i was out of Straight at the end of August. they had warped my whole self. i sat on the couch with my mother and held her hand. i read childhood books again. i was on ice, as my mother would have put me back in Straight if I had gotten out of line. i went to AA meetings to show her that i was going to be good. i was out of Straight due to the good fortune of not being treated for an obvious medical problem for a week at Straight, followed by high fever and iv drips at Fairfax Hospital for a kidney infection. my mom let me come home after that. maybe she had seen enough of me in the hospital to know that i was toeing the line. in fact, the brainwashing had taken hold well and good. i would not associate with former friends, i went to AA and NA meetings -- i was quite invested with my strict new outlook on people. my first boyfriend saw me at some point within the first few years after Straight, and he described that recently: i was a zombie. i looked like the person he knew, but there was someone else in her body. he said when talking to me back then, it was as though i had a checklist or an application to go through with him before i would talk to him, like if he was drinking or "using".
i had many problems with anxiety after getting out. i was worried a lot about getting in a car wreck, or having some deadly medical thing, also checking locks and that kind of anxiety.
it took me five years of being "clean and sober" before i finally drank alcohol again. it turned out that i did not drink like an alcoholic. i could drink half a beer and not want more, then go months or years before having another drink.
my deepest sadness in my life is that i could not resist the brainwashing. i have felt for a long time that i am a failure because of this. it is a horrible thing to know about yourself. maybe i feel this especially because of what i believed in before Straight. my personal code, so to speak, was all about self-direction, and no respect for authority based solely on fact of rank. this was the material 80s, and i wore whatever crap I felt like to school. once the subschool principal was calling me back and i said "bye" and walked on. i drew sandals on my feet so i didn't have to wear shoes (hoping from a distance they looked like the real thing). :smile:
then i went in Straight.
these days i still feel a vulnerability of mind. it was a professor of mine that took away the definition of brainwashing. he wanted to call it "radical resocialization", or, instead of "cult", call it a "new religious movement". well, really, he didn't want me to approach my historical anthropological exploration of Straight with any preconceived ideas, so that would throw his words out as well. so what do we think brainwashing is? explaining it is a bit like trying to convince someone that magic is possible. i think it is like i was saying to Jane the other day -- and forgive me, i don't know if that post was rude or not but i didn't mean it to be -- Real Jane was not allowed to speak, so she went away. it has been one mystery of the last eighteen years where the real me went, or, did she die. all the dirt Straight washed out of my brain, that was my memories, and included in the memories are my connections to my self, my brothers and sisters from that age, all the things that made me happy. happy! roller skating, and the bumps the cracks in the sidewalk made. swinging so high you get that moment of slack in the chains. bicycling around and around the grass island in the neighborhood parking lot. banana seat bicycles! flags on the back post, plastic woven baskets. mine was pink. i want my dirt back.
Straight filled up my mind with a whole lot of thoughts that were just reactions to anxiety related to the underlying question of what i could think and how to think it in my head so i did not get in trouble later. for example, say i thought of copping out by going through the screen door and climbing off the deck, then i would realize i thought that, then i would add thoughts to it, like how scared i was that i was going to find my druggie friends and get high, then that "good" thought is on the end of the copping-out thought, all ready to tell in just that way so i would be found innocent. this was my mind. those were bad years.
i don't know why the memories are hard to get. maybe Straight terrorized me so much that my brain was trained to stay out of the memory circuits.
some training in my brain messed up other things, too. i was an A student in English the year before Straight, when i went to class anyway. my professor thought my papers were outstanding. then after Straight i came back, i guess i got an A anyway, but she and i both knew something was not the same about the way i wrote. i was trained by Straight to write from the lying patterns they laid down in my thought circuits.
so it was not just training me to believe i was a diseased drug addict and alcoholic (utterly absurd given my drug and alcohol use), Straight was zapping my mind and emotions so much, it was messing with even deeper circuits dealing with creativity, purpose, happiness, connection to people and history, the ability to remember, the line connecting me from the very beginning, through all the childhood and teenage years, to my present self. my history, as contained in my memories, which gave me my self-conception, the true one that came from my own life, had been destroyed. the line was destroyed, the line of self knowing self. i became self unknowing self.
don't know if this makes sense, don't care. not everyone's reality is going to be the same. this is a decription of my reality.
