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9:48am August 20, 2014

lichgem:

‘Chill, it’s just the fur’

I have never wanted to punch anyone so much in my life

Considering cats are covered in fur, is there some sort of zone where they would finally find it unacceptable to set a cat on fire? What the fuck were they thinking? That cat had to get emergency treatment. ‘Just the fur,’ fucking asshole.

This story is disturbing on multiple levels, so be warned.

I was living in a residential facility for teens in the psych system.  At first, it was only for teens who had labels of severe enough mental illness that otherwise we were going to be in a state institution.  But they stopped being able to get enough of such people, so they decided to start taking parents’ obnoxious kids off their hands, for a fee.  Which usually meant bullies who didn’t give a shit about anyone but themselves.  Which is a horrible bunch of people to mix in with people with, say, severe schizophrenia or bipolar or autism.  Which were the sort of labels most of us had coming in.  (They tended to change our labels as we came in, so I had an autism diagnosis but it was changed to “infantile psychosis with childhood paranoid schizophrenia starting in adolescence, caused by bad mothering”.  Because they were psychoanalytic douchebags who were throwbacks to the seventies.  But anyway.)

So one day I opened my door and it was surrounded by the newer, bully kids.  And I smelled what smelled like burning hair.  And they said “We set the cat on fire.”  And the staff were trying to tell me this was impossible, but one of my biggest triggers ever is cat abuse so I was already flipping out and they knew it.  They had burnt their own hair with a lighter to make the smell.  And they were talking all about how badly the cat had died, and going into gruesome details, and stuff.

And they were going after my roommate, too.  I forget what they were telling her.  She had a delusional disorder and believed her family was part of the Irish mafia, and they were using that against her somehow.

At the time, I still identified myself as non-human, specifically I called myself an elf.  And right when they’d gotten me as freaked out as they could possibly get me, they started saying “When a cat dies, an elf dies next!”

At which point the only decent staff in the entire place, took one look at what was going on, scooped up me and my roommate, and drove us to the other house for the night.  (There were two houses, down the road from each other.)  He did his best to convince us that they were just fucking with our heads and that no animals had been harmed, but I couldn’t believe him until I saw the cat the next day.  And my roommate didn’t look too sure of herself either, she kept muttering about how she’d have her family kill the families of these other kids.

At any rate, this is a problem I saw over and over and over in my time in the system:  Places would have kids who were very vulnerable to being abused, and to make more money, they’d also take in kids who were being kicked out of their parents’ homes or their regular schools for victimizing other kids.  And they’d put us in the same schools, or the same institutions, together, and it would be the perfect environment to make sure the actually disabled kids were victimized by the kids whose only disability labels were basically fancy words for “habitual bully” and “asshole”.

But that was one of the worst nights of my life, thinking that they’d killed a cat in such a horrible way and were coming after me next.