What Willie Taught Me

Photo Credit: Gary Feinstein / The Sentinel

“Grab me two chocolate milks. And one apple juice!” I yell to Willie from the salad bar as he piles cartons of milk and plastic juice cups onto a tray. Everyone looks like they just rolled out of bed for the entirety of inpatient, but Willie had that special sweatpant swagger. The inpatient issued outfit - a groutfit. Drawstring pants with cuffed bottoms and a crew neck sweatshirt. No drawstrings in the pants of course, and the cherry on top? His blue slip-on shoes with white socks.

“Willie! You know it’s 2 per person! You can come back after the teens walk through and see if there’s more left.” The head chef calls out to Willie as he grabs the last chocolate milk and quickly closes the large beverage cooler door.

“Come on miss! You know I’m not getting all of these for me! You just heard her tell me her order. I’m trying to be helpful.”

Willie loves talking to staff, but they love giving him grief more.  He’s been here a time or two, and he’ll tell anyone who’ll listen. I’m certainly willing to listen. Up until about 24 hours ago, I had no clue what the rules were around here. And there are tons. 

“Keep it moving you guys! Stop messing around! You know you can’t be in here when the minors walk through.” We get shuffled through the hot food line and into our section of the cafeteria by an on edge ‘walker,’ whose sole job is to transport us from our bubble down to the gym or cafeteria. The only time we see the other groups getting treatment at Rogers is in transport. Beyond that, we’re locked behind a thick double door that requires ID badges and employees to open. 

It’s not a horrible place. No bars on the windows, or broken furniture made to look like a lounge area for between sessions. The staff smiles, and it’s always clean. My favorite part? We have a fridge in the lounge area with chocolate milk. There’s regular milk too, but come on. It’s also full of these cups of apple, orange or cranberry juice. The kind with a tin foil top that you peel off before sipping straight from the plastic. And, there’s stringed cheese! 

The worn wooden cabinets in the kitchenette are filled with snack size Cheez-it packs, Rold Gold Pretzels, and sometimes cookies. They’re normally oatmeal though. Chocolate chip is a rarity. 

This fascination with snacks and food isn’t necessarily new for me, but inpatient has certainly heightened my focus on food of any kind. It could be the hunger coming on from my new medication, or simply the fact that days move on and around the timing of food. Breakfast starts our day, followed by multiple types of therapy sessions. Lunch is a break to breathe. Talk about whatever you want, or not talk at all. The moods of everyone in the ward come out to play more in the cafeteria than anywhere else. It’s not about food for everyone, but time to eat is some of the only time we have to ourselves while we’re in here. 

There’s a mid-afternoon break between sessions and while some use it to go to the bathroom, or grab respite in their room, I most commonly snack on a string cheese or drink my fifth chocolate milk for the day. 

Willie often joins me and we chat life for those 15 minutes. He explains one of the ward rules or gives me a hard time telling me that I have no business coming back here, so I better get my head on straight. Coming from a guy with a state-mandated requirement to be at Rogers, I can understand what he means. 

“You have family here every night. People who love you coming to hang out in this horrible place, just so you know that they care. I don’t even know where the people I care about are. Things had been good for a while. I was living with my sister, I was seeing my kids, I hadn’t been drinking. And then I ended up here.”

Of course, it wasn’t that simple, and bits and pieces of Willie’s life would intersect with mine during the next 5 days. He’d stay with me forever, but it only started because of some chocolate milk and stringed cheese. 

When you enter an inpatient facility, it’s never going to feel good. If it’s your first time, it’s even more confusing and jarring. When I entered the facility, I was freaked the fuck out. Part of me knew that something very serious was going on and that I needed help. Another part of me just wanted to go home. To get out of this place and back to my life. Get back to everything I had before it got away from me.

Willie was the first person to make me realize that staying there, for as long as I needed, was the best thing that I could do for me. 

I was admitted on a Wednesday morning, and by Friday I was screaming in a private room at my psychiatrist and my parents after they asked me where I thought I was going when I left this place. 

“Home! Obviously! To my apartment! Where else would I go?!? You guys are insane! I get it - I have bipolar. Now I can go home and get back to life and deal with this.” 

What I didn't know yet? Dealing with this was a lifelong battle that I had just begun. And I was going to need all the help and treatment I could get. After storming out of the room, and barreling through the door to our art therapy session I proceeded to break up every sense of zen in the room and ask everyone what the deal was. If I wasn’t getting discharged today, I was stuck here, right? If they didn’t send me home before my doctor took his weekend off I was going to be stuck here! Indefinitely! 

Trapped. Without control. Completely lost. Stuck in here … forever.

My visitors didn’t come that night. Instead, I watched Rocky in the small section of the lounge. My outburst and request for them to LEAVE ME ALONE! had been met. Match, set. I had beat myself. 

“You know they’re coming back tomorrow, don’t you?”

Willie didn’t take his eyes off the TV once. 

“They’re going to be here tomorrow. I bet you’ll even get a present. Those people love you. They’re never going to just leave you here. You haven’t realized it yet, but you’re worlds away from where the rest of us are. If you don’t take this chance though, you’ll be right back here again. Just like the rest of us.” 

Who was this man? A guarding angel sent to watch over me? Or just the 57-year-old black man who had drank his life away time and time again. The one who had battled depression, trauma, and a life of hurt and pain. Someone to share perspective with me and make sure that I found some of my own. The person who reminded me that this was the only time I could solve this for the first time. The only time that I could go through treatment without jaded eyes.  

He wasn’t nice to me all the time. He was right about that Saturday night. They did come back. Tony had a present for me and a card that declared he was here to stay. I felt secure, if only for a short while, and then Willie took it away. 

“Why are you parading them around here like the rest of us don’t already know?! I was trying to watch my baseball game in peace and in they all come, wanting to watch the game together!”

I had absolutely no idea where this was coming from. Just 30 minutes ago Willie was sitting with my dad, Tony, and I as we watched the Brewers game and all silently acknowledged that this mundane task of watching baseball together was just what we needed after 3 nights of visiting hours full of crying and yelling and misunderstandings.

I went to bed that night extremely upset. My closest friendship in this place was now imploded because my personal life outside of this place was actually going to be ok? The reassurance I needed from those in my life was exactly the thing that pitted my inpatient guarding angel against me?

The next morning I found myself straightening books and magazines in the lounge. Putting away all of the markers before moving on to the snacks. Sorting the Cheese-its and pretzels in perfect rows like a focused grocery attendant. Trying to stretch these tasks to fill the 45 minutes before breakfast. Realizing only about 20 minutes had passed, I knew I was doomed. I opened the fridge and scanned left to right.

“A chocolate milk so early?!?!” Willie growled as he stretched his way into the common area. Instead of calling attention to the fact that he had been so angry with me, not more than 10 hours earlier, I decided to act as aloof as him. 

“I was actually going for a juice, but I could be swayed” I replied. 

“Nahh you know I like to stick to the decaf” he fooled. That was the only coffee option we had, and I certainly wasn’t going to take it. “If you stick to what I told you, you’ll never be away from real coffee again,” he grinned. 

And that was when it clicked. 

Willie's love was the best kind of tough love you could get. Every harsh bark and flippant attitude was to make me think. To wake me up to the fact that I was going to walk through life from now on with a mental disorder attached to my worth. To remind me that this world could get a lot darker if I didn’t gain control. That my future was in my hands, but also had an asterisk on it forever. 

*May be prone to intense emotions and episodes that place me in hospitalization … or police custody. 

I would always have mental health on my ‘record’.

I understand that I, unlike Willie, am shielded to some extent by my appearance. That I get another chance to not put myself in situations where I would be prone to have a public episode. That I, unlike Willie, am granted unmerited privilege because of the color of my skin and my socioeconomic status. But despite it all, my mental health disorder can still create a world where the system works against me. Getting sent straight to the nuthouse by a person of authority was certainly in my future if I didn’t take my mental health diagnosis seriously. If I was going to put myself in situations where I was prone to have an episode, resulting in the cops or an ambulance being called, I would have to take that chance and hope the person called to ‘help’ actually did that. All they would have to go on is my appearance, and the word bipolar.

I’m also fortunate to have an incredible support system. To Willie’s point, they were entirely invested in my treatment. These were the early days. The days when everyone still believed in me and was standing on the sidelines cheering me on. When everyone was there and wanted to know what they could do to help.

Mental health, addiction, grief - these things create connections, and they rip people apart. They don’t make a human any less human, but they can create a world in which your humanity is masked by anger, hatred, madness, and fear. If you’re not careful, one day you’ll wake up alone, for the 13th time in a mental health hospital, and you’ll be the one explaining to the newest patient why they don’t allow anyone to have shoes with laces, or deodorant without supervision. That’s what Willie was warning me of. If I’m not careful, I’ll be the one warning others to take control, take advantage of the resources, and turn their life around. 

I know if I find myself in a manic state again, I would return to inpatient in a heartbeat. I hope that doesn’t happen, but I also don’t want to associate inpatient with failure. 

The six days I spent inside Rogers were some of the most impactful and eye-opening days of my life. I buzzed from the highs and sobbed during the lows. I ate a ton of stringed cheese and drank way too much chocolate milk.  And Willie was by my side the entire time. As my world crumbled around me, he gave me the perspective to see a future full of hope.