Within the Ward
Photo by fitra zulfy on Unsplash
An Essay by Alexis Ragan
From the inside, on an involuntary psychiatric hold, where no open windows let you feel the warm, unrestrained sunlight or fresh, non clinical breeze, it’s easy to feel like the end of the world is unraveling “out there,” on the other side of empty, white walls. Easier, even, when you are in the shock of deep psychosis, unnerved and unaware of what is real and what is mere delusion. Breaks with reality really happen.
I have lived in the interior of a psych ward several times in my life. I know what it feels like to suffer the internal prison of a broken mind in need of healing. Perhaps you’ve felt locked in an unseen prison too. I also know gardens existed before psych wards. That gardens still exist despite them.
At a certain point, mental health diagnoses begin to bleed together. The world of psychiatric medicine and therapy is as muddy as it is misunderstood. When the doctors deem you gravely disabled, you start to think you’ve forgotten who you were. That you’ve lost yourself and a life free of fear is never coming back. Somatic symptoms alert your body that it's giving up on itself, and you begin to believe you're “crazy”—this harmful vernacular many mental health sufferers face. When I would tell the psychiatrists about spiritual warfare, they would reassess my medication, and decide to change or up my dose on antipsychotics. They couldn’t understand; they were only assessing the medical.
But God didn’t look at me and think, she’s gravely disabled. This kind of language comes from an ill-stricken world. Instead, I believe God looked at me when I was within the ward, and thought, there is my daughter, my light, in the dark.
Medical Labels, no matter how many are put on our charts, don’t define us. Christ’s blood does.
In the thick of battling OCD, I was hyper-spiritualizing everything. At one point, with all of the tragic world news being played in the breakroom, I actually thought Armageddon was taking place outside the ward. Most people are stumped when they hear the word scrupulosity. Many have no idea what it means. By definition, scruples refers to, “a feeling of doubt or hesitation with regard to the morality or propriety of a course of action”— it is an attack on the mind towards what is most precious to someone, their faith.
I didn’t feel His light in the ward. But even if it wasn’t felt, I know now the light lived within the pit of that ward, dark rooms and all, with me. There came a point when God gave me the strength to say, like Micah 7:8, “Do not gloat over me, my enemy! Though I have fallen, I will rise. Though I sit in darkness, the LORD will be my light.” Today, in remission, I rejoice to say that I live in His light again, the light that never left.
Truth doesn’t shift when sanity does, no matter what the world says. This is comforting news, and crucial to cling to when our inner and outer worlds feel like they are coming to an end.
God says that death and illness are not the end. And I believe Him.
✿ ✿ ✿
Consider John 11:4, when Jesus said, “This sickness will not end in death. No, it is for God’s glory so that God’s Son may be glorified through it.” There are no fatal endings in the Living Hope—only Resurgam, this grave shaking, garden-making act of rising again. And so we will. Again and again.
Alexis Ragan is a poet who uses her wounds to make wells of meaning, to make way for healing. Resurgam is the most important collection of work she has ever had the pleasure of featuring here, at Vessels of Light. It felt only right that she shared a glimpse of what she has been through, and how much she cares to spread light to the misunderstood and hurting. Jesus is the light of her life who makes this all possible. Today, she lives joyfully as an MFA student of poetry who has and is still experiencing Christ’s healing from mental illness.
