The grotesque irony of realising that you do indeed need to be hospitalised for your own safety and others even though the psych ward is a fucking horrible place to be and you wouldn’t wish it on your worst enemy and you generally end up being discharged from hospital in a worse state than you were when you arrived and you do everything in your power to avoid hospitalisation at all costs but today is a really bad day and you’ve had a really bad week and a really bad life and you think “Shit, I should definitely be in hospital” and so you frantically attempt to gather together some of your meagre possessions even though you know most of them will be confiscated upon arrival and you’ll never see these pathetic objects again but you need to throw some stuff into a bag because that’s what people do when they’re going away for a while and you pick up the only fucking bag you can find which is one of those supermarket carry-all bags that cost 20p because they’re an investment and you can use them multiple times instead of complaining every time you pay 5p for one of those too-small flimsy plastic bags that fall apart under the weight of six cans of lager so you throw your big bag o’ meds and a jumper and a comb and a towel into this bag that they call a “Bag for Life” and you’ve laughed at the idea of that before how this Bag for Life will survive longer than you will even when it ends up festering in landfill or smothering a turtle in some faraway ocean and you look at the bag and it has a picture of an elephant on it that says “I’m strong and sturdy” and you laugh for about fifteen minutes about the tragic fucking irony of the bag being “strong and sturdy” when you are everything but strong and sturdy because you’re weak and unstable because bipolar is trying to kill you and you’re trying to kill you and then you begin to cry because your brain is too broken to remember if pachyderm is a word related to elephants or maybe it’s some kind of skin disease or maybe it’s not a real word at all and you don’t know anything anymore apart from the fact that the only thing you and that fucking elephant have in common is that you’re both endangered