About feelings. Or the lack of them.

About feelings. Or the lack of them.

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Session 001

This is part of a project where I go through my psychiatric medical records from my youth, one session at a time. As a form of healing. Or maybe torture. This is session 001. You can find the previous sessions here: introduction, 000.

Night Fireworks no. 66 (1883) by Jinta Hirayama

Fall 1999

According to the medical records, I saw a psychiatrist for the first time a week after the horrendous day at the high school. I was there with my mother and the whole situation felt awkward. I was not against meeting the psychiatrist, and I do not remember opposing the possibility of my physical symptoms being psychological in nature. Although I do not remember much about the very first time I saw the psychiatrist, I know I was in a place that was utterly foreign to me. A place where you talk about your feelings. A thing like that was unknown in my family. Let alone talking about negative feelings. There was no such concept in such extremity that I doubt I knew what I felt. Or if I knew, I knew not how to feel anything other than those feelings not talked about.

So instead, the session’s transcription mostly includes descriptions of my physical symptoms. Starting from my childhood where vomiting was an excessive part of my life. You see, my fear of vomiting did not just spring from nowhere. Then the text moves from days past, to the current time.

Is unable to eat with friends. Describes eating excessively at home. No vomiting, but feels nauseous. Is afraid of vomiting especially when not home. Therefore going outdoors has significantly lessened. Discussions about the correlation between nervousness and nausea, but Kaisa does not clearly see the connection. Does not admit being nervous about social situations.

Although the psychiatrist was not the psychiatrist that would later become The Nemesis, I remember disliking him. I knew he wanted more. They all did. I know they were annoyed by me being so closed up. Just sitting there like a pretty doll, smiling politely. Another psychiatrist specifically told me so a year later. I doubt she wrote it down in my medical records. They hardly ever do that. Write what they themselves said. But the words are marked in me. I remember.

I don’t actually know if I actively thought to myself at the start, that I don’t want to tell the medical staff anything. What I do know is that ‘telling anything’ was not a thing I would have been able to do. Whatever thoughts or feelings I had, if I knew about them, they were mine. And I wanted to protect what was mine alone.

So.Kaisa describes the situation in terms of symptoms very scarcely, apart from feeling nauseous. Yes. I felt physically ill most of the time. And that was it. That was the symptom. I might have been depressed, riddled with anxiety and deathly afraid of vomiting (which is, as you can see, surprisingly written in the records right at the start, but I assume mostly forgotten afterwards), feeling physically ill was at the centre of my everything.

That. Was. The. Symptom.

Cure me of it, and I would be cured.

– Kaisa

Agoraphobic’s first visitation from the dread and panic – Session 000

Agoraphobic’s first visitation from the dread and panic – Session 000

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Summer 1999

I was a typical 90’s teenage party girl, living in a small, insignificant town. All of Wednesday and Thursday I would plan and worry about the weekend with my friends. Whose turn it was to throw the house party, who would camp near a store to ask the local alcoholics to buy beer and vodka for a small fee. And then, all of Monday and Tuesday I would go through everything that happened in the alcohol fuelled weekend with my friends in minute detail. So I thought it weird that in the summer of 1999, just short of me being 16 years of age, all of a sudden drinking became difficult. It made me sick in a way that simply stuffing my fingers down my throat to vomit the offending alcohol out, no longer helped as it used to. I felt wrong. Partying felt wrong. Physically.

Mirror Reflection (1911) by Alice Pike Barney

Then I found the perfect pair of green trousers in one of the two clothing stores in our tiny city, that offered us teenagers the late 90’s must have bootcut Stocker jeans. There, in the fitting room with the green trousers half way up my thighs, I felt it for the first time. The panic. The sudden certainty that I would surely either vomit or faint, or both, right there onto the fitting room floor. And then. The overwhelming fear, of doing just that. So I threw my own clothes back on and ran out of the store. My friend followed me out, confused. I liked the green trousers. So she went back to the store and bought them for me. I don’t think I wore them much.

After the first visitation from The Panic, it became an recurring oddity. Doors closing behind me, trapping me in public spaces, cars and houses, triggered the nausea, and the accompanying dread. The sliding doors to a grocery store became a magical line between normalcy and fear. In front of them, I felt ok. But the world behind them, the isles, the fluorescent lights, the people, the endless perky tunes playing in the background, turned into the most fucked up house of panic. The further into the store I went, the further away from safety I was, and the sicker I felt. Although I did not understand why I felt so ill in there, or in any public space really, first the indoor ones, and then, the outdoor ones, I knew, I would rather not go back.

The first day of high school came. I was so excited. New school, new people. New me. I wore red bell bottoms trousers, and a knit vest with the union jack. I felt cool, and I felt nervous, in all the right ways. I sat in the crowded gym hall and listened to the welcome words. I followed a teacher to a class room with my new class mates. I sat down. I listened to the teacher instructing us. And then I raised my hand and said: I have a dentist’s appointment, I need to leave. There was no appointment, I left home. And I never went back. After that, apparently, I became known as the girl who went to the dentist and was never heard from again.

I remember sitting in that class room. My mind whirling in panic with all the questions and thoughts that would become so familiar, so automatic, so disabling, for decades to come. Do I feel sick. Do I feel sick enough to vomit. Am I going to vomit. Am I going to faint. I am going to faint. How do I get out of here. How do I get out of here without making a scene. How do I get out of here without anyone noticing. I need to go. I need to escape. I need to escape.

I went to the doctors. I was feeling physically sick all the time. I (and my parents) felt there must’ve been something physically wrong with me. So I had all the tests made. The blood tests, the scans, the gastroscopy. Nothing was found. The doctors suggested that maybe I should seek psychiatric help instead. So I did.

– Kaisa

My psychiatric medical records – erasing their words with mine

My psychiatric medical records – erasing their words with mine

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A few years back I requested the psychiatric medical records of my youth from the medical archives, for reasons I no longer remember. Maybe I thought I was doing so well, with my head barely above the surface, that I could treat the words written like a distant turmoil I was now immune to. I read a few pages. And then I returned the pile of papers, inches thick, back into the white innocuous envelope they came in and stuffed them into a drawer where they sat for years. Reading the pages felt like the recurring nightmare I used to have where my mouth was filled with thick brown gravel that I couldn’t get rid of no matter how hard I tried to scoop it out with my fingers. Suffocated, disgusted, anguished. Voiceless.

The Masque of the Red Death, for Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘Tales of Mystery and the Imagination’ (1894) by Aubrey Vincent Beardsley

The thing with medical records is that they are written by others. They are filled with their words and their perceptions. Those writing them do not mark what they themselves said. I want to erase their words with mine. To, finally, own them. And then, I want someone to read the words, to make them no longer wholly mine. I want to rid myself of them, to cleanse myself of them. For them to float somewhere far away from me, where the words, mine and theirs, can no longer stain me.

So, here I am, in the beginning of a journey in which I go through my psychiatric medical records from my youth, one session at a time. As a form of healing. Or maybe torture. When I was 15 I started to struggle with crippling agoraphobia, social phobia, anxiety and depression, which lead to me not being able to properly leave the four walls of my room for nearly ten years. During that time I met with psychiatrists and therapists for 237 sessions in total, not including the time I spent in mental hospitals. My experience with the psychiatric help that I received was not, for want of a better word, nice. Anything that didn’t fit into their imagined mould of a normal young woman, was sick. So. All of me was sick. And I don’t need to read the medical records to remember how wrong that felt. The feeling has been embedded into me for all these years.

Now, nearly three decades later, seemingly living a normal life, yet struggling with the same anxieties, I feel haunted by those ten years. And I am, most of all, heartbroken by them. I want to make the young Kaisa visible. If not for others, for myself. For she was there. Hidden from the world, living a ghostly existence, she was there. She existed.

– Kaisa