And you cannot run from demons

Dissociation is an altered state of consciousness characterized by partial or complete disruption of the normal integration of a person’s normal conscious or psychological functioning. Dissociation is most commonly experienced as a subjective perception of one's consciousness being detached from one's emotions, body and/or immediate surroundings


I sit here, in front of the medication closet at Riggs, for my last time.


Mistake number one: I was taken off of an anti-psychotic medication called Abilify, as an "experiment." 
From that moment on, everything began to deteriorate, including my mind.  


Slowly, I began to have dissociative episodes, followed by panic attacks. These episodes are very hard to explain, several doctors are currently trying to work, towards the nobel peace prize, on trying to find an explanation for these episodes. 


Three weeks ago was when I started losing touch with reality in my episodes.  I felt confused. I lost touch with my surroundings. I looked at everyone around me and their faces appeared blurry, almost smeared.  I looked at my face in the mirror and could not find it.  I was terrified. I experienced these symptoms every night.  I remember one night especially, I had come out of a dissociative episode and straight into a panic attack.  I felt unsafe. I was unsafe.  I slept on the couch at the nurse's station that night.


Mistake number two: I made the decision to go to NYC with my girlfriends on that Saturday. To most everyone this sounds idiotic, especially after my terrible experiences over the previous week. But I wanted to feel normal, maybe if I no longer talked about my episodes with nurses and doctors, they wouldn't be so real. Maybe I just wanted a shot, at life.


Mistake number three: I felt the anxiety, eating me inside out, throughout the day.  I didn't say it.  I didn't communicate just how bad it was, until it was too late.  So there I was, in New York, away from all of my resources at Riggs, cell phone dead, no parents, no medication.


The next few hours are very blurry. My anxiety had grown. Into a massive state that I was no longer able to control.
I remember sitting in the ambulance, everyone around me was crying. My friends told me they loved me and I reciprocated.  A few days later, was when those four girls told me that at that moment, they finally saw "Jenna" come back.


I had a severe dissociative episode in the car, while we were driving through the city.  I don't know exactly where I went, but I was not there, in that moment.  The girls later told me they looked into my eyes, and I "wasn't there."


I could write an entire story about the New York hospital psych ER, but I won't.
I could write an even longer story about the next few excruciating days that followed this incident, but I can't.


My best friend Blair told me she loves to read my blog, but that sometimes she has to put it down, because it is just too sad.  But this is my life, in ruins.


For her sake, I'll skip the pain and remorse that I could write about...
For her sake, I will tell you that I am on new medications, that I have mended the relationship with those girls in the car, that I have not had a dissociation since that night, and that I have never been so hopeful in my life.


My adventure begins tomorrow, yet again.
I will venture home, then to another treatment facility.


But this is it, this is my shot, at life.