Once again, like so many times before, the world has shrunk down to just me, alone, in my bedroom. Black garbage bags over the windows to keep the sunlight out. Television on, sound off. Me, under the covers in filthy pajamas that haven’t been washed or changed in weeks, staring dully at the flashing lights and changing colors coming from the screen in the otherwise dark room.

“You have to get up,” my husband keeps saying, disturbing my insular cocoon by bursting through the bedroom door. It seems that all my adult life, since I began having these episodes, people have been trying to get me out of bed. My mother. My roommates. Now Jimmy.

“Can you tell me how you’re feeling?” he keeps asking.

But there are really no words to describe it. Mushy banana brain? Oatmeal slowly dripping from a spoon?

No one in my life seems to understand how I feel.

A few years ago, I was diagnosed as Bipolar, so sometimes I experience the opposite symptoms. Thoughts racing, staying up all night painting the kitchen or going to the all-night gym to run at superhuman speeds on the treadmill. These episodes have also resulted in impulsive, poor decisions that put myself and others in danger, such as going to Kennedy Airport at 2:00 AM, taking a plane randomly to Texas, and then living in the Dallas Airport for a few days.

I have found that people in my life have an even harder time understanding those episodes than times like this when I’m catatonic.

“Just leave me alone,” I tell my husband, throwing the dirty blankets over my head.

I keep getting the familiar vision in my head of my slashed wrists in the bathtub, blood seeping into the water, dissolving into a beautiful shade of pink.

My mother and my husband decide it’s time for me to go back to the hospital. They literally drag me out of bed, my body limp like a protester practicing passive resistance. They shove sneakers on my feet but leave my pajamas on.

I feel like I want to cry, but there are no tears.

And then, the cab ride to the hospital. It’s the first time I’ve been outside in over a month.

We arrive at Gracie Square Hospital. My friend Diana had a good experience here. I’ve been hospitalized eight times already, but this is my first admission here.

The intake doctor asks me the usual questions: who is the president? Remember these three words: clock, green, bicycle. Count backwards from 100 in multiples of 7. What year is it? What were those three words I asked you to remember?

And he interviews Jimmy about my recent behavior, my history of hospitalizations, what medication I’m on currently.

Finally, it’s time to go upstairs. But there’s a problem. The main ward is full.

“You’ll be going to the Asian Ward,” the doctor announces. “Right now, everyone on this ward is Chinese.”

I really don’t care where I go at this point. As long as they let me go back to bed and don’t try to get me up.

I ride the elevator with an orderly, my belongings—carefully packed by my mother to avoid contraband such as razors, mouthwash, belts or shoelaces—in a cardboard box. Like all psych wards I’ve been on, there is a sign on the heavy locked ward door: “ELOPEMENT RISK.”

At my first hospital, I thought this meant that patients might get married.

I look around the ward as the door locks behind me, that familiar feeling of being trapped again.

The signs on the wall are all in Chinese. The television in the Day Room is blaring the Chinese channel. In addition to the patients, all the nurses and orderlies appear to be Chinese.

“You want to kill self?” a cherubic nurse asks me with a big toothy smile.

“I want to kill myself every day,” I say. “What’s different about today?”

But she just keeps smiling. She doesn’t understand my response.

I’ve gone from people who don’t understand how I feel to an environment where people don’t understand my language.

After the nurse leads me to my room, I look out the window, down at the Upper East Side streets below. People going to work, walking their dogs. Grocery shopping. Out on first dates.

But here I am, locked up in yet another psychiatric ward. I’m beginning to feel that I belong in places like this, more than out in their world.

I get into bed and listen to the patients out in the hall yelling. I can’t tell if they are angry, or if the dialect just sounds harsh.

I sleep for a couple of days.

When I wake up, hungry, I venture out to eat the first real meal I’ve had in weeks. In the dining room, I can immediately tell who has what type of mental illness.

The schizophrenics pace around, talking to themselves, or shadow boxing in the corner. Manic patients talk quickly and laugh loudly, one of them coming up to me and yelling in my face, his hot breath smelling like vinegar.

And the depressed patients, pushing their food around on their plates, heads down, silent.

There is an elderly man sitting by himself, hands folded in his lap, staring at his feet. He looks so small and fragile, swallowed up in his hospital pajamas.

I sit down next to him. And I suddenly have the urge to put my hand on his knee. Inappropriate as it may be, I find myself gently resting my palm on his pajama bottoms.

As in every other psych ward I have been in, physical contact between patients is strictly forbidden. But the nurses’ aides monitoring breakfast are too busy flirting with each other to notice our interaction.

As if in slow motion, the man lifts his head and looks me in the eyes. We stare at each other. All the yelling and dishes clattering and loudspeaker announcements on the ward drift away, and it’s just the two of us.

Unlike everyone else in my life, I know he understands exactly what I’m feeling, without saying a word.

Here, under the fluorescent lights in a locked psychiatric ward, two people who can’t communicate verbally realize that they are not alone.

Alison Watson is a memoirist who writes about overcoming mental illness, addiction, and being an adoptee. She is currently shopping her full-length manuscript, “A Psychotic’s Journey Through Eastern Seaboard Psych Wards, ” with publishers. “No Words ” is an excerpt from her memoir. Alison’s work has been published in Issue #14 of Please See Me, as well as The Sun Magazine, MoonPark Review, and Bright Flash Literary Review. Her essay “Another Terrorist Attack,” published in MoonPark Review was nominated for Best of the Net, 2025. In addition to writing, Alison feeds her soul by working in an animal shelter. She lives in Brooklyn, NY with her husband of 22 years and their shelter mutt, Cindy Lou Who! To read more of her writing, please visit her website, alisonmorriswatson.com.