This blog was originally posted on my Substack on May 31, 2025. The original blog post can be found here.

This morning, I saw a meme that I’d seen a thousand iterations of before. It was the “I was too honest with my therapist” format; in this case, the text accompanied by a screenshot from an episode of SpongeBob where a character wearing a straight jacket is thrown into a padded cell.

*Meme shared by @freud.intensifies on Instagram. Original creator unknown.*

I saw it. I recognized the joke. I laughed.

Humor is usually funny because it’s true, and as I laughed at the familiar joke, I felt the deep weight of all that truth sink into me. I felt the pain well up. I felt the sharpness of a tangle of painful memories resurfacing.

It’s funny because I’ve been there. I have been too honest with a therapist, and found myself en route to the hospital, accompanied by an affidavit attesting to the details of my suicide ideation and attempt history.

I’ve gone to the hospital voluntarily to receive medical care after a suicide attempt, and been forced into a psychiatric stay.

I’ve gone to the hospital voluntarily, and signed myself in voluntarily, and then, when I felt I no longer needed care, found that my opinion about my own care was irrelevant to the doctors treating me.

I’ve seen so many others—strangers, peers, loved ones—forced or coerced into psych hospital admissions.

I’ve been put into positions where showing up for my own needs meant lying through my teeth. I’ve been forced to chose between my values and my safety. My values and my freedom. My values and my survival.

And I’ve also enacted that kind of harm on others. I’ve worked in the mental health field for over a decade. You can’t do that without getting your hands dirty. At least, I’ve never known someone to.

I’ve grieved so much of that pain, but there’s so much more to feel, still, after all these years.

When I saw the meme, the guilt and the anger hit; the emotional shrapnel tearing through me. The joke, and the truths it reveals. The joke, and the pain it tries to hide.

I needed to do something with the pain, but at the time, I didn’t have the energy to explain why. I love to write, but I’m also exhausted. And I knew if I tried to write it down, it would just be repeating things I’ve always said, a thousand times over.

Instead of writing, I just went back to look for where I’d already written. I found the snippets of poems, the journal entries, the art, and any other places I’d already expressed this particular sorrow.

I first shared them to my Instagram stories, but in the next twelve hours those will begin to disappear. I wanted to keep the collection of poems, and images, and context. Some things aren’t meant to vanish.

So, here they are.

“When healing looks like a world trapped inside a snow globe, and the fairytale says that life can exist without pain, and you look at the snowglobe and you look at your life, and you say, “there is too much of me to fit into such a tiny space. So why should I go on living, if loneliness is torture, and the only love I can have is torture too? I’ve had enough pain. I’d rather feel nothing.”

“I told this to the intake counselor at the hospital, and she nodded sympathetically, as if to say she understood, but years later I read the notes: “client displays lack of insight and poor judgment.”

“I want to punch her. I want to grab her by the hair, and pull her ear close to my mouth and scream, “Don’t tell me I'm stupid because the world told me I was worthless and I had the audacity to believe it.” Don’t get me wrong. I’m glad that I am still alive. But don’t fancy yourself a treatment center when you are a holding cell.

“If there’s too much of me for a snowglobe, then there’s also too much of me for this hospital ward. But I am used to fitting myself into things that are too small, (like old jeans, and airplane seats, and people’s hearts).”

—Excerpt from my poem, “In sickness.”

*Source: @kaylee.garber on Tiktok (original format - video)*

“A power dynamic is that you know what makes me want to die, but you don’t know my favorite song.

“A power dynamic is that even though I know more about myself than you do, that you get to be the expert. I know that you don’t believe that, but let’s just both call the insurance company and see whose word has more weight.

“A power dynamic is that you could sign a piece of paper, and make a call, and they would come take me away and lock me up and strip me down and search me. I know that you wouldn’t—not unless you needed to, to keep me safe from myself—but you could. If you were that kind of person, you could lie, and put words in my mouth, and say I was a danger to myself, and no matter what I said, they would believe you. Not me.”

—Excerpt from my poem “Working alliance.”

*Meme shared by @borderlinestears on Instagram*

“I know what it feels like for an affidavit to wrap its hands around your neck like a noose, for them to say, “if you sign here, all this can be voluntary, but if you fight, the floor will disappear beneath you.

“I always say that I have never been involuntarily committed, but when they tell you you can go willingly or in restraints, the choice is not whether or not to go, the choice is how much of your dignity you get to take with you.

“By the time the ambulance had taken me to the hospital, my nervous system had figured out how to regulate itself, but my therapist had gone home for the day. She was off the clock.

“Can I respect her boundaries, while also wishing she didn’t get to just sign a paper and wipe her hands of the situation? She got to go home to her family, and I got to spend the weekend in a cage.”

—Excerpt from “Working alliance.”

*Meme shared by @borderline.bunny on Instagram*

“When I tried to explain to the intake counselor that I was feeling better, she said, ‘look here: this therapist knows you so much better than we do, says that we need to keep you here to be safe.’ She kept saying that, ‘she knows you! She’s Your therapist! Don’t you trust her?’

“Lady, I have been working with her for two months. Which may be an eternity in treatment years, but she didn’t even know me well enough to get the affidavit correct. And maybe I trusted her, when I told her I was thinking about buying a gun, but I don’t anymore.

“But that doesn’t matter to you because, she has a license and a graduate degree and a lot of letters after her name. And goddamnit I have a license and a graduate degree and a lot of letters after my name, too.

“It’s like you can’t do anything to get your power back. The moment I showed up to the hospital six months ago with a bloody arm, and a BAC above point two, I gave up my ability to be presumed level headed.

“It’s not fucking fair.”

—Excerpt from “Working alliance.”

*Meme shared by @feralmamafinds on Instagram*

Note: I wanted to put a quick note here to clarify that I do not believe anyone should be locked up in the psych ward & I don’t believe that needing help means we are incapable of offering it to others. In fact, I think the opposite is true. Those who have experienced harm are often the most equipped to help guide others in healing.

But this meme expresses a larger societal belief in opposition to that—one that those of us who are both mental health providers and have experienced harm within the carceral care system contend with on a daily basis—so it felt very relevant to include.

“The thought that hangs in the air, is the both of us knowing. Harm comes in other shapes, too. We have both been to the place where they strip you of your clothes and your agency and your humanity, in the name of healing.

“Years ago, I wrote a line about the false ‘choice’ they keep telling us we have. When they hold your freedom in their hands, when they tie a threat around your neck like a noose, you do not have a choice of whether or not you go. Back then I wrote that the choice was ‘whether you get to take your dignity with you.’

“That picture is still too rosy. You never get to take your dignity with you. Even if you grovel your way out of an admission, they still end the negotiations with something of yours in hand. Even if someone else comes in to protect you, argues your case, and throws around their credentials. Even if. Even if. Even if.

“You still lose something irreplaceable.”

—Excerpt from “Damages.”

*Source: @thebooksmartbimbo on Instagram. Original format: video.*

“When they took her power away, I ached like it was mine. When they told her she needed to keep an open mind, I wanted to sling the platitude back at them. I could feel it in my bones—the memory of not having a voice; of how it felt for every word that escaped my mouth to be met with pity.

“For the first time, I do not have space to be scared that they are mad at me. There is something more terrifying than being hated, or abandoned, or unloved.

“She might die.

“I need them to understand that they took something from her. I need them to understand that for all their hemming and hawing about her safety, they have made everything worse. They have put her in even more danger than she was before.

“For protocol. For liability.

“That doctor slept soundly after what she did. Won’t blink wondering if she made the wrong call. Am I allowed to hate them for doing evil even if they don’t know it? Even if they don’t understand what they are doing?

“I want to scream and tear my own hair out. I want to take them by the shoulders and shake them. Cry until my voice is raw. Make them explain themselves again and again and again.

“I didn’t. I couldn’t.

“I laid awake in my own bed—crying, shaking, enraged, terrified—while they stripped her, and searched her, took her belongings from her, prescribed the chemical restraints (a precautionary measure), locked her choices away in a metal box, and told her it was for her own good.”

—Excerpt from “For her own good.”

*Source: @dumpsterfire_therapist on Instagram stories*

Note: Thank you to Brit for both this beautiful artwork, and the inspiration for the title of this post. I encourage you to check out their work at their Instagram account, or their website

“You hold people’s lives in your hands, toss them around like playing cards. (Objects, tools, tokens.)

“You tell her to swallow her tears, hold her tongue. ‘You need to understand what you did that got you here.’ You think she’s not sufficiently terrified.

“I want you to be afraid like I have been; like she has been. I want you to believe—not just understand, but really believe—that the thing you are trying to destroy is also part of her.

“She told you the problem. Told you they took her freedom away. Told you what it was like not to have a voice.

“You fed her platitudes and patronism. You said you understood, over and over, until it became so much more irony than truth.

“When she told you the ways she knits her world back together every time he sets fire to it, you told her there was no future for her this way.

“‘I understand, but-’

“No. You understand nothing.

“Hold your fucking tongue, or I’ll take it from you.”

—Excerpt from “Hold your tongue.”

Missing person.

When they took my power away,
I fought with every inch of myself,
with every breath in my body.

When they took my power away I screamed,
tore at the world until all my fingernails were broken and bloody.

When they took my power away,
again and again, I learned that
it was safer to just let them.

Play dumb. Play dead.
Tell them what they want to hear
so they will let you go when it’s over.

There I was sitting on my own chest,
crushing my own voice, forcing my own silence.

Now, I am trying to find my scream again.
Have you seen her?

“I will still hold sovereignty, here inside of myself.
I will be at peace with the parts of me
that I have been taught most to hate.
I will protect them from harm.
Even the rigid. Even the reckless. Even the rageful.
All of them are deserving of love. All of them.

“But that does not mean it will be easy.
It does not mean there will be no pain.
Remember what it was like to be a corpse, preserved in amber?
A fossilized insect to be ogled at.
We didn’t own our bodies then. (Or we did, but we didn’t know it,
so they might as well have not been ours.)

“I have not left behind the pain. I have it all here.
But I will not hold what is not mine.

“Take it back.
It’s not mine.
It never was.”

—Excerpt from “Take it back.”

*Source: @a_new_voice_therapy (me!) on Instagram.*

This blog was originally posted on my Substack on May 31, 2025. The original blog post can be found here.

The Good I Do Being Free: Reflections on Autonomy, and the Traumas of Carceral and Coercive Care

Missing person.

Reflections on Fear, and Being Human