blooming where planted

Nine months after graduating from MIT in 2018, I uprooted my life in Boston to teach math at an innovative new school in California, leaving my boyfriend, friends, and family behind, not to mention my unfinished master’s in education.

Much like at a startup, I had many unanticipated responsibilities at my new job where I was one, and the only full-time, of two math teachers for the middle and upper school.

You can imagine how well that went.

Planning four different classes, holding weekly meetings with advisees, writing full syllabi for accreditation, and revamping the school’s assessment and evaluation system as a first year teacher is a feat I could only pull off for so long.

Just before Christmas break this past year, I felt the effects of my mental health wearing down over the fall term, and with little chance of dramatic reduction in my workload in the coming months, I handed in my resignation. This is not something that any teacher, let alone new teacher, wants to do. I felt I had failed my students, their parents, my parents, my colleagues, and myself. I planned to return for one more week after the break to say goodbye to my students and colleagues, help transition a new teacher, and move out of my apartment. While home on the east coast for the holidays, the guilt and shame I felt for deciding to leave my students in the middle of the school year gave me trouble sleeping—so much so that I slept for two hours or less a night for a stretch of ten days. As you can imagine, this had both severe physiological and psychological effects, which I captured in the poem below.

Voices everywhere

Speaking in their ears—

Why do I even try?

I can’t run,

No one can.

No, not from the FBI.

They’re walking her through

Step by step

To get me to confess

That I steal and cheat and lie.

They’ve gotten to my mother

And they’re using her to lure me

Back to the airport where surely

I will be deported.

I never felt the plane take off—

This flight’s a simulation.

I can only imagine what’s in store

If I don’t confess before

We “land in New York”.

I get in the car

And stare at the screen

Just like they wanted.

Then we arrive.

Do you know where you are?

No idea,

But I know it’s not a hospital.

I’ve brought about the end of the world,

And their only option is to kill me.

Who knows what will happen, but

Maybe a pill can save humanity.

I told you she won’t take it.

My mouth is tightly shut.

So let’s do the injection.

I know my time is up.

Are you hearing any voices?

What a silly question.

Of course I was, and to me they were real.

How could I know they’re not there?

I remember everything from my psychotic episode. How it felt being watched by strangers, thinking my friends had been turned by the FBI to help capture me. For what crime, who knows? But I did know they were after me, and that’s all that mattered to my sleep-deprived brain.

Flashes on my in-flight screen meant my picture was being taken. The luggage carousel starting up the moment I got there meant that someone had planted something illicit in my bag. I read into every coincidence, and it’s fascinating to me now that I was simultaneously hyperaware and exhausted beyond anything I had ever experienced. Miraculously, I made it to my friend’s housewarming party from the airport, though not undetected, I suspected my Lyft had been co-opted by the Feds.

After a friend at the housewarming was able to get in touch with my parents, my mom flew out to bring me back to the east coast, specifically to Stony Brook University Hospital. But for the first week I was there, I was convinced otherwise.

Imagine entering the ER, having an IV, getting blood drawn and a cat scan, and then being separated from your family all while your brain is projecting a narrative straight out of a psychological thriller. If you’ve ever seen A Beautiful Mind, it’s a bit like that, though the movie is dramatized.

This is to say, a psych ward wasn’t exactly the best setting for putting my paranoid mind at ease.

One big circular hallway housed all the rooms, and there was a nurses’ station in the middle. Rooms were singles or doubles. No locks on doors, but there was a window in each without bars. My current thinking is that it wasn’t possible to open them, but I didn’t dare try because I didn’t want to be there any longer than I had to. Hemisphere video cameras were posted on the ceilings outside individual rooms. Murals covered the hall—painted by whom, I don’t know—that’s not the sort of thing I thought about when I was there.

After a week and a half without much response to medication, I underwent a round of ECT (electroconvulsive therapy) treatment. The doctor administering the procedure induces a safe seizure while the patient is under anesthesia. You can think of the treatment as a kind of manual reset for the brain. My second treatment was the one that flipped the switch for me. Upon waking up, I realized where I was. I no longer felt paranoia pulling me deeper into the intricate story I had crafted. The hospital became just a hospital again, and the people there were trying to help me, rather than torture me as I had believed.

In due time I was able to go home with my family, but I had a lifetime of recovery ahead of me: anxiety and depression, as I was diagnosed with, don’t just go away overnight. They’re chronic mental health issues that may lie dormant for some time, but there is always the chance of recurrence.

The plan was to stay home and continue treatment with medication and therapy with a local psychiatrist and therapist until I found providers back in Boston. After discussing further with my family, we decided that it would also be the best time for me to get foot surgery for the bunions that had been making exercise painful for me for a few months. So foot number one was done in February, and I was hoping to be back in Boston before the end of May.

My closest friends and my boyfriend came to visit me in the first few weekends I was home, and in that time I rediscovered an old craft that my grandfather had taught me. We pulled out a few of his miniature flower crafting kits one weekend and spent hours making teeny tiny daisies. My situation didn’t seem so bad as long as I could see my friends. That is, up until New York went on lockdown due to the rapid spread of a novel coronavirus.

That’s when I filled up my time by diving as far as I could into my newly rediscovered interests of crafting and writing. I had written poetry on and off since middle school, but I had been practicing more regularly for the few months before my episode. And as if I didn’t get enough the first time around, I signed up for three online classes from MIT on the free online education platform edX.

When I said that a switch had flipped after my second ECT treatment, I really meant it. I was back to having a full slate of things to keep me busy, just as I had done in high school, college, and the couple years after. This time was different though because it was all on my terms. Thanks to medication and therapy, I had the ability now to let go of things more easily and not hold myself to as high of a standard. These were the two greatest skills I could have learned, as the months-long quarantine transformed into a freeing experience for me. I recognize my extreme privilege when I say that, as I know I was in a position where my family could support me when much of the country did not have such support.

This is raw

This is real

All these things

I feel

Free

Freer even

In this time of

Restriction

Keeps my mind

From straying

Far from myself

I was before

I spent this time

Inside

My soul

Is content

And that

That is

Time well spent

After being in the hospital and having had two nearly back-to-back foot surgeries during the time that followed, it’s safe to say that I’d been rooted firmly in place since the beginning of the year. Many poems and miniature flower arrangements later, I write this now from my new home in Boston—still mostly indoors—but getting as much fresh air as I can.

I’ve been continuing the coursework I began online in statistics and data science with the hope that by the time this is published, I will have landed a job in educational data analysis. I do picture myself returning back to the classroom to teach one day, though only after a break and only when I feel ready.

All the while, I’ve been holding out for the off-chance that I make it big in the poetry world. Joking aside, I do have the goal of publishing a book, and I’ve been working on a manuscript over the past few months. The more seriously I take it, the more excited I get and the more real the idea becomes.

What matters most to me is the outlet and creative freedom of writing, and only recently have I worked up the courage to put it out there. Not only that, but I want to. I’ve heard from friends—long lost, close, and everything in between—that they’ve been reading and following along. Some tell me I’ve managed to put previously indescribable feelings into words for them. And that’s where my desire to share comes from—to be together in my experiences with others, and I, a part of theirs. That togetherness, sharing in something so as not to feel alone, it has become one of the primary reasons why I write, closely following my own need for processing and expression.

If you’re reading this, know that I am doing better than I ever have.

If tomorrow starts without me,

Know that I didn’t take my life.

Something else, sure,

But it wasn’t suicide.

Depression couldn’t kill me

Because help came just in time.

Thank you to my friend

Who knew that things were wrong.

Thank you to my mom

For flying for so long.

Thank you to my love