up a lot. Ace guy.

 

Day Four. Monday.

 

I was lucky I had a phone- and an iPhone at that, music was a boon, even if I was listening to the same stuff I was listening to when I did what I did. The staff had to look after everyone’s phone chargers so the patients don’t hang themselves or strangle others with them, so every time you want to charge your phone up, you have to go and ask the staff. Anyway it’s a good policy that you can speak to the outside world because that would certainly exacerbate people’s behavior. Talking is good and is something I never bothered too much to do; phoning mates up for a chat, or if I had a problem, asking for some help in the form of someone listening. This is a truly wonderful thing if people are lucky enough to have the friends, shit needs to be expelled, dumped into a generally uncaring world, where the information perpetually hovers above being meaningless, threatening to do this or that.

 

I could also email and do all of the stuff that I didn’t want to get straight back into but I got an email to write about Schadenfreude, not knowing I was in an observation ward. I thought along with drawing the horse it would be good therapy and cathartic and it gave me another excuse not to leave my room/ cell.

 

I think Steve visited again that day; but by that time it feels like you’ve been in there for an eternity. You ask the staff about the procedures and the status of your application and if you can discharge yourself, which I couldn't but you start to think if you are ever going to be let out and it must be a million times worse for people on meds. We talked about the Tour de France; Bradley Wiggins’ crash, Thor Hushovd winning a stage, Cav losing a sprint stage, getting done over by Rojas, whether he was going to make it to twenty stage wins this year and beat Mercx’s 38 wins. Steve kept me sane when my parents couldn’t make it to London from the West Country and gossiping kept me interested in the outside world.

 

Paranoia is everywhere in a psychiatric ward, in inanimate objects and the traces left in those objects by other parties-people are not necessarily needed to be present- and other things are implicated; it’s a chaotic ballet that is of no use to the victim, is one of the worst things when a brain works against itself by misinterpreting the external world, the doctors try to combat it by keeping people active and not in solitary confinement but it’s usually those social situations that start it. Arguments usually start up by people mis-reading how someone looked at them or gave them the wrong thing. Mistakes by people get blown out of all proportion because of the stress patients (and staff) are under and the place is like a fucking pressure cooker at times; when a person cracks, or has had enough then that’s it. It’s going to be hell for everyone. When dodgy J threatens the Nigerian woman with cancer, it makes me ashamed to be the stereotype that I probably am in her eyes, or when XX disappears in the night, or assaults the staff and is seen the next day looking like a ghost and her breakfast is ambivalently splattered over her clothes, or the 17 year old guy talking to himself from 9am til 2am everyday, walking around in his blanket or lying in his bed upside down with his door open chatting street slang, laughing hysterically at random moments. Its like paranoia is present when the smallest, most insignificant things are getting negated and it can participate directly or wait its turn- “Maybe it’s those neural networks not synapsing properly, which is why you should take the medication, Mr X.” “Your serotonin levels are depleted…”

 

Monday was when R was discharged. Was emotional/ disappointing, we exchanged numbers.

 

Day 5. Tuesday.

 

I think this was the day I lost it at breakfast with the Nigerian woman with Cancer, who wouldn’t let a new guy sit on her table when there were no seats left. What was so bad about the situation was, was that arsehole J was, again, making offensive racial remarks, like singing about counting bananas to her. The staff were mainly Nigerian too and its beyond embarrassing, it’s shameful, especially given that his behavior was not symptomatic of being of a particular generation (not that that excuses it either) but disappointingly symptomatic of being a particular type of person- a cunt. I really grew to dislike him as each day wore on, even if he had stomach cancer, had lost his daughter (which then changed to his son from one day to the other), his wife had died 5 years ago, he was homeless and a heroin addict, who had thrown himself in front of a bus, which was when he came in. Of course I felt sorry for him and pitied him and tried to speak to him, which was pointless as I was “posh” to him, even though I am a middle class penniless cretin and have been working as a decorator for the last 10 years because I couldn’t maintain a career in art, the thing that I studied for 6 years, as I was either deemed to be an arsehole or a shit artist- or both. Anyway he went off to his room and she continued ranting at everyone, telling us to fuck off, that we were all idiots, that I should fuck off and go to sleep. I shouted at her that she had no right to call herself a Christian and that there are prostitutes with more sense of humility than she had and asked her how was she going to educate people by telling them to fuck off. She started screaming that she wasn’t a prostitute, which was when I had to “fuck off” and leave my breakfast. I couldn't be bothered. Stuff like that leaves me in a foul mood for a long time, where I replay the scene in my head and generally fantasize about being in a better situation before the event happens. Spent most of the day drawing that horse in my room, listening to music and running to the canteen at lunch, eating as quickly as possible, not looking at anyone and scurrying off back to my room like an insect. She wasn’t there anyway.

 

Can’t really remember what happened for the rest of the day, probably made a phone call or sent some texts.

Oh yeah and some new guy came in who was a music producer, multi millionaire who had been traveling around asia, working China. He kept showing everyone clips of him at raves on youtube and telling everyone he was working on a book and he was a fucking huge big shot.

 

Xiao Xien disappeared that night after she attacked one of the guards. I think she went upstairs, which was for the full timers (some people have been up there for four years). I remember hearing her crying, saying she was sorry, that she’d be good and stuff like: her medication was working but as soon as she realized it wasn’t going to make any difference she slowly deflated, crying even more. She looked so alone in the world and then she flipped again, kicking the guards… I remember talking to her about cutting on the bias (after we had talked about how to insulate her floorboards) as she had made a toga out of her bedsheets and some cool slippers from hollowed out pillows. She was totally into it and I did some drawings for her showing her how easy it was and she seemed really happy that day. The best thing to do was to tell her to breathe slowly and try to relax and she would say it- and then do it- and be a totally different person. Anyway, in either state, she was fucking ace and I missed her.

 

Day 6. Wednesday

 

Can’t remember. Might have ventured into the tv room for the first time, washed my clothes. Stuff like that, boring shit.

The highlight of the day was when G came to visit. He thought the place was hysterical and he cheered me up no end. He brought me some biros to do some drawing and made me laugh, called me a twat and we talked about cycling and cricket. He kind of fills a room with his personality and I had to tell him what happened for therapy based reasons e.g. not keeping it in and telling friends so I don’t put it all on M. Strangely, it turns out half of my friends and family have tried it or thought about it, which is not particularly nice, so I suppose I know how they feel. Anyway G has a way of making everything seem funny and reminding us all how stupid the world is, especially ourselves; when he’s low he used to be quite dangerous and get himself into all sorts of scrapes but he’s a big guy and you wouldn’t not mess with him because of his size but because he is just so fucking nice. He bought me a load of biros for drawing with, which was really considerate and touched me. I make drawings with biro a lot and it takes me a few biros to make a really big drawing, which usually takes a few months. Given the amount he gave me, which was about 20, I would have had to stay in the unit for about a year before I would have used them all up and I still have an excess of black biros in my pen box.

 

The only other thing I remember is Big Shot and Dodgy J hitting it off and then watch them systematically assert themselves into some position of vocal authority, basically mouthing off, arguing with everybody, varying forms of social assertion and out and out bullying and creating social divides, acting like they’ve been in jail and were in a jail, which resulted in the tension of the place cranking up in that quiet invisible way, like only pressure can do with air. I couldn't wait to get out of the place. I wanted to hit them; Dodgy J was a wiry little cunt who boxed, or claimed to have boxed but I didn’t really care. Big Shot was older and louder and just as stupid, telling stories about hanging out with U2 and other celebrities in 10 star hotels in Dublin. Who gives a crap. The guy claims to be a millionaire and then walks into an NHS psych ward, committing himself, and starts moaning about not having his food and a digi-box. I wished I told him he should be checking in at the fucking Priory if he was so rich and discerning, he made patients feel like they were inferior, you could see it and he knew it, the smug prick. Maybe I was getting more cantankerous towards the end but this guy was an insecure tool and I couldn't care about being judgemental towards him.

 

Day 7. Thursday, Getting out.

 

Besides the visit from G the day before, I remember asking the nurse when was I going to get out of the unit and that not knowing anything was compounding the issue. Once again, imagine the scenario if the person is on medication, or in some other type of deep seated trauma, or both; that feeling of being trapped is awful. It disempowers you, which sounds wrong but that draining of will and being trapped makes people go foetal and the nurse looks through the glass at night to check up on her patients and she sees 80% of them sleeping foetally. People disengage, they lose interest, don’t participate, give up, become subservient, out of character: a personality is damaged. All of that- should refrain from generalizing so much…

 

The invisible bureaucracy of certain places people try to forget that they’re in. Emotional economy, the hatred of forms, of waiting, of being placated, of misdirection, jumping through hoops, of feeling like a child. Things take time. Placing trust in people who are not there to damage you and finding the resources to trust people you have no choice but to trust. Having to trust people as being normal and that doesn’t change in a psych ward and so one embarks on enduring certain procedures and processes to try and improve- or get out and improve in your own way.

The procedures, like most British state facilities, were muddy and confusing and didn’t instill any confidence in anyone.  Maybe it’s an institutional trait, like when people leave prison. Or, again, school trips or coming home from holiday, where the dread knots the stomach. On an everyday level, it is mundaneity personified; on a personal level it is something like anxiety or neurosis- or simply fear.

 

I don’t want to talk about the last day or the tedious rehabilitation program that involved being visited by a different social worker every day, asking you the same questions and you have to speak like they have read the notes and then endlessly repeating the same old story, time after time, of refusing medication and getting irritated about not being listened to and palmed off with more different meds, of being offered benefits, of filling a two inch stack of paper to wait six weeks for nothing, which you didn’t want in the first place. If a person is self medicating, self reliant and has a brain then they will know not to go near this ritual that is useful for lonely people who want to chat- and I have fallen into that category- but the unfamiliarity and the endless repetition is not cathartic in the least, neither is talking when it falls on deaf ears. Listening is an art- god knows I wish I could be better at it.

 

The last day was when I got into an argument with Big Shot, I came back from the gym (I found out they had a gym on the second to last day) and was all pumped and happy- and I accidentally made a joke about his girlfriend being an escort when he said she escorted him to the ward. He flipped out, called me a posh nonce, told me he was going to smash my face in, all of that. I just stared at him, which wound him up and walked away to sit on the sofa that I liked to read my Marquez book. I could hear him slagging me off saying that I swear too much. If I wasn’t leaving that day I would have pushed his fucking head through a window. Anyway he walked past later and I apologized for the comment saying it was inappropriate and to leave it at that and he was like: “Yeah, let’s leave it at that.” Looking dissatisfied that someone had apologized to him. I do have a big mouth, I’ll admit that but I do hope he has got a kicking somewhere down the line.

 

Anyway my mum and my sister came to visit, bought a cake for the nurses, took me outside for the first time in two weeks. I remember walking around Lewisham- and this maybe an endightment on the place and I certainly don’t mean it to be- but I remember looking at how fucking nuts everyone looks. That you struggle to refrain from making quantitative asserions like: “he should be in the ward” “she should be in the ward” “they look pretty bonkers” all of those things you normally contain, in a normal day, in your normal state. Yes it is a cliche and like the old lunatics taking over the asylum cliche, of Poe’s Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether but I don’t mind embracing a cliche if it seems to be true. It’s more resonant and profound, less of a cliche, more of something else. The capacity for unsurprise is something that I would like to move away from...so is silencing the mind, so is being judgemental. I think once you’ve become aware of it though, you’re fucked.

 

I want to say sorry to the dirty old man on the street, with his fingerless gloves, shaking his fingers around, talking to himself, to the care workers that cant speak too great but who’s hearts greatly supercede their words, to the recovering alcoholic with a busted up kidney and liver, who’s just come out of jail and into another type of self imposed jail, even to the people I don’t like, who I feel wronged by, even if they like me less, people who walk too slow and cannot walk in a straight line, to indecisive people, to shouty people, to idiots. Misanthropy, or hating the world, for me disappears when I’m with nice people.