eating disorder, my alcoholism, my self-injury. I tell her what I know. What I know is that if I stay home today, I’ll continue to cut. And I won’t stop until there is nothing left to cut. We go to the ER. I sit slumpishly on the stiff hospital bed and answer a series of questions about suicide risk and self-injury. I tell them the truth, tell them that if they let me go home I will cut again. They assess me, they agree, they know, they see it in my eyes, the desperation sitting pleadingly on my face. I sit on the hard hospital mattress, my legs swinging back and forth, swishing the white paper covering of the maroon mattress as I wait, as I yearn to move towards something else. I am admitted to the psych ward. I walk through the heavy metal hospital doors, am lead to a room dressed in depressing gray walls, and collapse onto another uncomfortable hospital bed. This one, a blue plastic mattress that is also barely there. It is just a small bit of padding against the steel frame underneath. I curl my legs up to my chest, and let out a sigh of relief. In this stifling place I will be taken care of, watched over, forbidden to drink, to binge, to cut. And in this uncomfortable bed, under the buzzing florescent hospital lights, I begin to feel a sense of surrender, of finally giving in to the care I need to have, to take, to give myself. BODY SOBERING It is my second day in the hospital. I have created a large dent in the thin plastic mattress, a mold of my body, of my need to just lie and surrender myself. The door swings open; a female social worker strides over to me, grabs my arm, and pulls me away from the bed. My body unsuctions from the mattress. She takes my hand as my legs creak with each step towards the meeting room, towards my first AA meeting. I sit. I gawk at the other alcoholics. I do not want to be here. I am stubborn at first, do not want to admit to my problem of alcohol even though I know it’s the root, the initial action that spurs all of my other problems. I just want to lie in bed and soak and be nothing and not think about anything but the mattress taking in my weight, sighing with me. I am resistant to getting out of bed, to going to AA, but I go because I am there, because each day the social worker comes and unsuctions me. Each day I remove myself from the solace of my bed, temporarily remove the heap of my body from the mattress to learn about my problems. And after a few meetings I start to get it, start to see how I am powerless to alcohol and, hell yes, my life has become unmanageable. I sit in a meeting on my ninth day in the hospital. I am slumped in a large maroon padded wooden-framed chair, and I feel a shift take place
Clammer
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