Flotsam

While I was in the hospital, I had occupational therapy for an hour each day. Allegedly, occupational therapy is designed to assist people in developing “skills for the job of living.” For writers, I suppose this means accepting rejection and mixing drinks.
You might expect a term like “occupational therapy” to include things like cooking and job interview skills. What you might not expect to be included is, say, substantial amounts of macramé. Or rug hooking.

But in my experience in the mental health world, “occupational therapy” (or “OT”) is simply a fancy phrase for time spent in a room with the best-stocked art supply cabinets you have ever seen, presided over by an invariably young woman with an invariably gentle manner. Oddly, after the drugs and my relentless jokiness, occupational therapy was the single most helpful piece of my treatment. Maybe because it gave me something to do with my hands, probably because it focused my mind on something other that my own quivering psyche. We had OT in the morning, after meds had been handed out, presumably so that everyone would be suitably mellow to be allowed access to an awl. During my first session, I made a leather coin purse for my friend Maggie, hand-stamped with the words “Greetings from the Bell Jar!”

After I was discharged from the hospital, I faced a rapidly changing landscape. One of the circumstances precipitating my decline was the dramatic abdication of the person with whom I was living, leaving me unable to afford the rent on our spacious 4-bedroom apartment. Shortly after I left the hospital, I moved into a small studio and began rebuilding my life more or less from scratch. I jettisoned the bankrupt magazine I had been holding together with my patented mix of denial and chutzpah, and returned to freelancing from home, convenient because it meant my employers could not see my tinfoil hat.

I kept myself to a strict routine, waking shortly after four in the morning, not because I was eager to begin the day, but because I was unable to sleep any longer. I took a daily sunrise walk around my new neighborhood; headphones plugged securely into my ears, I took deep, sharp breaths, and gazed at the lights of the capitol building from my vantage point on a crumbling slice of pavement. I always ended my walk at the cathedral, where I entered through a side door and knelt before a statue I did not recognize, lighting a candle for my sanity before I made my way into the main sanctuary and sunk into a pew. I am not a Christian, but the cathedral at quarter to five in the morning was empty, and its high ceilings calmed me. More particularly, I liked to stare upwards at a painting on the ceiling, of an angel bearing a banner that read “PERSERVERANCE.” Then I left through the main doors, coming out onto the cathedral steps with the whole city spread mistily before me.
Back in my apartment, I fried myself an egg and listened to Dinah Washington. Then I listened to a bit of Pearl Bailey and played Idiot’s Delight, sitting at the tiny wire bistro table I had salvaged and painted a sunny yellow.

Eventually I would look at the clock and see that it was only seven a.m., and a wave of panic would slosh through me. More than twelve hours left in the day. Sure, I could kill a few of those by watching ER and Law & Order, but then there was only silence until Dr. Phil and Oprah.

Two months after my stint as an inpatient, I signed up for a day-treatment program run by another local hospital. It was a group program that met three days a week, from nine a.m. to noon. I was subject to a long intake process to facilitate my placement among compatible patients, which is how I ended up in a group composed almost entirely of over-educated loudmouths, with a few quiet types thrown in so that there would be someone who could listen WITHOUT INTERRUPTING. Each three-hour day was composed of hour-long blocks of group therapy, mental health education, and occupational therapy.

I do not think it is exaggerating to say that this group saved my life. I suspect that it was the simple act of getting out of the house three days a week and speaking to other humans, but the occupational therapy didn’t hurt.
I made a small wooden box with a tiled lid for my brother, a copper etching for my mother, and a prettily glazed bowl for Frances. I looked forward to sitting, companionably sanding a teacup, with people who didn’t think it was odd that I woke from every nap with a wildly pumping heart. And when I left the program after three months, and returned to my finally blossoming new life, this enforced occupation was the one coping skill I practiced over and over. During the bleak, flattening hours between five and seven in the evening, I would paint at the small table in my studio apartment. I was not much of an artist, but there was something both satisfying and absorbing about mixing paint colors and applying them to canvas.

By that point, I was happy, perhaps even happier than I had been in years. As it turned out, living alone agreed with me, and there is nothing like a receding nervous breakdown to make a girl appreciate the color of the trees, and the way the sun reliably rises each and every morning. You would never know I had been ill, except for the handful of pills I took each day and my self-enforced occupational therapy, which had the advantage of appearing to others as merely a hobby.

Here are a few of the things I painted during this time:

1. “Self-Portrait Sans Phone Call:”

2. This painting, of a severed head, came after watching a bit too much I, Claudius:

3. And this one, painted after I discovered gold leaf, was the favorite of a man I started dating less than six months later.
It would be the first present I ever gave him, and it hangs in the house we share today:

To be Continued…