In 1994 I went to live in my first orphanage. A large white mansion on the shores of an inland lake in West Michigan. The property was owned by an English businessman who, in 1907, decided to turn it into a home for homeless boys.
Eighty-seven years later I became a resident and not much had changed in what we called The Big House, the original mansion which served as the offices and administration building. The 150 acre estate was slowly developed and by the mid-nineties we had two residential cabins. Each cabin housed 24 residents, 24 boys and 24 girls. We had a large gymnasium so that residents could exercise indoors during the long harsh Michigan winters and we had a few outbuildings to store canoes and other equipment for the lake.
Anyone visiting would see it as no different than any other summer camp in the region. We did activities and swam, we all had to learn to swim and if we didn’t learn quickly enough the exasperated staff would row us out to the middle of the lake and push us in.
Inside each cabin there was a room that the kids and the staff called The Quiet Room. Around eight feet by eight feet square. The room had a tile floor and tiled walls and about half of one of those walls was made up of a one way mirror. From inside you could see yourself but you could not see the person on the other side of the glass. the room itself was soundproof. No matter how much or how loudly you screamed no one could hear you while the door was closed.
The tile floor was heated. I don’t doubt that when it was designed the idea was to make sure kids who were put in there in the dead of winter were comfortable. Instead the staff members would turn the floor heating system to the maximum and whoever was unlucky enough to be inside; no shoes, no socks, no belts… would be forced to keep moving or end up with blisters and burns on the soles of their feet.
My first time in that room was when I was eleven. I missed my mother so much in those days. I spent most of my time in a haze, I was truly and completely convinced that I had been trapped in a nightmare for the preceding three years. I knew I would wake up soon and that my little sister would be asleep on the bunk beneath me. My mother and father would be sleeping in their bedroom. My grandfather and my great-grandmother would be alive. Our family dog, Strawberry, would be curled up in the corner of my three brothers’ bedroom.
I lived in that delusion until the next year when I started menstruating. Something about the experience of watching blood drip down my legs told me that I was not, in fact, in a never-ending nightmare. That this was my life.
It was in that orphanage I learned about drugs. About how substances can be used to numb our pain and how they can be used to control our behaviour. About projections of shame and wrongness.
The Quiet Room room was used to make us docile. Most of the girls, my cabin was all girls, would eventually give in. The offered us drugs instead. If we used the drugs to regulate the wildly unpredictable, and sometimes violent, moods of girls who were oftentimes horribly abused and without exception stripped of their families we could avoid The Quiet Room. Maybe a nice family would adopt us.
Xanax. Prozac. Zyprexa. Lithium. Zoloft. Ritalin.
There was a psychiatrist who came to visit us once a month. The therapists we saw weekly were all women but the doctor was a man. He gave me a Rorschach test once. I saw witches in the inky black blobs. He said I was prone to fantasy and offered me a prescription for Zyprexa. I declined.
They offered us all sorts of drugs to numb our pain. To make us docile and manageable. Some of the girls were so heavily medicated that the others would whisper about them with pity and fear. One girl, whose twin brother was adopted while she was left behind at the orphanage, was so heavily medicated that she would sit in the common room all day drooling and barely blinking. We would take turns brushing her hair and sometimes she would smile at us.
I chose not to take the drugs. My life got harder. I was sent to The Quiet Room so regularly that the staff joked that it was my room. I walked in circles until I was exhausted and delirious. My feet formed heavy callouses to cope with the intense heat of the tiles. I thought I was in a dream. Like Persephone in a story my mother once told me, I was determined to maintain myself. To remain myself. I thought the drugs would make it too real. I was offered drugs again and again. I was told they would make me feel better.
Still. The pain of grief and loss was ever present. Sometimes I would get the urge to scream and so I would scream. At the top of my lungs. Sometimes I would get the urge to cut and tear and my own flesh. And so I would cut and tear at my flesh until my arms were covered with pulsating shallow wounds.
No one liked it. I was a problem. My feelings were a problem. I was told I had Oppositional Defiance Disorder. Did I hear voices? Maybe it was schizophrenia. More drugs were offered.
I left that place after two years and found myself in another. A catholic orphanage on the other side of the state. They offered us pills in little paper cups. More girls with glassy eyes. More pain deferred.
I found a smuggled bottle of nail polish one day and smashed it in my room that night. I tried to use the broken glass pieces to cut off my face.
Somewhere along the way I’d learned that I should run towards pain and not away from it. I saw what happened to the girls whose pain was deferred for too long. The plunk into the middle of the ocean of despair when the drugs were suddenly gone.
The things we do not feel do not go away.
They wait for us to feel them.
They form a queue.
They form a gang.
They form a battalion.
I chose then, and still choose now, to feel everything as it comes.
My only secret to survival is to never ignore my pain long enough for the aches to queue up… never let them form a gang, never let them become a battalion.
This subject is on my mind because earlier this week Heather B. Armstrong, a blogging pioneer and an incredibly honest writer whose influence on the online world cannot be overstated, took her own life.
In her last blog post she talks about her struggle with pain and addiction.
This is not a lesson. This is a truth.
This is not a judgment. This is a truth.
This is a reminder that pain must be felt. It demands our attention.
Aside from how deeply this resonates with me, I just need to tell you that this is an absolutely masterful piece of writing. Thank you for sharing it with us.
This resonates so much. I’ve never dealt with alcohol addiction but I’ve done a great deal of delaying pain in order to keep going or get through it and you’re right, it does allllll have to be felt. It will form a line and just wait for you to slow down out of survival mode and hit you.