A Time I Ignored My Intuition: Moving Institutions

I haven’t written at all this past week. It was an eventful week, but I feel reluctant to disclose details. I have also been feeling uninspired to write about anything that isn’t just a diary-style entry starting with the phrase “Today I did…”. Well, that’s not what feels right to me.

I was talking to my assigned day activities staff this afternoon. We were casually discussing places I’d lived in before and I mentioned having moved from one institution to another to be closer to my husband in 2013. That was a big mistake.

The memory came back again when I read a journaling prompt in one of my many collections of prompts. It asked me to reflect on a time I had ignored my gut feeling or intuition. This was a time I did. Let me share.

In late 2012, my husband and I had accepted a rental home in a town near Arnhem, Netherlands. I was at the time living in an institution in Nijmegen, about 30km away. There was a lot of turmoil going on about the unit I resided on. For example, there was talk of us moving to another building. We’d just moved from an old building to a newly-built one in September of 2012 and I didn’t like yet another move. Unless it was closer to my husband. So even when the plan for yet another move was canceled sometime in April or May of 2013, I still said I wanted to move to the other institution, which was in the town next to the town in which we’d rented our home.

I had an intake interview in June of 2013. The psychologist was quite mental if you ask me. I’d come from a unit with 24-hour care and he was expecting me to move into a house with a few other patients and staff dropping in once or twice a day. Well, no way! He said that’d be better preparation for my moving in with my husband than going to another unit with 24-hour care and the in-between unit was full. He gave me the choice though, but I had to be quick. It was Thursday and I was expected to move before the week-end, because if I waited till Monday, the bed on the 24-hour care unit may have been filled already.

I felt rather off, but I reasoned my feelings away. I wanted to be closer to my husband, after all, and I wanted to ultimately live with him. Or so I thought. So I moved the next day.

Let me explain that my staff at the ward in Nijmegen had been as supportive as psychiatric care staff can be. I mean, they were sure I needed a lot of support at least. They had denied me the opportunity to go into a housing unit for people with visual and intellectual impairments in 2011, but it takes a lot for a psychiatric professional to go beyond their expertise and see that a person might be best served in developmental disability services even if they have a high IQ.

The staff in the new institution were not so supportive. Even though they allowed me to stay there for nearly four years eventually, they were adamant that I go live with my husband and eventually kicked me out with almost no after care, reasoning that I had refused to go into any home with more care they’d offered. Which, frankly, was none.

Now, nearly two years into living with my husband, I”m facing the pain. I’m still feeling angry towards the staff at the last institution and regret that I decided to move. From now on, I’ll twust my gut feeling when something doesn’t sit right with me.