So I'm new here, hopefully I'm not breaching some rule of etiquette in my post, I was originally going to post about two things, but this really got long and maybe the other one deserves its own post some other time.
My school at the time was a sort of military style reform school which resulted in a lot of extremely strict rules, and a lot of students having a lot of control over other students, since it was based on rank. The rules for neatness were very specific: t-shirts must be folded to a certain width and height, there can't be any wrinkles in your uniform, every shoe has to be lined up, your underwear has to be folded in a certain way and not be too loosely folded, etc... The way it was set up meant that if they wanted to, they could get you in trouble for almost anything if they looked, so a lot of the time locker inspections were a contest of how much the staff member liked you.
Well one student took a liking to f*cking me over, so every night before bed he'd come around, make me stand and face a wall, and then proceed to trash my locker completely. He started off by saying it was like a special inspection, and he'd only trash it if there were problems, but it turned into him just having fun with it and not even bothering to look for real ones. He'd just say things like "oh your name isn't on your soap" or "your towel has your name on it in the wrong place". If you complained about someone who outanked you, you'd get punished so I just had to watch this. He also made it odd because as I'd face the wall he'd come around and whisper in my ear about how f*cked I was and how much shit I'd be in, all with a big shit eating grin on his face. I think in retrospect he may have been getting off to it, we were only allowed to wear boxers and t-shirts at night, and he liked to get really close while whispering. Just that and his tone was weird, though I'm not sure he actually was turned on or if the sort of quiet whispering and closeness was just to attempt to make me more miserable.
We had to go to bed right after, so the next morning I'd inevitably be punished for having a messy locker. At first the punishments started off as just being things like yelling, laps, push-ups, etc... but they kept scaling since each day I was still messy. A few days in they upped the punishment to "suspension", which (despite the name) didn't entail leaving school, it was just called that to get social services off their ass. On suspension you'd do manual labor instead of school, eat meals outside in silence standing up, and on all spare time have to stand at attention facing a wall and not moving or speaking, which often would last hours. Eventually they saw fit to remove my locker as well, and make me live in the common area with all my belongings on a table for people to steal as they pleased, and a mattress on the floor.
This whole time my grades were dropping since I wasn't in school, and I started having to do punishments for bad grades, which involved having to do half an hour of intense exercise and then getting a terrible meal every lunch. The meal was usually a kraft single between two slices of stale white bread, and water. My grades fell to the 20% range from around 80%, all because of a messy locker. After a month or so this whole thing stopped. I can't even remember why it stopped, he may have just grown bored of torturing me. All of this happened when I was about 14.
I still have dreams about it. They haven't gone the abject terror route, more of the disturbing route. Everyone from there stands around laughing at me mockingly and saying I don't belong. Sometimes it gets sexual, which is worse because honestly it kind of turns me on, and I hate it because I'm just ashamed of it and I don't want to have to be reminded of that in my fantasies.
I just feel like I can't even tell if it's bad. Some people have told me it is, but I just sometimes feel like I don't deserve to feel like it was so shitty, like I'm just looking for something to blame all my problems on. The other incident I was going to talk about was more of a physical violence sort of thing, but I feel like this was just as f*cked up in other ways. It was supposed to teach discipline, but I feel like all it taught me was how to numb my emotions.
If you've read all this, thanks. It's a long read, but it's nice if anyone made it to the end. Part of why I wrote this is to get more over my problem of acknowledging any of it. Even Googling anything in incognito mode that even implies there was abuse makes me feel guilty. The fact that I can write this and post it at all is actually an improvement, it wasn't so long ago that I couldn't write about it without having a panic attack, now my anxiety is pretty low key. Next step is to get more comfortable talking about it with my therapist.
My school at the time was a sort of military style reform school which resulted in a lot of extremely strict rules, and a lot of students having a lot of control over other students, since it was based on rank. The rules for neatness were very specific: t-shirts must be folded to a certain width and height, there can't be any wrinkles in your uniform, every shoe has to be lined up, your underwear has to be folded in a certain way and not be too loosely folded, etc... The way it was set up meant that if they wanted to, they could get you in trouble for almost anything if they looked, so a lot of the time locker inspections were a contest of how much the staff member liked you.
Well one student took a liking to f*cking me over, so every night before bed he'd come around, make me stand and face a wall, and then proceed to trash my locker completely. He started off by saying it was like a special inspection, and he'd only trash it if there were problems, but it turned into him just having fun with it and not even bothering to look for real ones. He'd just say things like "oh your name isn't on your soap" or "your towel has your name on it in the wrong place". If you complained about someone who outanked you, you'd get punished so I just had to watch this. He also made it odd because as I'd face the wall he'd come around and whisper in my ear about how f*cked I was and how much shit I'd be in, all with a big shit eating grin on his face. I think in retrospect he may have been getting off to it, we were only allowed to wear boxers and t-shirts at night, and he liked to get really close while whispering. Just that and his tone was weird, though I'm not sure he actually was turned on or if the sort of quiet whispering and closeness was just to attempt to make me more miserable.
We had to go to bed right after, so the next morning I'd inevitably be punished for having a messy locker. At first the punishments started off as just being things like yelling, laps, push-ups, etc... but they kept scaling since each day I was still messy. A few days in they upped the punishment to "suspension", which (despite the name) didn't entail leaving school, it was just called that to get social services off their ass. On suspension you'd do manual labor instead of school, eat meals outside in silence standing up, and on all spare time have to stand at attention facing a wall and not moving or speaking, which often would last hours. Eventually they saw fit to remove my locker as well, and make me live in the common area with all my belongings on a table for people to steal as they pleased, and a mattress on the floor.
This whole time my grades were dropping since I wasn't in school, and I started having to do punishments for bad grades, which involved having to do half an hour of intense exercise and then getting a terrible meal every lunch. The meal was usually a kraft single between two slices of stale white bread, and water. My grades fell to the 20% range from around 80%, all because of a messy locker. After a month or so this whole thing stopped. I can't even remember why it stopped, he may have just grown bored of torturing me. All of this happened when I was about 14.
I still have dreams about it. They haven't gone the abject terror route, more of the disturbing route. Everyone from there stands around laughing at me mockingly and saying I don't belong. Sometimes it gets sexual, which is worse because honestly it kind of turns me on, and I hate it because I'm just ashamed of it and I don't want to have to be reminded of that in my fantasies.
I just feel like I can't even tell if it's bad. Some people have told me it is, but I just sometimes feel like I don't deserve to feel like it was so shitty, like I'm just looking for something to blame all my problems on. The other incident I was going to talk about was more of a physical violence sort of thing, but I feel like this was just as f*cked up in other ways. It was supposed to teach discipline, but I feel like all it taught me was how to numb my emotions.
If you've read all this, thanks. It's a long read, but it's nice if anyone made it to the end. Part of why I wrote this is to get more over my problem of acknowledging any of it. Even Googling anything in incognito mode that even implies there was abuse makes me feel guilty. The fact that I can write this and post it at all is actually an improvement, it wasn't so long ago that I couldn't write about it without having a panic attack, now my anxiety is pretty low key. Next step is to get more comfortable talking about it with my therapist.
