A sequel to my previous post,
"Fragments of PTSD."At age 6, my parents decided that the local public school was not good enough for us, so I got sent to a private school. The main thing I remember was being told off for forgetting my first homework assignment ever, and how made me feel like I was bad. Unfortunately, that set the tone of my school years: forgetting assignments and getting in trouble for it and feeling more and more like a failure. I was also forever missing the school bus. One time I asked my mother to drive me to school, and she did, only she spent an hour or two visiting friends and running errands, while I grew more and more frantic, before finally dropping me off at school. I learned my lesson — I never asked her again.
Starting in 5th grade, that school split us up into a boys' school and a girls' school, and that's when my hell really began. They had required after-school athletics, such as tackle football, baskeball, etc., which I was no good at and didn't particularly want to be good at; I got called queer, sissy, and weirdo; I got harassed and ostracized by both adults and children for not being tough enough and not being interested in being tough.
But things were actually worse in classes. By that time, just being there was so painful that I would zone out whenever I could, by daydreaming or reading or drawing diagrams, and that got me in trouble a lot. The school took as its mission to turn us boys into what they thought boys should be, and when it didn't work on me, they just upped the pressure. I got sent to the principal's office many times, and each time, he'd look out the window at the classroom wings and say, "all those people are able to do it, why aren't you doing it?" It succeeded in making me feel like the lowest of the low, but by then I was in such a constant state of panic that I never managed to do what they wanted me to do.
They had a system of "demerits." Teachers and administrators could give one for whatever they thought best, and you had to bring in the slip the next day, signed by your parents, and then come in on Saturday for an hour for each demerit. I wasn't disruptive, but I seemed to collect demerits like a shaggy dog collects burrs. Many of them were for forgetting to get my demerit slips signed, and I remember many a time calling my mother and desperately begging her to come by and sign the slips so I wouldn't get any more demerits; of course, she never did. If you got 10 demerits in a semester, you got suspended for a week: I got suspended every semester. Since I wanted to please people, you can imagine how this made me feel.
I didn't get any support at home, either. My parents, and indeed all the adults I knew, thought my troubles were my fault and I should just stop being stubborn and do what I was supposed to do. My father, in particular, enjoyed teasing me when I cried or was upset. Whenever I got suspended, he would call me "the demerit queen." "Queen" because my older brother, who also got suspended every semester, already had the title of "demerit king."
During those years, I seriously thought about killing myself every day. I planned out how I would do it. But whenever I visualized actually going through with it, I got scared off. I knew if I tried, I would have to succeed, because my mother had already indicated that she thought suicides were bad people for not taking into account how bad it made other people feel. If I ever thought a failed suicide attempt might get me a little sympathy, her comment made it clear that it wouldn't.
I might have gone on like this until I did kill myself or maybe withdraw into a catatonic state, but somewhere near the end of sixth grade, my older brother — the one who terrorized me through most of my childhood (my parents knew about it but did nothing) — had a conversation with me and helped me see that if I was that miserable at That Awful School, I should tell my parents I wanted to switch to the public school. I did, and they did. And my life got a lot better. Junior high was no picnic, but fortunately the teachers and administrators had bigger problems than me, so they mostly left me alone. Which, by this time, was all I wanted out of life. Just to be left alone. I had no interest in friendship or love or anything to do with anyone else.
The experience left me with a tendency to suicidal ideation and a burned-in sense of my own worthlessness, both of which plague me to this day. And when I'm criticized or make a mistake, that feeling that everything I've done, am doing, or ever will do is wrong comes up and grabs me by the neck, and it takes me hours or days before I can handle the situation with my adult brain. If trauma is like a stick of dynamite going off inside your mind, these experiences are like little bits of that dynamite being triggered by a careless footstep. I still can't deal even with the memory of that time; one time, my therapist tried to use EMDR to help me deal with it, and I dissociated for something like 10 or 15 minutes. I always say that I'm not afraid of Hell because I lived there, and once you've lived there, you'll never be entirely free of it.
They say that when you have children of your own, you understand your parents better, but for me, it was the opposite. I raised two high-maintenance children (one is on the Autistic spectrum, the other was finally — at age 16 — diagnosed with ADHD/inattentive variety), and my parents' behavior boggles my mind even more now than when I was young. It must have been obvious to both my parents and the school that what they were doing wasn't working and was, if anything, making things worse. It must have been obvious that I was miserable. Yet they just kept on doing the same things that hadn't worked before, and it was left to 11-year-old me and my 14-year-old, severely disturbed older brother to figure out what to do about it. Every time I think back to those days, I can't help saying, "
what were they
thinking ???"
