Coining Out
Rob Rogers
How do I say goodbye to the people who saved my life?
Sitting at the head of the room in the faux leather chair usually reserved for the clinicians who run our processing groups, I glance briefly at the coin in my right hand. The size of a quarter and the color of a Chuck E. Cheese video game token, the side facing me is minted with a sun rising between two mountains, underlined by a thin stream in a valley below. Embossed above the sun in slightly raised cursive is the message, “Never alone again.” Already holding back tears, it’s my turn to conclude the ceremony. I tap the coin three times on the aluminum leg of the table beside me and search for the words that will lead me into the rest of my life.
Coining out is how the patients in partial hospitalization at the La Amistad mental health treatment center conclude their stays before rejoining the world. At the end of a final day spent, like the rest, processing with others in recovery while seated at plastic tables set in an arc around the clinician’s chair, the outgoing guest of honor takes the seat at center stage, and a therapist hands one of a collection of aluminum medallions adorned with sentiments like fortune cookies to the nearest patient. Tradition dictates that the first of my recovering compatriots then taps the token three times on the leg of their chair, then offers words of advice and encouragement to the soon-to-be-departed. Upon concluding their remarks, they tap the coin three times more and pass it on. When the coin has completed its circuit, any clinicians or other observers in the room share their own remarks, before the final comments are reserved for the keepsake’s recipient.
The ritual can be awkward for some. Even the newly arrived are expected to participate, resulting in brief contributions like, “I just got here and didn’t really get the chance to meet you, but I wish you the best.” Many others are preoccupied with the troubles that brought them here and would prefer to avoid being made to feel like the best man at a wedding. But many offerings are heartfelt and tear jerking. We have, after all, been through a lot together in these last few weeks.
The artwork on my coin is fitting. I arrived here in partial hospitalization, meaning I spend only days here and sleep at home, after an aborted and traumatic experiment at a residential treatment center in the Appalachians. Having been saved twenty-five years earlier by residential treatment following a suicide attempt, I thought that retreating to the mountains far from my Florida home would help me escape the latest crises and find my way through my troubles. That lasted six days. When my wife saved me and brought me home, there was no question that we would return as soon as possible to partial hospitalization, but without the distraction, communication restrictions, ankle bracelets, and melodrama of the low security prison where my condition had worsened.
That was six weeks ago. On Monday, I return to work for the first time in three months, after my second sabbatical in less than a year.
The hours spent in this room, a conference room in an office setting not unlike those at the legal offices I’ve worked in for 20 years, have changed my life. The intensive psychiatric care I’d received twenty-five years ago had pulled me back from the brink and taught me basic concepts like self-esteem. But when your problems are severe, only so much can be accomplished in three weeks, particularly when you’re only twenty-three and still have yet to figure out who you are. So it was probably inevitable that I'd one day have to return to treatment.
The years since have been full of pleasure and pain, but for the most part, I’ve enjoyed the fruits of a happy life. A family. A reasonably successful career. A handful of friends, or as many as I felt obliged to have. But I never dealt with the underlying causes of my illness, or even identified them. Over the course of twenty years of a stressful legal practice for which I may not have been built, the pillars and beams holding me together disintegrated, and eventually I broke.
In this conference room, I have found a safe harbor to shelter from the tempest while I refit and refurbished, at these tables with these people. The days were not without their nightmares. Having bled my sanity dry for nearly a year despite a return to therapy and psychotropic medications, and particularly after using all remaining strength to extract myself from the disaster in the mountains, I arrived here at my wits’ end, tortured by anxiety, paranoia, and insomnia. Momentary breakthroughs were interrupted by fits of panic and racing thoughts that warped my perceptions of other patients and those treating me.
But the single feeling I had when I arrived on my first morning, the one that carried me through the agonizing lessons I learned here, was the warmth of knowing for the first time that I was no longer alone. Despite spending the last 20 years with a wife who loved me despite my eccentricities, I’d never met anyone who could understand the wars going on inside my mind until I arrived here. On my first morning, quivering beneath my patented “nothing’s wrong” smile and self-deprecating humor, I answered the clinician’s question about how I felt with honesty, that I was afraid. Before the host could respond, a room full of people I’d never met answered that they were all afraid. Within a few days I realized that I had found a sanctuary, a showroom of other misfit toys.
With them, I began learning and accepting. I came to understand enemies like cognitive distortions and post-traumatic stress that had mutilated me and left me scarred and raw. In this carpeted refuge with halogen lights and dry erase boards, I bore my soul and dug out the tumor. Slowly, painfully, but profoundly, I began to heal.
These days spent with my fellow walking-wounded, struggling to learn how to rebuild our lives, have been surreal in a bittersweet kind of way. We arrived as strangers, identified throughout only by our first names. During days spent confessing and crying, we shared little of our lives except those most personal and painful of secrets that we rarely share even with parents and spouses. Pulling each other out of the deepest and darkest of holes, we developed bonds that masqueraded as intimacy. But we are still strangers, tourists on vacation spending a short respite from our daily lives, and most of us will not stay in touch when the holiday is over.
As I have listened to the soldiers with whom I’ve shared so many foxholes move me to tremors with compliments and well-wishes, I shed tears knowing that I’ll probably never see most of them again. After returning to our lives, many of us will choose to leave in these rooms the pain we’ve experienced while learning how to survive, however transformative and life-saving that pain may have been. Many will bury these days in the past; others will return again far too soon. Some will never recover. But the memories of how each of these fellow travelers helped me heal is no less sacred. Few experiences have meant as much to me as looking into each of their faces and being met, for the first time, with the reply, “I know.”
So as my lips part and I struggle, tongue-tied, to share my feelings with my colleagues one last time, I grip the chair, close my eyes, and etch a portrait of the faces I see. I savor this last moment of camaraderie and postpone for now any foreboding about the new life that awaits me. I will miss them, but I am ready.
Rob Rogers
Rob Rogers is an attorney from Orlando, Florida and the author of Finding My Way Home: Fighting Depression Backpacking in Central Florida. His articles have been or will be featured in The Florida Writer, the Still Point Arts Quarterly and on FloridaHikes.com. He also writes a blog called the “Central Florida Backpacking Desk Jockey” (backpackingdeskjockey.blog). More about Rob can be found at his website, RobRogersWriter.com.