Starting in the middle seems like cheating.
When you begin your social life with an accent that everyone thinks is strange, braids down your back like Laura Ingalls Wilder and a huge crop of freckles, you tend to be behind the 8 ball. Looking back, I was a darling child. But not one that lived by the social rules that governed the small, Catholic grade school I attended from 1979 to 1985. Saint Anne of Normandy was the last bastion of white people in a largely economically depressed area that had some Monied Families with Family Names still holding on. But largely, it was lower middle class and black. As I was so pale you could hold me up to the sun and see through me, I stood out. But strangely, that wasn’t the issue I had. The kids I ran around with after school and during the summer accepted me, strange accent and all. Which is what made the rest of my social life so damn confusing.
Education and knowledge mattered to my parents. Not the right shoes or the right shirts. No Izod. No Polo. I can repeat sonnets and poems and read, on some days, three books a day. And listened to nothing but classical music. And to my parents, this should have been enough and made me happy and who cared if I didn’t look right or sound right. Well, I did. And it sucked. I cannot describe how shitty 2nd to 7th grade was. And it wasn’t just my accent and freckles that did it.
And then, puberty hit. And it killed my brain chemistry. It was so awful. And because it was the 1980s and girls didn’t get ADHD, I was just lazy (this word isn’t real) and I was just a hypochondriac who wanted attention. Well, turns out it was shitty brain chemistry that was trying to kill me on a regular basis. There’s a lot of people out there that had the same thing happen. I didn’t get antidepressants until I was 30. That’s a long damn time to wander in the wilderness while being told that it isn’t the wilderness and you’re just being overly dramatic. I love hearing my mother say “She was such a wonderful child until the age of 12…” and I have started finishing the sentence with “…when my untreated mental illness took over my brain and I was stuck dealing with depression and anxiety and self-loathing.” She doesn’t say it as much any more.
As I got older and I realized that there was no way I was ever going to be cool or in or have any kind of clique that would accept me, I went the other way. I liked punk music (along with everything else you could possibly name), I liked tattoos, I liked piercings, I liked Chucks and Docs and leather jackets. I slingshotted my way right the other direction. If you aren’t going to accept me just derping my way through life, you’re sure going to notice me screaming, running in circles and probably on fire.
I followed on to a catholic high school that was the public school of the diocese. There were more than one person I knew from grade school, so that part of my life followed. And I wasn’t going to escape and be able to start again. I was dragging the person I was behind me, and it was like an anchor. I made some friends. We were the strange ones. And that was ok by me. Freshman year was chaotic and hard and I was still struggling with untreated mental illness. It doesn’t matter that I can memorize all the Spanish verbs in two weeks when the only way I knew how to deal with my anxiety was to cut myself on my arms and legs. All of this is to lead up to the understanding that when things did go wrong, I was in no position to defend myself. And like any other child, I didn’t recognize a predator, or even a herd of them, when they were stalking me. And it was way too late when I did realize it. I have to be honest, it took me more than 30 years to understand the way the cult worked and why I was ripe for being folded into it. And I don’t use the word cult lightly. To this day, the same group is out there, still with the same names I remember from the 1980s (Clint Stonebreaker still sounds like a porn star and not the man who was going to inherit Palmer Drug Abuse Program and all the money and prestige that went with it) and with the same business model. Figure out which middle class white kids were disaffected, alone and had killer health insurance with which to line their pockets. The young girls with daddy issues and no idea of how to say no to sex was just a bonus.
- February 12, 2024
