(ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧ Picture This

For my choice memoir, I read Susanna Kaysen's Girl, Interrupted, a hauntingly detailed depiction of Kaysen's two years in the psychiatric ward of McLean Hospital after being diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder. Kaysen constantly compares the mental hospital to a "parallel universe", stating that though it is invisible from our current standpoint, the view of the outside is clear from the inside.

Kaysen's major internal conflict is that she struggles to delineate the boundary between the two worlds of sanity and insanity. Thus, for my symbolic illustration, I drew a person sitting inside a snow globe-bubble-like thing, whose outer glass-bubble-thing is fluid, and penetrated as the person inside pushes out. I guess my odd-looking Matched-esque drawing could be interpreted a number of ways, but I intended for the bubble to represent the unclear distinction between the "normal" world and the world of the mental hospital. The person's breaking free of these boundaries symbolizes the fact that Kaysen is in denial about why she has been placed in a psychiatric hospital, and she struggles with a sense of belonging and acceptance of her situation. The bubble could also be thought of as confinement of the person inside, representative of the tight security and oppression faced by Kaysen and her comrades, which is a second major conflict (but not quite what I'm discussion right now. I digress.)

Toward the end of the book, Kaysen directly poses her questions about the boundary between sanity and insanity: "Someone who acts 'normal' raises the uncomfortable question, What's the difference between that person and me? which leads to the question, What's keeping me out of the loony bin?" (Kaysen 124). In a way, she also questions the reasons she was sent to the mental hospital in the first place, as she believes there are many others out there who are not so different from her, and may be wondering the same thing upon hearing her story. She implies that she and others like her were wronged, and forced into lives they did not choose.