I self-harmed again.
I don’t know how to soften that sentence, so I won’t. The voices had been getting louder over the past few days, and by the time last night arrived, I felt like I was sitting inside a machine that had forgotten how to turn off. The voices spat names, promises, and warnings. I felt stripped down to the bone.
I felt very different when I finally reached the emergency clinic. I felt a strange kind of silence. The clinic also has this certain kind of sharp, clean, and distant smell, like metal and ethanol mixed with something human you can’t quite name.
The doctor dressed my arm. The antiseptic smell almost made me cry. It wasn’t the pain. It was the calmness of someone just doing their job, like this kind of wound is a line they cross daily.
I said very little.
She moved with quiet precision: cotton, gauze, tape, done. I watched her hands instead of her face, the way they didn’t tremble, the way they had probably done this hundreds of times before.
When asked, I told her that I had trouble sleeping lately. So, she gave me quetiapine for the night, said it would help me sleep, help quiet things down. Quiet—how strange that calm could come from a pill. I nodded, pretending I understood what that kind of quiet might feel like.
It did quiet things down. Not completely, but enough for a few hours of dreamless black.
I was called back again today.
I sat in the waiting hall. The chairs are half-blue, half-grey, always a bit sticky from disinfectant. People came and went. There was a faint hum of people: footsteps, the shuffle of coats, the soft thud of doors closing.
I was shaking my legs violently, as if the movement could drain something out of me. It’s obviously the side effect of the meds, but in that moment, it felt more like a quiet rebellion of the body against the calm it was being forced into. I kept repeating to myself that I just needed to show up, say things were “okay enough,” get my prescription, and leave.
Then she walked by.
Dr. H.
Dr. H is the boss of the doctors. Not the final boss, but the penultimate one. She wasn’t supposed to see me. Not today, not like that. She was crossing the hall with a bunch of people following her, probably heading to some meeting, when her eyes caught mine.
It wasn’t even a full second. But I waved — half out of politeness, half out of this feeling that exclaims, “Hey, I know you, do you remember me?”. She stopped, turned, and in that moment, she recognized me.
She scanned me, head to toe. Not judgmentally, just… clinically, but with a sort of quiet alarm. Like when a scientist suddenly realizes the experiment isn’t stable anymore.
“I think you need to be treated here with us,” she came very closed to me and whispered. “Every week we have a meeting, and your name came up, and I recognized you.”
I froze. There was no way to hide the exhaustion. “Umm,” I said, “I know, but I’ve taken too much work at the university. I can’t afford to be admitted.”
She tilted her head. “You don’t even have a week?”
I laughed a little. The brittle kind of laugh that tries to sound normal but isn’t. “I’m very sceptical,” I said. “I have too much on my plate.”
She looked at me for a moment, not impatient, not surprised. Just quietly studying me, as if to check whether I actually believed what I was saying.
“How is it going with university?” she asked. “Concentration and all?”
I looked down at my shoes. “I know it’s very bad,” I said, “but I have to manage, I guess.”
She sighed… not dramatically, just the kind of sigh that comes from someone who already knows how the story goes. “You need to come here,” she said. “Otherwise it’s not going to work. Taking meds at home only will not work.”
And she was right. I knew she was right.
But still, I said, “Okay, I’ll think about it.”
When she walked away, I stared at the door she had disappeared through. I wanted to disappear with her, into whatever place she thought “here” meant. Into a place where the voices would quiet down, where I could stop pretending I’m managing. But I also wanted to leave, to run back to my messy desk, my emails, my lab notes, the fragile scaffolding of “normal life” I’ve built around myself.
Later, when I got in with the doctor I was actually scheduled to see, she asked how last night was. I told her, “It was okay. I heard voices, but I guess this is what we have to deal with.”
She didn’t flinch. She just nodded, wrote something down. Then she asked what I thought about Dr. H.’s suggestion.
I said, “I have a presentation on the 17th. After that, I can come for the treatment.”
She said that sounded like a good plan.
So, I guess I’ll be spending half of November in the hospital.
There’s a strange kind of relief in saying it out loud like I’m signing a temporary peace treaty with myself. A break in the war I keep fighting quietly. But that is not the truth, the truth is, I’m tired. Tired in the bones. The kind of tired that makes even sleep feel like work.
It’s not that I don’t want to get better. It’s that I don’t know what “better” looks like anymore. There was a time when I thought it meant finishing my degree, publishing papers, working in clean labs with humming instruments. That it meant returning to a stable graph, a steady equilibrium. But lately, “better” just means no trying to figure out in what ways that my brain sometimes can turn against me.
Quetiapine helps in the way a heavy blanket helps during a thunderstorm; it muffles the noise, but the thunder is still there, somewhere behind the fabric.
When Dr. H. said, “taking meds at home will not work,” I think she meant something deeper. Not just about medication, but about the illusion of self-sufficiency. I’ve spent so much time trying to keep my illness quiet, to make it coexist with my studies like it’s just another variable to be controlled. But it isn’t. It leaks into everything. Into my attention, my sleep, my relationships (if I have any), my words.
And maybe that’s what scares me about being admitted; the idea of finally stopping. Because stopping means facing it. It means being seen without the usual props of productivity or competence.
Still, part of me knows I need to go.
I think about how small the world becomes when you’re afraid of your own thoughts. How even your own name can feel foreign, like it belongs to someone else who’s gone missing.
I picked up my phone to call my sister, but couldn’t tell if the phone was real. Everything blurred, as if the room had rotated slightly out of alignment. I remember trying to breathe slowly, but the air felt like dream.
That’s when the idea of hurting myself stopped feeling like a “bad idea” and started feeling like a way to see again, to prove the world was still solid. It’s hard to explain that logic to anyone who hasn’t lived inside it. It’s not about wanting to die. It’s about wanting something to feel real.
But afterward, all I felt was shame.
“You don’t even have a week?”
It’s a simple sentence, but it carries weight. She wasn’t asking about time; she was asking about permission. Permission to let myself rest, to stop performing survival as if it’s an assignment due at midnight.
The truth is, no one at the university will really remember whether I missed a week in November. But I will. I’ll remember if I pushed myself into another breakdown just to finish a slide deck.
There’s a quiet cruelty in how academia measures success. You have to show attendance, output, meet deadlines. As if mental health can be scheduled around presentations. I’ve tried to keep up. I’ve tried to be the student who can balance both worlds: the lab and the clinic. But the truth is, the voices don’t care about deadlines. They come when they want, and they don’t stop just because I have class at 8:30.
I am very worried about my university work. I am afraid I will fail courses if I get admitted and lose the most of my valuable time in the university. Every week feels crucial now, every lecture, every lab, every piece of progress. The idea of stepping away, even for a short while, feels like letting everything I’ve been holding together start to fall apart.
But if I do get admitted, maybe that’s okay. Maybe this is the kind of experiment that requires surrender. To stop running the test alone, to let the others observe, adjust, intervene. Maybe, maybe “treatment” isn’t failure.