A note: our power is out. I’m writing this on my mobile phone.
We are safe and sound, but heavy storms came through yesterday, leaving swaths of our area without power. This means I can’t post external links or do a whole lot of spiffy stuff on today’s post. Apologies!
Monday’s post, which looked like this:
… sounds like it was hard for many of you to read. I get that. It was hard to write.
I want to offer some actions and resources, as promised.
First, an extra big squeezy hug to those of you with currently or formerly incarcerated loved ones (including yourselves). I am honored that you felt seen by the jail post, and grateful you reached out. And I am so, so sorry you and your beloved/s are going through such pain. Please accept this bouquet of flowers and then skip to your lou, right on down to the photo of friends at the end of this post, the part where I say how much I love you.
Ok. For the rest of y’all: thank you for reading that post. Thank you for wondering “What can I DO?”
The first thing I invite you to do is to sit with your discomfort.
Sit with the unease, moral distress, pain, sadness.
Resist the urge(s) to ignore, run away, intellectualize, do do do, or throw money at the problem. Recognize and let your body (and soul) understand that our carceral state imposes violence on folks. In our names. With our money.
Then let it lead you to action.
Um. About that action.
Unfortunately having no electricity or wifi and writing on a cell phone means I can’t share external links.
Why? No idea! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
So this thread will be a three-fer.
I’ll post action steps and resources when electricity and wifi return. I pinky promise.
For now, I’ll share my own mild-in-comparison-to-jail experience of being locked up in a “secure facility.”
If you’ve read Believarexic you know that I spent 10 weeks in inpatient treatment for anorexia and bulimia (bulimarexia) in the winter of 1988-1989, when I was 15.
The treatment facility was a secure, private residential psychiatric facility.
Secure means it was locked. Locks all over the place.
Private means it wasn’t state run. But it does not mean it was fancy. It accepted medicare, medicaid, and insurance. It wasn’t one of those Malibu spa rehabs. It was a dark, depressing two-story building with musty, dung-colored carpets.
It had been converted from an old, fairly crappy hotel into a “hospital.”
While it was NOT fancy, I want to be very clear that, as difficult as being there was for me at the tine, it was NOT jail. Nope nope nopity nope.
Still, it learned me some things about power and control.
The gist of the place:
Patients at the hospital were a mix of “voluntary” and “involuntary” admissions.
My admission was technically voluntary, but because I was 15, I could not sign myself out. I was stuck for however long the psychiatrists said it took me to get better.
HOWEVER, I knew that average stay for eating disorder treatment lasted 1-4 months. I wanted to get better (weirdo!), so I figured it’d be on the short side of that.
But I didn’t get my discharge date until I six weeks in, and then I had another month to go.
I hated the not-knowing. Six weeks might not sound like long. But being in limbo was hellish for an anxious, to-do-list-making, calendar-diary keeping, FOMO-ing, straight-A-control-freakish, nervous wreck of a teenager.
Truly, every day in there felt like purgatory.
But! Importantly: never did I think I would be there for years or decades. My friends who’ve been inside tell me that that is a totally different survival mindset.
I also wasn’t scared for my physical safety.
And - the place was dingy, but clean.
These are all huge differences from any kind of incarceration. I know that.
Also important: I was a teenager. This means my family wasn’t relying on my income; I didn’t have children to care for. My family, school, and part-time job survived just fine without me. Probably they were glad to have a respite from dealing with my depressed and sickly ass.
Anyway. The EDU (Eating Disorder Unit) was one of six units. Units were locked. Nurses carried big, heavy, jangly jumbles of keys.
To leave units or go outside, you had to be escorted by staff through double-locked vestibules with loud bzzzzzzzz clannnkk remote locks.
We were searched carefully on admission and half-heartedly whenever we came back to the unit, but we were never strip-searched.
We weren’t allowed “sharps” like razors, tweezers, or scissors; no outside food; no dental floss; no glass picture frames; no stapled sheets of paper; no belts; no chemicals like hair spray. (You could sign your razor, floss, and hairspray out from the nurses’ station for an hour before breakfast.)
Basically, almost anything you could potentially hurt yourself with was a no-no.
Halls and common areas stayed brightly lit 24/7. Your bedroom door had to stay ajar at all times, including through the night. But our bedroom doors weren’t thick metal jail-cell doors with loud locks. They were your average hollow-core, cheap hotel door.
Nurses checked on you and the light bulbs in your room hourly through the night, but they tried to be quiet and not wake you up until 6 AM.
We had twin beds, desks, chairs, reading lamps. Your average double-twin motel room.
The worst parts for me were particular to the EDU:
You had to eat everything on your tray and stay at the table and lounge for an hour after meals and snacks.
You couldn’t have visitors or call your family or anyone for a week. This felt like a lifetime. It especially sucked because my first week included the Thanksgiving holiday. Boooo. After that, there were limited visiting hours and one pay phone that had to be shared by everyone on the unit.
The worst: all bathrooms were on total lockdown 23/7. The hour before breakfast was the hour of bathroom freedom. Staff figured there was nothing in your stomach to purge.
So, 23 hours per day, you had to ask a nurse to unlock a bathroom to do your bidness.
You had to leave the door partly open while they stood outside and listened, often checking on you in the mirror.
Then they had to flush your toilet for you.
This was a nightmare for a girl with a shy bladder.
It was a special fresh hell on Tuesdays, when breakfast always included prune juice. Prune juice threw off the entire unit’s shit schedules - of course we had all trained our colons to poop in the hour of bathroom privacy before breakfast. Everyone hated Tuesdays — patients and nurses alike.
Oh, and imagine you’re a fifteen year old with your period — and your favorite male nurse gets to flush your toilet.
Yeah. No bueno. It still makes my stomach churn from embarrassment.
Although it was indeed humiliating and shame-inducing, again, I am under zero illusions that this was as restrictive or dehumanizing as being in jail or prison.
We were in heaven compared to jail.
We could have books, listen to music, see visitors (after the first week and at certain times), go out on supervised activities, watch TV in the lounge, take private daily showers (after we were medically cleared), and we could move freely between rooms within our unit.
The nurses carried heavy keychains, but they did not carry weapons.
Sure, there were metal grates on the windows, but our double bedrooms certainly weren’t locked jail cells.
Still, living under lock and key teaches you some things.
Distilling them down:
1. FREEDOM, POWER, AND POWERLESSNESS.
I learned that if you are locked up, you are nearly powerless.
Keys equal power.
No keys? No power.
You are at the mercy of the people who have the keys. Full stop.
2. ANYTHING YOU SAY OR DO, CAN AND WILL BE USED AGAINST YOU.
The people with the keys? They can twist, manipulate, misinterpret — intentionally or not — anything you say. Anything you do. A.n.y.t.h.i.n.g.
A look, a joke, a nervous twitch.
And you know what? The people with the keys are human.
Humans can be kind. Or they can be mean and power-hungry. And they can be arbitrary and capricious.
If a nurse or doctor decided they didn’t like you, there was zero you could do about it.
Advocating for yourself? Be careful. It usually makes things worse. Even if you are calm and your assertions are totally valid. Does not matter.
Complain to someone higher up?
Ha. Enjoy getting written up, having your hard-won privileges taken away, and / or being literally psychoanalyzed.
Example. I made the huge mistake of —brace yourselves — looking at the menu schedule posted in the nurses’ office.
GASP!!!
Yes, I confess: I was curious what was for dinner that day.
This did not seem like that big of a deal to me.
It also didn’t seem like that big of a deal to Chuck, the nurse who was actually nice.
But the head nurse? She thought it was a VERY big deal.
To her, it was “obsessive and diseased behavior” for a person to wonder what was for dinner.
I was like, “Well, why does the kitchen print the menu then?”
“For NORMAL, NON-DISEASED people, Jennifer.”
Uh-oh. All three syllables Jenn-i-fer is never good.
I got in MORE trouble.
Even though, I shit you not, I’d just come from Assertiveness Training class.
Apparently there was a big difference being assertive and being diseased. Depending on the nurse.
Anything could be like that. Anything.
Fun times!
3. PERSPECTIVE.
As much as I was in a pit of my own despair, I did get thrown into a veritable abyss of perspective.
The worst of my problems - clinical depression, anxiety, OCD, self-harm, alcohol abuse, and a raging eating disorder - these were the least of many of the other patients’ problems.
Sure, I had witnessed poverty and child abuse growing up. I went to public school in a very poor, rural county. I wasn’t completely sheltered or naïve.
But here?
Here I was on a unit with a girl who had been impregnated and then pushed down the stairs to miscarry, by her father.
I shared a room with a teen whose parents padlocked the refrigerator and wired her jaw shut.
Down the hall were folks with psychosis and schizophrenia. At night we could hear them screaming in misery and confusion.
Whoo doggy.
As much as I did need help, and as dysfunctional as my family might have seemed in our family therapy sessions, I knew I would eventually be okay. I knew my family loved me. That’s huge.
4. HUMAN ADAPTABILITY.
I learned that you can get used to almost anything.
I learned the utility of telling yourself, “Hey. Self. Baby girl. It could always be worse.”
It could always be worse. You can get used to having the period shits and farts in front of a male nurse and watching while he has to check and flush your toilet.
You can get used to waiting at every door for someone with keys.
You can get used to just deciding to keep your mouth shut so the bitchy nurse doesn’t write you up for the joke you think is actually quite hilarious.
You can get used to having to chew, swallow, and pray not to gag, bite by bite through a tray loaded down with clumpy powdered eggs, gelatinous cream of wheat, prune juice, and other disgusting things, all served at oh-so-delightful room temperature.
In tons of ways, our ability to adapt is a good thing.
It means, among other things, that I can cultivate the ability to enjoy camping. (That joke is for you, Noah, Andrea, and David.)
But/and human adaptability is also very dangerous.
Like the frog that doesn’t know it’s being boiled alive while the heat increases by degrees, adaptability can inure us to things we should never, ever get used to.
Like, say, the conditions we are subjecting people to in jail and prison.
4. FAITH AND THE GOOD THING.
You know what makes almost anything survivable?
Finding at least one good friend.
It changes everything.
A good laugh. A subversive glance behind a nurse’s back. A sly wink.
Someone to talk to. Someone to listen.
It really does change everything.
You know what else helps?
If you have some kind of faith to draw upon. Doesn’t have to be religious, stated, or make a whole lot of sense. It doesn’t have to be much.
A little dab’ll do ya.
If you can have a deep down, can’t-explain-it feeling that somewhere, somehow, even when you feel most unloveable - you are a child of the Universe. Beloved. Beautiful. Holy.
Prune juice poo or no.
It helps.
So -
I hope each of you has at least one good friend.
And I hope maybe you feel my friendship coming through these words to you.
I hope you feel beloved and treasured by something way, way bigger. Way big. So big it’s downright unknowable. Infinite, even.
Whatever that means to you, however you conceive of it.
Much love to each and all of you.
Thanks for reading.
XOXO
Gosh, JJ, I am just loving your posts, though they do raise uncomfortable, empathetic feelings. I can feel how sharp and immediate these memories are for you, thirty-five years away. Your observations about human adaptability being a double-edged sword were pointed and poignant (though I don’t understand adapting to camping; I’ve never been able to get there). Thank you for pecking this out on your phone during a blackout. Sending you love.
Thank you, Gabrielle!!!