"I'm a penguin."

When I was 14, almost 15, I was a real shit. I was very rebellious, angry, and gave my parents a lot more trouble than they deserved. I started staying out till whenever I wanted, I starting smoking, drinking. My mother and I would have terrible screaming, yelling, throwing thing fights. We both said very nasty things to each other. I don't exactly know what happened. It was worse than just the "normal teenage stuff", so I can't blame it on that. That summer before I turned 15, I had met a lot of people who would have been considered the "bad kids". These were kids that really did have tragic lives, with families that were truly disfunctional. I guess I probably tried to fit in too hard, and I turned my circumstances into much worse than they were.

Anyway...when I was 15, almost 16, my mother had decided she had had enough, and she took the advice that my therapist at the time gave her. "Tough Love". I don't really remember the circumstances that lead up to it, but my mom told me we were going to see some new person for me to talk to, and the next thing I knew I was being checked into a "mental institution". Not really a mental institution...it was more of some kind of rehabilitation center. A place for "bad" kids, adults with drug habits, kids with drug habits, etc. It's so weird that I don't remember what lead up to it because it seemed like the end of my life at the time. I did find out later that one of the contributing factors was that I had folded my clothes to put away, left them on my bed, and my mom was so paranoid because of my behavior that she thought I was going to run away. I swear I was not. I just did something I normally didn't. Fold my clothes.

I got stuck in this place where my first roommate liked to cut herself for fun. Most of the other kids sat around during rec time and talked about what it was like to get their stomachs pumped, and there was another kid who had molested his little sister. I DID NOT fit in at all. I was just an angry little girl who that didn't do as she was told. Now, as an adult, this would be called spirit. I hated it in this place where I had to have someone watch me shave my legs. Where later my roommate was switched, and the new one tried to commit suicide in the bathroom with a wet towel, where she later left before I did, and stole all my clothes, where I had to sit in a rec room watching TV, as these therapists sat around and marked down on their little clipboards what they perceived my "behavior" was, and where I had to sit in the padded room because I refused to play volleyball.

I was there for three weeks. My friends, everyone at school, had no idea what had happened. And when they found out, they couldn't believe it. I, after all, was probably one of the most well-behaved out of all of them...except for Jessica, of course! :) This is when my mom started to buy me cigarettes. My therapist came clean, told her I smoked, and told her that if she bought them for me so I could smoke in this place I might be happier. We were allowed 3 cigarettes a day. We smoked those things all the way through part of the filter. I took a million and one tests to figure out what was "wrong with me". All they could come up with is that I was angry about my household situation. My dad had recently been sent on a remote tour to Korea. I wasn't a drug addict, I had never tried to commit suicide, I wasn't violent by any means, and except for mild depression, I didn't have any mental disseases. Still I was kept under lock, key, and very watchful eye...for being...angry.

My mom regrets sending me there to this day. She regrets letting all these psychobabble people tell her how to "rule" her daughter. Soon, after I got out of this place there were so many things on the news about these kinds of places. They were being sued left and right.

So, they did finally release me, and expected me to just get right back into the normalacy of life. Which was not easy. My next year of high school, my junior year. Things just got worse. I ended up dropping out of high school my junior year, in April! Stupid I know...And that summer, I stayed out all night, my mom couldn't find me, she called me in as a runaway, and threatened to send me to one of those outward bound program things, but I convinced her to let me just be sent away to my aunt's house for the summer.

I was a completely terrible teenage. I admit that freely, but I often wonder if all the psychiatrists are right. Did I get labeled as a bad kid, and then got worse. Because things did get a lot worse. Would they not have gotten worse if I had never been sent to that place? Would I have stayed in high school? Stuck through college after that? Not had Gabby at 20? Who knows...I was just thinking about that place this morning. Actually I was thinking about some of the people I had met there. Like this one guy, Carlos, who made me laugh so hard! He had done a lot of drugs, acid mostly, and we would sit in group therapy, and he would put some of his fingers together, and say, "I'm a penguin!" And follow it up with some little penguin noises. And if he got lost from a conversation he would say, "Hey, I got on the wrong bus. Rewind! Errrrrrr."

These are all the little traumas we go through that make you wonder, at least make me wonder, what I would have been, could have been, should have been if they had not happened. And maybe if I was in a more secure place in my life now, I wouldn't wonder these things...I would just chalk them up to making me the person I am today, but since I don't seem to be too happy with myself and my situation right now...I do wonder...if I had never seen that little part of life, would things be different. I mean it was 3 tiny weeks of the last 14 years, and I still think about it...I guess it kind of traumatized me.