Rowan presents as a severely psychiatrically compromised individual, whose internal state remains unstable despite intensive intervention.
Recent behavioral shift toward structured writing suggests a potential adaptive outlet, though not indicative of recovery.
Patient is stabilized but not well.
Signed,
Dr. Kazimierz Lewandowski, MD
The Overwrite
Chapter 50
They told me there were only a few months left. They just dropped it in the middle of a sentence, like I was a date on a calendar they were slowly approaching. I remember sitting there, thinking that it didn’t feel like an ending. It felt like being pushed out of something that, against every instinct, had started to hold me together in a way nothing else ever had.
The days didn’t change.
Same walls, same voices, same trays of food that all tasted like nothing. Same chairs, same rooms, same everything until it stopped feeling repetitive and started feeling dependable, which is a word I never thought I’d associate with a place like that. And I hate that I’m saying this, little Ghost, but a part of me wanted it to stay that way. Because in there, I wasn’t dangerous. I wasn’t making decisions that spiraled out into something I couldn’t undo. I wasn’t reacting on instinct, I wasn’t becoming something worse every time I lost control, I was just contained. And for once, that didn’t feel like punishment, it felt like a boundary I didn’t have to fight against. There’s something twisted about realizing you function better when you’re not free. That the version of you that doesn’t get to choose is somehow safer, not just for everyone else, but also for yourself.
I could feel it in my body too, and there was nothing gentle about it.
The medication spread through me like a slow chemical death, flattening every thought, every instinct, every feeling into something distant and muffled until even existing started to feel unreal. I was tired all the time, and sleep never touched it. The exhaustion spread through every part of me until even my ownthoughts started feeling distant. Nothing hit the way it should anymore.
Fear passed through me too fast. Anger never reached its full force. Even grief felt restrained somehow, trapped behind whatever the medication had done to my head, and after a while I started hating it more than the pain itself.
Like I was watching my own life through something instead of being fully inside it, but I wasn’t breaking. That was the biggest difference. No violent swings, just this steady, muted version of myself that didn’t spiral out of control every time something shifted. So yeah, maybe it was something. Not good, but… something that worked better than what I had been before. That didn’t mean I trusted it, though. It didn’t mean I wasn’t aware of what it was taking from me, because it was taking something, I could feel that too.
Reactions that got cut off before they fully formed, thoughts that never became clear enough to become dangerous. A part of me wondered: what happens when you sand something down enough times? Do you end up with something stable, or do you just erase it? Either way, I followed the routine and I took what they gave me, because for the first time in my life, nothing inside me was trying to tear its way out. I didn’t know if that meant I was finally under control, or just drugged enough to forget what I was.
In the months leading up to my release, my thoughts kept finding their way back to him. Like my head refused to leave it alone, kept dragging me back there every time things got too peaceful, like it needed to press on that bruise just to make sure it was still there.
Zwierek.
Me.
Even thinking his name felt wrong, and it wasn’t because it didn’t fit, but because it fittoo well.I still couldn’t fully wrap my head around it. I could understand it, logically. I could repeat it back to myself in a way that sounded convincing enough.
He wasn’t real. He never existed outside of me. It was all in my head.
But it didn’t sit right, didn’t settle into something solid I could stand on, because it didn’t feel like something I had imagined, it felt like something I hadknown.That’s the part that truly stayed with me. Because when you realize someone was never there, you don’t just losethem.
You lose every moment you thought you shared with them, and I had built so much around him. Conversations, silence, decisions, justifications, he had been there in the moments that mattered and now, nothing. It should have felt like abandonment, like everyone else, but it didn’t. Because the more I sat with it, the more something else started to creep in underneath all that confusion, another thought appeared. He couldn’t leave, not like everyone else had.
They come close, they stay for a while if you’re lucky, then they go and they disappear in a way that leaves something behind that you can’t fix. That’s how it works, that’s how it always worked, but him, he never walked away. Never decided I was too much, too wrong, too damaged to stay near, because he couldn’t. Because wherever I went, he was already there. That realization did something to me, something I don’t even know how to explain without it sounding completely fucked, but it felt like another form of relief.
Because for once, something in my life didn’t depend on someone else’s choice. It didn’t rely on them staying, it didn’t hang on whether they could tolerate me long enough, it was just… there.
Even now, even after everything, I could still feel him from time to time.
A presence without form, a shape, like a habit my brain hadn’t fully let go of yet and I didn’t fight it. Maybe I should have, but I couldn’t. Because pushing him away felt too close to pushing parts of myself away, and I had already seen what happens when I start pretending parts of me don’t exist. So instead, I let it sit and I started looking at it differently. Because if I really strip it all down, if I take away the explanation, the diagnosis, the clinical way they would frame it, what was he really?
A voice that stayed when everything else left.
A presence that didn’t disappear when things got too heavy, something that filled the space when there was nothing else there.
That’s survival.
Twisted and dangerous, but still, survival.
