Sister Story #5

Sister Story #5

So, I was a normal teenager who was really social; my grandma would always say I was the social butterfly of the family. I had a lot of friends and I hung out with a lot of different groups of people who liked to experiment with different things. I think that that was normal for my age. I was in my senior year, which is supposed to be, you know, the year that you look forward to the most - so excited to be wrapping up school and closing that chapter of your life, and looking to going off to college and doing all this fun stuff. I was 17 at the time and I liked to party on the weekends. I was doing (college level classes) at the time, and was obviously doing okay.

I'm an only child, so it's not like I could hang out at home. I also had a boyfriend who I was just crazy about and I think that with my being an only child and being a girl, my mom was extremely overprotective. She's definitely a helicopter mom and I think she saw a lot of herself in me.

She had gone through a lot. She was a single mom and she had very high hopes for me, very big dreams for me. And I think that desperation and fear just sunk in with her, where she thought, ‘Oh my gosh - my child is not staying home and staying up late with her nose in a book.’ She had high hopes of me being very religious too, just being very Catholic. We never saw eye to eye on that.

That summer, I went to go visit my family in Florida. I have an uncle and a couple of cousins there, and she thought this would be a really great thing for me to kind of get away from my boyfriend. She was like, ‘you need to be focused on your school and your future and I think you're spending just too much time with this boy. You're spending too much time partying.’ So I went to Florida and I thought, this is kind of cool. I will stay here for a little while and then go back to school and feel refreshed and this is awesome. It's nice weather. There's beaches ...great.

So I stay with my uncle for a while, and then my mom came down to meet me and she said, ‘Why don't we go take a look at some schools here? Wouldn't it be cool if you ended up finishing up high school here?’ and I thought, “No not at all! I want to finish my high school with the friends that I've grown up with. I do not want to switch schools!’

One night, I got a phone call from my cousin, who's also one of my besties. She said, ‘I heard my mom talking with your mom on the phone. It sounds like she wants to send you away somewhere. I'm gonna put money in your account or buy you some Greyhound tickets and you need to get back here.’ And I thought, that is crazy. My mom has done some wild things, but something like that, without consulting me, asking me, telling me, or giving me any heads-up is nuts! She would not do that!

The next morning I woke up to my mom crying, my uncle crying and two strangers in the room where I was sleeping, and they're like, ‘You’re coming with us. Today. We're going and we're taking you away. You're not going to see your family for a while.’ And I'm looking around, kind of in shock and numb like, this isn't happening. What is happening? I had so many questions, but I feel like I was so shell-shocked that I couldn't even put it into words. I couldn't even ask what the hell was going on. It was a man and a woman. The man spotted a baseball bat in my uncle's room and he was like, ‘Oh I need you need to go take that somewhere else’ and the woman checked the bathroom for any razors and she was like, ‘you can't you can't use this, you need to just shower and leave. You may not have a stitch of makeup on, you may not do your hair. You just need to shower and get dressed and don't worry about anything else. And where we're going, they're going to have just what you need.’

And I couldn't even put in my contacts. I had to take my glasses, and it was just so bizarre. I was just terrified, and I was being treated like I was like a mental case, right? Like what, are they afraid I'm going to hurt someone, or they’re afraid I'm going to hurt myself? What is going on? And I had no warning signs or no suspicions that this was ever going to happen, that I’d be sent away somewhere for what I thought was just being a teenager!

I kind of remember my mom saying, ‘I'm doing this for you. This is going to be the best thing for you. I love you. This is for your own good. I'm doing this because I love you.’ And still at this point, I didn’t even know what was happening! My uncle just kissed me on the forehead and he said, ‘I'll see you in a couple of months. I love you. You're going to be fine.’ And I’m thinking, ‘A couple of months? Where am I going for a couple of months?’

I followed them out to the car, then everything from there was a little bit of a blur - but I do remember that it was a very long drive. We drove from Florida - mind you, I’m with two strangers and I still don't know what is happening - to Georgia. And I asked them a bunch of questions which they could not answer. There was no clock and their car, they couldn't tell me what time it was. They didn't want to tell me how much time was left to get there, how long the drive would be, what state I was going to - I had no idea. They couldn't tell me what the name of the place I was going to. They couldn't tell me any identifying information. Later on. I learned that that's for kids who were planning to run away. And I guess this program got a lot of kids that were on suicide watch, and even kids who were court ordered to participate in a program like this, so cases that were much more extreme than mine was, but surely they should have asked whether those things applied to you.

I also later found out that this organization is so money hungry that they don't put the child's interests in mind. They say, ‘Oh, yes! Your child seems like they really need the help and this would be the best thing for them! So give me your $100,000 deposit, and we will change your kid and she will be prepped to go to a prestigious university!’ That was the endgame - dollars. So these these organizations actually take their “therapeutic nature woods therapy” and then they transfer you. They kind of have like, a partnership with different boarding schools where they will send you off or suggest that to the parents. Yeah, it all comes down to the money.

So I got to the woods. It was very much like I was being checked into jail. They had me strip down. They checked every part of me for everything and anything…. like everything, everything. And they took a sample of my hair. They took a sample of urine. They gave me a hiking pack that was about 60 or 70 pounds heavy and they said this has everything you're going to need. We would have these stainless steel bowls and they would just we just scoop out this dry granola mixture and just put cold water that we get from the creek and filter it and that was our breakfast. And we would eat with spoons that we carved ourselves from sticks.

So to say that this was a shock from where I lived before was just an understatement. The first day, I couldn't even go to the bathroom. I couldn't eat. I couldn't even urinate because I was so in shock and traumatized from the whole thing that I couldn't even go off and find peace enough to be able to pee. So by the time night time came, I was like, shaking and sweating and just in massive pain because I wasn't even able to go to the bathroom. And I remember just sitting - they have you sit away from the group for a couple hours when you first get there. I think it might have been for the whole day. It was anywhere from five to eight girls at a time. When I entered it, I think there were only like three because they were expecting a lot more girls. It was like a transition period for this group. So while they did all their group activities, I could see what they were doing. I could hear what they were saying, but I was off by myself with a journal, a pencil, my hiking pack, and a tarp. We had one tarp that would go on the ground where we would put our sleeping bag and we had a thin little foam mat that rolled up in would put that down first in our sleeping bag over it and we had one rectangular tarp that we would hang on rope over a branch or something, and kind of stretched it out so it was kind of like an umbrella.

And that's how we slept. It wasn't like a closed tent. It was nothing modern of the sorts. Oh, and we were eaten alive by mosquitoes. There were times I wake up at night and I feel something crawling on my face, but we didn't even have flashlights. We had like headlamps if we were hiking at night, especially like in October it was getting darker a little bit earlier, but once it was time for bed, we didn't we didn't get to have any lights or anything. And they never told us what time it was. We would get one pot of ice-cold river water. We would go fill a pot full of river water and have to go find a secluded space in the woods to take our baths. So just pouring water over your body. That's all you got. We got soap if we decided to wash our hair, but a lot of us didn't. We would rather have greasy horribly dirty hair because it would be so cold. They wouldn't let you have deodorant. We weren't given any of that. Not even face wipes, nothing. You got a bucket to pour over yourself once a week. I'm sure we had bugs in our hair. I'm sure we did.

The whole time I'm thinking, my mom cannot possibly know what is going on. She cannot possibly know that I am living like this, because like I said before, she is a helicopter mom and she would go to the end of the Earth to make sure that I was okay - and I was not okay here.

I think humans are so strong and we are able to adapt. We are so, you know, just able to kind of change and go into survival mode. So after three weeks, I could find happiness in like, ‘Oh, I started my own fire. This is awesome.’ There were little things, like we would get a delivery of bacon once a week, where a nice old lady would bring out her pickup truck and drive out and meet us on a trail at the base of one of the hikes, and deliver some meat and fresh food that we otherwise wouldn't be able to have. Those were the days we would look forward to the most. Those were little things that we could find joy in. Not to mention, you’re in nature and it's beautiful. It was the Blue Ridge Mountains in Georgia, and it was gorgeous, but there was a life that I was just ripped up out of and dropped into the middle of the woods in my senior year of high school. Despite any of the wonderful things that I may have learned and taken away from this experience - like I'm strong as hell and no matter what situation I'm in, I will see it through and I will come out better on the other side - there are just overall … just how it happened and the way that it happened….

I just can't imagine if someone were really struggling with suicide or major depression - because at the time I wasn't struggling - if they were treated like that, it could go the complete other way. There was only one person trained in psychology, and that was the counselor that we would meet with once a week. But the camp counselors, they were just kids; they were college kids just doing this for an income. They were not trained in psychology. They were not trained in anything, except probably survival skills and CPR. They were kind, but they were only trained, you know, not to tell us what time it is, not to have any sort of technology out, and they were trained to lead group in a positive way and to be able to let the girls vent and talk about what they needed to.

Every time we heard a car approaching one of the campsites, we would all go bonkers and we would think that it was somebody leaving or somebody getting picked up, because we were never given any information. Their motto was, “just be in the moment and be just in the present.” But we all kind of figured out that 6 weeks was the pattern; that somebody would be with us for six weeks and then they'd get picked up and go home. We also knew that some would go to a different place so then that was another big fear and stress in the group - were we going to go home, were we going to go to another facility? What's the goal here? And they never told us that. We could write letters to our families and we would get letters from our families, but they would edit the letters. They would review the letters and if the letter gave us any sort of information, they would block it out with a sharpie.

So, my mom actually ended up coming out. It was on my sixth week, and I thought I was going home with her, but I found out that she was only coming to visit because she was looking at boarding schools in the area. She was checking out boarding schools in Virginia and in North Carolina, so she wasn't there to pick me up. I remember when I found out, I was just sobbing and sobbing and begging her to take me and she was crying with me, because she got to be there for a day and see how I was doing and to her I think it was incredible to see her daughter be able to make a fire and put up her tent and go fetch water from the creek and filter it by hand and all that sort of thing. But she was also kind of like looking around like, this is how you sleep in the middle of the woods, with no protection...with nothing. This is actually how you've been living for six weeks. And it kind of hit her. She told me then, she was like, ‘I'm gonna come back sooner. I thought that I would come back in 3 weeks to get you but I'm going to try to get you sooner rather than later.’ But she wasn't supposed to tell me anything. I think she was trained on what she could say, and what she couldn't say, especially around the other girls - like, you can't tell them what time it is. You can't tell them what day we’re on, you can't tell your daughter when you'll be able to pick her up or what's what's happening after this. So it was hard, I'm sure, for her too, but...

I do know that they thought that I hadn't accepted that I had issues because I kept saying that I didn’t have anything to share that was anything comparable to what these other girls were sharing, because I didn't. Other girls were sharing about their suicide attempts, or their abortions at age 14, or their time in juvie. I didn't have a story like that. So they thought that I was very much in denial. And they were recommending schools to her, these therapeutic boarding schools.

So I ended up at one of them, which now is closed; it burned down. This place actually ended up losing a child - a kid tried to run away and was never found. And I think they've had a lot of lawsuits against them. It was insane. This was in Virginia. We had to have our hangers or coat hangers one finger part if they were shirts to finger apart two fingers apart for sweaters. They would check every morning. Our beds, our hangers, the bathrooms, everything. It was very much like we were inmates at that school. If we were too close to any one single person, we would be put on something that's called ‘personal bans’ where you were banned from talking to that person. So when I was there I quickly became best friends with a girl named J. We had a lot in common because we were both like, ‘what the hell are we doing here?’ She had a similar situation, where her parents had sent her away for having a relationship with a boy and he was two years older than her. They saw that she was getting distracted and wanted to send her to a place where she wouldn't be able to be distracted by boys.

We were able to write letters, but we were not able to use any technology or anything like that. No phones. I wrote to my mom and I told her how horrible it was and I told her that if she didn't pull me by my 18th birthday, that I was going to leave on my own - because I could have, even though they made it seem like it was absolutely impossible. I could have left on my 18th birthday. There was no court order for me to be there. So she ended up coming in December, just before Christmas and she was going to visit me for Christmas there. But I told her, ‘I'm leaving if you don't take me now. I will leave on my birthday. I will leave.’ And I think she also saw the emotional manipulation that everyone was under. It was just not fostering a supportive environment. It's just the worst kind of abuse, emotional and mental abuse, and they were selling it as, ‘we are having these kids work through all of their shit.’ No, it was making more shit!

So I came back home, and my cousins were there to pick me up from the airport, along with my aunts; the whole family. They held up signs welcoming me back….and we just sobbed.