Cutting, Both Ways

Every two weeks or so I am publishing an essay from an emerging writer. This week, we are publishing “Cutting, Both Ways” by Lacey Jones. Lacey thinks and writes about despair, repair, and secular aesthetics. She has a PhD in English and Religious Studies and works as an associate editor at The Yale Review. Currently she is at work on an essay collection and applying to medical school. You can find her fiction in The Kenyon Review and her poetry at Image.Subscribe nowI am a 32-year-old English PhD who plans to become a physician, so I volunteer in the basement of a psychiatric hospital with garishly painted walls: mustard yellow, Jolly Rancher green, mouthwash blue. Every week, security buzzes me through to a hallway lined with abstract paintings. My favorite is flecked with small orange splatters. Thin, black lines slash across the right half like tally marks. I walk past it on Friday mornings with an eye roll at how fucked up it is that someone hung that painting in this hall. Then…