Well...
I was 17... almost 18
First it was the friends from the acting class I was taking that my mother found a bit odd. One was a bit of a perv and was always talking about sex... He loaned me a bloodhound gang cd (Hooray for Boobies) once and my parents found it. They shattered the CD and banned the kid from ever coming to the house again. ("How dare he bring that filth into our house")
When i turned 18 I decided i would try getting drunk to see what all the brew-haha was about. I did it, hated it, my parents knew about it (they didn't care much). Blah. i was sick all over and i had the worst headache of all time. I never got that drunk again.
I was miffed at this and what i felt was ridiculous conservatism. I had dealt with it for far too long and when i turned 18 I decided to be more vocal. There were arguments and slammed doors and yelling and screaming about it. I felt they were too restrictive with their curfews and such, that they didn't trust me (they claimed they had valid reasons since the had caught me with porn a few times during my teen years). They searched my room almost weekly, looking for porn and other contraband, would read my mail, my diary, everything. I printed off the UN declaration of the rights of the child and stapled it to their door, highlighting rights to privacy. They told me (rightly) that the US had never signed the declaration. I told them yes but Ireland(where we were living at the time) had signed it. It mattered little and it was the principle of the thing but they refused to give me more freedom.
The situation deteriorated. Eventually, after an argument over a sandwich of all things, i decided to "let them have it". I told them i was bi, and that i had just broken up with my boyfriend. My mom was... livid. She cried and cried and yelled and screamed and told me I was going to die of aids and burn in hell...
So I spent more and more time away from home. As I already mentioned many of my friends were from my acting school, which was located right smack in the middle of Temple Bar, Dublin's goth hangout. I made friends with many of the Goths there and met a few wiccans who i felt had the religion thing spot on, with their only rule being "do what you will, an harm ye none".
It is worth noting, the goths there were religiously comprised of catholics, protestants, aetheists, satanists, wiccans, etc... we all got along. I couldn't understand how my parents could condemn them for who they assumed them to be. My parents immediately thought they were doing hard drugs and performing ritual sacrifices. (though most of them did no drugs at all, about half smoked pot, and none that i knew of did hard drugs)...
So i thought they were pretty cool and I honestly liked the all-black aesthetic. I started dressing in mostly dark / all black clothes and we would play around with applying make-up (literally, we would mess around with it).
About two weeks after I told them i was BI they presented me with a
printout of a webpage (still the same after all these years). I said "fuck no". I didn't want to go to soem fuck-up school with a bunch of fucking junkies. I talked to my friends about it and had many invitations to stay. So i disassembled my computers, packed the parts in static bags, wrapped the bags in clothes to pad them, and snuck out. Although i might have forgotten the toothbrush the computer was up and running the next night.
For fun i hung out with my friends, i tried pot for the first time outside of my parents house.
Meanwhile they were having me followed, they had hired (private?) investigators to see what i was up to. I had no idea. I thought they were going to let me go and suceed on my own (although i was an illegal immigrant at that point). I worked under the table. I volunteered with the socialist workers party to meet more people. I met a beautiful girl, fell in love. I might have married her had my parents not done what they did.
My parents.... (father worked with the embassy) had my visa pulled. I told them I didn't fucking care, there were thousands of illegal immigrants and nobody gave a shit. They told me, that due to my father's position, i would be prioritized for deportation, that i would be arrested, and sent back to Washington DC with no money... Their alternative, their offer of mercy, was Benchmark (see previous link)...
What could i do? So i decided to go to the "boarding school" the state dept ed-con, Anne Weiss, (at the time, now "retired") suggested. Ann was personal friends with Jayne Longnecker, the program's owner... My parents thought "oh this is a place we can trust". And the sweet little old lady owner of the place.... just so comforting. Nevermind she was director of A CEDU school prior to starting her own clone....
So I said goodbye to my girlfriend. We were so in love. Benchmark told us we would be able to write and call each-other. My parents gave their stamp of approval (she was catholic). They lied. Many months later, when i was able to make an unsupervised phone call, i found out she though i had abandoned her...
My "issues" according to my parents stemmed from my rejection of their religion. Deviant sexuality was an issue (rejection of masculinity). I'll always be androgenous. I don't see the point in acting all man-like when i really don't see much of a difference between the sexes. I fell in love with my girlfriend for her personality, as a person, not her tits and twat (though she was drop dead gorgeous). I fell in love with a guy in program for the same reasons. I believe physical attraction
They deny they sent me to program for that reason, though i have documentation (they don't know i have) to the contrary (their initial "issues" letter to program). I let it be and let them live in their lies. We get along now by not talking about sex, religion, or politics (we break the last one a lot).
So that's what i did. Pretty bad huh?
