My life had been focused on violence. I became so much more aggressive. Violence and aggression was a way out of some problems, but it usually caused more problems. People I cared about started getting hurt more than the people I hated. Enough of this landed me in a mental hospital, to "fix" me.

Places like that can be helpful, and some people see very real progress by going. Some institutions are just punishments disguised as rehabilitation. I hope more people receive the first option.

It took 6 hours to be admitted, after just waiting in the lobby. We walked in at around 7pm, and they put me in a room after midnight. I had lost track of time at that point, I only knew what it said on my paperwork. My first night isolated from the rest of the world went worse than I had initially predicted. I fell asleep faster than I thought I would, but still didn’t get enough sleep.

This had been the first morning in a long time that I woke up to and didn’t witness a single recognisable face. Even the people who had brought me in were gone. I was forced awake early in the morning, and couldn’t place the voice on anyone I found surrounding me afterwards. Everything I owned was taken from me. The disturbing unfamiliarity in both my location and my surroundings was putting me under an extreme stress I hadn’t felt before. I explored my room, which I found to share with another child, who was obviously a few years younger than me. I found him crying in the corner, on his side of the room. We were both called to the hallway, where everyone else stuck here was also waiting. The sense of emptiness came over me as I failed to recognise anyone in the lineup. I quickly understood that whoever I wanted to see, and whoever I knew before this, was completely absent from life inside these walls. Anything I knew before simply wouldn’t exist here.

Time kept passing, and every night I’d cry behind my bed thinking of the people I couldn’t talk to, and wouldn’t be seeing the next day. Making the best of the situation didn’t work. I found that as long as I couldn’t see the people I knew before, I wouldn’t be happy. I made new friends, but it couldn’t replace people.

Over a week passed by of bullsh**ting my way through their sessions and spitting out their medications into the shower drain. I was allowed to make a deal and go home as long as I followed their out-patient program. Before I had even left, I thought about what I could even say to the people I missed out on, and how I would explain my absence. Of all the people who I had worried about, the first person I saw was my father, who put me in there in the first place. I had kept thinking about my friends, and other family members, and never once spared a worry over him, missing him, or what he would think of me after I left. I cared about my mom, and my step dad. I still went home with him, but refused to talk.

Arriving home, I came back to everything I had missed out on in the past week, and contemplated all the things and people I had to lose. I immediately valued most of my family much more than I did before. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, and this was the first real absence I had felt in my life.