8:34am June 2, 2015

The Day I Spoke Up

One of the last houses I lived in before I finally got out of that place was one I hated the most. The supervisor of that house had a really bad mean streak. I did my best to stay on her good side because if she didn’t like you she made sure your life was hell. Mostly I got along with her and bit my tongue when she tested me. But I was always stressed at that house, especially when she was in charge. I remember one day one of the other girls commented that we were being tortured. She got angry and said that we didn’t know what torture was, referring to her home country. But she was wrong, We knew torture very well. She had no empathy towards what we went through every day mentally and physically. She had the nerve to try and make us feel guilty for commenting on our own abuse.
It was a Saturday or Sunday. We were all sitting in the living room having some free time. One of the other residences called saying that a certain girl in our was on the list to go on a field trip with them. So the staff had to get her ready to go. She needed help dressing and stuff and she didn’t have any socks on. Staff didn’t feel like going upstairs to get the girls own clothes so they dug through the laundry that was downstairs with us. When they were giving her the socks I noticed they had another girls name on them. She was kind of my friend, and not even thinking I said, “hey —- aren’t those yours?” She said “yes”. Now I just want to say I didn’t do anything wrong. It was against the rules for staff to give our clothes or property to other students, although they did it all the time. And it was free time so I didn’t need permission to speak to my friend. But the supervisor got really mad that I said that. Her face turned nasty and my stomach dropped. She told me “No talking out!” I tried to hold it in, but the oppression, the fucking oppression, the power tripping staff who saw us as less-than. The policies and the “program” that stripped us of our basic rights to freedom of speech and freedom from cruel and unusual punishment. The program that denied my intelligence and personhood. I couldn’t take it another day. I came right back at her, saying “I was just helping my friend”. She says “no arguing with staff”, and it went back and forth from there. I knew I was going to lose all my privaleges by this point so I just kept talking. There was nothing I was doing on my program that she could shock me for. But she searched and searched my sheet. Finally she stopped and called the monitor from next door over. They had to call the monitor over to shock us ever since the prank phone call fiasco, so I knew what was coming. And I knew it was for a lie she made up. She lied and told the monitor I was tensing up, and they shocked me.
I was so incredibly frustrated. I was at my breaking point. Staff did whatever they wanted and got away with it. And we weren’t even allowed to defend ourselves or speak up. At JRC, even if a staff is pinpointing you wrong, you are expected to accept it and the punishment, and then later write a “business letter” to your case manager telling them what happened. They teach us that we are punching bags and must accept all the shit done to us with out so much as a peep. That is teaching us to be victims that don’t matter. I was sick to my stomach. I had to get away. I requested to call my legal guardian but was denied. I felt so unsafe there, with her. I knew she could make up any lie she wanted to hurt and shock me.
I gathered the strength, and ran up the steps and out the front door. As soon as I hit the cold winter air, my lungs tightened up from my asthma and I barley could make it across the icy front yard. I just crossed the street and I got grabbed from behind. It was the supervisor, and I felt like I was in a fight for my life. I couldn’t let her take me back inside, because now that we were outside, she could say I did anything and there was no camera to prove I didn’t. I knew she would. She tackled me into a snowbank and was sitting on me. I was trying so hard to get up. Cars were going by, and one finally stopped. A man got out, and told her to get off of me. I was yelling “help help”. She told him she had a right to do what was because I was in a “group home” and she was in charge. I kept asking him for help, and he got between us and made her get off of me. I remember I hugged that man, and I felt safer with that stranger then these staff I had been stuck with for years. He had called the police and when they came she kept arguing that she had a right to take me back to the house. But thankfully they wouldn’t let her. The police called an ambulance which took me to a nearby hospital. I felt so relieved to be away from her, like the world off of my shoulders, I had been so scared. They put me in an empty room at the hospital, and soon after, the supervisor arrived. She tried to come in the room with me and I freaked out. the security guard told the doctors that I was calm until she came near me, and they made her get out. After a while the weekend administrator came. She told me because of what I did I had to move to another residence with more staff. I actually felt relieved. I would be away from her.
I am so thankful to that stranger who stopped to help me. If he hadn’t pulled her off of me and called the police, she would have gotten me back in that house and shocked the hell out of me. It is amazing to me how all those strangers had more common sense and compassion then the staff and JRC program. It shows that what society considers wrong, is excused at JRC. Strangers saw me as more human the staff did. I was lucky that day, but there were many other days when I wasn’t.

Okay the following is not meant to take away from the impact of the story above at all, it’s just a reminder because of the symbolic super-importance the JRC has taken on in the minds of many people who have never been there or never been anywhere like it. This should not detract at all from the horribleness of the JRC or the experiences of the people who have lived there or have been at risk of living there. (I’m glad I didn’t have different parents, I would’ve easily been a candidate as a teen and young adult.)

So this is for everyone who wasn’t at the JRC:

Just a reminder that no matter where you are, these things are happening in your backyard, right now. You probably don’t even know how to recognize half the institutions in your area (many of them look almost like ordinary houses, these days), and your eyes may even glide over some of the more obvious ones as background scenery. And things just as bad or worse are happening there, too. The JRC sucks but there’s very little unique about it. Focus on its uniqueness only contributes to the torture of others at other places. Closing it may not even help some of its inmates: Many will be sent to other institutions, and those institutions may do more damage than the JRC did for all anyone knows (and that can happen whether or not the person is consciously aware that the place is worse: it’s very common to be in a Stockholm Syndrome situation or one where you think a place is better because it lacks one specific thing that happened to you at another place, meanwhile it’s actually worse than the other place and you only realize it ten or twenty years after the fact when you look at the impact both actually had on your life – the worst place I was at had no locks on the doors, no bars on the windows, the windows were regular glass, no restraints, but it was utterly diabolical in ways that are far worse than things that other people would think are “objectively” worse… similarly many people I know who’ve been in both private and state institutions would take the state institutions any day, which causes surprise and disbelief among people who’ve only been to one or the other or neither – there’s no measuring stick you can easily use to say “this one is the worst” and I worry when JRC is singled out as the worst place anyone could possibly be… it’s an utterly horrible place, but unfortunately for disabled people everywhere, it’s one among many thousands, probably (I am not good at numbers but I think thousands at least)… so if you care about shutting down the JRC, please care about shutting down all the other places too, including the ones that are deceptively beautiful-looking but sometimes the most awful of all).