The experiences I had as a child were damaging, and happened at the hands of specific individuals, but the construct of abuse that I experienced came about through institutional forces and ideological pressures that we were all constrained by… I was raised in a world that no longer exists, only the ghosts and bones of it remain. I attended tenth through twelfth grade in Goddard High School, where years earlier a student had brought a gun to school, killing long ahead of the nationwide trend. I learned of this killing from friends in the school, as if being let in on a secret, something the teachers clearly wouldn’t discuss. I was treated with underlying suspicion by nearly all of my teachers for reasons that I understood only much later when I learned the details of James Alan Kearby’s actions in 1985, and how the students internalized the murders. I had grown up traumatized, and in adolescence was developing behaviors that were the result of this trauma, but I was also embedded with a graduating class that had also been traumatized, that was dealing with a collective breakdown of safety and security.
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