-
Mad Moment of Mine
Mad Moment of Mine
When I was a child, I was brainwashed, kidnapped by a cousin, then kidnapped by the troubled teen industry. As an adult, it has taken me decades to process the trauma of being labeled crazy by an oppressive system. To be clear, I am still deep in that process of decolonizing my perceptions of those experiences. I survived multifaceted abuse from many different adults and children as a child that was never competently addressed. Over the past 10 years I have shed an abundance of shame, guilt, fear, and self-loathing through using the knowledge I have sought out with the goal of reassessing my complicity in my own captivity both physically and mentally.
My Mad moment was at 11 ½ years old. I had been returned from being kidnapped and taken to CAPS (Child Adolescent Psychiatric Services). My mother had hired a private investigator to retrieve me from my aunt and cousin’s abduction. The cities of Lincoln, Clarkson, Schyluer, Village of Leigh, Pilger, and David City refused to devote resources towards my abduction in favor of classifying me as a Black runaway.
Fresh out of being left in a farm house for almost a week alone, malnourished, unwashed, and constantly disassociating, the hospital labeled me a threat to myself and others. My mother signed me into therapeutic care, and that care was anything but therapeutic.
I was stripped, medicated, isolated, forced to speak or receive punishments, and dehumanized in ways that words fail to convey with enough weight. My existence was limited to the labels that paid for my stay. All the while, I wondered how I got there. In clothes that weren’t mine, in a body that didn’t feel like mine, in a bed and schedule that wasn’t mine. How did I end up the child in a box labeled sick and twisted while the adults that shaped me kept their autonomy?
I distinctly remember the smell. Vinegar, ammonia, sweat, lemon, and suffering. I remember I cried until I threw up. I remember them taking me to the isolation room in a hug jacket that first night because I was scratching at my arms trying to use my nails to release me from my body. I remember laying on the cold floor wailing. A sound I’d never heard myself make and now hear echoed in every animal that roars in a zoo. A sound I’ve heard echoed from ICE concentration camps, prison concentration camps, Palestinian and Sudanese survivors. The pinch of injection led to what felt like weeks of out of body experiences.
Sexism stole my voice and limited my story, at that time, to the angst of a pre-teen girl. Racism got me incarcerated by placing the blame upon me for the trauma I endured, as well as elongated my time of incarceration. Capitalism profited off my captive body; the medications being forced into it, the therapy forced up it, and the torture labeled as treatment. Colonialism created and maintains these systems of oppression from antiquity to modern day reality. It is the umbrella under which the ism-s gather.
My Mad moment happened because the adults charged with my care had not decolonized themselves enough to understand what was happening. I journey forward in faith that I will be better than those who surrounded me because I actively seek ways to expand my perspectives to honor the dignity of All lived experience.
- Maghie Miller – Jenkins