Shattered

May 10, 2018·23 min·2 clips

Matthew Leeds describes the full physical reality of severe mental health episodes: burst capillaries, blackouts, waking face-down on the floor with walls covered in frantic scribbles.

The episode opens with a content warning about mental illness. The narrator, Matthew Leeds, describes a strange door in the station that fills him with irrational dread, which he manages by using the freight elevator to avoid it. He realizes he has been working back-to-back nine-hour surveillance shifts without a day off and decides to take one, but his music player malfunctions and triggers what appears to be growing anxiety. He describes his first panic attack, which occurred in an eighth-grade math class taught by an eccentric teacher who presented a 40-minute lesson on the mathematics of seesaws. By page eight of the packet the narrator was shaking, by page eleven gnawing his knuckles, and by the end openly sobbing. He describes the aftermath as seeing mathematical equations layered over everything in his field of vision for days, making even opening a lunchbox feel impossibly complex. After recovery, the episode seemed like an overreaction, which he identifies as a repeating pattern. A few weeks later the teacher gave him a much thicker, unabridged binder on seesaw mechanics as a gift, apparently proud. The narrator reflects that complicated enough material protected him from the worst of the knowledge. He describes the attacks becoming worse through his teenage years and into adulthood, with blackouts, missing time, and waking to find his walls covered in imagery of mouths in foreheads and trees with eyes. He catalogues the physical aftermath: burst capillaries, racing pulse, inability to sit in chairs normally, retreating into furniture. A public breakdown led to him waking in a hospital gown with no memory of the lead-up. He details the financial cost: $2,000 per night, $250 per pill, $10 per cup holding the pill, $5,000 for the emergency room, $2,000 for the ambulance, none of which included psychiatry or follow-up. He argues this system adds financial anxiety on top of the condition it claims to treat. He lied his way out and never returned. The one untreated episode cost him six months of savings. He describes the ongoing nature of his condition as a wolf always at the door, a permanent background dread even when life seems stable. The second half pivots: the narrator listens to someone currently trapped in an elevator and reflects that the station is not what is doing the real damage. She describes mental episodes she has had in safe sunny settings and argues that the internal reality of a severe episode is beyond the reach of any external horror. The episode closes with sounds of the station shifting and an abrupt encounter.

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