A snippet of something I wrote to myself a while back. If this were a rap a peer would say now "Can anyone relate to this girl?" and you all would have to put your hands up.
"Drinking a cup of coffee on my living room sofa at 7:00 AM, watching The Today Show this morning, I was overcome with happiness.
During the early mornings in The Host Homes, under slept and emotionally exhausted, we as Newcomers would be pushed aside for a moment, while we observed the closest thing to normal happenings of our Host Home families. Our Host Home mother serves us breakfast and then quickly empties out the dishwasher and cleans the counter tops, a practice she does so naturally we know she’s been doing it since marriage. Our Host Home siblings listen to the radio in their rooms while dressing themselves for school, and fuss about homework while packing their backpacks. Our Host Home father comes downstairs last in his suit, and stands in the kitchen with his cup of coffee, readying himself for another long day of holding up in the business world and then coming home to AARC and all of us.
This is where I longed for the outside world the most. In two Host Homes I can think of, our Host Fathers would break the rule of no television and turn on the news as they ate breakfast. While the home was buzzing with the normal commotion of assuring that Newcomers spent no longer than five minutes in the bathroom, and that no others slip away while one of us is in there, the sound of the morning news brought a level of normalcy to our situation. In the mornings I was aware that all around us were homes filled with families, tired and dragging themselves out of bed, brewing up coffee, and listening to the sound of The Today Show while beginning their new day. All around us were normal families going about their normal lives, not for one moment having any idea of what was going on in our home.
And when we drove to the centre, early in the mornings before the sun had come up, I would be looking into the windows of every home we passed and imagining their normal lives, in their warm homes, which would smell like toast and coffee just like the Host Home I’d come from. Whether their blinds were closed but I could see light behind them, or there was a television set flickering in the dark, whether or not it was an upper class home or a lower class apartment, I wanted more than anything to be inside by that light. I wanted to make it out of AARC just so that I could experience again waking up without having an Oldcomer’s bed pressed in front of the door, turn on the news, make some coffee, and then sit down and enjoy it; without asking permission. To make the decisions then if I wanted to leave early for work, or if I would call in sick and crawl back into bed, or would I be a student? Whatever I wanted, starting my morning outside of a Host Home and in a home of my own, I would have the freedom to make those decisions, and I would think about everyone out there who didn’t have that freedom.
I picked pieces up from each Host Home on how I would operate my mornings once free; like Car***ne’s mother I would have my coffee pot set on a timer and bring a thermos with me to work. Like G*n*v**ve’s mother I would have royal blue glasses. Like C***y’s father I would let the car begin to warm up fifteen minutes before it was time to go.
So that’s what I do, even when I am once again under slept, or I am overworked, I do this unconsciously. I set my alarm a half an hour early, knowing how important this morning time alone is. Since 1996, since returning home from AARC, I have eaten the same breakfast every day. I’ve gone to great measures to assure that this ritual is undisturbed, while traveling, while camping, I find a way to bring it all with me. No matter what chaos may be erupting in my life I have to have this one thing that stays the same.
So I sit there in the dark under just the light of the TV, knowing what it looks like flickering from the outside. I am filled with gratitude for the peace and quiet of my home, for the freedom of having for breakfast whatever I please, for the freedom to watch the television, for knowing that I have one more day where I will not undergo psychological torture. Even when I have had next to nothing, even when I was homeless, I was thankful for everything that I have; which is that every morning that I can sit with my coffee and not be forced anywhere is total freedom to make any decision.
One Sunday A*d**w arranged for all of us to drive out to a family members home on a farm, where there was a hill to toboggan on. It was a long drive through gravel roads in the middle of nowhere, where the sun reflected brightly off of untouched snow, something which in normal circumstances I would find beautiful, but in such a situation the snow only reminded me of what I was trapped in.
I was in his girlfriend’s mini van with some of my group members, who spoke very little during the trip (taking advantage of an unusual amount of freedom of thought). She played a Blue Rodeo CD, which reminded me of my fathers Patsy Cline tapes he’d played in his van in my youth. The CD must have repeated several times on the way to the farm house. Later on Peter played the song “Try” from the same CD for my Step One Progress Rap. Recently I found myself wanting to hear those songs again out of respect for music that brought me comfort in such an awful time.
Now I get into my car; my nice car, and every morning I am surprised to be in it. Not for one second do I take for granted that my car doesn’t need to be started fifteen minutes in advance in order to be warm, or how smoothly it takes its corners. Every morning when I get in it I give thanks, for I still feel as I did in AARC, that it will be forever before I am one of those people waking up every day to head off to a normal world.
I stop at stoplights and more often than not I find a suit in the car next to me looking over at the made up blonde in the nice car, most likely wondering what the story is behind her. They don’t know that under my jacket I am heavily tattooed, or that I still attend raves. They see a woman in a Club Monaco coat drinking from a Starbucks thermos, and they think I’m one of them. They have no idea that I once had to confess for having acted on my Defect of Pride when in a rush to complete my chores I couldn’t successfully sweep up 100% of the spilled coffee grounds in the staff’s kitchen. In my five years of living in this suburb I have yet to meet another person who was not born into the lap of luxury, which in my eyes is anyone who was able to live at home until they could afford rent for themselves. They do not know, when they look at me at the stoplight, how foreign it is for someone like myself to be sitting there in that car.
This morning, inside my warm car on a cold morning reminiscent of Calgary of course, I
listened to that Blue Rodeo CD (Care of Amazon. Do you know how hard it is to find a Blue Rodeo CD in America?). It certainly did bring up some old feelings of AARC. “I feel like a stranger in another world/but at least I’m living again”.
I don’t know if it should be considered sad or amazing that I have this acute memory of what it’s like to be imprisoned, and such a gratitude for freedom. Regardless, I know that I have a love for living which the suit in the car next to me most likely does not have.
For the longest time, telling someone about what I’d gone through was a terrifying experience. I couldn’t do it without tears. There was so much fear in revealing my secret. I was already the odd girl out. In life in general I’ve danced to my own drummer, and coercing others to look beyond the differences and take me for who I am has been a task. To reveal in one conversation that I had been brainwashed and kidnapped set me further apart from the rest. You don’t want to be an outsider. You don’t want to have a traumatic experience that nobody you know can relate to.
And then there is all this crap that you’ve been fed to believe. You are a manipulative druggie; nobody will believe you. You are whining and looking for pitty. You are fighting. There is all this crap that even when you know it is wrong, once you bundle up the courage to tell the person you’ve been working with for one year what you’ve gone through, at the top of your throat this stuff seems to stop you and tell you that you can’t take the risk or she may turn on you. You fear that when your friends learn what a bizarre experience you’ve gone through that they will say to one another “I had no idea she was so fucked up!”
You tell yourself that the best thing you can do is go on like it never happened, and hope that something bad enough happens that will put an end to AARC without you having to do anything. When you try to talk about it, you feel like you’re in Rap again; going into a regressive and painful state. You don’t want to go back to “a time and place when…”
But I worked at it slowly. At first with a therapist, in whom I found immediately out of AARC, and then with some authorities. And then periodically off and on over the years, and then on these pages. I told bits and pieces to those closest to me, learning slowly what I was emotionally able to reveal and what I was not, sometimes diving too deep and bursting into tears abruptly with friends perhaps not close enough to me to fully understand why.
Then it occurred to me on one of my half hour drives to work, that in the end all abuse is the same. The words “cult”, “brainwashing”, and “programming” are intimidating, but the shame I seemed to feel over what had happened to me was no different than anyone else’s. A co-worker had recently revealed to me that she was a victim of incest, and I’d questioned why it was that people felt shame over sexual abuse. Here is something so clearly done to a person and not by them, and strictly because sex is a taboo subject in our society they become too afraid to report their abuser, when most likely they wouldn’t blink about reporting someone for having mugged them.
Yet there I was, ashamed of what I had been put through, for no reason. I was not a drug addict who deserved to loose their rights in punishment for my sick behavior, and make amends to my parents for having harmed them and cost them so much money. I did not do anything to ask for AARC, or for Münchhausen's to happen to me, yet I didn’t want to tell anybody that it had. I hadn’t recognized it as shame. I saw it as complicated.
This encouraged me now. I would not hide from a co-worker if I had been mugged, so why wouldn’t I be able to tell a co-worker I had been programmed?
And this realization united me. I don’t know if the man or the Soccer Mom in the car next to me has ever been through something quite like I have, but I know that many of my daily crawl traffic companions have undergone abuse or a trauma of some kind, and for all of them it is hard to discuss. None of us wanted it to happen, all of us feel separated from the rest for having gone through it, and all of us would rather be thinking of something better than our traumatic event. The severities of our experiences may vary, but the bullshit telling us to lay low about it is the same...."
