Recover, Recovering, Recovery: The Arduous Ascent into Wholeness

 There's something about the program of Alcoholics Anonymous that, as anyone who has experienced it knows, is somehow divinely inspired. 

I can't explain why exactly it is that working the 12 Steps not only enables someone who compulsively drinks to stop, but results in a complete intrapersonal transformation the writers of the Big Book, AA's basic text, refers to as a "psychic change."

I hopped into and out of the program in varying intervals since I was 18. A large part of the reason I'd historically never benefited was due to an inherent inability to consistently follow through with anything until I was 31 and entered the psych hospital (yet again) and they finally identified my frontal lobe damage and executive dysfunction and put me on lithium. Finally, for the first time in my life, I responded favorably to medication. 

The Lithium did something to screen out elements that prior to left me in a state of constant overstimulation which sent my moods bouncing from one uncontrollable extreme to another. It enabled me, over the course of the year that followed my picking up that white chip on January 10th, 2016 (what you do in your first meeting to signify that you've surrendered your drinking) to do something I'd never done before: get a sponsor (an experienced person in the program who serves as a guide) and work the Steps all the way through. 

There was just something about this that gave me the first sense of stability and equilibrium I'd ever experienced. 

If you consider the meaning of the word recovery, nothing about it denotes any kind of instantaneous happily ever after. In a coastal town that's been ravaged by a hurricane, the most important thing, of course, is to survive the storm. But afterwards? Inhabitants must contend with millions of dollars of damage that's been done, a monumental mess to clean up. 

So this metaphor was made manifest for me. And I began my arduous ascent into wholeness, a commitment to sifting through so much wreckage and rebuilding my life. 

2016: This was my first year of sobriety. I moved into a nicer apartment complex after living in a dumpy apartment in a bad corner of the city. I hired a lawyer and got every other weekend visits with my daughters. I worked all of my steps and struggled to maintain my commitment to the program when I lost one of my adjunct professor positions, and shortly thereafter, the other, when the school closed without warning. I found myself working at a daycare during the day and a grocery store at night and I was so exhausted. After being rejected by three imprints of PRH and HarperCollins Children and an unsuccessful rewrite, my agent dropped me. The amount of disappointment and setbacks were crushing. But I held on. 

2017: This was my second year of sobriety. I went to work as a leasing agent for my apartment complex. I had enough money, health insurance. The custody of my children was moved from every other weekend into a 50/50 arrangement. I moved from a two bedroom apartment into a spacious three bedroom. That fall, I was laid off from my job and no longer had enough money to meet my needs. This disappointment threatened to take me under. I decided to go back to school and finish my Master of Arts in Teaching to become a secondary English teacher. More disappointments, more setbacks, but I held on. 

2018: This was my third year of sobriety. I only had a semester of courses before I could do my student teaching. I relied on support from my parents and student loans to make it through. I spent that summer at my parents' in Tennessee scrubbing boats at a marina to make enough money to help cover my expenses. I drove three hours back and forth from my city to take the girls to stay with their biological father every two weeks. As my complex was beginning to be overrun with drugs and gun violence, I moved into a beautiful 1930's apartment in the nicest, safest part of my city. I completed my student teaching, finished my second Master's degree, and became a licensed English teacher. 

2019: This was my fourth year of sobriety. I got a teaching job at an alternative school and for the first time in my life, I was making more than $40K a year and had health insurance. My girls' father had relapsed back into drugs and alcohol and was making poor choices. The courts awarded me full custody of my daughters and left him with weekend visits. The job with the school fell apart when a student assaulted me and I had to leave. Suddenly, I had no income and no way to support myself. I threw myself back into substituting but at a fraction of what I was making. I felt so overwhelmed and hopeless at even more disappointments and setbacks, but I held on. That summer, my partner of four years and I married. That fall, my daughters and I moved into his home in his city and our new life began. I picked up a job shortly thereafter as a SPED teacher in a middle school that was right across the parking lot. 

2020: This was my fifth year of sobriety. When COVID hit and lockdown came, I was grateful to still be making my regular salary and be able to be at home with my daughters. We had endless days together, doing art, planting seeds, making up in so many ways for time we lost. I had the happy family in a beautiful home I'd always wanted. I was taken on that fall to teach 8th grade English. I began to experience troubling issues with bullying from my department chair and principal that weren't serving me. But I hung in. I pressed on. 

2021: This was my sixth year of sobriety. I transferred into a 6th grade teaching position, but the stress and strain of the postpandemic world of secondary teaching in addition to the bullying I was enduring finally broke me. I had to leave my position in October and came very close to having a breakdown. It was a nightmare, losing benefits and pay again. But for the first time in six years since my agent dropped me, I returned to writing. I reimagined and rewrote the first two books in my series. I was re-evaluated by a neuropsychiatrist who added Ritalin to my medicine regime. This opened up a whole new world for me, and my family. My daughters switched to virtual learning. My husband stopped substituting in the public school and began to substitute at home. As continued to be the theme of my recovering life, anything that seemed bad could be a catalyst for things higher and better than I could have ever imagined. I had to keep myself grounded in faith that there was a God as I understood Him who knew me, loved me, had plans for me greater than I could imagine, that I was on my way toward as long as I didn't drink and kept working the steps. I was able to get into an online teaching position. 

2022: This is my seventh year of sobriety. Everything about my life is more than everything I ever wanted. I have a happy marriage to the man who has been my best friend for seven years. I have full custody of my daughters. I have employment at home that gives me plenty of time to focus on writing. And I've made a comeback from the pain of the rejection I experienced during my first time attempting to publish that I would never have imagined myself capable. I'm now actively seeking a new agent for my book, and the amount of rejection that's hitting me over and over is just as disappointing and frustrating as all the other disappointments and frustrations that have come before. But just as each one of those were all leading me to something higher, something better, so I can confidently know that each rejection I face is doing the same. Every "no" is only pushing me that much closer to the only "yes" that's intended for me. 

I'm not helpless, Paulina came to believe, and it was this belief that saved her. So it is for me. I'm not helpless. I don't ever give up. I haven't ever given up. And because of that, my daughters have their mother, and I have a life and a story that may be what someone out there, in time, is going to grasp onto to discover within themselves everything that I discovered...you're not helpless. You can survive. 

On Being "Not Helpless": The One Who Inspired Me to Save Myself

 So the decision I was about to make that fateful night? I didn't. 

I know how the popular rhetoric goes. All you need is yourself. You don't need a romantic partner. Be strong and independent. 

Perhaps this is true, or at least mostly true. But for me? In that moment? I had failed in every way that I possibly could in being strong and independent. I wasn't someone I could rely on. And as far as needing a romantic partner? Well...that wasn't exactly the point. 

What was the point, however, was that someone had managed to come into my life and for whatever reason, choose to stay. To this day, he would tell you...he saw the mess that I was, the state I was in. It was as unlovely as unlovely gets. But he also saw through that, somehow. He saw everything within me that was beautiful and capable and worthy, parts of myself I hadn't seen in so long I had deemed them imaginary, if I'd ever seen them at all. 

One of the most poignant parts in my first book is how Paulina finds a way to survive one of the darkest, scariest moments of her life. Her daddy was killed in a mining accident, and her mother has gone insane with grief, so much so that she neglects Paulina to the point that she is near to freezing and starving. Her only escape is in lucid dreams, where she discovers a friendly black bear (who is really the boy in disguise) who does two important things for her: he believes in her until she believes in herself. And he teaches her what becomes an affirmation that will steel her resolve through every challenge life brings her: 

You're not helpless. 

This relationship was very much created as a metaphor for the relationship I had with the person who'd come into my life around the time I came very close to doing something final and permanent. Just as Bear never rushes in to save Paulina, to come between her and any challenges, so my person never set out to save me from myself. Bear's love for Paulina became a catalyst for her own empowerment, as my person's love did for me. 

The right kind of love is one which inspires you to dig more deeply within yourself than you thought you ever could to find a greater reserve of strength than you ever knew you had. 

Even though I had no faith that things could ever get better, I knew I didn't want them to get worse. Even though I was certain that nothing I could ever do could make anything better, because he believed that I was worth one more try, I decided to believe in his belief in me. 

On January 10th, 2016, I went back to AA. And this proved to be the first step on a thousand mile journey. It has been six years, and I haven't touched a drink or taken a drug since. 

This was when I began my ascent into the life I have today, a life that's imperfect but also the sum total of everything my heart has ever desired...and yes, I did get my children back. 

Bear came into Paulina's life at precisely the right time in precisely the right way; without his belief in her until she believed in herself, she might have perished. And as I wrote this, I was in truth writing the story of how my person came into my life at the right time in precisely the right way; without his belief in me until I believed in myself, I might have perished, too. 

I'm not helpless, Paulina will continue to affirm and use as the foundation upon which she will base her entire life. So it was for me. 

And my person? He came into my life in the Fall of 2015. In the Summer of 2019, he became my husband. To this day, he continues to be to me what Bear was to Paulina: not my savior, but the catalyst to find within myself whatever it is that I need to become to savior of myself. 

Adulthood isn't Automatic: Neurodivergence at Quarter Life and Beyond (CW: suicide attempt)

 In the looking back over the earliest years of my emergent adulthood and onward, one thing was very constant: nothing that I did on the outside had any effect on my chaotic, fragmented insides. 

But I tried everything. Surely going to my dream college would fix me; it didn't. Then I thought I'd try grad school to see if it would help; nope. I jumped into a marriage in hopes that this--what had to be the greatest affirmation of adult stability short of having children--would make be all better; another try, another failure. 

I stayed sick. I stayed broken. I remained unresolved. 

The decade between 20 and 30 was a dissonant whirlwind. I attempted all of the above, to no avail. I tumbled down the proverbial rabbit hole of pharmaceutical drug addiction in such a way that was never an attempt to become the manifestation of a dark Appalachian stereotype, a hillbilly pill head, but the shoe certainly fit. I was a statistic waiting to happen. 

I ended up on the wrong side of my parents and being one phone call away from ending up on a Britney Spears-type of conservatorship, for mostly the same reasons. Matter of fact, I was having my own substance abuse fueled mental collapse at the same time that she was. Reading of this on my favorite celebrity gossip blogs was such a darkly comforting affirmation for my existence. I'm not alone, after all, a sadly hopeful little voice whispered within me.  

Honestly, the outward act of marriage, setting up house, and soon after, becoming pregnant with my first and then second child did cause the chaos within me to abate for a little while. 

A little while.

I had very strong maternal instincts, and I had daughters. There was something about the strength of the feminine energy within me that had always been feminine like nature as opposed to female like a girl that was at its peak manifestation. Being a mother to daughters was something I was as naturally good at as writing.

 I felt very much like a creature in the wild compelled with a knowledge that was in-born when it came to my girls. And how powerful it was to have girls. Friends of mine teased, the force-of-nature femininity in you would never allow for anything male to grow in your womb. I thought of it in terms of Clan of the Cave Bear. My totem is gonna whoop any man's totem's ass because, yeah. I'm that cyclonic. 

God, I want to be able to tell you, even at this point, that I had found my happily ever after, for I was, with my tiny daughters, happier and more full of purpose than I had ever been at any point in my life prior. 

But the day came when I yet again fell to pieces...there was another mental breakdown, another relapse onto drugs and alcohol. 

The breakdowns have somewhat of a pattern: 

Hospitalizations / relapses: 15, 21, 31, (almost) 39.

This one happened around my 31st birthday. I just came apart. My moods began to swing so wildly that I couldn't get back to any kind of equilibrium. I spiraled. I reached out for anything to self-medicate. The drugs made it worse. Things were already going bad in my marriage (we were not right for one another) and so it all just finally imploded.

 I landed back in the hospital. 

My ex husband knew me back during the last relapse and witnessed how bad things got with me when I had a psychotic break and picked drugs and alcohol back up. He hired a lawyer, went straight to court, and hit it head on.

And just like that, I lost custody of my precious daughters, ages 1 and 3. 

I was denied even supervised visits. I can't describe the degree to which I felt like my soul had absolutely been ripped from my body. Those girls were the sum total of any and everything that had ever been good about me. 

But it happened. I'd never hit rock bottom this hard before. And it was goddamn hard to pick myself up. 

So I did the only things I could do: relocate back to the city where I'd lived right after undergrad. Regress backward in my internal age about ten years. go back to graduate school. Finish one Master's degree and start another. Write three novels by hand at first and then type them up. Get an agent. Get a job as a college professor. 

And drink. God, did I ever sit in my apartment and just drink myself into an absolute stupor. 

It was really dangerous, in the looking back, how big of a difference there was between what I presented on the outside for everyone to see during that time versus what was really going on inside of me. To the world, I was a brilliant, quirky, energetic albeit eccentric professor who was the absolute favorite of all my students, the one they wanted to go with them on road trips and come over and get high with them and sometimes, to date them (I did none of the above; I always had ethics, regardless of how wayward I was in other areas). Everyone was so impressed that I'd written books, found an agent and, holy shit, had secured an audience with major publishing imprints. I was interesting, I was successful, I was cool, I was so, so cool....

Meanwhile, on the inside, I had begun to obsessively contemplate in a very real way whether or not I might ought to go ahead and end things altogether. I'd tried at least three times to go back and get my girls returned to me, but family courts hate drug addicts and drunks in equal measure as they hate crazy people and I had all of the above going on. No, no, no, they kept telling me. 

Almost three years had passed. My daughters were growing up. My ex wouldn't even let me see them, and there was nothing I could do about it. Losing my girls and being unable to have them returned to me was very close to being something that was a very real end for me. I sat in that apartment drinking more and more every night, looking back over my life. No matter how hard I had tried to rise--and I'd tried, God knows I had--I always fell back down, and there was nothing I could do about it. Mental health professionals certainly couldn't help me. Something was fucking wrong with me that couldn't be fixed. Everyone who'd ever loved me paid the price as the result. And now, this curse had passed down to my little girls. 

It began to make a whole lot more sense to me to end things. Once I did this, sure, everyone would hurt, but wouldn't it be better for them to suffer one last. large hurt from me as opposed to contend with me hurting them over and over for as long as I was alive?

Once this idea had entered my mind, it was like a seed was planted that began with each passing day to put down roots, to push its head above the ground. It was frightening how plausible it seemed. And then this sense of fright gave way to a numb calmness, like I knew what it was I had to do, I needed only to decide how I would do it.

 And the "how" came to me with such smoothness and ease it was almost frightening. I went to the pharmacy and acquired an entire three months' supply of lithium. I recalled the literal pinky promise I made to my psychiatrist before I left the hospital the last time that I wouldn't use it to kill myself. Well...I reckon I was about to make a liar of myself. 

The Friday evening I'd chosen rolled around. I'd already made all the arrangements I needed, I'd written all of the notes necessary, to whom it may concern. All that was left was to move forward. 

*

Seven years have passed since that night. And I'm still here, still living, aren't I?

What happened? Well...You know how they say it's always darkest before the dawn? 

Hmm. I'm not sure that's true. Matter of fact, I'd say it usually isn't. But for me, right then, it was. 

I will always remember this time time as the moment that things finally began to change. 

What it Takes for Me to Function: A Recipe

600 mg of Lithium

100 mg of Seroquel

45 mg of Ritalin

Bimonthly therapy sessions

Constant working of CBT & DBT skills to endure daily life

Trimonthly check-ins with a psychiatrist

Bloodwork to see to what degree my meds are harming my kidneys and/or thyroid

Consideration long-term whether to choose functioning body parts or mental stability

Permanent abstinence from drugs or alcohol

Weekly attendance at AA meetings

Consistent working of the 12 Steps with a Sponsor

A daily walk with God whether I want one or not

Morning and evening prayer and meditation exercises to stay plugged in

Pour all ingredients into a tiny mason jar. Shake until combined. Store in a cool, dry place with not too much sunlight for 24 hours. Retrieve and repeat every morning for the next 40 years or until life has ceased. Failure to do so will result in destruction of personal relationships, termination of employment, relapse, confinement to a psychiatric hospital (again), possibly loss of custody of daughters. 

Neurotypicals could never understand just how much work is required for my kind to simply wake up and face life. 

In Literary Purgatory: the Pains of Querying

 I don't know that I have a whole lot to say about this, other than the fact that I just want to say, I'm hurting right now. This process is painful, painful, painful. 

I had an agent before. She got me into three PRH imprints, and even HCC. The concept was ready, the manuscript wasn't. I reworked it. Now I'm back out there. 

And nothing. 

I'm hurting because I wish I wasn't so attached to this book, but I am. I wish I didn't care, but I do. 

I just have this feeling of dismal foreboding that a novel that straddles several genres--Appalachian as well as being Historical as well as being Fantasy--is going to need an agent that's a unicorn, who somehow loves all of that. 

I'm hurting and confused because I got so far that last time, and feeling lost, in a way, in what I should expect this time. 

I just don't know. 

What an opportunity for spiritual discipline, however, I will say. That whole axiom about that which doesn't kill makes you stronger is too much of a simplification. Difficult times have always given me two options: sink or swim. Sink down into self-loathing and helplessness, or swim up in affirmation of being not helpless, grow more mature in areas of patience, acceptance, living in the moment, trusting God. 

If little Paulina in my story can swim in the way she did, be as not helpless as she became, then so can I. My protagonist is my inner strength. I have to make more of a conscious effort nowadays to remember to let her take the wheel. 

I affirm that this difficult moment of uncertainty and waiting will be an opportunity for me to grow. I will count it all joy...well, maybe not, but...I'll keep trying to try. 

A Beaten Retreat: Leaving the Therapeutic Boarding School

 How did I get out, you may ask? I went in six months before I turned 18 and I was still there three months before I would have turned 20. 

There was no such thing as an actual program duration. Parents were told 12-18 months, but so many students had been there 4 or 5 years, with no end in sight.

 The owners enlisted the help of other students to manipulate and convince parents to leave their child in the school, pleading that they would literally die if they left. This worked on a great many families.  

Mine? Not so much. They were a harder sell. Honestly, their issue was the fact that I was aging so rapidly. I was nearly 20, and "if I waited much longer to get out and go away to college, it was going to start to look bad." 

Thank God they felt that way, because that school was hellbent on not letting me out. Ever.

When my parents had contacted them to express their intent to take me out, the owners went into their typical overdrive mode that they went into whenever a student was about to leave. 

First, they began to target me for abuse. At that point, I was disassociated most of the time. I rarely spoke. I scarcely knew I was anywhere. But they began to nitpick at me for anything I did wrong. Even things I wasn't doing. I had begun to attend distance learning community college classes after I finished high school, and I was doing well, carrying an A-B average. This was my ticket out of there, transferring into a four-year college. I kept my head down and focused on my school. 

The day came when I was supposed to go take my final exams. They came in and announced that I wouldn't be allowed, so that I would purposely fail and thereby, I wouldn't be able to transfer to college. They had someone take a paper I had written and mark all over it, making it look like I'd made an F. This was evidence, they gloated, that I was stupid. They began to break me down, tear away from me two things I knew to be true about myself: I was intelligent, and I was a good writer. 

They began to belittle me, torment me every day saying I was stupid, I was too dumb to go to college. I needed to stay there and run their kitchen, because that was all I would ever be capable of doing. They insisted that I was ugly, hideous, and fat, on top of it. They told me that I was a terrible writer. They told me I had no friends. Everything they could to to shred me to pieces was directed at me in a concentrated attack. They told me I was a white trash hillbilly who was going to end up in a trailer park in Appalachia getting beaten up by a piece of shit man. Hillbilly white trash, they called me, over and over. I was an ugly loser, a joke, no one liked me, they insisted, 

Soon, they found a reason to put me in the worst punishment there was: jumpsuit. Yes, they'd make you wear an orange prison jumpsuit, sleep on the floor without a pillow or blanket, and you'd have to "earn back" basic toiletries such as soap and a toothbrush. I'd literally done nothing wrong. Then they had groups of girls waking me up in the middle of the night, threating to assault me / cut me if I didn't tell my parents I needed to stay. And on top of that, the way they mentally broke me down convincing me I was going to die if I left that place. 

All of these actions and words sunk beneath my skin more and more each day until I began to believe them. 

I kept thorough records of all of this going on, in notebooks I had hidden, so I could expose this place once I got out. But the day came when they suddenly put me on a "writing ban" when they discovered these notebooks and had them all destroyed.

This was the same day my parents arrived to take me home. 

And yes, that not being allowed to take my finals did a great deal of damage. Those professors at that community college put in a zero for them, causing me to fail every course I had taken. All my hard work was burnt to the ground. It was very difficult for me to have to explain this whole story, as to what exactly it was that I'd been through, at every college where I applied. 

But I was able to get into the college of my dreams. This is a happy ending as far as this goes. 

However...coming out of this hell and then four months later being packed up and sent away to college wasn't a recipe for success. This is an understatement, to say the least.

Wherever you go, there you are. So it was for me. My struggles came away with me to university, too, and there was a whole lot more suffering and confusion in store for me. 

#BreakingCodeSilence: Horrors Inflicted at my Therapeutic Boarding School (TW: Abuse; Torture)

WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT AHEAD. THE TW IN THE TITLE WAS NOT A JOKE. BUT THIS IS A TRUTH THAT MUST BE TOLD. #BREAKINGCODESILENCE ________________________________________________________________________________

I wish to write one last post about my time at the therapeutic boarding school just to sum up this experience as something I've discussed and hopefully won't need to discuss again. The only exception being, of course, would be if at some point in the future, if you are among my readership and have a similar experience you need to share, then I would be glad to exchange experiences. When self-disclosure serves a purpose, I'm always willing. And at this moment, there is a purpose to serve, so I will share...but that purpose is, at the moment, an open-and-closed sort. 

So yes. The punishments...more adequately described as, the abuse. And in some cases, torture.

I will never understand what it is that causes certain human beings to be wired in such a way that they appear to thrive over the domination and humiliation of those weaker than them. This was the definitive summary of the two women who ran that hellish place. 

Their cruelty was bizarre. I didn't have it as bad as a lot of others. But perhaps one of the strangest, worst things they did to me (aside from the spider incident) was to treat my anorexia by forcing me not only to eat a full plate of food every meal (piled ridiculously high) but to eat a peanut butter and jelly sandwich afterwards. And I'm not talking about a regular PB&J. The peanut butter and the jelly were each three inches thick. It was obscene. They would require me to stuff myself to the point that my stomach was distended and if I took another bite, I would throw up. Then they would hover over me, taunting me, daring me to throw up, accusing me of making myself try to do this on purpose. 

As a result of this torture, I quickly put on twenty pounds. Then they proceeded to make me stand up in Life Skills while they laughed at me and told me I was fat. 

This was pale in comparison to what other students suffered. 

--One girl was accused of flirting with boys. One night, they made her stand outside and had everyone spit in a cup and then made her drink it. 

--This same girl had long, beautiful hair. They made her stand up in Life Skills class while they took scissors and hacked every bit of her hair off, down to her scalp.

--One boy in particular was accused of looking at girls. He spent nine straight months sitting in a chair facing the corner from the time he woke up until the time he went to bed. Otherwise, they made him mow the lawn over and over. They eventually made him wear this homemade helmet that caused him to only be able to stare at the ground. He wasn't allowed anything to eat other than tuna fish or oatmeal for every meal for a period of around nine months. One day, he was suddenly gone, and we never knew what happened to him. 

--Another popular punishment was being forced to dig a six foot by six foot hole in the garden, digging a literal grave. Sometimes students would be put outside to dig from waking until sleeping, sometimes deprived of sleep to work under bright spotlights all night long, for days, sometimes weeks. 

--Another boy was accused of looking at girls. He was taken outside and made to kneel with his wrists and his ankles bound while a group of girls were instructed to circle him and kick him, stomp him, beat him while he could do nothing to resist and was unable to get away. Very much like that scene in the Handmaids Tale. The look of confusion and desperation on his face as he was assaulted until he was battered and bloody still haunts me. They let the girls proceed until he was so injured he required treatment at a hospital. 

--One day, they came in without warning with dump trucks and cleaned out every single personal belonging we had, every article of clothing, book, photograph, and threw everything into giant dumpsters. They went to Walmart and bought (in their words) "the most intentionally ugly clothing" they could find because (in their words) we were "a bunch of spoiled rich kids who needed to be put in their place." 

--In addition to this, they began to ominously gloat that we should expect "any day now" for them to come in with razors and shave everyone's heads so that we would no longer have any personal identity or ego. Then they would go around and pick out who they thought would be the ugliest with a shaved head. 

--They brought in a drill sergeant and started making students do "calisthenics"  up and down this big, sloping hill. They intentionally forced people to do this until they threw up. The infractions that earned this punishment were baffling... a student forgot to do a homework assignment, for instance. Or, sometimes, they'd make you do it even if you'd done nothing just so you could "see what it was like." I was in this category. The throwing up element soon gained popularity with them. Offenders were forced to eat an entire plate of food, then an entire plate of seconds, so that they would throw up during this ordeal. Then they made students roll through vomit. One night, I remember a boy having to be carried in by several adults. He was catatonic, appeared to be in shock. They were shining a flashlight into his eyes and his pupils weren't dilating. They had to call 911 and screamed at us that if anyone said anything about this to anyone, we didn't even want to know what they'd do to us. 

--And then... the jail tours. The women had two police officers who were in kahoots with them. One of them came in and told us, we were under their control. If we crossed them, if we told anything on them, they would take us to the jail and splice together video to make it look like we did something bad. And who was going to believe our word over theirs? The other officer....well, I'll get to him in a minute. But students would be picked up, "arrested" by one of these officers, and taken into a jail and left overnight, sometimes for several days, without supervision. One girl came back with her arm in a sling, and they screamed at us not to ask what happened, for if we did, we'd get taken to jail and left there, too. 

And so, about that other officer? This happened.

After this event, the school was finally sold and then shutdown.