My time in residential treatment
I never intended to pursue residential treatment. I also never intended to be cripplingly depressed.
Not just depressed — not just suicidal — but utterly listless, devoid of anything at all. I was an outline someone had neglected to color in, a bulleted list without any entries. At the age of 25, and after years of therapy and myriad other forms of treatment, I lacked not only the desire to live, but also the desire to exert any effort to end my life.
Work was impossible. Maintaining relationships felt unnecessary. I wanted only to sleep. When even my dreams became tiresome, I wanted to cease existing without having to do anything about it. I wanted to wake up in space, drifting out and out until, like a dull and elderly star, I winked out.
I resisted residential treatment for a variety of reasons. Primarily — and most familiarly — I didn’t want to get better. Getting better meant putting in work, and time, and, most repugnant of all, effort, my nemesis after years and years of Trying Too Hard and Doing Too Much. Therapy was difficult enough, a once-weekly commitment to extracting my pain like infinite scarves from a magician’s hat. Inpatient and outpatient treatment had been even harder. Residential treatment was as far up the treatment ladder as I could go: constant work, constant pain, the constant inability to ignore my problems.
