Member-only story
This is Why I Didn’t Kill Myself.
I was saved by strangers like you.
I was twelve years old the first time I attempted suicide. The whys aren’t the important bit here, but the Cliffs Notes version is this: it was bad at home. The more acute trauma came a few years later, when I was locked up in a notoriously violent “adolescent treatment” program, one which would later be investigated, sued and shut down for abusing kids.
After sixteen months in the program I was psychologically shattered. I returned to my high school with every reason, and concrete plans, to kill myself. But then I met my English teacher, the soft, wise, living embodiment of Blanche Dubois. In exactly the ways I needed, she was kind. She kept me from committing suicide. She did this by caring about my words.
To visualize the traumatizing effects of the program, consider this snapshot: hundreds of kids trapped in a warehouse, tasked with brutalizing each other into morphing from rebellious teens into compliant, self-hating dweebs. To do the job we used “attack therapy,” which included subsets “spit therapy,” “toilet paper therapy,” “the spanking machine,” and child-on-child five-point restraints. There was a running soundtrack of screaming and sobbing and preschool songs. On bad days we heard cracking skulls, breaking ribs.
I returned to my high school…
