My Radical Instagram Sangha: A Love Letter

“Psych ward day 1// the side effects are hitting hard [barf emoji] [eye-roll emoji]”

–– Caption for soundless video of a young woman in her inpatient hospital room in Kenya. She wears a medical mask, points the camera at herself in the mirror, flashes a peace sign. Instagram user [redacted], 1,604 followers.

I can’t remember my first day in the psych ward. My delusions were so total, I’m not sure where “I” really was. I recall wandering the hallways in hospital socks and a hospital gown that kept flapping open. It was as if the whole floor were abandoned. In my memory, it is morning and all the overhead lights are off. I stumble across an empty room and flip the light switch. A small round table. A piano. I sit down and play. It’s horribly out of tune. The next memory is a window, and I suppose those are my eyes looking out of it. The next memory is bedtime. My roommate is asleep as I stand in front of a full-length mirror in the dark. The next, I lie in my bed, hallucinating lightning in the closet. The next, I’m pissing the bed, my body frozen in panic. Perhaps it goes without saying, I didn’t have my phone.

*

“Dude thats a nice ass psych ward. We had no mirrors or closets, we were definitely not allowed bags in our room and DEFINITELY not our phones. I hope you get well soon, stay strong luv xx”

–– comment #14

The only visitors are Mom, Aba, and my brother. I only remember their presences in slivers and chases. My Aba snaps open a shesh besh board, our family pastime. The drugs slug my moves. Another visit: Mom sits beside me. Because of the newest batch of drugs, I can’t speak. It’s as if I’ve been in a major car accident. I can’t lift my arms. I can’t lift my eyelids. We just sit. I feel her hand resting on my hand. The rest is murk. They come, they leave. I lie in my cot listening to a Discman, a privilege. I reread a pamphlet: Bipolar Disorder and Priorities. But even a pamphlet is too much for my submerged, sparking brain; I get dizzy after the first thin page. Besides my family, there’s no one. My friends are in college studying for exams and getting drunk on the weekends. My phone is wherever the nurses put it. In any case, no one has called.

*

“you’re so strong and so wonderfully made! im so proud of you for getting the help you need i know this is hard work and its so inspiring to see! i am sending you so much love and light, i am so hopeful that you feel supported and cared for right now!”

–– comment #13

Fourteen years after that first stay in the psych ward I stumble across an Instagram user whose self-deprecating memes about mental health make me cackle. The humor is dark enough to make an able-bodied person cringe, which admittedly makes me like it more. I can’t stop scrolling. A meme reads, “Tip: Spice up your panic attack with a harmonica.” I smile. Another, “me: *wakes up* me: why.” I smile again.

The account owner is Gen Z; everything about their transparency, their tool for communication, and their subversive humor is perfumed with this fact. For her, the internet was always there. While I was raised on landlines and dial-up, her peers were likely using iPads as toddlers. More defining than any technological upgrades is the signature candidness of Gen Z. [Redacted]’s Instagram profile is a list of all their medications, followed by their many diagnoses. Before the lengthy catalogue, dancing between a [fairy emoji] and a [skull emoji] is “Tw.” Trigger warning.

To put it as simply as possible, Gen Z couldn’t give a fuck. Swimming since birth in a far-less-boundaried reality, there’s a “what’s the big deal?”-ness to those gawking onshore. Fluent as they are in fluidity, they’re a Rolodex of shrugs. Gender, who? Bipolar, what? My medication, your business, sorry, not sorry. And I love them. I mean I full-body, middle-of-the-night, lose-my-breath, can’t-believe-I-survived-without-their-audacity love them.

Another meme: a poorly collaged dog with his arms open wide; next to him, it reads, “due to PERSONAL Reasons I will be at the *Psychiatric Ward* for 3-5 BUSINESS DAYS.” I experience simultaneous aloneness and unaloneness. I remember my best friends and me on a three-way call the week I got out of the psych ward. How they rattled on that they’d looked online and “wow, it looked like a spa in there!” I barely said a word. One of them began listing homeopathic remedies. My heart and mind checked out. I was an ear to a phone, the tin of their voices bouncing off.

But here, fourteen years into the future, I’m grown and sitting in the studio of my apartment in soft lamplight; Angel, my partner of nine years, fiddles on her phone as I fiddle on mine. My screen lights up with a proclamation: “Psych ward day 1// the side effects are hitting hard [barf emoji] [eye-roll emoji].” She’s in Kenya, this meme artist, this anonymous, unequivocal best friend. Easy-breezy, she admits she’s in the ward, even gives us a ten-second tour: on her bed, a neon backpack, headphones, a fidget spinner; her glorious feet in boots; the flash of a peace sign in the mirror; a window frames distant flowers.

If I were to try to recall when I revealed to strangers that I’d been hospitalized, I’d say it was three months after my release. I was flown across the country to read poems at a festival. The auditorium was packed with four hundred shadowy faces. When I say “revealed,” I mean I read a persona poem in the voice of a mental hospital’s piano. Even using this poetic device, I felt exposed. But while my poems alluded to madness, they weren’t explicit. The audience could perhaps infer some of my story. Or not. I was a paid performer inviting the room into my inner landscape. But vulnerability in a poem is different than a real confession, than “Psych ward day 1// the side effects are hitting hard . . .”

I revel in the comments, which are casual and loving, curious and frank, and land on, “you’re so strong and so wonderfully made! im so proud of you for getting the help you need i know this is hard work and its so inspiring to see! i am sending you so much love and light, i am so hopeful that you feel supported and cared for right now!”

In my years as a Millenial, I’d heard, over and over again, especially since the iPhone’s epic first wave, the shaming “You guys are always on your phones.” [Redacted]’s vulnerability of casting just four words into the universe, “Psych ward day 1,” unveils an ache I’ve long felt for normalization, connection, trust, and candor. The return volley, “you’re so strong and so wonderfully made!” homes my ache. She’s in Kenya, but who knows where this loving comment is from? I go to their profile: a name, but no location.

What is a friend? The word has, perhaps, been cheapened through Facebook’s coinage, while Instagram and Twitter prefer “Follower.” I can’t help but think of Rumi calling God “The Friend.” Sometimes a friend is simply a mirror. I am thirty-six years old, fourteen years older than my hospitalized self. In the words leaping off the screen, both of us are reached.

Sometimes a friend is simply a mirror.

*

“I’m literally about to go to a treatment center in the next few hours. Wish me luck. [fingers-crossed emoji]

–– comment #8

There are three likes on this comment. A “like” means “I agree,” “I see you and affirm you,” “I support this.” The year 2006 was, literally, a time of no “likes.” To have had one proverbial like––that would have been beyond my wildest dreams. I wouldn’t have needed three. Not even two. Just one “like,” unashamed and unshaming––a kinship not built around the edges of my hospitalization secret but forged from its direct admission. This would have changed my world. “Wish me luck,” the user says. Just like that. They ask for it. They are open enough to invite blessing. In my hand, my phone is a portal. “Good luck,” I say into the night air. But then I go beyond my private voice in my private apartment: I press the tiny heart beside her words. I like it.

*

“All the best! Lots of love from [redacted] Psych Ward”

–– comment #9

I holler and stamp my feet. Angel looks up, “Hmm?” I can’t explain how light fills the non-bones of a jellyfish, or how animal a flower looks blooming on fast-forward, or what it does to the spirit to touch a redwood older than you, so this feeling? I can’t explain. I just laugh. Remember in game shows when the host would give you the first two options and then, kabam, they’d unveil door number three? Door number one: suffer your mental illness alone. Door number two: maybe, maybe there’s kinship out there, but you’ll have to secretly seek it out. This is door number three. Not only is there kinship, but it is rebelliously alive despite, and broadcasting from all ends of the earth, twenty-four hours a day. It is currently in a hospital typing, unabashed; it is exclamation pointed. The fever dream that I could have had companionship around my hospitalization––it’s why I laugh and laugh now. Oh, bless door number three, that I could have had currently hospitalized companions at the touch of no-button, just a glowing screen in my palm, hello, you’ve found me, you’re here at the ready, blessing and loving me. A door beyond my wildest doors.

*

“Stay strong [username redacted] [muscle-arm emoji] [red heart emoji] we believe in you”

–– comment #10

Which isn’t to say that over the last fourteen years I haven’t been in community with other mentally ill people. For nearly a year I attended a DBSA (Depression Bipolar Support Alliance) group in my small college town. Fifteen or so of us, some regulars, some drop-ins, would meet every Wednesday evening in an emptied office building off Main Street. Unlike my experiences of group therapy where a therapist holds the space and guides the conversation, DBSA is peer-led and so, for me, deeply radical. We could talk about anything, illness-specific or not. We could choose to not talk. Family of those living with illness were welcome, as they also needed support.

Inclusivity, patience, and nonjudgement were hallmarks of the space. J., a middle-aged, no-nonsense, potbellied sweetheart who lived with Depression his entire life, was our facilitator and fellow struggler. At twenty-five, I was younger than everyone in the group by at least a decade, sometimes two or three. My first meeting rocked my preconceptions. There was a car mechanic, a veteran, an elderly couple. We listened well, and complained, and bickered. It was messy, and imperfect, and freeing. I wouldn’t miss a Wednesday meeting for anything.

Simultaneously, I also began attending a weekly Buddhist meditation sitting group in, of all places, a nursing home where one of our members lived. Here, too, I was younger than everyone by two to five decades. The seven of us meditated together on plastic pull-out chairs and participated in a sharing circle where you could speak, uninterrupted and without responses, if called to. While the mind and its intricacies were given prime real estate in our sitting practice and sharings, mental illness often felt like taboo territory. Group members frequently spoke of instances of anger, insecurity, and revelation, but when it came time for me to speak, I had no idea how to tiptoe even to the edge of where my mind had been, how to gaze over its precipice and describe the rapid slap of waves disintegrating the shore.

Both spaces were by nature places of seclusion. There was a code of privacy and confidentiality, acknowledged aloud. As spaces to grapple openly, witness and support others’ healing processes, and actively reflect on the mysteries of the human mind, they served me tremendously. In a time when my own family failed to know how to protect me, where I felt left to my own devices because of the ravages of my illness, I had found two sanghas.

The Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh describes a sangha as “a place to practice for the transformation and the healing of self and society. You take refuge in the sangha so that you can restore your strength, your understanding, your compassion, your confidence. And then in turn you can use that strength, understanding and compassion to rebuild your family and society . . . to restore communication and harmony. This can only be done as a community—not as an individual, but as a sangha.”

Although the language of sangha is explicit to life as a Buddhist, Nhat Hanh expands on the definition, “the trees, water, air, birds, and so on can all be members of our sangha,” and adds that this idea is not entirely new but can be found throughout the sutras and the Abhidharma, where “a pebble, a leaf and a dahlia are mentioned” in this respect. As a poet, this makes intrinsic sense to me. I know we are buoyed by the so-called inanimate. I too have been supported, even saved, by a sprawling autumnal hillside or the chutzpah in a single red leaf.

I too have been supported, even saved, by a sprawling autumnal hillside or the chutzpah in a single red leaf.

What then of a phone? A photo-sharing app? A choir of emojis gathered around the campfire of a meme? Nhat Hanh goes on to say, “Abandoned, alone, you get lost, you get carried away. So taking refuge in the sangha is a very deep practice, especially for those of us who feel vulnerable, shaky, agitated and unstable. You allow the sangha to transport you like a boat so that you can cross the ocean of sorrow.”

Perhaps the most revolutionary thing I’ve heard the renowned monk say is that it’s possible the next Buddha won’t take the form of an individual. Instead, “the next Buddha may be a sangha.”

*

“[Crown emoji] They give you your phone at yours? Up in New York it’s like@jail no fresh air no ciggs & nurses constantly walking in on you every 15/20 mins didn’t even have a table in the room just a rubber bed nailed to the floor”

–– comment #11

It’s evening in Brooklyn. Angel smiles at my laughter and reenters the catharsis of her phone. Her face is lit green. As a Black queer woman in America, who knows what distraction, or laughter, or kinship will bounce from the screen to soon find her eyes? Soon I’ll take 750 mL of Lithium, split into two dosages, one pinkish, one chalkish. I’ll note how late it’s gotten, 1 a.m., and wonder if it will affect my mood the following morning. I have a decade of such minute-by-minute charting under my belt. It’s taken fourteen years, but I’m finally married to my illness.

The moment I hit rock bottom (for the fourth time), I took real vows to my illness: I won’t underestimate you. I’ll spend every day listening to you and honoring your power. I know your power could kill me, so I’m not going to help you do that. It’s not romantic. It’s a blood pact. It’s acceptance mixed with accountability. It’s love.

The screen jitterbugs with typos and soul: “Up in New York it’s like@jail.” I nod, transfixed. I teach poetry for a living, and let’s be clear, this is poetry. “No fresh air no ciggs & nurses constantly walking in on you.” I remember a shadow opening my hospital room door every fifteen minutes each night on rounds, revving my insomnia with each sudden sliver of neon hallway light. To remember is a type of bob and weave. The memory creates a stir of panic in my blood as the walls of a hospital room close around me and the ambiguous darkness of a face opens my door, where nothing, not even my sleep, is private.

Yet here I am, safe in my Brooklyn apartment, the evidence of a privileged and loving life everywhere around me. To remember (etymology: “pass through the heart”) is a type of alchemy. My memory is spun to gold by comment #11. It is corroborated, uplifted. A space has been created by this unflinching journalism, this unabashed Instagram memoir. “Didn’t even have a table in the room just a rubber bed nailed to the floor.” My heart hurts for them. This wasn’t my experience. As if for the first time, I notice “[crown emoji].”

As if to say, this is how we speak to each other: You got to keep your phone? How crown. A victory in this war. I’m happy for you.

*

“I am so glad you have your phone with you. You can do this. [two red heart emojis]

–– comment #3

“You got this [prayer hands] you’ve come out the other side before and you can do it again [red heart emoji] sending love”

–– comment #6

“[four pink heart emojis]”

–– comment #16

“Hang in there girl! [red heart emoji]”

–– comment #14

“Looks way better than the psych wards I’ve been to. How’re you feeling today?”

–– comment #1

“You got this [red heart emoji] you’ll come out better and strong in the end [hibiscus flower]”

–– comment #8

Lord knows I’ve been guilty of distraction. The doomscroll. Hours wasted. But in my small hands I hold an ode. I scroll and scroll the residues of tenderness. It never ends. I consider every digital symbol on the screen. [Muscle arm], [red heart], [prayer hands], our century’s hieroglyphs. Little [hibiscus flower], which in the real world I’ve been told aids in digestion and helps with depression. [Fingers crossed], a gesture of hope for good luck.

I type my own. I want them to know I’m right there with them, praying the day along, the way only survivors can. I too once puked up the pills, [barf emoji]. I too [eye-roll emoji] at the seventh doctor to make assumptions and not understand despite all the maps I draw. Oh, phone. This rectangle is not a concept, mist in the fist. “You got this,” the phone glows, “you’ll come out better and strong in the end.” Another “you got this,” and another. The phone speaks in several tongues all at once; “you can do this!” and “hang in there girl!” shout their love from my hands.

“You ready for bed?” Angel asks.

I nod and plug the world into the wall to charge. Tomorrow, a young woman in Kenya will read my words. She is behind locked doors, trying to be well. She’ll see what I commented, what no one could tell me in 2006 in my small hell: “I’m here with you,” a love letter from across the world.

[Hibiscus.] [Crown.] [Fingers crossed.]

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