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 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