I Never Promised You a Rose Garden

Content Warning: This guide contains descriptions of self-harm, mentions of suicide, depictions of life in a psychiatric ward, and the use of outdated language to describe mental illness, as well as several references to antisemitism.

Deborah’s inner world clashes and contrasts with the outer reality of the world around her, and after years of horrible experiences, she retreats into the inner world of Yr almost entirely, ready to leave reality behind. She senses herself to be approaching some sort of destruction, which she calls “Imorh.” Whenever Deborah starts to approach reality, the voices and gods of Yr and the Collect call out to her, warning her against it, begging her to come back, and describing her as a poison against the world to scare her. Deborah sometimes becomes caught between her perception of Yr and reality, although something she calls a Censor is supposed to be there to keep the two separate. When this happens, she names herself Januce, “because she felt like two-faced Janus—with a face on each world” (13). When Deborah’s inner volcano erupts, “her lack of inner control matched the anarchic world with an Yr gone newly mad itself” (189). She finally rises to the occasion of her own life and confronts what angers and terrifies her. Meanwhile, she also learns that she “must grapple with symptoms of madness in the world” (217), something she only has to deal with fully once she has recovered and seen with clarity how wrong things around her can sometimes be. Deborah’s desire to join the outside world is one that all the patients share, but she is of the rare sort to actually go forth and test it out, and to eventually succeed.

While in the facility, Deborah experiences both a dehumanization effect by many of the staff, and simultaneously a sense of freedom in her right to embrace her mental health condition: “To those who had never dared to think of themselves, except in secret, as eccentric and strange, freedom was freedom to be crazy, bats, nuts, loony, and, more seriously, mad, insane, demented, out of one’s mind. And there was a hierarchy of privilege to enjoy these freedoms” (41-42). She observes that people who work in the facility and are closest to this “insanity” are the ones who are most afraid of it, because they see parts of themselves in the patients and how easy it is for anyone to develop a mental health condition. Deborah refers to this as the “similarity between the madwomen’s uttered thoughts and their own unuttered ones” (103). As Deborah starts to find herself again and reconnect with the world, she regains her emotions and senses, and in doing so, others begin to see her as human again. Still, she finds herself forever disconnected from people who lived much easier lives, and knows she will always have a different story to tell than they do.