The everyday triumph

June groggily awoke from her medication-induced slumber. “What day is it?” she thought to herself, wearily hoping to remember that it was a weekend. To her dismay, it was Tuesday, another workday in the endless cycle of drudgery. It took all her effort to will her body out of bed.

Erratically June stumbled downstairs to the kitchen and poured herself a large glass of water. She sighed deeply as she took the daily prescription box off the counter. Staring intently at the cocktail of medicine, she hesitated before swallowing the lot.

Mindlessly, she opened the blinds on the sliding glass door. For a brief instant, a ray of light entered her slowed, scattered conscious. It was already 8:30 and the sun was streaming the window. Wistfully she glanced at the calendar, wanting desperately for something to be written there. As usual it was blank. All she ever had, it seemed, was her dead-end job at the local grocery store. “Guess it’s time to get dressed”, she mumbled to herself.

Still stumbling, this time from the medication, rather than tiredness, June managed to get upstairs. On the way to the shower, she looked longingly at the disheveled bed that seemed so inviting. There had been many days when she refused to resist the call of the still warm blankets and was forced to call in to her job with a meek excuse for missing work. Contemplating the feel of the warm blankets versus the stern scolding her boss would impart if she missed another day of work, June resigned to getting into the shower.

The cold initial blast of water jolted June into remembering, remembering her time at the hospital, the psychiatric ward. At the hospital the water never got warm. Patients were forced to acquiesce to the cold showers, or risk a note in their files, mentioning a lack of self-care that would reflect poorly on their chance of release from the institution.

June had spent 29 long days in the psychiatric institution. The average inpatient stay is between 3 and 10 days. Over the last three weeks since she had been released, she had managed to find a job and with her parent’s help had secured an apartment nearby both her parent’s house and her work. Even though her job was at risk, due to the amount of work she had missed, these were no small triumphs. Even still, June longed for more. She wanted things to go back to “normal”, to be the same as before the hospital stay, before she was given the label, bipolar.