In Shadowed Corners: The Confusing Nature of an Abusive System
Whenever I think of that first day, I think now of the dark shadowed corners of the school building and how I should have known.
The principal was a fat, happy man with a glass eye. His name was Dr. A and he said that he had a stroke years ago when he was still in his thirties.
He read over my application portfolio, furrowing his brows so that they cast a shadow over his dark eyes. His red pen circled and crossed out my printed words as he explained that this is the way I would learn in my creative writing classes at his school, at The Center. After straightening and folding his hands in front of his crotch he began to explain where the supply list for my classes. They would start in two weeks.
“She’s just the kind we’re looking for.”
It’s difficult to piece together the purpose of everything he said, the meaning behind lies he told.
I can’t quite say that I regret attending the school. But I can say that I will never wash away the bitterness that it brought with its rejuvenation. I was a shy homeschooler that learned to make friends, to think outside of the rural box I had been raised in and to doubt the things I had always accepted as truth. I don’t wonder what version of me could have been without The Center because I know that the Victoria of those days was grasping for happiness, struggling to lump words into sentences.
Maybe it’s Stockholm Syndrome, maybe it’s a victim mentality, but this trauma in particular seems to me to have unavoidable in my life. The blessings of being in school and having my creativity fostered were needed – I was fifteen and I needed something to live for.
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From the beginning, there were frustrations. Choir gave me headaches and it was a required class for all students. I had known that I would have to take choir – but I hadn’t known that we would be punished with running the block in heels if we missed a note. My second day the teacher threw a fistful of markers into the boy’s section because it “sounded off.” The math teacher taught using complex terms that I had never heard of. He assigned hundreds of problems but never explained how to do them.
When I asked for clarification of how to perform the operations he asked if I understood the problem he had written on the board.
“No sir.”
“You don’t understand that?” he asked incredulously, his voice developing a high, disbelieving pitch.
I shook my head.
“If you don’t understand math, you don’t have common sense.”
Stunned, I walked back to my seat. I stared down at the blurring numbers on my notebook paper and sniffed. The eight-grade students around me pretended not to notice. A blond-headed girl gave a me a sorrowful glance and looked away.
That was the first time I was told that I was stupid for struggling in math. It wasn’t the last.
My mother had made a point in asking that first day if I could wear colorful hair to school. Dr. A had said that there were no rules about that at The Center that I could be free. I learned when I began that only students taking theater were allowed to do that. Theater kids, he said, enjoyed trying on different personalities, it was logical, and it was artful. For anyone else, it was a sign of mental illness.
But who cares about the small bits of discomfort, not being able to dye my hair, struggling to clap on beat during choir? Birds are fragile, when you hold them you can feel every bone in their little bodies. Just as easily as those bones are felt, they are easily broken. So was I during the time I enrolled at The Center. So is every child, even if they are a teenager who insists they know what’s best for themselves. To say exactly what happened at The Center requires a book’s length. The brute impact of each day is neither minimal or compact. The hazing over and manipulation of our young minds cannot be stretched out to its full length here. But I can give an overview of that time.
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Each morning before classes began the whole school (it was only ever around 100 students) would assemble, usually in the choir room, to have “Morning Meeting” with Dr. A.” In these meetings, he would discuss life with us, religion, philosophy, and how to live our lives as artists. All of these things, he said, were connected. Because God was a creator, we His creation must create. It was part of acting in His likeness. Makes sense, doesn’t it? We could only maintain that status if we obeyed God’s prophet, Dr. A.
During these meetings, he would tell us that we were different from the outside world, the people outside of the school. We could never make those people understand us. That was why we didn’t need friends from other schools, there were much better people, fellow artists, right here. We didn’t the outside world and their suspicions. They didn’t understand art the way that we did, not from a spiritual level. They didn’t know how to see angels. They didn’t have someone in their life who talked to God like Dr. A. did.
I had always felt different than everyone else, every teenager does. So naybe what Dr. A was saying was true. I felt different because I was different. It wasn’t a burden, but a blessing because it meant that I could understand things that other people didn’t – the people in the outside world that is.
It was easy, it played along with the teenage ups and downs, the feeling of being out of place and uncomfortable with your own skin. The outside world couldn’t understand us, our parents really didn’t understand us, as so many adolescents often feel. It was all true, but we who had chosen to come to this school had found each and found a new way to live – we were blessed.
There were good moments. There was getting my ears pierced the day after a choir performance in Maryland with my friends. There were sweaty car rides with all the windows down after school. There was reading and arguing meanings of stories with my peers. There were good moments, but they weren’t the ones I thought I would remember at the time.
I don’t want to be pretty about this. I don’t want anyone to confuse this for a Byron-esque romance about tortured artists. Yes, we were tortured. Yes, we were artists. But those things did not influence one another in that they were dependent upon one another’s existence.
One day, he took us outside and told us to see the angels. I looked up, peering towards the blue, watching the clouds stand stock still.
“You all can see angels, if you let yourselves.”
I squinted.
“There’s one right there by the steeple.”
In the glare of the eleven o’clock sunshine, a curved, fat floater squiggled across my vision.
He knew how to flip things on their head, Dr. A did. He knew how to make things that were common sense seem like they had been a lie and like the fantasies he created were the truth.
My mind is attached to this moment and circles it back and forth in my consciousness from time to time. It curls up and then unfolds again – a function of itself unbound by any mechanism of restraint.
“Do you see it?” he addressed us.
“I do!” I answered quickly.
He looked down at my small form:
“That’s because you’ve been seeing them all your life.”
My friends beside me muttered about seeing it and being able to make out a wing. My heart pittered – even with his kind words, they seemed to be so much more spiritual than me.
Victoria Richard is a writer and aspiring curator. After spending several years in a high control group, Victoria now writes a weekly column about religious and spiritual abuse called Angels Over Presley Boulevard. Whenever she isn't researching cults and interviewing survivors, she is working to highlight local talent at the Mississippi Museum of Art. She is currently a masters student at Johns Hopkins University.