Everything is Everything
For me, Everything is Everything isn’t just a lyric—it’s an incantation. A whisper humming through the air, curling around me like a secret I never quite understand. Donny Hathaway’s voice—rich, deep, and golden—folds over me like velvet. His melodies pulse with the rawest kind of emotion—genius entangled with brilliance, brilliance suffocated by suffering. For every note he belted into the world, another lurked beneath—the one only he could hear—whispering, unsettling, unraveling him.
Donny Hathaway was a musical genius whose voice carried the richness of soul, jazz, and R&B, transforming the sounds of his era. Diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia in 1971, Hathaway battled auditory hallucinations, paranoia, and mood swings—trapped within a mind of a warped design.
As his illness progressed, his professional life faltered. He became more isolated, unable to keep up with the grueling demands of recording and performing. The cruel irony is that the very industry that profited from his pain—the music industry that begged him to create—stood silent as he deteriorated. There was no safety net, no space for his humanity.
Worst still, the word’s indifference wasn’t just personal. It was systemic. In the 1970s, Black mental health care was an oxymoron—stigma woven deep, compounded by insidious treatment.. Overmedication. Institutionalization. Electroshock therapy.
Hathaway was prescribed 14 pills twice a day—a chemical straitjacket—all while the world marveled at his musical gifts.His death at 33—a suicide on January 13, 1979, falling from a 15th-floor window of a New York hotel—was not just the tragic end of a legend. It was a final exhale of a system that had abandoned him. A metaphorical fall for so many who suffer in silence, trapped between the art they create and the absurdity they endure.
And I hear him. The sweet discordance of Everything is Everything plays on, and in its fragmented beauty, I see myself reflected back.
I’m then confronted with a soul-aching pathos: my own story of involuntary commitment in 2024—a story that stripped me of agency and dignity.
I was suicidal, and I asked for help. After a full Columbia assessment and seven hours alone in a room, I wanted out. A white cis male VP at Skyland Trail—a residential treatment center in Georgia—told me over the phone that I had no rights. Just like that.
Those words dug a hole in my chest, a deep puncture wound infected by the hollow reminder of how the system treats those it deems broken. A wound that has yet to heal. I remember immediately folding into a puddle of hopeless powerlessness.
I was sent to a hospital in deep bumblefuck Georgia—a place I call the Deep South Ward. When I arrived, I walked into a scene. Someone had broken into the doctor’s office and smeared shit on the wall. I chuckled—until I saw a puddle of piss in front of me, the stench clinging to the air.
Plastic chairs. Bland walls. A woman strapped to a stretcher, half-conscious, murmuring in a language only she understood.
It was the worst hospitalization I’ve ever had.
They placed me in intermediate care. That meant no outside time, no actual therapy groups, just long hours in a classroom with occasional drawing exercises—corralled like children, contained like threats. There were the hallway crew—the ones the staff whispered about, the hopeless ones, the ones who shuffled up and down the corridor with nowhere to go. And then there was progressive care—all white, mind you. They had therapy groups, a separate sleeping area, and most importantly, outside time.
I didn’t step outside for seven days.
We all knew the rule: refuse meds, and they’d keep you longer. I learned this the hard way when a nurse added a medication to my regimen by mistake. When I tried to correct her, she refused to listen. I thought about protesting, about holding my ground—but fear slithered in, wrapping tight around my ribs. So I swallowed the pill, tears stinging my eyes, catastrophizing every possible way it could wreck me from the inside out.
I allied myself with two young Black women—19 and 20 years old. Lovely, albeit severely overmedicated individuals. So overmedicated that they drifted in and out of wakefulness. We didn’t talk much; their bodies wouldn’t let them. But I learned they had never been told their diagnoses. They didn’t even know what medications they were taking.
Two beautiful beings—deemed too fragile to be trusted with agency, yet too dangerous to hold on to autonomy.
That’s what this system does. It strips you down until you’re just a symptom, just a case file, just a liability. It drowns you in sedation, in silence. It locks you away and calls it care.
The overmedication. The lack of explanation. The disorienting experience of being treated like a symptom, not a person. So many identities lost in the fog of sedation within those walls. How could anyone hope to heal in such a place?
Everything is everything.
The phrase becomes a mantra. A reminder that nothing exists in isolation. Not Donny’s pain. Not mine. Not the countless others who came before us, who will come after.
The songs in my head, the moments of brilliance, the heartache, the ecstasy—they are all part of the same tangled, beautiful, painful thread that makes me who I am. Inseparable.
Everything is everything.
The joy and the agony. The beauty and the destruction. The voice that sings and the voice that suffers. All braided together in a singular experience of being. It’s all part of the same melody.
