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The Most Controversial Thing I Ever Wrote, Part One: By R.L. Stollar

HA Editorial Team5 Comments

The Most Controversial Thing I Ever Wrote, Part One: By R.L. Stollar

 By R.L. Stollar, HA Community Coordinator

When I prepare to publish something I wrote that I know will be controversial, my stomach clenches into a knot. I feel nauseous and worried. I start imagining how it will be misinterpreted and attacked — and, when I am right, I am right on. I predict exactly what will be said and the tone with which it will be said. Which is always discouraging, because — as a trained communicator — I try my best to anticipate controversies and nip them in the bud. In fact, I’m almost neurotic about that. I have a tendency to pad my writings with qualifiers and disclaimers like a worried mother might pad her kid for its first day of street hockey.

The thing is, I revel in provoking conversations and breaking down assumptions. I have always tended to fight the status quo and to question the toed lines. But at heart I am a peacemaker. I don’t shout “fire!” in a crowded theatre when I see no fire. I am motivated by love and compassion for my fellow human beings — particularly the misfits and the disenfranchised. When I am outraged, I am outraged by dehumanization.

I wasn’t always plagued by a stomach knot before I published something controversial.

That knot only started growing about ten years ago.

Because ten years ago, I wrote the most controversial thing I have ever written.

In 2004, I was a junior in college. I attended a conservative Christian college in Eugene, Oregon — Gutenberg College, a classical, Great Books school with a heavy emphasis on exegesis of the Bible and the canon of Western Civilization. At the time, I considered myself a conservative Christian. In fact, after a long bout with depression the previous summer, I had recently recommitted my life to Jesus. I was also still involved with NCFCA through occasional coaching and the research books I did each year — the Plethora Series.

I tell you this background because I need you to understand the context in which these events occurred. I was a conservative Christian; I loved NCFCA and — three years after I was a competitor — was still heavily involved because of my love for it; I was attending a conservative Christian college.

I was a far cry from the proverbial soul lost in college.

I made the mistake of speaking up when I saw a problem.

Every summer, I created research books for NCFCA debaters. (And keep in mind that, ten years ago, there was only one homeschool debate league — NCFCA. STOA had not at this time split from it, as this was half a decade before the Great BJU Protest of 2009, when competitors, alumni, and coaches protested holding the NCFCA National Tournament at BJU on account of the university’s history of institutionalized racism.) I called my book series “Plethora,” in the sense of overabundance, because these research books contained an overabundance of evidence for policy debaters — at least in my mind at the time. Being the typical homeschooler nerd, I named the books after the Matrix series for the first three years: Plethora, Plethora Reloaded, and Plethora Revolutions. In 2004, the fourth year, I ran out of Matrix titles to copy, and we had just read Nietszche at Gutenberg, so I called the fourth book Uber-Plethora. (The final year’s book was The Last Breath of a Dying Plethora.)

In the months before I began working on Uber-Plethora I had recently learned about the scope of self-injury among some of my students and friends in NCFCA. I had been thinking about my own experiences in NCFCA and touring with CFC, and trying to process — as a Christian — the incongruity between the pressures and values of the league’s high performance culture and Christian love and compassion. I had also been out of homeschooling for three years, attending college, and had become particularly fascinated by the study of sociology. The concept that, even in NCFCA, sociological forces were at work was game-changing. It was helpful for me to understand how something like self-injury, or any of the problems I was observing, could occur in a Christian homeschool debate league.

I made the mistake of thinking people would listen.

Plethora had always been a different sort of research book. We never were strictly an “evidence book,” giving debate students nothing but evidence. I prided myself on the fact that Plethora included analysis of the topic and provocative essays by debate coaches and competitors from around the country that challenged how we thought about debate strategy and theory. I wanted to promote new ideas, to encourage dialogue about controversies, and include a diversity of voices.

My experiences with Plethora were, in a sense, a lesson in organizational strategy that would foreshadow HA.

Plethora would foreshadow HA in more ways than one.

In 2004, for Uber-Plethora, I had a fire in my heart. And I wanted to take Plethora’s value of thinking critically to a new level. So I included a brand new section. In some ways it wasn’t new: the values that influenced it were always there. But what was new was that I asked fellow debate coaches and alumni of NCFCA to use what they learned from NCFCA to think about NCFCA.

Why? Because as an NCFCA and CFC alumnus, a coach, a Christian, and someone with many of my best friends in NCFCA, I cared about NCFCA and I hoped that, by having these conversations, we could make NCFCA better.

(Sound familiar?)

We called the new section of the book, “Towards a Sociology of Debate.”

Here’s the introduction to that section that I wrote:

*****

*****

Towards a Sociology of NCFCA Debate

Rarely do we ask ourselves what psychological or social impact speech and debate might have on adolescents. Of course we know the usual list: better articulation, better research, better cooperation, and so forth. But the activity has become so much more than speech, evidence, and teamwork. Ask anyone who competes today and his or her reasons for competing will differ widely. Most likely one’s answer will be about socialization or about the ideological mindset that sees forensics as part of apologetics or cultural redemption. Few nowadays perceive the activity as purely post-motor-skill enhancement.

These perceptions, consequently, give rise to certain questions: What is the relationship between a purely academic exercise (such as debate) and the culture in which one engages in the exercise? How do our preconceived assumptions enter into debate? How do they shape our expectations about the activity’s results? Why do adolescents behave how they do once they enter the activity?

In recent years people have given significant attention to such questions. Primarily, though, this attention has come from non-NCFCA, non-homeschool circles. For example, Gary Alan Fine analyzed primarily the debate culture of the National Forensics League in Gifted Tongues: Highschool Debate and Adolescent Culture (Princeton University Press, June 1, 2001). Deborah Tannen explored American culture at large in The Argument Culture: Moving from Debate to Dialogue (Ballantine Books, February 9, 1999). It seems, then, that our culture — mainly a Protestant, conservative homeschool community that adores speech and debate — ought to put its own self under the microscope and analyze itself in similar fashion.

To aid in this task, we have included — for the first time ever in an NCFCA source book — a collection of essays that begin this process. Jonathan Wolfson, for example, discusses how debate can be used in non-academic situations: in college, for example. Joel Day argues that, if one has participated and learned from debate, one brings into the “real world” certain powers that consequently come with certain responsibilities. Kirsten Flewelling shifts the focus from society at large to individuals specifically: how does success in debate impact the people who succeed? Lastly, R.L. Stollar explores NCFCA’s tendency to have false expectations and how these tendencies can be detrimental to the health of its members.

Our hope is that these essays will spark further interest in the relationship between debate and society. We have merely scratched the surface in this book. There is much more work to be done. We urge you to consider the issues explored in these articles. Do not critique them superficially. Think about what they suggest and ask yourself how you, your club, and others ought to act in light of the material presented.

We pray that what we have contributed will serve you, your clubs, and humankind beyond our inner circles. And we look forward to continuing these studies further.

*****

*****

I don’t think it is necessary to tell you that we did not continue those studies. I probably don’t even need to tell you that our essays sparked no further interest at the time in the relationship between debate and society.

But what I need to tell you is a lesson in anatomy.

The anatomy of the pedestal, to be precise.

Because “the anatomy of the pedestal” was the title of the most controversial thing I have ever written.

And I wrote it ten years ago for Uber-Plethora.

Part Two >

I Was The Original CFC Fuck-Up: R.L. Stollar’s Story

HA Editorial Team17 Comments

I Was The Original CFC Fuck-Up: R.L. Stollar’s Story

R.L. Stollar, HA Community Coordinator, served as a Communicators for Christ conference instructor for three years, from 1998-2000. He wrote a book on intermediate debate theory, Beyond Baby Steps, that was published and sold by CFC. He created CFC’s very first website, too, and freely admits that, in retrospect, he sucked at HTML. 

*****

“Bottle it up, and the bottle goes crack.”

~Craig Minowa, “The Exploding People”

*****

I have a confession to make.

R.L. Stollar’s staff picture from his 2000 conference tour with Communicators for Christ.
R.L. Stollar’s staff picture from his 2000 conference tour with Communicators for Christ.

I did not want to write a single post for this week.

I have spent over a decade carefully bottling up all my distress and rage, putting those bottles into reinforced cardboard boxes marked “Fragile,” and hiding those boxes in the deepest, darkest basements in my mind so I would never have to think about or feel them again.

This week hurts. It hurts a lot.

Honestly, I forgot just how much it would hurt. As I forced myself to slowly pull those boxes from my mental basement, unwrap the newspapers guarding the bottles, and uncork them and watch certain moments from my life flash before my eyes — I realized why I never wanted to remember those moments ever again. I had to re-live things I had literally blocked from my mind. My insomnia flared up. My appetite vanished. My heart rate accelerated. The blood of nervousness and self-doubt rushed to my head. I felt like that frazzled, insecure, and confused kid that I was, putting on an aura of self-confidence because the only confidence I had was the bit that forensics taught me to fake.

In a sense, I still am that kid. I don’t think I ever quite grew up. I think some important piece of my soul got lost on the side of a road during a CFC tour and maybe, someday, I will find it.

For this week, I had to feel those things that keep me wishing I could just re-live my life all over again. Wishing I could just have been a normal boy with a normal life.

Then there’s the persistent fact that, honestly, I wouldn’t change a thing. All my experiences, even the painful ones, make me who I am. They instill in me a fire and a fierce determination to stand up for my friends and the people that I love. It is my pain and sorrow and tears that drive me. It is the pain and sorrow and tears of my friends that inspire me to keep pushing, to keep doing my best to make the world — and our homeschool world — a better place.

Because this world is a very sad place. And for me, the homeschool debate world was likewise. It was a place filled with people who became my best friends, a place filled with some of my most favorite memories — but it is also a place filled with loneliness and confusion and psychological beatdowns and overwhelming hypocrisy.

Preparing for this week, therefore, was difficult. It only became more so as I heard the stories of others — in particular, the stories of former CFC interns, some of which we are publishing. These stories made me sad, because I could relate to what they said on such a deep level. But they also gave me peace, because for one of the first times, HA has helped me feel not crazy. Because their stories made me realize that I was not the only fuck-up.

See, I was the original CFC fuck-up.

I am the reason why CFC changed the structure of its internship program. Because CFC was determined that another me would not happen again.

I had a unique experience because, other than the Moons’ own children, I was the only student instructor who toured for so many consecutive years. When I think back to my high school years, I don’t have many memories of my own family. Between being uprooted from California as my family moved to Oregon, flying around the country to tournaments, and spending months at a time with the Moons, my high school years feel homeless. Most of my high school angst is directed not towards my parents but the Moons. They became surrogate parents of sorts, my adopted family with whom I traveled — circus-like — across the many and divided states of America, like Christian minstrels carrying our music of golden oratory to the untrained masses.

But as time progressed, as month after month of touring and teaching went by, as the months became years and I finally couldn’t take it any longer, my spirit began to twitch. I began to lose my ability to just shrug everything off like it was nothing. It was not nothing. It was something and there was a reason why I hurt. And when I began to lose control over my external placidity, when my soul split from years of parents looking down on me in my youth while I taught their youth to not be looked down upon, I snapped.

It happened at the very last conference, in Hawaii, during my third and final year of touring. It happened over something completely inane, something about going to a movie with friends after the conference. But it happened. And it was one of the only two times in my entire life when I yelled. I yelled at Teresa and she yelled back. And we kept yelling. And at some point we stopped talking to each other at all. She sent Wendell after me, to be our messenger because we were done talking with one another. And I refused to talk to Wendell then, too. I refused to talk to him and he was my best friend for the last three years.

I am not proud of that. I am not proud of my anger. I am not proud of the hurt I caused either my teacher or my friend. But I couldn’t control my psyche any longer. I had a full-blown nervous breakdown. Following that night, I would descend into a major depression marked by self-injury and consistent suicidal thoughts that I continue to fight to this day.

I don’t think I can summon a cogent narrative of how I got to that point. But I can relay some interesting stories to lighten the mood. Like how the very first time I got wasted was on a CFC tour.

The beginning of that story is that I didn’t get wasted with fellow CFC interns (not that time, that is; CFC interns did not start getting wasted together until the third year). I got wasted with the children of homeschooling leaders from around the country.

The second year I taught with CFC (I was 15 at the time), which was the first year we officially “toured” around the country in the Moons’ motor home, we stopped at Regent University. HSLDA was holding their National Leadership Convention. This convention was an invite-only event for recognized leaders in the conservative Christian homeschooling world: the directors of all the state homeschool organizations, for example. CFC was tasked with teaching the leaders’ kids about speech and debate.

So, pretty much our job was to babysit the kids while the parents got inspired. During the day, we taught our peers. During the evening, while the parents mingled together like God’s chosen socialites, the kids roamed the university, unsupervised. One of those nights I was offered hard alcohol by the son of a national homeschool leader. I accepted. I was too scared to follow up the shots with a prescription-level painkiller, but I watched as he and his friends — the children of some of the other leaders — all took shots and popped various types of pills. They commiserated with each other, and found solace in their mutual disdain for each other’s parents: “____ cares more about the idea of homeschooling than homeschooling his own fucking kids.”

I could name names that would shock you, but that is not the point of this particular story. The point of this story is that, the higher you climb the power structures of the homeschooling world, the more they resemble the power structures in any other world.

I can tell you other stories, like what it was like living in a motor home for months on end. How traveling in a motor home with David Moon was like traveling with Jekyll and Hyde. One moment he was the lighthearted, lovable counterpart to Teresa’s professionalism. Then he’d snap and turn into a completely different person — red-faced, terrifying, and raging — and Teresa would silently turn the other way until his “episode” subsided.

I can you about the occasionally strange and otherworldly host homes we would stay at. Like the home where my CD player got confiscated by adults I had only meet two hours prior, because I was listening to Newsboys and “Newsboys have a rock beat and rock beats are Satan’s mating call.” Or the home where I couldn’t fall asleep until past midnight because the dad was rotating between yelling at and spanking his own kids for hours in the room right next to where I had to sleep. Or the one that still feels unreal, the house up on that hill in the middle of nowhere that had no kids and thus no one attending the local CFC conference — that house where the woman kept “accidentally” coming into the bathroom whenever I was showering, the same house where Playboy and Maxim magazines were “accidentally” left out in prominent display right where I was supposed to be sleeping.

I can tell you how I’d modify our teaching material to ensure that we did not offend our increasingly conservative audiences, as we traveled further and further into the Deep South. And after my small group spent hours creating some skit based on Veggie Tales, Teresa would make me break it to them that our time was wasted, because some parent thought Veggie Tales were Satanic. That after so many moments like this repeated over and over, week after week, I would begin to show obvious signs of strain. That I would withdraw completely from social interaction and disappear for hours. That no one ever bothered to make sure I was ok. No one, except Wendell, who one night sought me out and sat next to me silently as my body shook itself to sleep.

That was one month before the breakdown.

I can tell you how, in spite of everything I just said, I will be forever grateful to Teresa Moon for the gifts of speech and debate she gave me, and I love her very much.

I could tell you other things, too. I could write a book, really.

But right now I do not have the energy.

Right now, I am just trying to write this little bit without all my soul’s pieces falling apart again.  Right now I just want to say that I am not alone.

I am not alone. 

I am not the only fuck-up.

I have waited over a decade to say that, though I wish I didn’t have to. But at least when I say it now, I can say it loudly, because there are others saying it with me. So even as I fall apart while I put these words together, I have a newfound sense of peace.

We are not fuck-ups. We are survivors of a mad, mad world.

There is hope in that realization. There is healing through our shared pain.

I Was A Problem To Be Ignored: Krysi Kovaka’s Story, Part Two

HA Editorial Team11 Comments

I Was A Problem To Be Ignored: Krysi Kovaka’s Story, Part Two

Krysi Kovaka is the 2008 recipient of the Institute for Cultural Communicator’s Raudy Bearden Community Speaking Award. She served as an intern for the 2008 Communicators for Christ conference tour.

< Part One

I was a problem to be ignored.

At a post conference party in Texas, I met a man who used to be part of the NCFCA/CFC scene.  He was well into his twenties and I was seventeen.  We talked for a bit and ended up exchanging numbers.  Our relationship happened mostly via text and IM, and it was a case of trouble attracting trouble.  We never dated, but our relationship was really creepy and weird.  One night after I had taken loads of my Xanax and other meds, he drunk texted me and over the course of several hours, ended up talking me into sending him naked pictures of myself.  Despite this creepiness, I ended up disclosing a lot of my life’s story to him and I told him about my father abusing me.  He really encouraged me to tell Mrs. Moon about the abuse.  A few weeks later we ended up sexting again – eventually my mom found out about him and threatened to have him put behind bars if he ever talked to me again.

Towards the end of tour, I really started to fall apart (as if I wasn’t falling apart before.)  I started to stress about having to return home.  Things got so bad that I did end up telling Mrs. Moon and several of the other interns about my father molesting me.  I don’t know what an appropriate reaction is when a teenager tells you that her father molested her, but what happened was far from a right response.  We were at a conference in TN when I told Mrs. Moon about the abuse, and she had me tell my two younger brothers about the abuse, and then she had me tell my mother.  My memory of this conference is pretty fragmented, but I remember crying a lot and feeling absolute horror about what was going on around me.

At the time, I really didn’t have words to describe the abuse.  People kept badgering me and asking me questions about exactly what happened, but I was in no emotional state to talk about it.  I felt like I was on the verge of having a mental breakdown.  My behavior got more and more erratic and shortly after I told my family about the abuse, Mrs. Moon kicked me off tour.

We were in Pigeon Forge, TN and Mrs. Moon told me that she had asked my mother to drive down to TN to pick me up.  I would not be able to finish the last two weeks of tour.  Apparently, she had finally realized that I was in no condition to be on tour.  The Moons had a goodbye breakfast for me at a little diner in Pigeon Forge.  At this breakfast, I said goodbye to all the people who had been like family to me.  The Moons promised that they would stay in touch with me and help me and that if I ever needed to talk about anything that I could call.

I was completely numb at that breakfast.  I cried a lot and I remember several of the other interns crying.  Very few of them really understood what was happening or why I had to leave.  I hardly understood why I had to leave – in a way, I felt like I was being punished for speaking up about the abuse.  I was on vacation last week, and I ended up driving through Pigeon Forge – to this day I hate that place.

After being kicked off the internship, I didn’t return home.  I went to live with some family friends until my mom decided to divorce my father.  Life got really rough after that.  I attempted suicide again just a couple months after leaving tour.  I also started drinking all the time and I started using more prescription drugs.  I felt like my whole world had crumbled.  The following is an excerpt from an email I wrote to Mrs. Moon the day I left tour:

“Saying goodbye to the team was the worst thing I think I’ve ever had to do.  Arriving in North Carolina was even worse.  It occurred to me that I might be stuck here for a long time.  I really, really, really hate it here.  I don’t know anyone.  I’m lonely, depressed, teary, and scared out of my head.  Life is so confusing right now.  I hate this….All I want to do is go home.  I have no clue what home is right now, but I know I want to be there.  I just wish I could be somewhere where I knew people and where I felt safe and cared about.  I’ve yet to see what that would look like in practice…”

I tried to keep in touch with the Moons and with the people I toured with, but shortly after leaving tour, one of the other interns told me that none of the people I interned with would be allowed to talk to me.  As it was explained to me, Mrs. Moon felt like it was best that they not be in contact with me.  I later contacted Mrs. Moon and received a similar answer from her.  I can’t even begin to explain how much this devastated me.  These people were my friends and support system and all of a sudden it was all yanked away from me.  The Moons stopped talking to me shortly afterwards.  On tour I was treated as a problem to be ignored – when that problem got too big to ignore, I was dismissed from tour.  Once again, I could be ignored, as I was now someone else’s problem.

Needless to say, I was not invited to the annual Masters conference.  A week before Masters I was diagnosed with meningitis and was hospitalized.  I was told later that when Mrs. Moon heard I had meningitis, she was relieved because she would be able to use that as an explanation for why I wasn’t at the conference.  When she heard I was in the hospital, I was told that her exact words were, “Oh thank God.”

Several months later, my mom emailed Mrs. Moon and asked if I could use her as a reference for another internship I was applying for.  I should have known better.  This was part of the reply she sent to my mom:

“I have not really had a chance to experience the Krysi that is dependable, trustworthy, honest, respecting of authority, a team player – many of the qualities I would expect an internship director to look for. I am optimistic that these character qualities can become a part of how Krysi is known.  I currently have no real frame of reference for making that type of recommendation.  I recall receiving only a few pieces of communication from Krysi shortly after she left the team complaining about her life and her options…”

The email to which the last sentence refers is the one I quoted previously.  As to the rest of it… what did she expect?  I was an emotionally traumatized teenager put in an impossible situation.  Tour was one of the most stressful environments I’ve ever been in.  Mrs. Moon knew I was unstable and she still allowed me to intern – when that didn’t work out, she took away the only support system I knew.  I’m really not sure what other outcome she would have expected.

Six months after I left the internship, I sent an email to a friend and tried to explain to her how tour was for me.  This was part of what I said:

“People put way too much pressure on 17 and 18 year olds.  This was what damaged me the most, I think.  Everyone expected all 13 of us to be absolutely perfect.  On the platform and at conferences, we did a great job of meeting those expectations.  After a while though, it become sort of soul killing.  I’d go to a conference and feel absolutely dead – no one really knew me.  They thought they did, but they had no idea about my life.”

That’s the thing, the one person who had an idea about my life (Mrs. Moon) accepted me to intern – being fully aware of my mental health problems – and then put me on a platform and expected me to act, look, and behave perfectly.  When I didn’t measure up to those standards, I was rejected.  I really don’t understand the reasoning behind any of it.

The last contact I had with the speech and debate world was during the spring of 2010 when I went to an NCFCA tournament to judge.  I showed up with an orange juice bottle full of vodka.  I was completely drunk and I gave alcohol to several of the competitors.  After that I never went back.

I’m definitely not proud of all my actions over the years.  I know I’ve made some mistakes, but then again, so have the responsible adults in my life.  What happened on my CFC internship definitely messed with my head – I learned that nothing in life is permanent, that people will eventually abandon you, and that talking about trauma is unacceptable (and even punishable.)

Post tour, I got into a decent amount of trouble and did some crazy stuff (I was a wild one).  I rejected Christian fundamentalism, in large part because of the hurt I experienced in the “Christian community.”  About a year ago, I started to work on my trauma and substance abuse issues.  It’s been a journey, but I’m finally in a good place.  I’m happier than I’ve ever been, I have a great job, and I have people in my life who don’t abandon or reject me when I act a little crazy.  It’s the first time I’ve ever known what stability looks like.  I’ve re-embraced spirituality; I don’t consider myself a Christian – I’m just trying to figure out what it looks like to follow Jesus.  I still screw up a lot and make mistakes, but I have people who love me through those mistakes rather than rejecting me.

I’m sure that there are people who will be angry for the things I’ve said about CFC/ICC, and I’m okay with that.  I’m past the point in my life where I feel like I have to pretend everything is okay.

End of series.

I Was A Problem To Be Ignored: Krysi Kovaka’s Story, Part One

HA Editorial Team11 Comments

I Was A Problem To Be Ignored: Krysi Kovaka’s Story, Part One

Krysi Kovaka is the 2008 recipient of the Institute for Cultural Communicator’s Raudy Bearden Community Speaking Award. She served as an intern for the 2008 Communicators for Christ conference tour.

I’ve spent a long time trying to figure out what I would say about my CFC tour experience if ever given the chance.  It’s a lot to try and put into words. CFC was one of the first places where I felt a sense of family and acceptance.  It was also one of the first places where I experienced the rejection and hypocrisy that seem to go hand in hand with conservative homeschooling groups.

Krysi Kovaka's staff picture from her 2008 conference tour with Communicators for Christ.
Krysi Kovaka’s staff picture from her 2008 conference tour with Communicators for Christ.

To give proper background to this story, I first have to explain a bit about my childhood.  I grew up in a conservative Christian middleclass family.  On the outside, everything about my childhood was perfect (albeit a bit unconventional.)  My parents chose to homeschool me and my four siblings.  I was given a great academic education, but school is really only a very small part of any discussion relating to homeschooling.  My father molested me while I was growing up, and given the insular community of which I was a part, there were very few people who would have been able to spot any signs of abuse.  Nobody found out about the abuse until much, much later.

When my public schooled peer group was playing sports, doing ballet, or marching band (or just being normal teenagers) I was busy doing competitive speech and debate.  I started doing speech and debate when I was eleven and I went to my first CFC conference.  After that, I spent the majority of my time going to NCFCA tournaments, researching debate resolutions, and attending CFC conferences.

The thing is, I never quite fit the mold of what a conservative homeschooled debater should look like.  I was a bit different; I liked to dress differently, dye my hair weird colors, and do anything else I could think of to stand out from my homogenous peer group.  I think part of this was personality (I’ve always been a bit quirky) and part of it was my attempt at a cry for help.  I was a very troubled teenager; despite (or maybe because of) my Christian homeschooled upbringing, I had problems with cutting, eating disorders, depression, and substance abuse.  Of course, when I was competing in NCFCA tournaments and attending CFC conferences, very few people had any idea about my problems.

To adequately explain what happened on my CFC internship, I have to rewind a bit and talk about the winter before I went on tour.  Christmas break of 2007 I was put in a behavioral hospital for attempting to commit suicide.  I was radically unhappy at home, so I tried to overdose on over the counter pain medicine.  I was in the hospital for nearly two weeks before I was discharged, just a few days before Christmas.

Several weeks later (January 2008) my mom was hosting a CFC Masters conference in my hometown of Louisville, KY.  Prior to my suicide attempt, I had been accepted to be an RSA (staff assistant/all-purpose slave) at this conference.  For reasons that still baffle me, the adults in my life decided that I needed to attend the conference and pretend that everything was okay.  While I should have been in therapy, I was busy cleaning bathrooms, setting up for banquets, and doing any other menial task that came my way.  Child labor laws where never even talked about.

During this conference I spent a lot of time holed up in bathrooms either cutting myself or making myself throw up.  It’s interesting now for me to look back at pictures of myself at that Masters conference – it was evident from looking at me that there was something deeply wrong.  Still, no one talked about it or asked about it.  Depression, suicide, and mental illness are not socially acceptable topics among conservative homeschoolers.

To illustrate the polarity that was my life, I was awarded the Raudy Bearden scholarship at this Masters; in one minute I would be in a bathroom trying to hold myself together and in the next, I would be up on a stage accepting an award or giving a speech.  Prior to the awards ceremony where I was awarded the scholarship, I was in the bathroom making myself throw up.

It was also during this conference that I decided I wanted to apply for a CFC internship.  It wasn’t so much that I loved CFC or that I loved public speaking – I just wanted to leave home and this seemed like a perfect opportunity.  The week after Masters I filled out an application to intern – I was pretty sure that getting accepted would be easy since my sister had interned twice.  Turns out that I was right.  I had a phone interview with Mrs. Moon, and despite the fact that she knew all about my mental health background (including my recent suicide attempt) she accepted me to intern just a few weeks after the phone interview.  I told her that I was on psych medication but that I would be fully competent to tour the country in a motorhome with a dozen other people.  To this day, I’m not sure why she took my word for it.

That spring and summer was a blur – I remember a lot of emails and writing a lot of classes.  I remember having to go shopping for tour clothes (all of us interns had to wear color coordinated outfits.)  I remember feeling a lot of pressure to perform well at that year’s NCFCA national tournament.

August rolled around and it was time to go to prep week and start tour.  Over that summer I had spent a lot of time at counseling and therapy, but I was still in no mental or emotional condition to be in such a stressful environment.  On tour you are expected to look perfect at all times, teach multiple classes in a day, give speeches, and function on very little sleep.  At this time I was still dealing with an eating disorder (which I tried to hide by saying I was a vegetarian), I cut myself regularly, I was very depressed, and I was starting to abuse alcohol.  I tried to hide all of these problems and put on a brave face as I got up on countless stages and spoke about the benefits of communication training and homeschooling.  I felt like a performing monkey.

My internship wasn’t all bad – I made some great friends and I felt a real sense of community with a few of my fellow interns.  I got to see the country and I got to get away from home.  I loved not being at home.

Tour was a very stressful environment though, and I started to crumple under the constant pressure to be perfect.  I would get up on a stage to speak and the second I got off stage I would run to a bathroom (bathrooms were the only place I found privacy) and hurt myself.  I started having really bad anxiety attacks during this time, so a doctor (who was a friend of the Moons) prescribed me Xanax over the phone.  I promptly started abusing this medication and nobody attempted to monitor my use of the pills.

What really amazes me about all of this is how few people took notice of my troubling behavior.  Of course, there were a couple of my fellow interns who knew that something was wrong, but they were only teenagers themselves.  None of the adults in my life took any notice.  I can only attribute this to the fact that I was in a homeschooled bubble – I assume that the people I was around were sheltered to the point where they didn’t know what to look for.  The other explanation is that the people I was around purposefully didn’t take notice of my behavior.

During the second half of my internship I began self-medicating with alcohol more frequently.  One night, me and one of the other interns separated from our group.  We were in Boston and we decided to strike out on our own to explore the city.  We found a couple of homeless men and we had a fascinating conversation with them about life and God.  During this conversation, I shared their vodka.  Yes, I did that.   I really didn’t see a problem with sharing vodka with homeless people.  When we got back to the group no one noticed that I was slightly inebriated (or they pretended not to notice.)

On another occasion, I and two other interns raided the liquor cabinet at our host family’s house.  We got black out drunk that night and ended up playing a risqué game of truth or dare.  That night was the first (but not the last) time that I got sloppy drunk with a boy and made decisions I regretted later.  The next morning we three were nursing hangovers, but we drug ourselves to the motorhome and tried to pretend that we were fine.  I’m sure that one or two of our fellow interns noticed, but no one said anything.  That was the culture we lived in – pretend that everything is fine, don’t make waves, and ignore problems.

I was a problem to be ignored.

Part Two >

From Hell to Heroin to Here: Jezebel’s Story

HA Editorial Team9 Comments

selfinjury

HA note: The author’s name has been changed to ensure anonymity. “Jezebel” is a pseudonym.

Trigger warnings: child sexual abuse, self-injury.

I’m not really sure how to describe my childhood.  Blacks and whites don’t really exist in my world, so it’s difficult to say that it was ‘good’ or ‘bad.’  I feel like we put labels like that on things to simplify them.

Unfortunately, nothing is simple.

My earliest memories are very fragmented – my memory isn’t that great to begin with, and PTSD combined with years of drug abuse have further eroded the recesses of my mind.  I remember starting first grade.  My parents decided to send me to a ‘cottage school’ where I would go to school two days a week and be homeschooled the other three.  I knew my friends from the neighborhood went to something called ‘public school,’ but from what I overheard my parents talking about, I was pretty sure that public school was bad.  That didn’t make sense to me, because my friends were really nice and their parents seemed nice too.  I was curious about public school, but at such a young age, I didn’t pay too much attention to the differences between myself and the other kids.

Around this same time (when I was seven) my father started to molest me.  To this day, I don’t talk about it too much.

At the time, I didn’t understand what was happening to me.  No one ever taught me about sexual abuse or inappropriate touching, so I thought that what was happening to me was normal.  I hated what was going on, but I understood that it was very important for me to pretend that everything was okay.  From a very young age, I understood the importance of not making waves and protecting my family’s reputation.

As I was growing up, the only sex education I received was from my time with my father.  My mom never talked about sex with me, and since I was homeschooled, I was never given formal sex-ed.  In one sense, I was insanely naïve about sex, but at the same time, I was receiving a sex-education from my father that would prove to be incredibly damaging to my psyche.  The messages he gave me were that I was powerless, worthless, and valuable only as a pleasure receptacle.  It was all very confusing for me.

As young girls, my friends and I used to talk about how we wanted our weddings to be.  We would all daydream about what type of guy we wanted to marry and what type of dress we wanted to wear.  Me, my sister, and our two best friends were planning a quadruple wedding.

When I found out that a father/daughter dance was a part of a traditional wedding, I remember deciding that I didn’t want to get married anymore.  I was willing to do anything to avoid spending time around my father.  The idea of having to dance with him made me sick to my stomach.

My parents continued to homeschool me and my three siblings.  We stopped going to the cottage school and started going to a homeschool co-op (it was pretty much the same thing, just less organized.)  I don’t remember too much from this time period.  I know that I wasn’t particularly happy and that I found solace in drawing.  I was off in my own little world much of the time, and I had quite a few pets that were my best friends.  I didn’t have a lot of friends, and the few I had I didn’t really like; most of the time I preferred to be alone and draw with my dog.

The abuse from my father continued until I was eleven.  I can’t tell you how many people have asked me why he stopped.  Don’t fucking ask me – go ask that pervert.  Maybe he’ll tell you.  I can only assume that I was getting too old for him or that he found someone else he liked better.  I didn’t ask questions about why he stopped, I was just thankful that he did.

I remember the time period after the abuse stopped a lot better than I remember my childhood.  My parents were still together.  I can’t begin to convey how terrible this was for me.  On Sunday’s my family would attend church together (by this time we had started to attend a home church because traditional church was too secular) and my dad would get up and lead worship.  I hated him so much and I didn’t understand why nobody else saw him the way I did.  Everybody I knew acted like he was such a great person – after all, he had a great job, he let my mom be a stay-at-home homeschool mom, and to all appearances he was a loving father.  My mom never noticed him abusing me, but I don’t blame her for this.  I can only attribute it to her own dysfunctional upbringing and the years of emotional abuse she endured with my father.

Even then, as a young teenager, I didn’t have the words to describe what had happened to me.  At thirteen I knew very little about sex, and I knew even less about how to express myself.  I was full of inner turmoil and hurt, and I had no outlet for it.  This is when I found out about cutting.  I was reading a magazine article about Angelina Jolie and the article said that she used to cut herself.  This was the first exposure I had to the concept of cutting and I decided to try it right away.  I got a safety pin and started to scratch my skin.  I couldn’t draw blood with my safety pin, but I liked the pain it caused me.  For the first time in a long time, I felt some release.

Around this same time, I realized that I could achieve a similar level of catharsis through not eating.  I wasn’t entirely aware that what I was doing was considered to be an eating disorder – I just knew that I really enjoyed how it felt when I would starve myself.  I came up with crazy diet plans and arbitrary numbers of how many calories I was allowed to eat in a day.  Occasionally, I would screw up and binge.  I felt horrible about my binges, so I would cut myself to try and feel better.  Somewhere along the lines I figured out that I could make myself vomit.  From that point on, I would starve myself for days, binge, and then make myself throw up.

This sort of behavior went on for quite a few years.  Of course, during this time I did my best to hide my eating disorder and cutting.  To outward appearances, I tried my best to look happy, well adjusted, intelligent, and well educated.  I simply wanted to be perfect.  I was part of a very insular community, so it was fairly easy to hide the symptoms of my problems – after all, everyone was sheltered to the point that they couldn’t recognize the symptoms of emotional disturbances.

In my early teen years, I started participating in competitive speech and debate.  My mom signed me up for NCFCA tournaments, and public speaking and debate took over my life.  I still kept up with my other school work, but the vast majority of my time was spent designing visual aids for expository speeches, researching debate resolutions, and practicing speeches.  I had very little life outside of NCFCA – as has been said by others, the closest thing I had to a graduating class were the people I competed at tournaments with.

During my teen years, I wasn’t allowed to date.  Despite the parental prohibition on relationships, I started talking to a boy I met through NCFCA.  He became my first boyfriend, and he was the first person I felt I could really confide in.  At fifteen, I was looking to him to save me.  I told him things I had never told anyone – I told him about my self-harm problems and my eating disorder.  We commiserated over our teenage angst and unhappy upbringings.  I was never able to trust him enough to talk to him about the abuse I suffered as a child, but this relationship helped me to begin to open up to people.

Of course, the relationship ended badly and dramatically (as most teenaged relationships do.)  Still, the simple experience of being able to confide in someone was profound.  Shortly after this breakup, I was researching something online, and I stumbled across an article on child abuse.  The article talked about sexual abuse and molestation.  For the first time in my life I had words to describe what had happened to me.  Prior to this time, I had heard people talk about molestation, but I always thought that if what happened wasn’t actual rape, that it didn’t constitute abuse.  No one had ever taught me otherwise.

I came unhinged when I read about what molestation actually was.  All the evil I had experienced as a child finally had a name.  Not only that, I felt justified in feeling that the abuse I suffered was wrong.  I spent that whole night crying, cutting, and throwing up.

The next day, I called my best friend.  I told her that when I was little my father had sexually abused me.  It was the first time in my life I had told someone the truth about my childhood.  I was sixteen years old.  My friend told me that she already knew – she could tell by the way I acted and talked about my family.  She knew I was miserable at home, but she didn’t know how to help me.  She was only a teenager herself.

Having the words to describe my experiences made me feel better about myself, but it didn’t help my immediate situation.  I still lived at home with my parents and my siblings and I didn’t feel safe enough to tell anyone about the abuse.  To make myself feel better, I started self-medicating with prescription pain pills and alcohol.  I started to get drunk off alcohol I stole from my parent’s liquor cabinet and I would get high off of Lortab’s and Percocet’s I found in our medicine cabinet.  My weight continued to fluctuate and my arms were still crisscrossed with cuts.  Because I was fairly isolated, few people took notice of my behavior.

My mom and I started to drift further and further apart – we would fight over the silliest things.  I wanted to listen to secular music, and she preferred that I listen to opera and classical.  I was a political libertarian and she was a staunch republican.  I thought that morality had little place in art, and she believed that the books I read needed to have strict moral messages.  We fought a lot.

On one particular day, mom and I had argued over the Harry Potter books (what homeschool child hasn’t been through a conflict involving these books?)  I ran upstairs to my room in tears.  I wasn’t really depressed about having differing opinions with my mom about Harry Potter – it was simply the metaphorical straw that broke the camel’s back.  The weight of all the secrets I was keeping came crashing down on me and I couldn’t deal with it anymore.  I felt like I had no way out, that my adolescence would never end.  So I did the only thing I could think of – I swallowed a bottle of pills and prayed that it would kill me.

My sister called an ambulance when she came upstairs and found me – I was inconsolable as I told her that I had just swallowed a bottle of pills and I wanted to die.  The ambulance came and carted me off to a mental hospital where I stayed for two weeks.

Ironically, the mental hospital was the only place where I came close to being in a public school.  Because I was in the adolescent ward, we had to attend school while at the hospital.  When I went to science class, I raised my hand and challenged the teacher on her teachings about evolution (that was what I had been taught to do in all my worldview and debate classes.)  I’m pretty sure that the staff took this as further evidence of my mental problems.

After I was released from the hospital, I went through a very rough period.  I finally told my mom about what my father had done to me.  It was an experience that I can only describe as horrific.  My mother believed me, and she had me write a letter to our church elders asking them for help.  I wrote a detailed letter and told these men what my father had done to me.  The church elders responded to my mother and said that both she and I were lying and that we weren’t welcome at that church anymore.  To this day, my father still attends that church and is a very active member.

Amidst all this madness, I attempted to finish my senior year of high school.  It was chaos.  My mom and I cobbled together a transcript that was substantiated by my debate experience, my love of classic British literature, and little else.  I was very intelligent, but no one ever really made me complete my math or science homework.  I would tell my mom that I did my math or science homework, and for the most part, my word was enough assurance that I was getting a well-rounded education.

When I went to take the SAT I hadn’t studied (literally, I think I cracked the study book one time) and I was hungover.  I did very well on the English and reading portion, and I bombed on the math portion.  At this point, I didn’t particularly care about school though, and my home life was so hectic that my mom didn’t have time to care either – she was in the process of dealing with a hellish divorce.

During my senior year I was so busy going to therapy and psych appointments that I never got around to applying to colleges.  Growing up, I had always wanted to go to college, but in the midst of the wreckage of my parent’s divorce, nobody really had time to help me figure out what I wanted to do with my life or where to apply for school.  I got more and more depressed and I started drinking and abusing pain pills even more heavily.

After high school graduation, I was simply drifting through life.  I worked a dead-end restaurant job and spent all my spare time at bars (I had a fake ID that I had stolen from someone.)  The only friends I had were people I knew from work – very few of my NCFCA friends kept in contact with me and I felt a bit ostracized.  Alcohol and pills fixed these feelings though, so I continued to self-medicate.

Eventually I applied to the local community college.  I went there for a semester, and I enjoyed it.  At the time though I was working fulltime at the restaurant, working weekends at a haunted house, and trying to keep up with a fulltime school schedule.  I ran myself ragged – my health started to deteriorate and I ended up in the hospital with meningitis.  I would also periodically have to go to the doctor because I got severe kidney infections.  One day as I was leaving to go to work, I simply collapsed in the garage – my body was wearing out.

While I was going to community college I couldn’t stop drinking.  I would routinely show up to class drunk or high out of my mind.  Alcohol was the only thing that helped me feel less stressed.  After one semester of college, I dropped out.

After dropping out of school my life became a bit of a blur.  I continued to drink myself into a stupor every night because I was severely depressed.  After a while, I got fired from my restaurant job because I routinely came to work drunk.  Within a few weeks of getting fired, I tried coke for the first time and I loved it.  I started routinely doing hard drugs.  My drug use culminated in an addiction to heroin.

To support my drug habit, I started working at a strip club.  I worked as a stripper and a prostitute for several years before I got arrested for trafficking heroin.  My life was a wreck and I had nowhere to go, so I went to rehab.  I had tried going to rehab several times before, so I wasn’t sure that it would work for me, but I was out of options.  I ended up in a year-long program, and it saved my life.

When I was shooting up heroin and stripping, I didn’t care about my life.  I would overdose or get beat up and it didn’t matter to me.  I felt like I was a fuckup and that my life wasn’t worth living.  In rehab I did the hard work of processing everything that had happened with my family, and as awful as it was, I’m a more whole person for all that.

It’s ironic – while I was in rehab, I was processing with a counselor and I told her about how I was brought up – conservative Christian homeschooler.  She was shocked.  She said that my story completely reframed how she thought about homeschooling.  She had always assumed that homeschooling was a good way to safeguard against having your kids become radically screwed up.  I guess I disproved that idea.

Since graduating rehab (most of the kids I competed in NCFCA with graduated college this year – I graduated rehab – ironic, right?) I’ve done my best to live life sober.  I attend 12 step meetings and a big part of my recovery is letting go of my resentments.  I’m still working on letting go of some resentment I have about my upbringing, but I’m slowly coming to terms with it.  In no way do I blame my choices on the way I was raised; I accept complete responsibility for my actions over the last few years.  Still, as people we are the sum of our experiences, and homeschooling was a huge part of my experience.  My upbringing shaped me into who I am today.

I can’t say that I liked the process of getting here, but today my life is good; I have a good job, I’m clean and sober, I’m not incarcerated, and I have people that love me when I don’t love myself.

It’s been hell to get here, but it is what it is and I’m okay with that today.

Burn In Case Of Evil: Cain’s Story, Part Four

HA Editorial Team14 Comments

Burn In Case Of Evil: Cain’s Story, Part Four

HA note: The author’s name has been changed to ensure anonymity. “Cain” is a pseudonym.

*****

In this series: Part One | Part Two | Part Three | Part Four

*****

My Home “Education”

A lot of people read this site and remark on how accomplished, out-spoken, and well-educated we all seem.  Many have remarked that it was obviously homeschooling that made us who we are.  The answer to that question is complicated because I am what I am because of, and despite of, homeschooling.  When your entire social life and community K-12 is homeschooled, of course these influences significantly impacted my life.  But much of my adult life has been spent “re-learning” everything (from social skills, to history, to biology, to relationship etiquette).  I was taught about all of these things through homeschooling.  Some subjects I was never taught properly in high school and my insufficiency handicapped my educational opportunities.

My mother was the primary instructor and, bless her heart, she only had a GED and a few college classes.  It’s not that my mother is not smart, or stupid; it’s that she was not qualified to give me a high school education.  I consider most of my educational experiences before 8th or 9th grade to be generally positive.  I excelled in spelling, math, science, and language arts.  I really had an interest in science at an early age – I can remember enjoying earth science, nuclear science, and astronomy/space.  As I entered high school, a few things happened.  First, we got involved in ATI (a homeschooling cult) when I was about 10, but by my high school years the “Wisdom Booklets” became my primary textbooks (other than math).  Second, I became involved in NCFCA/CFC when I was 13 – started debating at 14.  Third, I started liking girls and “rebelling” by falling for them and having innocent phone and text conversations.

We used Saxon math as a supplement to the Wisdom Booklets.  I excelled at geometry, basic algebra, and word problems.  I’ve always enjoyed problem solving.  As I got involved with advanced geometry and algebra II, my mother simply could not keep up.  I would call my older sister, who was pursuing an engineering degree, and she would try to help me through it.  But math-by-phone is no substitute for a math teacher.

I think about 15 or 16, when I got involved heavily in debate, my mom stopped requiring me to do math.  Debate literally took over my life and I spent about 40 hours a week researching, writing speeches, and talking to friends in homeschool debate.  I consider my friends from CFC/NCFCA as the closest thing to a “high school class” because they were the only social group that I interacted with somewhat limited parental oversight.  I excelled at debate and it fed my father’s interest in history and politics.  So for three years all I did was debate, which was vastly superior to Wisdom Booklets.  My education with Wisdom Booklets made me think that AIDS was a gay disease and my sex mis-education was downright reckless.  I “learned” about logarithms intertwined with the tale of Jesus multiplying the loaves and fishes.

When it came time to submit my high school transcript for college (and to apply for state scholarships) my parents sat down at the computer and literally made up my transcript.  Debate-related activities and research were labeled under lots of different titles (American History, Composition, Logic, Civics, Public Speaking, English, etc).  Of course, I got A’s in all of these categories.  Now, my parents had some semblance of ethics and they decided I needed to complete some science courses to qualify for the state’s college entrance requirements.  My science courses in high school were pathetic, with the exception of computers because my dad worked in the industry for his entire adult life.

During most of my junior and senior years, I worked full-time and debated.  There was a long-distance Latin course from PHC, chemistry, and biology course interlaced with working and debate.  I got C’s in all of these classes and I’m pretty sure I had to cheat on two of the finals just to pass.

Technically, I took a chemistry and biology course, but in reality, I learned nothing about those subjects.  My mom wasn’t that knowledgeable in sciences. I used the Apologia biology textbook.  I remember bumbling through the biology book, not understanding anything I was reading.  Mostly because there was no grand narrative, like evolution, to make sense of all the different species.  I excelled in college biology, but not until I understood the topics from an evolutionary perspective.  My chemistry course was me and my homeschooled friend learning from his father, who was a doctor.  The “classes” lasted for maybe a month or two, but then life got busy and I stopped going.  He didn’t really follow-up, for whatever reason, and my parents didn’t seem that interested either.  So I taught myself chemistry?  Nope, I suck at chemistry – on a very basic level.

As a side note, I’m great with computers because of my father, but I never took a programming class beyond Visual Basic.  He tried to teach me about things, but it always seemed like I was missing part of the story – like he wasn’t “dumbing it down” enough.  Looking back, I realize it’s because my father was trying to teach me only the practical applications of computers while never learning the scientific theory.  I know he knows all about it, but I don’t know that he was qualified to teach it to a child.  It’s not like I gained marketable skills from my computer education.

I was also a huge asshole when I began college. I’m sure you know the type: fundamentalist Christian debater.  I had no idea how to navigate relationships with non-homeschooled people and it took a year or two, many broken friendships, and loneliness to find friends.  I was also encouraged through programs like Summit to challenge my “evil, secular humanist” professors in class – to “stand up” for Jesus in the public classroom.  I was prepared to enter an atmosphere that antagonized Christians and Christianity.

College was fantastic, but difficult and filled with substance abuse.  I realized that I had ADD, but self-medicated for sometime with cannabis.  Alcohol and cannabis helped with the anxiety –social, existential, spiritual, school and parent-related – and helped me to socialize with big groups.  I still can’t socialize with big groups of people easily and I lucked into taking a lot of Honors classes with small class sizes.  I almost lost my big scholarship (which required me to keep a 3.5) in my sophomore year because I got terrible grades in science and foreign languages.  I didn’t know how grades or tests worked, let alone how to study.  I excelled in political science and history, so that’s where I stayed.  I didn’t take biology until my senior year.  I finally understood it and, since then, I’ve developed a keen interest in neurobiology, psychopharmacology, psychology, and health care issues.  At this point, I’d love another two or three years of school to get a B.S. and another three to get an M.S., but that part of my life is over now.

I remember a time in middle school when I really wanted to be an engineer and I still think I could have excelled at it, if it wasn’t for my homeschooling.  Yes, I have an MA, but I’m confident I could have a stable, well-paying job in a science-related field.  My liberal arts education came easily to me, but I would have relished the challenge of advanced science and math.  Almost every public school student has a somewhat competent math teacher and most have access to AP calculus.  Yes, debate is a great skill and it has made me successful, but I’ve always been jealous of people who excelled in math or science – like I once did – and moved seamlessly into the job market.

To be continued.