Well, friends… did I ever think I’d end up in a psychiatric hospital again?

Absolutely not.

And yet, here I fucking am.

If you think I’m joking when I say my life somehow turns into a complete shitshow every single day. I’m not. At this point I’ve stopped exaggerating. Reality does a perfectly good job on its own.

Yes, yes, yes, yes, I know. This is my own fault. Funny thing about free will while you’re making a decision, it feels like you can choose anything. A few hours later you realize the freedom part is over, and now all that’s left are the consequences. Maybe that’s what philosophers meant when they talked about responsibility. I couldn’t cope. I took those damn pills. Now I’m dealing with the fallout of my own impulsiveness.

One unexpected discovery, though psychiatric hospitals in Poland and Belarus are worlds apart. Comparing them is like comparing a hotel to a prison camp.

Here I can use my phone. There’s Wi-Fi, a smoking room, a TV, a library, a hair dryer, and every room has its own bathroom and shower. In Belarus, there weren’t even doors on the ward. Orderlies sat outside the room, and you had to ask permission just to use the bathroom. We were allowed outside for about thirty minutes a day, always under supervision. Never thought I’d end up writing reviews of psychiatric hospitals, but apparently life enjoys experimenting with different genres.

Yesterday my friend dropped off a bag with clothes, some food, and a few books. Turns out it doesn’t take much to feel a little less alone. Sometimes it’s enough just to know that someone remembered you.

It’s raining outside. My bed is right next to the window. There are two elderly women and two yоunger girls in my room.

One of the girls seems to have serious bowel problems, so the rest of us unwillingly get front-row seats to the entire digestive process.

The woman sleeping next to me snores like she’s trying to start a tractor every night. I honestly tried making earplugs out of toilet paper. It was an optimistic experiment. It failed. Even with sleeping pills, I barely slept.

The people here have actually been surprisingly kind. They introduced themselves almost immediately, offered me cigarettes, and even offered me clothes when they saw I had been brought here wearing whatever they found me in. Funny how sometimes you find more basic human decency inside a psychiatric hospital than outside of one.

I don’t remember much about the day I took the pills. I remember sitting on a bench in the park. I remember watching a squirrel jumping through the trees. Then the ambulance. For some reason, I vividly remember shouting that doctors weren’t taking away my driver’s license. 😅 Then IV drips. After that… nothing. I woke up in the ICU at around two in the morning.

Everything else comes back in scattered flashes. Conversations with doctors. Pink flowers that looked exactly like that little pink flower emoji on an iPhone (🌸)

Whether they were real or my brain decided invented that after all those pills, I honestly have no idea. Memory is strange. It quietly erases the things that actually matter but hangs on to squirrels, flowers, and completely meaningless details.

The food here is terrible. Breakfast was semolina porridge so runny it could have passed for soup. Two slices of meat, which were completely wasted on me because I’m vegetarian. Two packets of butter. A single lettuce leaf. And terrible coffee 🤢

Today I had an ECG and another conversation with the psychiatrist. The plan now is simple: read, wait until Monday, and hope the doctor agrees to let me go home.

Because my cats are waiting for me.

One thing I genuinely like about this place is that if you’re hospitalized, social workers can actually go to your home, feed your cats, walk your dog, or water your plants. I think that’s one of the most humane ideas I’ve come across in a long time. Belarus didn’t have anything like that.

Physically, I’m doing much better. Mentally… not quite yet. I just want to go home. Hug my cats. Sleep in my own bed.

Maybe desire is the strangest thing about being human. The moment something becomes part of our everyday life, we almost stop seeing it. But take it away, and suddenly it becomes the only thing we want. Maybe the value of anything isn’t determined by what it is, but by the distance between us and it. That might be why happiness is so difficult to hold onto we get used to yesterday’s happiness so quickly that we immediately start looking for the next one. All the while, the thing we were searching for was quietly waiting for us back home, curled up on the bed, wondering when we’d finally come back.