FireMinstrel

Well, goodbye, then.

The good news is that now that I'm settled into a halfway house, I can consume my time with work, school, and working out at the gym. Working out has always done my mind and body good as well. The only thing that I'm wary about is that they really want you to go to meetings. I mean, that's fine- I do enjoy SMART Recovery, which is 12-step free. I also go to Narcotics Anonymous meetings, mostly to surround myself with people who have been in my shoes. But instead of surrendering my will to some imaginary friend(i.e. "God"), I adopted reality as my "higher power", which is certainly much bigger than my drug-driven whims. At least I don't cause trouble, which automatically makes staff like me, since I make their job easier. I suppose all treatment really does is give you an environment where you're protected from drugs and alcohol while you get your head on straight. It would be nice, however, if they could take that certain element of condescension out of the picture. Addicts already have a lot to deal with.

Two months ago, I checked into a detox facility to get clean from heroin. How I ended up using is a long story, but I've had this problem for over three years. Now, I was finally ready to do what I needed to do to not only stay clean, but to get away from the FOO. However, I don't know if the approach used in the facility I went to is that conducive to recovery. After a few days in detox, I transferred to a rehab facility where you stay until they can find you a place in a halfway house(which I wanted). It was an all-women's program on the top floor of a hospital. There were 20-something women all cooped up in that ward, unable to go outside very often. We were fed hospital food and not allowed to have food brought in(although some staff would look the other way). Since I have a lot of texture and taste issues(and always have), I pretty much lived off of apples and peanut-butter-jelly sandwiches for five weeks. Every morning you'd get woken up by some harpy turning the lights on shrieking "Good morning, ladiiiiieeeees!!". There were several "group sessions" throughout the day, heralded by staff shrieking "Group time, ladiiiiiiieees!!". There was a lot of "female empowerment" garbage. Like we were so awesome because we're women...nevermind that many of these women were virtually MGTOW fodder. Many of them were planning to dump their boyfriends/husbands as soon as they were out of rehab, but in the meantime, had no problem accepting money/gifts/emotional support from their poor white knights. Screaming matches between women were a regular thing, and occasionally, they were able to goad some of the female staff into similar fights. I finally got released to a halfway house, where I'm relatively happy for now. I'll be going back to work soon, and plan to re-enroll in school. But I'm still bothered by my experience in that hospital There's a certain atmosphere of clients being treated like children, which I don't understand for the life of me. Is the belief that because people were abusing drugs, that they lost the right to be treated with a certain dignity? It's a well-known statistic among people in recovery that a significant amount of people relapse early on, and I wonder if it's because of the way clients in rehab are treated? But I don't know how it should be changed. Any thoughts? Are there any other folks here who have dealt with addiction and treatment?

I don't think it was ever supposed to do any of that. Our educational system was based off of the Prussian school system, which was designed to produce obedient soldiers and citizens. I want to weep for the next generation. Seeing little kids glued to tablets while the family is out for dinner...well, that doesn't help. Future media zombies who will buy into all this "special snowflake/trigger warning/self-hating first-worlder" garbage.

I would see kids coming home right after school, with their mothers at home, waiting to give them a snack. It made me feel like a freak, being held up at daycare after school, and not being able to relax. Daycares tend to be heavily structured, and when I wanted to read a book, I had to sit in a circle and sing songs with the other kids or do other stupid things. I would see fathers who were intelligent and compassionate. I had a clown for a father who took nothing seriously and was like an overgrown child himself. I saw kind, gentle mothers, while my mother was constantly stressed from work and I had to walk on eggshells. I became very jealous of other kids who had lives more similar to kids on TV. Then, when my learning issues popped up, TV was often held for a ransom of "Try harder!", which I could not pay. That's okay...since I need to just re-read this post, and get angry again whenever I feel I'm about to sabotage what I've got going for me. It's a good motivator.

My high school was the same way. They had a problem if you were cursing someone out to attack them, but if you were just kidding around, or say you dropped your textbook by accident and swore in frustration, no teacher was going to give you detention or whatever(actually, they didn't have detentions there, but that's beside the point).

Sometimes people decide to film now and figure out what to do as they go along. I did similar things with my camcorder when I was in high school.

The kids in the second comic sure nailed it.

That's an old page. I remember reading it back when I was a senior in high school, back in 2001. I simply thought I was lucky since I didn't go to a school like that, but I didn't realize until much later that my appetite for learning was already dead due to my K-8 experiences.

http://time.com/3698495/kidnap-boy-hoax-denise-kroutil-nathan-wynn-firoved/ This is just disgusting. How can these people NOT think this won't traumatize their kid?

I would check out some videos by Aaron Clarey. He made me realize that a degree really doesn't get you a job, depending on what you major in. You might also want to look into trades, such as plumbing or being an electrician. They could end up paying more than a degree in communications, and at a much lower cost.

If the kid doesn't want to go to college, he or she could use the money for something else after finishing high school(like capital for a business). So long as the parents don't bribe/blackmail the kid with that money, it shouldn't be a big deal.

That would definitely keep the masses from attacking you, but I'll bet you that NOBODY will reply. They'll be just as uncomfortable, but they'll have no basis whatsoever to attack whoever says that. So instead, they'll ignore it and hope it goes away. It's sick, but a lot of parents will justify abuse because the child's reaction to it is "cute". Like, "Oh, my little girl's being a drama queen, isn't that cute?"

I reported it as well.

I'm glad we didn't have youtube back in 1987, as my dad filmed me having a fit as well. It was my fourth birthday, and he tried to shame me into stopping by implying that hundreds of people were going to see the movie and go "Is she CRYING?", and then encouraged me to deny it when asked that. He then tries to change the subject, which I wasn't having. Now, this video was erased by accident more than 20 years ago, so that's how vivid the memory is. The irony is that when my dad discovered the video had been erased, HE was the one who wound up crying. Unfortunately, we didn't actually have a video camcorder back then, so I couldn't try and turn the tables on him...nor would I have had the inclination to do so back then. :/ The comments section proves how we've got a long, long way to go...