...

Blanket content warning for this entry.

The written word is precise. It clarifies. It may seem at first like a feeling is something I cannot even begin to try and translate, but if I try I can put an intially indefinable experience into one or more words that have preexisting associations; sad, scared, confused, angry.. These simple words strung together can form a more complex “sentence”, and larger or more detailed parts of what is trying to be communicated can be revealed if you are careful how you arrange it. I can say “sometimes I get so confused and scared it feels like I’m the recipient of psychic beams from some hateful atavistic god. Like some all-seeing ancient bloodthirsty machine intelligence is staring right into my soul and I’m withering under its gaze.” But in reading this sentence, do you actually understand the feeling I'm having? The actual nature of the emotion is lost, becomes warped by which words I choose, the way I try to phrase it. Watch the music video for Come to Daddy and you’ll be significantly closer than I could ever get you with my words. Music is a thousand times more effective at capturing the nuances and indefinable aspects of emotion than precise words could ever be.

I run into this problem when I try to translate some of my experiences into the written word. I don’t actually want you to feel what I felt because I'm not a complete emotional sadist, but I want to convey some of the situation as accurately as I am able. So let’s talk about a wound today. I didn't think I'd mention it this early into our relationship but it’s been suppurating lately. I hope you can find it in your heart to forgive me for being so personal so soon, and I also hope that my partial recounting of these events will maybe make a few people curious. Maybe you'll learn something new.

When I was younger, around 13, I was the recipient of a special kind of training for children. Upon the advice of the highest authorities in the Fields of Psychiatry, my parents decided that I was to be sent away. 1,377 miles away, across the country, to a state I had never been to before, a place I had never visited. They said this would help me. I was not functioning well enough at home. I saw the situation clearly for what it was; my punishment. What my great crime could have been, I did not know. Maybe it was my refusal to go to school anymore, my insistence upon staying up on the computer at all hours, maybe I had been too sad for too long. Maybe they were looking at what they had thought was their child and feeling scared, seeing something they didn’t recognize. I had come out as trans the year before and started insisting on puberty blockers. I had just been diagnosed with a developmental disability. I had tried to kill myself three times in two years.

I was told that I would be leaving with only a few days notice. In this regard I am extremely privileged. Some children are given no notice of their training. Instead, their families hire “teen escort companies.” This consists of hired goons coming into the home during the night and legally kidnapping their child, often transporting them across state lines or by plane without telling the child anything about what is going to happen to them or where they are going. I think my parents thought this would be too harsh.

I learned a lot of things during my time at “therapeutic boarding school.” The first of which is; to be good, you have to submit completely. If you are good, you don't have any boundaries. If someone in a position of authority over you is doing something that hurts you, that makes you uncomfortable, you have no right to ask them to stop. Tolerate it without complaint. Punishment is necessary, even if you don’t understand what it’s for. If you do something wrong (and the details of whatever wrong thing you did are always left hazy), you will be held responsible. If someone who is your “peer” does something wrong, you will also be held responsible for their mistake. "Being held responsible" is a synonym for punishment.

You are defective and this can only be corrected through rigorous abuse. If, in a moment of great distress, you dare to try and leave a room without asking permission first, an adult man three times your size (and you're a big kid) will knock you to the floor and lie on top of you pressing your face into the grey shitty dust stinking carpet while you drool and convulse and beg and beg and beg for him to get off. You cannot trust yourself. This is for your own good. You are hysterical, your emotions are out of proportion with the issue. Over the course of days you scratch the back of your hand and your wrists into great bloody wet scabs. Even if you try to be good you will be punished. Even if you do everything they ask you to. You're never going to leave. You're going to be here forever.

I left after 17 months. I was very very lucky. Some would be there until it closed, around three years later. Even then many would not go home, would be shuffled off to another facility, maybe better, likely worse. Immediately upon my return I started summer school, since my grades had suffered severely while I was institutionalized. Everything was supposed to go back to normal. Better than normal; I was fixed. My little sojourn to M[xxxxxxx] was left undiscussed for years to come.

I would have these vivid recurring dreams about having to go back. Not about being there, but about being dropped off. I would be back in the rental car, on the long drive down from the [XXXXX] airport, my mother in the front seat and landscape moving silently past us. Scrub grass, Walmarts, gas stations, flatland. We would drive through the railroad nowhere town of A[xxxxx], then just a little further, past the community college, down a lonesome cement road, through the gates.. Pull up at the prefab 1910s Sears catalog cottage with the attic gas leak and walk the driveway. Open the front door. My mother said she always hated goodbyes; they hurt her too much, she just avoided them altogether even when they were important. No hugs, no kisses. I’m alone again. Later, I wake up with a feeling inside that I can't even begin to put into words.

If you’re interested at all in learning more about the troubled teen industry and how it works, I suggest checking out the website Breaking Code Silence and the comic Joe Versus Elan School. There are many other people who have had similar experiences to me, worse experiences, longer stints in TTI facilities. Many facilities with long documented histories of sexual and physical abuse and torture are still open. Many professionals, psychiatrists and diagnostic clinicians and more, are paid off by private facilities for giving recommendations to desperate parents. There are no laws against teen transport companies and there is very little legal recourse for the abuse that happens in this industry. The facility I was in had government deals and many of the children there were sent in to be abused by court order.

I was institutionalized over a decade ago and I feel like it has shaped the trajectory of my entire life from that point onward. My parents have apologized for it at varying points, but always with the “we thought we were doing what was best for you” and “it helped you some too!” excuses attached. Family is complicated. “Family is a weird experience! Sometimes you don’t like your family, but you still love them.” What happens when your family doesn’t actually love you? What do you do when someone who is supposed to care about you treats you as an object of ridicule, something to abuse for fun? What happens when a member of your family hurts you deeply and unforgivably, many times over many years? Apparently, you are just supposed to lie down and take it because they are your family. Blood is thicker than water after all, (But isn't "the blood of the covenant thicker than the water of the womb"?) Things that you would never contemplate tolerating from a stranger or even a friend become a rote acceptable routine when done by a member of your family. After being around my grandmother yesterday, I find myself thinking about the lessons I have learned and what they’ve done for me. I won’t talk about what it. There’s not really anything to learn.

The next entry will be more positive, I promise!

Song recs: Metric, Metric, Metric, I’ve been listening to so much Metric. They're really really good!