I met Darla when I was first admitted to a psychiatric ward, better known to its inhabitants as the West Wing. I didn’t know where I was or its name at the time. It was late, or early, but I hadn’t slept in over 48 hours, so time was meaningless. The rest of the ward was asleep, but Darla was awake. She was perpetually awake, her demons too relentless, her pain too piercing. “Nobody listens to me,” Darla told me one day, maybe a week after we first met. “That’s why I like you. You see me as a person.”

 

After a lifetime of cocaine and fentanyl abuse, Darla’s intellectual capacity had decreased considerably. She was raped more times than she can remember. Her beloved sister, her only tie to normalcy and childhood, died last year of cancer. Her best friend died in her arms, shot in an act of police brutality. She bore five children and watched as they were ripped from her arms. She has struggled with schizophrenia her entire life, left untreated and without access to care. Her form of self-medication, drugs, quickly morphed into an addiction that she hated having but had no way of fixing. Worst of all, perhaps, was that Darla had nowhere to go, no house or apartment to call home. 

​

That night, Darla limped over to me and introduced herself. Her words slurred together in a low rasp as she reached out to hug me. I stiffened at her touch and the nurse ushered her away. Days later, we would always hug before breakfast and after night meds. We would draw together, my obsessive tendencies well suited for detailing the intricate scenes she asked me to outline. A house by the shore – her dream. We colored it together, and she laughed the entire time. I smiled, but it never reached my eyes; I knew she would never see the shore or her house. 

​

Darla, however, laughed almost as much as she cried. She danced too, to music she either sang or forced the nurses to play from phone speakers that barely worked. She saw me doing yoga one day and asked to join. 65 with part of her skull and hip missing from a terrible car accident, she managed a few lunges. She woke up from a coma once and doctors told her she would never be able to walk, let alone write her own name. She proudly showed me her signature. It flowed, beautiful and girly. Darla was a poet, a master of words that she crafted out of thin air. She recited her poems when the pain was too much, the flashbacks to her life outside the hospital too vivid to bear.

​

No doctor, psychiatrist, nurse or patient left more of an impression on me than Darla. I cried when she left, half-heartedly blaming the tears on my fragile state. Anyone who knew her would have cried too, even on the sunniest of days. Darla promised to recover and I promised to answer her calls from rehab, where she would stay for a year.

​

Meanwhile, I watched the world cast its judgment. The nurses dismissed her. I knew from the way they murmured behind their big glass desks. My own mother didn’t want me to befriend her. “People like that are dangerous. You have too much empathy,” she told me between headshakes. Everyone else dismissed her, too. “She’s 65. If she wanted to recover, she would have already.” “She probably wants money from you.” “She’s going to bring you into dangerous situations.” 

​

What they never considered was that maybe Darla truly wanted to get better. Maybe, just maybe, she had been trying to get better her whole life, only to find herself utterly lost in a cruel world that dismisses the mentally ill, blames the homeless, and ignores the addicts. Her calls for help were left unanswered, her pain left to metastasize. Darla was forgotten, cast aside by a society that refused to acknowledge its fault in both the creation and perpetuation of all that she struggled with. 

​

Meanwhile, Darla called from her new rehab facility, though I picked up sparingly. As our calls turned into the occasional voicemail, she always kept me in her prayers. How could someone so hurt, so immensely and repeatedly beaten down by the world, have enough kindness and strength to care about me? 

​

My heart hurts for Darla and anyone in a similar situation. And yet, it is these exact people – the ones that need our help the most – that are constantly criticized by society. Even in an age of the de-stigmatization of mental health, individuals with chronic and overlapping issues are cut from the narrative, left to fend for themselves in a system that provides neither help nor guidance.

 

Our collective perception of homelessness, addiction, and mental illness is a harmful one that teaches us to villainize and ostracize those struggling – often the most vulnerable, brave, and kind souls among us. Darla believed that we can change these narratives, and her words stay with me, even today. 

​

“You and me, let’s get people to care.”

​

This is Darla’s Story.