Behind These Walls // Brendon Urie

Chapter 1

(Mentions of: Self Harm)

I've never looked good in white; it's such a bland, unflattering color. The fact that the t-shirt I was given was two sizes too big may also have been a factor in how absolutely atrocious I looked. Then there's the factor of the florescent lights looming above my head, and also the fact that I'm already paler than a piece of copy paper. The main point here? I looked horrible. Not that it really mattered, because you know, I was in a mental institution. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that; I live in a mental institution. It's....it's a pretty sweet gi-who am I kidding, living in a mental institution sucks ass, pardon my French. There's no privacy; we're all perpetually 5 years old again, so you can only imagine the kind of attention we receive throughout the day. We don't get to really watch TV; they have a bunch of Disney movies on loop, which, don't get me wrong I love Disney movies, but when you hear "Bippity-Boppity-Boo" a thousand times a day you'll be wishing they bippity-boppity-wouldn't. Oh, and then there's the fact that, you know, you're surrounded by insane people. You have those who are completely off their rockers, who spend their time laughing and mumbling to themselves. You have the ones who are practically comatose, I call them the Blankos because they literally sit there and stare at the walls blankly. All. Day. Long. Then, of course, you have the ones who are coherently social, which is honestly the largest group; my group. We consist of people suffering from things such as Schizophrenia all the way to people like me who really didn't have anything that really needed to be handled behind the peeling walls of a mental ward. People like me who were pretty much just dumped here by our families because they didn't want to have to deal with us.

Oh yeah, maybe I should mention that I have both depression and bi-polar disorder. Yay for me. I'm just a cocktail of issues aren't I? Speaking of cocktails, can we please talk about the slew of pills that are thrown at our faces on a daily basis? I mean, seriously, there are some patients here who have to swallow about 10 pills a day. Luckily I have two, one for the depression, and one for the bi-polar disorder. Also, you're probably wondering why my family decided to drop me off in this god forsaken place when my mental illnesses are pretty easily handled outside of the crazy house. The honest answer? They didn't want me from the beginning. No, my parents wanted to travel, they wanted to see the world and live their lives in exotic places. So when my mom found out she was pregnant with my lovely little self, it put a damper on their plans. I guess I was lucky that they held onto me for 16 years of my life; a few more months and it would have been a solid 17 years. But I figured they were looking for a reason to get rid of me. Eventually they found one; it's called a suicide attempt.

Buzz

"All patients in Wings A, C, and E, please report to your rooms for your morning checks." A happy voice chimes in over the speakers.

I've only been in this place for 2 months, but I can already tell there's something weird about the people who work here. For some reason most of the nurses are happy, like, overly-happy. Don't let the fact that I'm diagnosed with Depression affect what I'm saying. What I'm saying is that these women, even to people who aren't chemically predisposition to a more somber outlook on life, are super happy, annoyingly upbeat at all times. Don't get me wrong, there is absolutely nothing wrong with loving life and being a genuinely cheery person, but there's something so eerily fake about the smiles on the nurses faces. It's almost as if they're being forced to act in a certain manner, which, now that I think about it, isn't too weird, I mean, c'mon, they are working in a mental institution, so keeping a sunny disposition at all times could possibly just make the days easier.

A knock came at my doorway, cueing me that it was time to put the book – The Cider House Rules by John Irving – down and prep for my room check. Every single morning at 10am on the dot, these things called checks would begin, starting with the female wings which were wings A, C, and E. Once they finished up with our rooms and schedules, the nurses would simply walk across the corridor to the male wings B, D, and F. There really wasn't much space between the female and male rooms, and fun fact, in this institution, if you were 16 or over you were thrown in with the rest of the patients, the cutoff for the juvenile ward was 15 years old. So, I pretty much roamed the halls as the youngest patient in the ward.