The Prairies Always See You: Speaking with Psychosis

The Prairies Always See You: Speaking with Psychosis Erin Soros (bio) The isolation room is compact—I can almost reach the walls if I stretch out my arms. A corrugated metal grid covers the entire back wall; the front wall is glass. I focus on the side walls, their stretch of beige, how the glossy paint exaggerates the unevenness of the surface. The flatness is uninterrupted by poster or painting. The beige feels close, ominous—the evidence of something gone, a mirror with no reflection, a face with no features. I can find no other clues as to how I have arrived here or why I’m being detained. I am wearing beige cotton pajamas, hospital pajamas. The medical staff had forced me to take off my top and my pants, my bra and underwear, and then they took all my clothing away. Now I match the walls. I could disappear. I’d been allowed one phone call and I wasted it on a mental health advocate who told me, firmly, quickly, that I can refuse to talk, as if my only chance at liberty could be found in one more form of erasure. On the other side of the glass doors, I can see no one, but I do hear the nurses declare the data of other patients, and some of the noise ricochets with my own story, shards of details that are not mine but that fit—the names of places, the names of symptoms. My thoughts hit against the beige walls and slide down them. [End Page 145] And then I find a bond, in the stark isolation that is a psychiatric segregation unit, and this one intuitive choice is what I want to explore in this piece of writing that will remain as small as the room. I look at the wall and remember a reassuring sentence from a conversation the day before on the phone with a friend. I did not use the word psychosis when I spoke to this friend, but instead I said that my mind was awry. He repeated this word, and it seemed right, how I could share its meaning with him, this vocabulary of my choosing, my perspective off-kilter, cockeyed, shards of my mind turning within a kaleidoscope. I was surprised that he was speaking with me at all. I have grown used to another’s discomfort when my words betray the errors of my mind. I have grown accustomed to stiff faces, expedient statements, and swift departures. But he stayed on the phone and found something to trust in my skittering dialogue, how I’d crack open one comment and veer in a new direction, still somehow reaching him, or he’d interrupt to reach me. How am I doing? It was his question, voiced as if his halted attempts had a technique that could be appraised and as if I was the one in the position to judge. This is helpful, I said. I meant both the connection and the words, how they were still working somehow even as I moved them too quickly. I relished the respectful way the question positioned me, when the mad-woman is so often assumed to possess no insight. I could feel the value in my perspective, my own ability to assess what kinds of speech eased my fluster. But where to go from here? I knew he was from the Prairies and so I told him that the Prairies made me feel vulnerable, singular, how I could sense the force of my verticality in the flatness. He responded slowly, but with ease—and he said he was telling me what had been told to him, his gift already a gift—the Prairies always see you. I could imagine standing in the beige wheat fields and finding solace in them, held by a gaze of the ground. He was nowhere near me as I stood facing the beige walls, and then when I sat on the foam mattress on the metal bed, but I recalled his vivid assertion. The Prairies always see you. I had always been a child of the woods—mountain greens, somber firs, generous branches sieving light...

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