Paris: The Memoir(26)
Kudos to the copywriter. Evil genius.
Desperate parents latched on to the idea of this artsy, intellectual place where “tough love” would fix a broken child they loved but could not understand. A staff psychiatrist made regular visits to the CEDU campus to supply prescription drugs and report back to parents on their child’s progress.
Most of those kids were like me: disobedient ravers from conservative families and ADHD kids who got kicked out of school. Some had experimented with weed or molly, but none of us were as street smart as we thought we were. A lot of kids were gay—or gay-ish—which upset their religious parents. Foster-system floaters came from bad situations that had nothing to do with them, but they had to be parked somewhere that looked okay on paper. Other kids lived in darker worlds: addiction, violent predatory behavior, and suicidal depression.
The decision to send me away is a rough topic for my parents. They haven’t shown me any records, so I don’t even know the exact dates when all this happened. I have some theories, but I don’t know exactly how they found CEDU or who convinced them that this was their only option.
“This wasn’t about a kid ditching school and talking back,” says Mom. “We did it to save your life.”
Dad says straight up, “You needed to go there. You were out of control.”
End of conversation.
To me, that feels like blame—You made us do it!—but I love my parents, so I can’t bear to take that coping mechanism away from them. We’re all living with the brutal legacy of this the best way we know how, and they have expressed regret, in their way.
“I’m sorry you had such a hard time.”
“I’m sorry you had to go through all that.”
For a long time, I just wanted to hear them say, “I’m sorry we made a terrible mistake.” But they’re just not there yet. Maybe they never will be. And that’s okay.
To be fair, I’ve never said, “I’m sorry I pushed you to the point of desperation.”
So here we go.
Mom and Dad: I apologize. I am so sorry. Not knowing where your child is—that’s a kind of psychological torture, too. I’m sorry I was insensitive to how cruel that really was. I’m sorry my choices put you in a place that must have seemed like a no-win situation. I love you, Mom and Dad. And I forgive you, even if you don’t ask. Hopefully, we can all redirect our anger in a positive direction—like state and federal legislation that kicks the crap out of the troubled-teen-industry con artists and keeps them from destroying other families in the future.
Moving on.
TRIGGER WARNING: This next part is really hard. Take care of yourself, okay? In Psychology Today (a review of James Tipper’s book The Discarded Ones, November 2012), Jann Gumbiner, PhD, compares the programs I survived to “Jim Jones’s Guyana, Patty Hearst’s kidnapping, or Zimbardo’s Prison Experiment.” A lot of people will find it upsetting. And they should. It should make you want to cry and throw this book across the room and yell, “This is wrong! This has to change!” I find it upsetting, too, but I don’t cry about it that much anymore.
The terrible truth is, I became numb after a while. When you endure horror day after day, month after month, it becomes normalized. I built high stone walls around my heart—walls that no one could break through or climb over for more than twenty years. My MO was to not think about it, not talk about it. Don’t feed the beast. Don’t give it any oxygen. It’ll go away. For a long time, I made that work, but every now and then, some random thing would trigger a flood of memory and anxiety and crush my soul all over again.
The spin-control sorceress inside me is moaning: “No! Not this! Don’t go there!” Like I said before, I’m not comfortable talking about private parts and bodily functions. I worry about how it might impact the brand I’ve worked so hard to create—a brand that’s all about beauty, laughter, impeccable fashion, lovely fragrances, high-tech innovations, luxurious living, and the sophisticated art of not taking myself too seriously.
But people need to know what we’re talking about when we use sterile terms like “congregate care facility” and “troubled-teen industry.” I mean, think about that word—industry—in the context of children as raw material. I can’t soft-pedal this just so you and I (and my parents) don’t have to feel bad. That’s how these people have been able to continue abusing children and tearing families apart for decades with zero regulation and oversight. I will not—I cannot—let them hide in the shadows any longer.
In 2021, I collaborated with Dayzee via Superplastic on an NFT drop built around a simple message: THE TRUTH WILL SET YOU FREE. These pieces speak to the way my story has been steered by the media, partly because I was afraid to tell it myself.
That’s changed. I’ve changed.
When I realized that my story was a sledgehammer to that wall of silence and shame—that I had the power to free myself and maybe save someone else’s life—everything I was scared of seemed trivial. I was finally ready to become the hero I needed when I was living in that hell.
None of the names used in these chapters are real, for obvious reasons, and I’m not pretending to remember every conversation word for word. For much of the time that I was locked up, I was being force-fed drugs intended to dull my wits and make me comply. I think they wanted to hide their actions by clouding our memories. I feel like Alice, trying to reassemble a broken looking glass. To the best of my ability, I’ll tell you exactly what happened. Some details are burned clearly into my memory; others are foggy, but research and the testimony of fellow survivors back me up.