On The Wrong Side Of The Bars

Part One

When I was a young adolescent, in the last two years of high school, I could not articulate, that, like so many others, I was incredibly lonely. I was a homeschooled kid who had been in public school for six weeks in the first grade, and I had no idea how the world worked or how I worked.

I watched my brother make friends and succeed in ways I thought impossible for me. I felt left behind and wounded, especially since we were twins. As an adult, I have the language and experience to articulate my hurt and teenage despair, but back then, I only knew how to lash out. And lash out I did. I made some very bad decisions during that time, and I said some really hurtful things.

An aside — one of the reasons I’ve avoided sharing this time in my life is because I have not wanted to hurt my family by accident. If the mentioned family members happen to read this, know that I fully expect differences in memory, but the feelings and emotions that motivated my decisons were real, even if our perception of events may be different. I also take full responsibility for how I reacted and felt, and this isn’t meant as anything other than a framework to provide context for the choices I made. I love you all so much.

I filled the void playing World of Warcraft (WoW). My brother had gotten a beta version, and I was so excited to make a night elf druid. I thought this was one of the most beautiful games I’d ever seen (look….I had grown up on Asteroids and Chips Challenge and the first Oregon Trail, okay). Eventually, my mom also got her own Warcraft account and I started playing with her. My enjoyment of the game eventually grew into self sabotage.

Photo by WTFast on Unsplash

My brother and I, along with some other kids we knew from church and/or homeschool groups, took advantage of the perk where we could take classes at the Community College for dual credit. We only took one subject together, though I remember I switched from a day class to an evening class that my brother was taking. We would carpool to this one class, and he enjoyed hanging out with his classmates at the end of it.

I, however, chafed at the lost time that could be used to play World of Warcraft. The self sabotage is obvious now, but at the time, I couldn’t see it. When I attended the classes I didn’t share with my brother, I went straight home after I was done.

My homeschool experience did not provide a lot of social models for various kinds of relationships, and I was not in a hurry to learn these skills when I was taking classes at the community college. A lot of the initial failures that comes with learning how to make various kinds of inter personal relationships would have taken place in elementary school, not high school/college. Struggling at that older age was not something that felt good, so I didn’t like hanging out with people after class. Not that I had the language or framework to wonder why I kept failing at making friends, I just knew it was easier on WoW and on other online platforms (how many kids started writing their first fan fictions on Lord of the Rings fan forums, anyone?).

When I was more child than adolescent, the family went to church and the occassional homeschool group, but church was mostly sitting through a sermon with an hour after to socialize, the home school group was three hours or so once a week. Eventually, the family stopped going to the homeschool groups (I’m not sure why), and we also stopped going to church for various reasons — sometimes because the church didn’t believe the same thing we did, then because we eventually gave up believing.

I ended up being the kid where my mom was my best friend…and I was my mom's best friend. Since we were home schooled, my mom was a stay at home mom. My mom’s and dad’s marriage was not a happy one, and I knew that growing up.

While my brother was at Royal Rangers, I’d hang out with my mom. The organization wasn’t for girls, and my mom didn’t want to drive back home and then back again to pick him up, so we’d either stay in the car talking or we’d go to the mall. On many of these mall trips, she tried to find little romantic gestures for my dad. I remember chocolate, cards, even browsing the lingerie section with my mom. I’m not sure why I was with her, or why I couldn’t be left at home.

Even though my brother was in Royal Rangers, I was not in a similar group of my own until some years later when I was allowed to be in Girl Scouts (brownies + juniors), but it was in those groups that I realized how socially awkward I was, how obnoxious and frustrating the girls found me, and how I also found them. They’d talk about movies or books I hadn’t been allowed to watch or read. I did not enjoy my time there, and did not beg or implore to be allowed to graduate into the next level.

Before we left the faith, our household chewed itself up by going through various denominations of Xtianity before espousing reformed presbyterianism, a particularly strict denomination of Xtianity, for a good chunk of our teenage lives. Even before that, our family had established the pattern of watching sermons at home when we couldn’t find people who believed like we did. I have clear memories of watching Pastor Hagee (yeah I know!!) in the morning, for example, and some guy named Kennedy in Florida instead of going to an actual church.

We eventually stopped listening to Pastor Hagee (I don’t recall the exact reason), and we found other people to listen to on tape. A key principle for reformed presbyterianism was the concept of predestination (the idea that Jesus only redeemed a select few from their sin), which began to center in many of internal fears and uncertainty.

Instead of “dating,” I was expected to court. Making out would extend to only holding hands. We went out of our way to listen to a pastor who talked about how he was gay and how sinful that was and how he had to marry a woman for God.

I was on the watch for any kind of sin, especially lust as I entered puberty. I policed all my inner feelings, and I judged the families we interacted with at our home school group and the few times we went to church before we retreated to our living room and our sermon on tapes. By the time I entered community college, I had never had a best friend in my own age group or outside my family, and I had never dated.

Ironically, Predestination is what finally broke me as I would have anxiety spirals if I was truly saved, truly selected or not. I stepped away from the church, but I hadn’t yet done any unlearning beyond a surface level, I guess I’m an atheist now. My lack of experience with creating friendships outside family + the rampant homophobia in our family created the right conditions for me to a) mistake friendship for romantic inclination and b) an obsession with getting the fuck away from my mom.

As most mama kids know, being your mom’s best friend can only last so long before it reaches a self destructive point for everyone involved, and people get extremely hurt. This happened around the time I was making some of my first sustained friendships on World of Warcraft, which I played between my high school classes at home, my community college classes, and my part time job. At one point, my mom’s character had way better gear than my character did because, since she was still a stay-at-home mom, she had more time to play, specifically raid, with our guild (because, of course, we were also in the same guild).

I don’t remember the exact conversations I had with my brother or my dad, but by the time I was at my breaking point, I had the impression that Nobody Understood What I Was Going Through (standard teenage angst fare), I felt like my brother was tired of me, that my mom was obsessed with me staying, and punishing me for wanting to be with my boyfriend at the time. My mom had completely undermined my relationship with my dad, and I don’t remember how I felt about him at that time.

Granted, I don’t think any mother would be particularly thrilled to hear that their kid wanted to leave home for a guy they met online. Playing World of Warcraft. Whom they’d only met a grand total of twice in person. Who lived half the country away.

With the hindsite of a decade and a half, I do believe that my mother had a point. But I also think that our emotional constipation did not necessarily pave the way for either of us to discuss our feelings in a way where we could understand each other. This constipation, this trauma, doesn’t grow in a void, of course. My parents had their own issues from their families, each passed on, generation to generation, each new limb on the family trees choosing to break their cycles or not even realizing there’s a cycle to be broken. This will be familiar to everyone, I’m sure.

My online, LDR boyfriend at the time was also a correctional officer—ie, a prison guard. I knew all this when I decided to leave my family for him. I knew there were a lot of prisons where he lived, but I also knew there was a university. I knew things would be hard, but I knew we could do it together. At the time, a prison was just that — a job.

Hence, the table was set. Though I had already exchanged my Xtianity for some half-baked atheism, I had not yet even begun to identify the layers and layers and layers of bullshit that shaped the way I viewed the world — not just as a sheltered homeschooled kid, not just as an adult with Mommy Issues, not just as a white person who lived under the delusion that white privilege didn’t exist—but as someone, like millions of others like me—who had a carceral vision of the world.

I don’t think that adjective was even in my vocabulary at the time.

If you’ve read the original Oz books, you’ll know that the Emerald City isn’t really made of emeralds. Dorothy and her friends are given green lensed glasses that transforms a drab city into one of gilded green brilliance. So it was with me, except my framework was one of systemic punishment—not gems.

Though I claimed to be an atheist, the internalization of hell was strong in me. What is hell but an eternal prison?

What is predestination but the consent that some people are just…deserving of hell. Of prison. Of suffering.

In other words, I was physically and emotionally primed to become part of the carceral concepts baked into our own secular world in the most literal way possible:

A prison guard.