Ep. 9 – Co-Sign

I do not think that I am an experiment, like the adoptee triplets Robert Shafran, Eddy Galland and David Kellman who were literally experimented on in the seventies and eighties, or that there has been a preponderance of surveillance of me… more than any other person in today’s society. But a life-long anxiety about my place in the world was made worse, not better, by the circumstances of my closed adoption. I saw that by embracing the growing aggressive tendencies I encountered within evangelicals that the logical endpoint of that mindset was the justification of political violence. If I had remained in Idaho, and had never questioned my life path, I would have been radicalized into a violent supporter of evangelical ideology, perhaps filled with self-loathing. My adoptive parents wanted me to attend a private religious college in Kansas and become a teacher or preacher, or leave the country and serve in the military overseas. Moving to Kansas had reset my expectations about what I could do after high school, but while other students were visiting colleges, I was locked up and being dosed with what was a new class of medications, fresh on the psychiatric market. Still on these drugs after senior year and I’d graduated, I did not have the option to go to college after high school. My adoptive parents refused to sign the paperwork for student loans, and said they had spent all of the money they’d set aside for me to use for college. They said I could live at home as long as worked forty hours a week and paid them rent, which is what I did after high school. They suggested that I go into the military and go to college that way, rather than co-sign a student loan. I did not mention that the Marines had turned me down because I’d been on Prozac, at that time an experimental medication. Instead, I turned my attention inward, pursuing deeper and deeper dissociative states of being.