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conversation. He asks what I’mlistening to on my Walkman and, ashamed, I say, “George Michael.” “I like George Michael,” he says, furious at me for making it seem shameful. Never use pop culture as delineator with someone who hears voices. You don’t know what they hear between the melodies. On my last day, I leave him my Walkman and all my music. I wonder if it’s easier to navigate a stay in a psychiatric hospital now iPods exist, or if it impedes progress.
    There is a lovely middle-aged man, a straitlaced dad with small children, calm and sweet and I cannot for the life of me work out what’s wrong with him, so even is his voice and energy. It turns out that he broke his leg and arm climbing a generator pole. He waited until he healed and then did it again. “Why did you do it again?” he is asked in group therapy. “Why that pole?”
    He looks at the therapist like she’s mad. “Because that’s the pole that leads to heaven.”
    The grounds are very beautiful at the Priory. Somewhat Edward Gorey, a little Aubrey Beardsley. One expects to see peacocks, and I imagine there must be patients who, in fact, do see peacocks. It is a place for a gothic love affair. A place to hide from the world. It isn’t until I leave that place that I go out and find love for the first time. That could be because I got well (I doubt it) or because the grounds have, by osmosis, worked their way into me. This is love: beautiful, secret, overgrown, last chance.
    A nurse from the juvenile ward comes up to me in the cafeteria one day. “Emma?” I blink. It takes a moment to recognize her as a friend of a friend. We all used to go dancing. Thankfully, I am too tired and too medicated to feelany embarrassment, even when she asks, “So … how have you been?”
    I look at her a moment. “Not so good.”
    She lets it go and moves on with her rounds.
    For some reason, I care deeply about what I wear in the hospital. I’m still thin enough to wear curious things.
    Have you ever eaten something appalling for breakfast, something really bad for you, a chocolate cake, and just thought, “Fuck it, this is bad, I’d better keep going? Christ, this is making me feel horrible, I’d better have more?”
    And then have you ever left the last bite, less than the last bite, a morsel, a crumb even, and said to yourself, “There, I didn’t finish it. That didn’t really happen. You don’t process the calories unless it’s the final crumby morsel. Everyone knows that. So, we’re cool, right?”
    And you walk away whistling and try to think of worse things you might leave a crumb of, come lunchtime. If that all sounds bulimic, it is. The mind-set is: I’ve started on a path I’d prefer not to be on and I’m ashamed so I’d better just keep going. Somewhere along the line it becomes a perfectly routine and reasonable thing to be doing of an afternoon. All self-inflicted pain is excess consumption—heroin, crack, sex, food—even anorexia is its own path you can’t turn back from, more air, more nothing, space filled, to bursting, with space. Anorexia didn’t suit me, because I couldn’t make it work fast enough. The medium is the message, and my medium was cutting and bulimia.
    Chicken and egg: Which comes first, looking at yourself with burst blood vessels on your eyes and vomit in yourhair and having to cut yourself because you’re so ugly? Or eating everything in the cupboard to try to hold down how ugly the cutting has made you? It is madness. And if you don’t know who you are, or if your real self has drifted away from you with the undertow, madness at least gives you an identity.
    It’s the same with self-loathing. You’re probably just normal and normal-looking but that’s not a real identity, not the way ugliness is. Normality, just accepting that you’re probably normal-looking, lacks the force field of self-disgust.
    If you don’t know who you are, madness gives you something to believe in, and whilst I am