Summary judgment

Let me tell you a story.

Twenty years ago, my older sibling disappeared. Rather, 'was disappeared.' I was nudged unusually hard to go to a sleepover with my friend. During the evening before my mother left to go back home, I noticed she was in a really deep conversation with my friend's mother, who was a psychoanalyst. When I got home the next day, I was told that my older siblings was taken in the middle of the night, by a company which in the shadows moves 'difficult' kids to remote parts of the United States, to a wilderness program in alpine Utah.

These facilities, often referred to as 'troubled teen' programs, were not super well known at the time. People formerly confined to them were sounding the alarm, there was quite little media exposure, especially at a national level. These places were often extremely remote and often were not licensed in everything they actually did. They were a fortress and a void together, changing names constantly when a local newspaper ran an exposé.

Every year, more documentaries, more podcasts, more longform journalism comes out about these places, who take in a hodgepodge of underage children viewed as a nuisance, and subjects them to totally unregulated 'treatment' that is abusive and clinically unsubstantiated. My sibling spent several months at one; psychiatric inpatient treatment is only validated for a much smaller amount of time, which where we lived would actually be local to friends rather than cut off. Much like the incarceration system, so much of it is just punishment. These kids are bad and they should be treated badly.

Queer 'conversion' therapy overlaps with all of this- many facilities are pretty flexible with what they claim they can do, much like quack medicine. The glossy brochures can be persuasive. I don't dispute that these facilities are predatory to family just as they are to the kids who actually end up there. I also have high expectations of parents who think highly of the job they are doing.

I was not yet in high school. I spent every day until I became a legal adult fearing I too would be whisked off in the night. I had a difficult high school. A lot of people did, and I sympathize. I was unwell, my medication was not adequate, I was stuck between keeping my condition secret and falling way behind, or prostrating myself in front of random faculty and friends begging them to let me to fail my senior year. I believed if I fell enough, was unwell enough, I would be punished for my pain.

Why do I desperately want to trust people, but instead get lost in the riptide of my own suspicion? Why do I take people disengaging as betrayal? Why do I assume people are acting in conspiracy on an implication within an implication?

Twenty years later, I have not forgiven my parents for what they did to my sibling, and in the process did to me. I learned the hardest way that the people you trust are capable of lying to your face. It has been very important, something I return to in difficult times since.

I normalize so many things, traumatic things, awful things. I didn't normalize this. I never thought it was okay and I'm content going to the great sleep still thinking that. In shifting sands, my legs losing firm footing, this remains ever-solid.

It can be good to never forgive.

Artemis