Amy Dillon
ENG 484
2/12/19
Workshop Story
Boredom
Introduction
Mental Illness is something that many teenagers have to deal with. Having friends or acquaintances with mental illness, as an adolescent, had become something new for me in high school. Before my experience with it, I had branded a stigma on people my age who were diagnosed with bipolar disorder, clinical depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, and other mental illnesses. When I went to the hospital in my sophomore year of high school, a whole new world was opened for me. I felt like I became part of a new group of people, of friends: those with mental illnesses. Before that, I would have turned my nose up on them, but after my first few days in the hospital, I had found something new to belong to.
Being in the hospital meant going to groups, talking with my doctor, and being social with the other patients. It was during these times that I felt I had opened up a whole new branch of being; a new thing to focus my attention on: in the short run, getting out of the hospital, in the long run, overcoming my mental illness and finding a way to cope with my problems. This came, however, after a long era of boredom- when I didn’t know what to do with my time, the result of that being walking the halls after school, taking the activities school bus home out of boredom. Eventually, my illness led me to solidarity, a point at which I should have been most bored, but instead, it was during this time that I used to find myself.
I. My Strongest Memories from Loyola Academy
I stopped in the bathroom before speech class starts. I had four minutes and thirteen seconds to pull my hair back and grab my stuff my locker, that was right outside of class.
I looked at my self in the mirror. My freckles were gone from summer because it was winter. My eyes were red from pulling an all-nighter. The roots of my red hair were greasy, as I hadn’t had the time to take a shower that morning. My lips were chapped, and my collar was folded the opposite way on the left side, so I fixed it. I just needed to grab my German II book before going to speech class.
The seats in speech class formed a circle. The quiet chatter before class flooded my ears. It was just us sophomores and Mr. Richards. My speech teacher posted clip art characters of students standing behind podiums giving speeches. To my left sat Willie, a short kid in the honors program who constantly recited quotes from The Simpsons, and to my right was Kevin, a short, red-haired kid that hit the mark of at least five jokes per day in the classes I saw him in. He was in trigonometry sophomore year, and the day before the big midterm speech, when we needed to show the class how to do or make something, I saw him studying for a trig test, his hands over his ears, his head hung low over his textbook. This was how I saw most of the smart kids study: they blocked everything out and tried to concentrate, even if there was the hum of noise surrounding them. I used to study in this manner, in junior high, when I didn’t have anything else on my mind. At that point in my life, however, the October when I was fifteen years old, I had just been diagnosed with clinical depression and bipolar disorder, so studying was something I didn’t think about (because I had other things on my mind), even though the fact that I could get kicked out of Loyola Academy for failing grades was apparent.
Sometimes Kevin, the best speech-giver of the class, would arrive late to class, coming from the nurse’s office. “Sorry, I had to take my medicine,” he would mention as he slipped into his chair and placed his North Face book bag on the floor. That was a big transition for me, going from junior high to high school: everything in style was much more expensive and much more conservative. Also, I was the only girl from my grammar school of St. Monica’s to go to Loyola Academy. My mom bought me some Tommy Hilfiger shirts from Kohl’s, but I still didn’t feel like I belonged. I had never even heard of Abercrombie and Fitch when I started at Loyola Academy, a high school in Wilmette, but Kevin had. He was always decked out, head to toe, in Abercrombie and Fitch, with the exception of the rules of the dress code at Loyola: no patched pockets and only collared shirts. My first year I became acquainted with to the preppy style of clothing (flared khakis without back pockets, Lacoste polos, etc.) but in sophomore year, I started to look for something more to worry about, besides how to dress. I remained a quiet kid, listening to what was going on, taking in the energy and excitement, and with Kevin in the room, there was always energy and excitement. I had just met Kevin last year, when we were both freshman, but I felt like I knew him well the beginning of sophomore year. When I became more acquainted with my peers, I began to realize there was a whole other side to school besides rules and regulations about how to dress, how to conform. I found the boredom, the need for excitement, that lay in the partially lit hallways by the caf, by the library. I began to realize that we were all looking for something to follow. For me, I was hoping to follow the dream of a memorable high school experience, something that I didn’t know if I would be able to achieve.
II My Sister Courtney
My first memory is me sitting alone in the back seat of my dad’s car: a rusty red Ford that my uncle had given him before I was born. I was four years old and I had a mermaid Barbie doll in my hand, and the seat to my left was empty. The sunlight flooded through the window and into my eyes, partially blinding me. This made me feel alive. My parents were talking, and I was the only one sitting in the back seat, with nothing to do but braid the Barbie doll’s hair and look at the passing cars and houses.
I have good memories of traveling in my parents’ cars as a child. The other cars would pass us slowly, calmly; and seconds later my Dad would quickly drive by those cars; peacefully and calmly. Sometimes we would cruise down the Kennedy Expressway, in the Northwest side of Chicago, coming from the exit by Sayre Ave., and we would pass the house with a castle for a garage. The yellow lines lining the road whizzed by me as my arm hung low out the passenger’s side window, but I still felt safe, because my parents were there, and they could make anything wrong better. I could only see the back of the house with the castle for a garage. I had never seen the front of the house, and I wondered if it was like the garage, but from what little I could see, it wasn’t like the garage. It was just a normal house, with a garden window sticking out the side, decorated with a tall scarecrow and three pumpkins on the porch, for Halloween. That meant to me that whoever built it didn’t have intentions in mind as to whether people would see it, if you don’t count that backside view from the highway. This spectacle was just one of the many things that amazed me as a child. It fed that thing in me that needed to be challenged, that thing being something that I would understand when I was older- the reality that sometimes things just stick out. As a younger child it was something magical, as an adult the castle would be an abstraction, something people would laugh at. A castle on the highway? Not possible! But it was fun to look at. That was how I felt about the Scary Jesus Statue that was in front of a house on Foster, the closest busy street by my house. Scary Jesus was encased in a box that lit up at night. He wasn’t a concrete statue, but more like an oversized doll, with brown hair and a glowing halo overhead. His toes jutted out from under his gown and he held out his hands, as if to say, What are you looking at? Instead of, Follow Me, I am your Savior.
The person I connected with the most as a child was my sister, Courtney. She was four years younger than me. We went to the same school, we had shared a room since she was able to sleep in a bed. We had a way of communicating with each other, even without talking; just with a glance, a look. My most vivid memory of my sister and me was of her and I in my dad’s car’s backseat, as my dad took us through a McDonald’s drive-through. The seats were sweaty, as the AC didn’t work, and my dad had just shoved down the Jeep’s side windows down, so that we could stay cool with the gushing wind that followed us. “Are orange sodas okay?” he asked, turning to face us, his arm around the front passenger seat. My sister and I looked at each other, and we both nodded, yes, even though our favorite soft drink was Coca-Cola. We didn’t want to hurt his feelings, to deny the custom of driving through McDonalds and getting Happy Meals with orange sodas, because orange sodas were his favorite drink. He would be hurt if we didn’t agree. It was a thing we did, it was our way of hanging out, of showing the person behind the register, the people behind us who saw the orange sodas being passed from the building into the car, that my family and I had our own way of doing things. My sister and I giggled while we waited for the exchange to take place, while my dad bopped his head to the song on the Classic Rock station. Did he notice us laughing? We noticed him singing.
“Thanks, Dad,” I said as he passed the boxed happy meals and orange sodas back to my sister and I.
When I was in third grade my sister and I started to not be afraid of my upstairs, particularly my attic. Before the emptiness and silence terrified me, but once I got a bit older, the phobia seemed to fade away. Before then it seemed just like a big, empty space, but a few toys later it was the happening place to be. Before my parents turned it into a bedroom for my sister and me, it was a big and empty space, with the exception of some toys that were kept there. I have a memory of building a fort with red cardboard blocks, and halfway there, I had felt a gust of wind from the drafty window facing my eastern most neighbor. My attention at the moment was directed towards my American Doll, Molly, the red head from the 1940’s, and she was sitting on top if a fort I had made out of carboard boxes. I twirled her hair in my hand before the first gust of wind hit me. As a kindergartener I considered the gust of wind to be my imaginary friend, saying hello with a gush of cold, but as a third grader I just considered it to be the cold, an angry visitor that brought in the outside to the inside. I stopped what I was doing, froze, and slowly turned around, with hopes of not finding the cable that hung from the top of the roof jutting from the window. We had never touched it before, and we probably never would, but it was a thing my sister and I used to talk about; running away from home in the middle of the night by sliding down the cable, falling into the gang way, and hopping over the fence. We never really knew the purpose of the cable. It was exciting to think of, running away, and I used to day dream of things like that to defeat the boredom that hung over me, like the N’Sync poster plastered over my bed.
My parents spent a lot of money fixing up the biggest room upstairs to make it a bedroom for my sister and me. It had gray confetti carpet and two window boxes without places to sit. When I wanted to be alone, I would sit down in the window box space with a book or magazine, with my neon-yellow boom box on full blast, on B96 or Kiss FM, and I would just relax. I hung out by myself a lot when I was in junior and senior year, as the symptoms of my clinical depression seemed to ease up a bit. When it was nice out, at night, I stuck my head out the window of the window box, to be one with the silence of the side street.
“Hello, world,” I shouted out on more than one occasion to the night sky. Oak trees furrowed the street that was lined with SUVs and statin wagons. Almost directly across from me was a mansion that did not belong on the block that I lived: a block away from Foster Ave., the nearest busy street. It had Spanish tiles on the roof, a messy front garden that was covered with weeds, and a patio on the side. An old lady who was in her eighties lived there. She paid me to shovel for her in the winter and to take care of her cat occasionally while she visited her granddaughter in Dallas. The mansion was always silent. I could tell it was silent just by looking at it, even when I had my radio on.
Before the upstairs bedroom was remodeled, my sister and me and my best friend Stefanie would spend a lot of time in the older part of the attic. There were rolls of fiber glass in the corner, boxes of Christmas ornaments in another, and the old couches that my mom had inherited from my grandma next to the window that showed the backyard and alley. There was also a ladder with two steps that went up to a place that no one had ever seen before. It probably led up to more storage space, but we always imagined that it led up to some other hidden room. We never got the courage to climb up it, and it was left, unexperienced, when my family and I moved in 2004, a block away from my old home (we moved so that I could have my own in-law in the basement). While we didn’t have the courage to climb the ladder, we did have the courage to try to enter other worlds, ghostly worlds, like in the movie Beetlejuice. One night, Stefanie took a gray piece of rock from the alley that substituted as chalk, when she was sleeping over at my house. It was gray like the alley pavement, jagged with shiny pieces of crystal sticking out of it. We ran from the alley up the porch stairs, and then up the stairs that led to the attic. We scrambled through the entry to the attic, to the right. Stefanie sat down on the wooden floor and stared at the ground, collecting her thoughts. She took a deep breath in and then sketched a rectangle with a circle in the middle on the ground. “After we draw it, we need to knock three times,” she said. And so, we did. Stefanie knocked once, I knocked once, and then Courtney knocked once. Nothing ever happened, of course, but the thrill of the hunt (of ghosts) flowed through my blood like unleashed tigers, or ghosts, for that matter.
“What are we supposed to do while we wait?” Courtney said, and Stefanie and I both laughed.
“Let’s try again,” I said, and we knocked on the door, to find nothing but the need to try it again.
III. My Best Friend Lisa
My friend Lisa lived two blocks from my new and old house. Before the time of cellphones, we dabbled with walkie-talkies, but after a few days of static, we decided that land line phones served better purpose. Lisa’s house was a bit worn in but comfortable. My sister and I started to be friends with her in grammar school, after we had attended an after-school program with her, her Mom being a supervisor. As soon as we realized we lived a block away from each other, we clicked. I would go to her house after school, and also during the summer when we had nothing to do. After school we would spread out all of our books and notebooks and workbooks over the gray carpet in Lisa’s front room, in front of the television. I usually didn’t get anything done until later at night. Still, when I was at Lisa’s house, I was at home. I didn’t have to worry about what other people thought of me, because Lisa and her friends and family took me for who I am.
“What are we going to do today?” My sister Courtney asked as we walked in the door into Lisa’s front room. The new reclining chairs her parents had just bought sat in the two corners, while a desk and a family portrait that was taken a few years ago hung in the other corner. An arched entryway led to the wooden worn dining table, and to the right was the kitchen, where we had spent many days baking and cleaning, out of boredom as well as the need for purpose in our adolescent, pre-teen lives.
“Can we do the thing where we stand on our heads?” I asked. The new thing that we did because we didn’t have anything else to do was to stand on our heads as long as we could, until the blood rushed to our faces and we couldn’t take it anymore.
“Ok,” Lisa said, “Last time I won-- thirty seconds.”
“Courtney never wins,” I said.
Courtney went through a prolonged awkward phase, where she was shy and awkward with people she didn’t know, from when she was about three to thirteen. She always lagged behind me, but I still stood up for her when people were mean to her because they knew that she couldn’t stick up for herself, because of her awkward demeanor towards those she didn’t know as well.
Lisa’s dog was named Hacker, because he occasionally made a hacking, coughing sound. Hacker was the type of dog that had a lot of energy, kind of like Felix, the dog of the family we used to babysit for. Felix and Hacker almost had too much energy. Hacker was a mutt that always was exerting energy, and Felix was an Airedale that had the same amount of energy, that is, until the dad of Calvin and Kendall would tell him to go into the crate in the basement. At Calvin and Kendall’s house there was always something to do- I was never bored.
Sometimes Lisa would babysit for Calvin and Kendall, and sometimes I would, and often times we would visit while the other was babysitting. Kendall’s room was pink and girly, with a bed in the corner that had a table next to it where she always placed a cup of water at night. Their mom always kept a bag of Ghirardelli’s chocolate chips and bags of gummy bears in the set of three baskets that hung over their microwave. The green and blue microwavable plates with flowers painted on them sat under the microwave. Their freezer always had a bottle of Oberweis milk and tortillas and blocks of cheese for quesadilla- making. “Keep an eye on it,” their mom would say. Calvin and Kendall’s mom showed me how to make quesadillas for the kids: just boil some water on a pan, place the rack and then the tortilla over it, let it soften, and the roll the cheese in it. The first time I tried to make it I burned the pan so that all the water evaporated too quickly and the pan started to char. Calvin ended up making the quesadillas, under my supervision.
Lisa lived a block away from Calvin and Kendall, and I lived a block away from her. Calvin and Kendall lived on the other side of Foster. Foster was the divider of the neighborhoods of my peers that went to Saint Monica, in the northwest side of Chicago. I was one of the few in my grade that was on the side opposite of St. Monica’s. Almost everyone else in my grade lived on the other side of Foster. Foster was a busy street, but when there wasn’t that much traffic, it could almost pass for a side street. When I wanted to see Lisa, I would call her on the phone, and either I would start walking to her house to go there, or she would start walking to my house to visit me, or we would agree to leave at that exact moment so that we would meet each other halfway. Lisa was one of my best friends until I started high school at Loyola Academy. She was in the grade below me, and I went to a different high school than her. Once high school started, we stopped seeing each other as much. She found new friends and I found mine and we went our separate ways.
IV. My Friend at Loyola, Kathy
Loyola Academy was too big for me. I only felt unintimidated when I was in enclosed atmospheres, like in speech class. The capacity of students made the school seem like a different world; one where you could pass the same people in the hall on the way to class everyday yet still feel like just a student identification number in the eyes of teachers.
The first day of class I couldn’t find my rooms on time. I wore khakis, a collared shirt and a pair of white and blue Adidas, the kind that were fashionable in 1998. My first bus ride to high school my mom walked with me to the bus stop. I picked gooseberries off of the bush that stood on the corner, and I thought to myself to not get my expectations up to high when it came to friend-making, as I was the only girl from my class to go to Loyola. Almost all of the other girls in my eighth grade class went to Resurrection high school, an all-girls high school that was less than a mile from my grammar school.
I saw Kathy for the first time the first day of Faith class, when everything and everyone was fresh and new. She was shorter than me with long blonde hair. Her book bag was a blue Jansport, and she always wore the flared, pocketless khakis that were in fashion at school. Kathy walked in with another girl I had never seen before, while everyone had already taken their seats. They both walked through the space in the middle and sat behind me, and the whole class couldn’t help but watch them, because they interrupted the discussion.
“Take your seats, ladies,” Mr. Smith said when they walked in late.
“Sorry,” Kathy, the girl in a blue polo said in a tone that I recognized as rude yet intimidated.
The first time we had a group assignment was when I talked to Kathy first. A boy wearing a baggy white polo sat next to us, and I noticed his lips were exceedingly chapped. He took out a tub of lip balm and smeared it all over his lips.
After class that day Kathy asked me if I wanted to have lunch with her.
“I really don’t have anyone else to sit with,” she said, “I usually just walk around, anyway.” We turned the corner around the cafeteria to Kathy’s locker. She pulled her hair behind her ear before opening the purple metal door of locker open and taking out an Algebra One and a Latin I book. We turned three more corners, walking silently until we got up to the space in the basement by the elevators. We sat down behind the gray pillar.
“I can get us some cookies,” I said, not knowing what to say about the fact that we had forgotten about food. “Do you like snickerdoodles?”
Kathy and I made other friends, Lindsey being one of the ones we spent the most time with. When summer came around, however, Lindsey and Kathy stopped talking. I was still friends with both of them, but we didn’t spend time together anymore. Lindsey’s house was huge. She lived upstairs in a big room with a window that showed the outside of a neighborhood that was close to my home yet I had never seen before high school started. That summer the boredom hit us hard, but we knew how to handle it. We made a list of things to do: camping in her back yard, going to the mall and the Norwood Park pool, and walking around her neighborhood (This one was my idea. Lindsey’s neighborhood was beautiful, with dollhouse- like houses and lavish purple and pink gardens and flowers around every corner. She didn’t appreciate it as much as I did, because she had lived there her whole life, but when I visited, I stepped in another troposphere.).
Another thing that was on the list was to throw a party. We planned it for a Saturday night. One of Lindsey’s friends had invited her friends from Resurrection high school. I walked there, and on my way I saw three kids from my school walking down the round street, towards me. I told them to come by the party, but the girl in the middle just waved at me, and they walked by, like a passing storm. When I got there, all of the girls from another school were sitting on the wooden benches of Lindsey’s back porch.
After it had gotten dark out, I went inside. Lindsey and one of her friends who was a boy who wore a green North face fleece were the only ones by the front door. Lindsey’s friend was sitting on the stairs going upstairs. I started to cry, partly because I felt left out of the party, but partly also because I was sad that nothing exciting was happening. One could call it boredom, but I think of it as aggravation. I used to cry a lot when I was younger, and that moment was the last time I cried because of a lack of present emotion. This used to happened a lot. The party was just too dry for me, so I stirred up some drama by telling Lindsey I needed to use the phone. I called my friend Maddie who lived far away from Lindsey’s house, to ask if I could sleep over. When I called, no one picked up. After I hung up the phone, Lindsey and I walked out the front door, alone, and I lied and told her I had gotten in a fight with my Dad. The tears came streaming down my cheeks, and she gave me a hug. I brushed my face and we walked back in, where no one knew what had happened.
My sophomore year at Loyola Academy was boring because I only hung out with Kathy. We would stay after school and wait until our parents picked us up, loitering in the hallways for someone to come our way and talk to us.
“What kind of candy do you want?” I asked, getting up from the floor at the hallway intersection by Kathy’s locker.
“Skittles,” she said, placing her fleece jacket by her side, and then opening up a notebook.
I walked the hallway until I met the corner with the staircase going upstairs in front of the cafeteria. I dug two dollars in quarters out of my pockets and shoved the coins in the vending machine, pressed the buttons until bags of Skittles and Twizzlers fell into the bottom of the machine. Turning around, the bulletin board and all of the flyers attached caught my eye; there were flyers for the poetry club, track, the chemistry club, art club, Poms try-outs, and other obscure papers with dates scrawled across the front.
That was the last time I stayed after school with Kathy. It was the last time I walked the halls lined with purple lockers, where the ceilings hung low and the musty smell of outside wind filtrated homeroom classrooms weekday mornings. My mom and I were supposed to give Kathy a ride home a few weeks later, but I didn’t make it to school that day, as I was checked into the psych ward at Lutheran General for clinical depression.
V. Unproductive Solitude
After Loyola I went to three schools: Resurrection, Luther North and Taft. Resurrection was a bad experience, and since it was a private school and I got bad grades and slept through class because of my medication, they kicked me out. The summer going into junior year my mom called my Uncle Bernie about obtaining money from my trust fund so that I could attend Luther North.
“Yeah, it seems like a good choice,” my mom said to my Uncle. We sat at the kitchen table as the sunlight flooded over the wooden floors, and a flurry of dust particles danced in the light. I noticed this happening when I was younger, when my grandmother would sit at the table with me and we would talk.
“One might consider them angels,” my grandmother had said.
My Mom looked at me encouragingly as she listened to my uncle for ten or fifteen minutes. A few days later, I was registered at the small school with less than 300 students in all four classes.
Homeroom was a unique experience. The Kid’s News Program was on television, and I would occasionally watch as the news anchors who were my age took over the television for a good twenty minutes of the morning. Since there were so few classmates as compared to the other school I had attended, I could match a name to a face pretty easily after a couple of weeks. Two girls that seemed nice were the girls that sat behind me in English class. The blonde haired girl sat in one corner of homeroom while the brown haired girl sat in the opposite. One morning the blonde haired girl shouted across the room something about borrowing the brown haired girl’s boots, another day a question about an invitation to go to a Dave Matthews Band concert. She wrote a twenty-five page paper for English class on the Dave Matthews Band. I watched in envy as she placed the packet into my English teacher’s hand, claiming she had been up all night writing it. I had decided to do my paper on the Black Plague. I followed through with the first few steps of the assignment. I wrote a thesis statement and brought some references to class, and took them up to the teacher’s desk. She leafed through it, looked up at me, and said,
“Wow, I am impressed.”
Her compliment felt fake, like I was special compared to the other students. But I took it.
The boy I was in love with who went there was named Jackson. I used to day dream about him when I had nothing to do: my hand on my cheek, my chin up in the air. While this should be a good thing, everything that led to the fact that he wasn’t interested and taken led to me being alone. He was tall with a buzz cut and freckles over his cheeks. His girlfriend had short blonde hair. I was in love with the soft look in his eyes; the way he talked to girls; and the way he was nice to me while being a complete jerk at the same time. My counselor told me that he had caused problems before, so I was wary of him and the fact that every mean thing he did and said broke my heart. I thought I loved him, but at the same time I hated him. I hated the way he walked into a room like he owned it. I hated how he thought he was exempt from the rules. One day in history class he walked in with his pants rolled up past his knees, and the teacher called him out and gave him a detention. He looked around the room in disbelief and said, “Just for having my pants rolled up?” The history teacher was the type of teacher who craved authority. Jackson was the type to challenge everything.
Lunch period was boring. Until I came out of my shell a bit junior year, I used to sit in the bathroom stalls on toilets and eat chocolate chip cookies from the cafeteria that fell apart in my hands. Free period was even worse. I sat in the hall on the green tile ground with my books spread out in front of me, not having the stamina to do work, as I sat heartbroken at the fact that I was missing out on a normal adolescence because of my clinical depression and shyness. I wish I could go back and do things over again. I would talk to people more. I would join the math club, and run the halls after class with the rest of the track team. I would be the opposite of what I really was: awkward and unsure of myself.
Taft was different, because I wasn’t as intimidated with my peers. At Luther North, I was one of few, at Taft, one of many. The students at Taft were less snobby, but I still found myself, occasionally, alone, and bored. I stopped dreading public speeches and sitting in the front row of class. After school I would have nothing to do, so I sat in the after-school computer lab and played Cubis. When I got home, I vegged out in front of the television and watched Total Request Live on MTV.
Graduation day it seemed like there weren’t that many students graduating. This probably was because a good number of students didn’t pass. I still had not made friends, but I felt a sense of pride and achievement that I could share with my fellow students. Gabriella, the girl next to me, blew up a beach ball while we waited for the ceremony to start, and it went from corner to corner, over the graduates’ hands, who were sitting on the seats on the floor of the auditorium, in a manner of seconds. My parents sat in the bleachers, watching me as I watched them, my mom smiling, my dad’s eyes an even brighter blue than usual. After the ceremony, we went to Russell’s, a restaurant we used to go to when I was younger. I ordered fried shrimp, and French fries and an orange soda (I didn’t order the orange soda because of my dad, but because I had a taste for it). My parents and I sat at a booth, talking about my plans for the summer, and for next fall. I was going to volunteer at the Anti-Cruelty Society that summer, and I wanted to register in a few weeks for classes at Wilber Wright Community College for the fall.
“What are you going to do this weekend?” my Mom asked me, taking a sip of her Diet Coke.
“I don’t know, mom,” I said. “What is there to do?”
Conclusion
I was last hospitalized in 2016, again, for clinical depression. Walking through the secured doors, I didn’t know what I was in for- I didn’t know what would happen. Would I be bored out of my mind, or would I find friends that I could relate to? One night when I was in the women’s ward at St. Joseph’s, I sat up late and colored with my friend, Josephina. She told me that she thought I was a good drawer, and I gave her the colored-in Mandela that I had finished coloring. The Olympics were on, but we didn’t watch them, because we were going to groups, talking, eating, and socializing. The first night I was there, I realized that I had opened up yet another new door: that of the realization that boredom would never take over again, as long as I had other people in my life that I could connect to, that had the same illnesses and problems as me.
I had another friend in the hospital, Evelina. She wore a shirt for two days that said, “Adios, Suckers,” with the Nike swish symbol underneath. Her shirt was a blinding green, just like her eyes. When I first got to the hospital, I found a green squishy stress-relief ball under my bed that had the name “Angela” on it. When I first met Evelina, I invited her into my room and gave her the ball. That night we stayed up, just sitting and listening to the radio. We probably should have been bored, but we weren’t. We had each other’s company. Looking back, this is the first time since I was diagnosed with my mental illness that I found meaning in just being with, hanging out with, another person. And I found myself, not bored.