death and life

I think I'm actually getting somewhere with all these essay things. I guess I'm trying, yet again, to understand myself.
So when I was little, I watched my brother go to jail and prison and bootcamp and residential treatment. He wasn't home from the time he was 13 on. My parents sent him to Samoa for drug treatment, this island roughly near Australia. He came back two years later, got into drugs again, and got sent back. After that he was mostly in trouble with the law and the court.
I love my brother so much. Probably more than anyone else in my family, although it is perhaps a sin to love someone more than everyone else. But he is an awesome person. I've tried throughout the years to be mad at him for what he did to me, but even now my anger is brief and then I regret it.
The day after my 14th birthday my parents sent me to the same hospital my brother was at for a few months. I stayed in the accute unit- mostly for my bipolar being out of control. You know how you think you're way better than the people in those behavioral residential treatment places? YOU'RE NOT. I've been there. They're just like you.
I went in there with the attitude that everyone would be crazy and of course I wasn't. I was so naive back then. Anyway, I was probably the craziest one there.
My father works at that same hospital. Every day outside my bolted windows I watched him pass. Until I was in that psych ward, I've never felt homesick. But the week I was there I cried myself to sleep every night. People woke me up every fifteen minutes, coming into my room. I wasn't allowed to have pencils or drawstrings or go to the bathroom with the door shut. It was... Hell. It was death. It was nightmarish- the painful group therapy sessions, the anger that was coursing through me the whole time because my dad was three hundred feet away and I'd begged him to come visit me but he wouldn't. He was worried about his reputation- everyone knew my brother had stayed here. What would they think if they knew I had too? His refusal to visit me was for the same reason that a year and two months later he would forbid me to tell anyone of his suicide attempt and that nightmarish night at yet another hospital.
I could see my house outside the window to my small room. Every morning I sang to it. Something about wanting to go home I don't remember exactly what song it was.
On my last day in the hospital, a saturday in late May of 2003, they finally decided we weren't going to run away and let us outside. After a week of being confined in a small room all day every day, being able to go outside was like being let out of a prison camp. We ran through the grass... we rolled in it, we kissed it, we ate it. I've never realized how lucky we are to be able to breathe fresh air and walk on grass and see the sky every day. WE ARE SO FREAKING LUCKY.
Anyway, we didn't care what anyone thought of us, didn't care if they thought we were crazy- we were, after all, in a psychiatric hospital.
As I lay there on the ground, for the first time in my existance I was overjoyed just to be alive. And alive I was- I was so alive. I loved that my lungs were working, that my heart was pumping, that it was almost summer and that my hellish days in middle school were almost over (I didn't know my freshman year in high school would be worse than sixth, seventh, or eigth grade).
All that mattered to me at that moment was that I existed, that I was me, and that there was what seemed like an eternity of days in front of me to be free and to be happy.
That's the most alive I've ever been- ironically after one of the worst weeks of my life.
We don't appreciate what we have. Think of people in other countries who don't have nearly as much as we have- think of Asia getting hit with those tsunamis and earthquakes and all those poor people dying. I wasn't deprived in the hospital- I had everything I needed- but it taught me how lucky we are to be free, to be in control of ourselves, to be able to make our own decisions, to have locks on our doors and our own rooms and warm blankets that are ours.
You don't know the horror of Hell until you stay in a psych hospital.
But if I die tomorrow, if I kill myself tonight, at least I'll have had that one instant when I was totally and completely alive, when every cell of me cared about nothing but that epitome of life that was shining hard in me like a star of hope.