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Sometimes I just remember the one moment when I felt really cared for after a year of abuse from my 'best friend' and months of strained relationship with my parents after I had pushed them out during that year, then left them with the broken aftermath of their very traumatized, very expensive, daughter.
I was in the ER. Not a rare occurrence at the time. It was before one of my inpatient stays that year, but I'm not sure if it was the second or the third, they all blur together. I usually would have to spend a night there and wait for a bed to open up before being admitted, and that was how it went this time. In the middle of the night, I woke up with a nosebleed from the dry hospital air. I didn't really know what to do. Any normal person would get up and go to the nurse's station and get some tissues or something, but being a mentally ill child who was just yelled at by her mother the day before for saying she needed help because the hospital bills were already stacking up and going to the ER cost a lot of money, not to mention the inpatient stay, I didn't want to inconvenience the nurses (it's literally their job) so I just laid back with the back of my hand over my nose while I waited for it to stop. Swallowed a lot of my own blood, but I was already in such a horrible mental state, broken to my core to the point I wanted to leave mortality, that I could care less as long as nobody else was affected.
The bleeding stopped and I did the best I could to get the dried stuff off my hands by licking my finger and rubbing it off, but it was dark, so I couldn't really see if it worked. I went back to sleep and then woke up in the morning and did my usual ER routine of sitting in the dark because I didn't want to have to go out to ask the nurses to turn on the light (lightswitches weren't in the rooms for safety reasons or something idk). When one of the nurses came in to bring me breakfast, she turned on the light, but I didn't notice there was still dried blood on my hands and just ate my breakfast in silence because I never asked for them to turn on the TV. I always waited for them to suggest it since I didn't want to inconvenience them (again, it's literally their job to do that but I still felt bad asking). When she came back to take my tray, she noticed the blood and asked about it. It was only then I realized that blood on the hand of a mentally ill child in the ER because she could hurt herself is easily interpreted as literally anything other than a nosebleed. I panicked and started explaining myself, and to my relief she believed me and I wasn't put on a 1 to 1 (I had to experience that at some point later and it sucks). She left to go get me a wipe to clean it off.
She came back and I was sitting on the floor next to the weird little plastic round side table thing. I was expecting her to just throw it at me or something and leave me to clean myself up, but to my surprise she sat down in front of me and (after asking permission to touch me) started wiping my hands for me. She was just so careful and sweet about it. She called me 'honey' and it left me with a warmth in my chest that I hadn't felt in over a year.
It's kind of odd but I just look back at that memory with a weird sort of fondness. To her it was probably just a normal day on the job, but for me that moment meant so much. She was also probably just using it as an opportunity to look me over and make sure I was telling the truth about the nosebleed, but still. I was just this scared kid who felt like she was so worthless that she couldn't even ask a nurse to turn the TV on for fear that she would be loathed, and this woman went out of her way to lightly scrub the blood out of my nails.
Nowadays I'm doing better. My mental state has improved and I've been working on moving past that all, but I think that some time this past week was the 2 year anniversary of that day, and it just goes to show how far I've come. From being surprised and comforted by a psych nurse's gentle touch on my hands (the first human touch I had felt in months), to casual hugs with my friends and a year and 7 months out of the hospital as of yesterday.