I don’t really know what it was that made me crazy, specifically, but if I had to guess it would be the entire fucking universe. Do you know how hard it is to be alive in today’s world and not go crazy? Are all of you unconscious? This place is a fucking pigsty. We’re all living inside of the internet, blocking blue light with Amazon glasses, scrolling through a tidal wave of time sucking shit. Salted caramel bone broth. Children starving to death. Black Friday fashion haul. Processed food is going to kill you. How to homestead. Why men hate women. Where to find the biggest espresso martini in New York City. Dark tricks to make him obsessed with you. Shein crop tops clogging waterways in China. Jesus loves you. Who fucking cares?

I used to care. A lot. But then I realized that I have no power to do anything. I can’t help kids who live 9,000 miles away choking on dirty water from a billion-dollar oil company. I can’t fix the coral reefs. I’ll never own property. I can’t save the stray dogs in Bali or knit the ozone layer back together or help get all those innocent people out of jail. I can’t even afford to buy chemical-covered groceries.

The media was making me crazy too. The news, the movies, the endless violence and sickening shit we see all the time. It makes sense that I would go crazy consuming all of that. Chewing on it and swallowing. Can you even think about showing a pioneer dude some of the crap we watch today? You could show them a genocide happening on the news, where the richest countries in the world support the bombing oppressor. You could show them the movies, where men suck cum out of bathtub drains, cut body parts off of human beings and eat them, set houses on fire with children inside, show a pregnant woman’s head in a box: torture, rape, murder, war, necrophilia, porn, obscenity after obscenity. Don’t you think they’d vomit? Don’t you think they’d beg god for forgiveness? Don’t you think they’d want to take one of those American guns and blow their brains out?

I think after the incident, the institutionalization really fucked me up. Therapists are all crackpots, they got educated on the internet, they wrote essays with ChatGPT. They’re trying to blame my parents. Can’t we all blame our parents? Isn’t that a cop out? Can we blame somebody else? The government, Hollywood, Jeffrey Bezos? Why do I need to know the reason for all this suffering, can’t I just keep living like this? It isn’t going to get better, I’m not going to get better. Maybe I don’t want to get better. Can we even get better when we’re breathing in this awful air? Tell me when you start to suffocate.

I think people also made me crazy. The way they adore the internet, worship it, feed it every day like anyone cares what they ate for breakfast or how their boyfriend’s hair looked in 2008 or which Hollywood star said something politically correct. We’re eating all this useless information, getting full to bursting with irrelevant details of stranger’s lives. We are never looking anything up. We don’t actually use our agency. We’re letting the internet serve us what it wants, delivering our plates steaming hot and full of shit that makes us less hungry for real life. And you can see it everywhere: phones on tables and in back pockets; phones taking pictures of every tourist attraction, every work of art, every beautiful thing marred by the snap of useless photographs centered on some girl posing with her lips out, some guy in sunglasses with his arms crossed. There is no joy anywhere anymore unless it lacks cell service. You can’t fucking escape it. I couldn’t escape it.

Sometimes now, when I go to sleep at night I feel this incredible pain in my shoulder. It’s like I’ve been shot, or I’m on fire, or someone with very strong arms is pressing scissors into the bone. Sometimes it hurts so bad that I start screaming for medicine. I love medicine. It drowns out everything and produces this numbing sensation. Medicine is the only good part of institutionalization. And I get isolated from the internet. I hate the internet. Sometimes I really put on a show, throwing the sheets off of my bed and yelling so much I can feel the skin scraping off my lungs. Then they’ll send in Manny. Manny is this 300-pound Hispanic nurse with calloused hands and a mustache. He wraps me up in this bear hug that hurts. He holds me still while someone else stabs my muscle with that sweet, sweet medicine. I always act like I hate it. Thrashing around. Kicking people in the stomach. It’s my favorite thing in the whole world. I think I’m in love with Manny because he’s the only person who’s touched me in seven months. I hope he never gets another job.

My room is white, white, white. The bed is stiff. The breakfast is inedible oatmeal, congealed to the bottom of a chipped plastic bowl. All of the bowls are chipped. I guess because every morning someone is filled with such rage at the oatmeal that they throw the bowl across the room. Once I did it just for fun.

I don’t have any friends in here but I didn’t really have any friends outside either. It was too hard. Everything was about the internet. All of the language, all of the laughter, all of the lessons: came from the internet. Slay, cap, bet, flex, cheugy, rizz, bussin’, salty, dead, granola, high key, lowkey, cringe, fire, ghost. Every joke led back to a five second video seen two months ago. Every “article” someone read was a white girl on TikTok. Every human experience could be seen online. We didn’t need to live anymore. We could just watch. Learn from strangers who we don’t know. Take to heart something some sixteen year old on the other side of the world said who has never met us. No one asks their grandmother shit anymore. We just want the Boomers to die so we can pay seventeen times as much for the house they bought in 1942. Prime real estate. I always thought it was stupid, the way people talked. Like any of our lives actually matter. All you’re doing is sitting in front of a screen, Susan. It doesn’t matter what you do for the four hours before work and the four hours after. You’re digitally enslaved to your computer, your phone, your coffee machine, your security system, your car. They all have a screen. You’re always staring at something.

So yeah, I didn’t have any friends there or in here. But besides, everyone in here is crazy. Yeah, I guess me too. But I’m also incredibly smart. I ended up in here because I’m overeducated. And because of the internet. I hate the internet. Sometimes when I close my eyes I can still see it, dancing in the white bursts of light behind my eyelids. Best limoncello in Italy. How to make $50,000 a year from a 2-hour side hustle. How much money does it take to be happy? Parents playing a prank on a baby that makes it cry while people laugh. Dogs at an agility contest. Girls eating. Girls not eating. Girls talking about eating after not eating. Costco hot dog date.

Sometimes they let me do art in the craft room if I’ve been really good. They only let me paint because technically I’m high risk or whatever. They’re always wary of me when I have the brush, clutching it in my hand like a weapon. But I’m only holding it that tight because I really care about my art. All I paint are forks. You know, the metal trident thing. I miss forks. I never get to have forks here anymore. They only ever give me spoons. Once they gave me a spork and then they regretted that decision. Poor Manny. My love, tiny circles of blood caught in the thick black hair on his arms. I haven’t seen any type of tongs since then. I like the way they look, four straight spires, plunging upwards to unknown destinations.

Once I met a guy in here that flirted with me for three weeks. He did this by whispering terrible sexual things into my ear while we sat at the cafeteria tables. His nailbeds were always bleeding. He had a horrible skin-picking habit, peeling the sensitive layers of his fingers off one by one, shredding them like carrots. You could find the long pieces of fresh skin lying around the rec room, on the tables, inside magazines, stuck to the bottom of your socks. One day he told me that when I was sleeping he’d shove his whole fist into my asshole until I cried. I smiled like that’s something beautiful, took his bloody crusty hand in mine, and pushed his wrist backwards until it cracked and he lay crying on the floor. I hope he can never make a fist again. Manny hauled me back to my room. Gave me my beloved medicine.

The psychiatrist says that I have extreme responses to things. He doesn’t know what exactly is wrong with me. He’s given me like four different diagnoses. I am always doing something to change his mind. What an idiot. I guess anyone can be a doctor these days. I would’ve hated being a doctor. All these idiots coming in with a self-diagnosis from some crackpot online. WebMD. TikTok therapy. Five ways to know if you have ADHD. Seven ways to cure depression. How dogs can sense your sadness. Three quick tricks to solve your identity crisis. Twelve journals for sale that show you the way to your inner truth. Nine questions to ask for a better connection with yourself. How God physically healed my non-verbal Autistic son once I stopped eating gluten. #LoveYourself #Me #MentalHealth #Survivor #triggerwarning #burnout #depression #anxiety #adhd #autism #bodypositivity #ozempic #bipolar #COVID #cancer #grief

The psychiatrist is always trying to “get to the bottom of things” and “figure out what sparked the incident.” I never know what to say.

The psychiatrist already knows the basics. No, I did not know the girl. Yes, I was aware of what I was doing. No, I don’t regret it. Yes, I would do it again. No, I don’t think that it was entirely my fault. Yes, I did laugh afterwards for three days straight. No, I didn’t see her again. Yes, I know she went blind.

If you had been there, on that day, you might have done it too. You know, people always think of events in the singular. Oh, one day: she snapped. But you forget the most important part of mental illness is the bending. The bending happens long before the snap. You take the weight of something you hate or something you fear or something you desire and you hold it up, hold it up, hold it up. The weight bends and bends and bends, getting heavier and then: it breaks. It’s the same for all of us in here. We just couldn’t carry that feeling anymore. It broke free of our body. It did damage. Some of us are sorry about it. Some of us aren’t.

I walked into therapy the other day and the psychiatrist looked too pleased with himself. He gestured for me to sit down. Manny doesn’t usually come into the room with me, but today he did. He stood beside me, tense. The psychiatrist said something I don’t remember and then he held up a fork. A beautiful silver piece, thick handle stamped with flowers and vines. The thin tines looked so proper, like the fork was going to communion or a coronation, something royal. My breath caught in my throat. It had been months since I’d seen a fork.

Now, to clarify, I haven’t always been obsessed with forks. It’s just that now I see them as a tool of liberation, a reminder of what I did to break free from the clutches of the internet. If I had never had that fork in my hand, I would never have done it. I would never have been free. Manny sets a firm hand on my shoulder and I snap out of the memory. I think I’m hyperventilating.

“Take a deep breath.” The psychiatrist motions with his hand to mimic breathwork, sucking air through his nostrils, the sound of his snot catching in his nose hair breaks my trance.

“Can I hold that?” I stand up, hand reaching for the fork, but Manny pushes me back down into the chair. I love the feeling of his hands on my shoulders. I do it again and he shoves me back down, leaving his beautiful hairy hands like paper weights on my arms.

“Why do you want to hold the fork?” The psychiatrist asks, pen poised over paper.

“It’s important.” I beg, beckoning for him to bring it closer.

“Tell me why, and I might let you get closer.”

“Please.”

“Why?”

The word rings in my head like a fire alarm and I can physically feel my chest constricting. I don’t want to know why, anymore. Why doesn’t matter. It’s already done. Can’t we just leave it alone? Why you aren’t having better sex, why you can’t wake up in the morning, why you can’t stop scrolling, why you can’t get a boyfriend, why you have IBS, why you can’t travel, why you aren’t losing weight, why you need therapy, why you should quit your job, why you need a side hustle, why you should move to the countryside…

“I couldn’t take it anymore!” I practically scream, the words running out of my mouth like there’s an active shooter hiding behind my molars.

“What couldn’t you take anymore?”

“The noise.”

“What noise?”

“The internet.”

“The internet?”

“Her phone.”

“She was making noise on her phone?”

“Yes.”

“And you attacked her?”

“Yes.”

“Because of the noise?”

“It was too loud.”

“What type of noise was it?”

“Loud.”

“Was she watching a video on her phone?”

“Yes. Lots.”

“And that bothered you?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Can I hold the fork now?”

“Why did the noise from the video bother you?”

“It was stupid.”

“What was stupid about it?”

“Everything.”

“Why did it make you so angry?”

“I didn’t want to hear that noise.”

“Why?”

“That noise had been making my head hurt.”

“You had been getting headaches?”

“Yes.”

“From the noise?”

“From the internet.”

“Ah, the internet.”

“Was it social media?”

“Everything.”

“It was everything?”

“Yes.”

That’s all I told him. He never let me hold the fork. I may never hold a fork again. Manny quit a few days later. I never saw him again. But I know he remembers me, because the spork I stabbed him with left a scar. I imagine him seeing it everyday, tracing it with his tongue. I’m in love with him, I’m pretty sure. And if I ever get out of here, I’ll find him.

I’ll find him.