(NOTE: I posted this earlier today on my blog, because today for some reason I thought about one of my more upsetting childhood memories and realized that it was almost exactly ten years ago. The circumstances of my upbringing were moderately abusive, and this particular experience represents the first time anybody took me seriously about it and tried to help me. I never got to say thank you, so instead I wrote this.)
Giving my age away here, but ten years ago I was a high school freshman--in fact, the events I'm about to write of happened exactly ten years ago as of February.
One day I will go into these upsetting stories in detail, but for the moment I'm not going to--not least because it will require a lot of very traumatic memories and take up many thousands of words. All you need to know is that my parents abused the medical community to have me medicated for psychiatric illnesses I didn't actually have, and continued doing this for seven years of my life. I was not allowed a voice in my own health and well-being, adding a feeling of complete helpless isolation to an already abusive environment. By the time I started high school, I had been taking extremely large doses of drugs not even approved for use in children for almost five years. I had never felt so alone and so completely lost in my life.
And it's here where Holly Dacek came into the picture.
Ms Dacek was my history teacher and, like the freshmen, was new to the school. She was a good teacher, but not an overly strict one. She was also very friendly and opened her classroom to students during her breaks and lunch periods to provide a safe place for children who felt they needed one. I spent a lot of time in that classroom, and she provided the only beacon of support I had. Not only was she just an all-around nice person and talked to me, she also listened to me, and listened with an openness and non-judgmental attitude that I had never seen in another adult before. Eventually I felt comfortable enough to open up to her about the situation at home, in particular the medications I was being forced to take that I knew were causing me a lot of problems. (Not light side-effects either. I lost motor function, couldn't control my hands, my appetite was gone, I wasn't sleeping, I had profound memory loss, and felt completely cut off from my own emotions--many of these side-effects are still with me, years after I was old enough to stop taking the medication.)
To my surprise, she was horrified. She tried to get me help. I had only wanted to get it off my chest, but seeing someone--an adult!!--have an intense negative reaction to my situation was one of the earliest indicators that what I was going through was in no way normal and vindicated my growing suspicion that my parents were abusive. Most people scoff, but the fact is that abuse needn't be extreme nor leave marks to be abuse--chaining a child up in the garage is abuse, certainly, but so is constantly berating a child and tearing down any scrap of self-worth they might have. Denying a child medication is abuse--but so is forcing them to take serious neurological medications when they don't need them.
The final straw for Ms Dacek was the day I came to her classroom in tears. I don't remember over what. But she wasn't going to sit and watch and brought me to the administrators and school psychologist, explaining my situation and inquiring about protective services. My parents were called, doctors were contacted, records were searched.
In the end it went horribly awry, but it wasn't Ms Dacek's fault. It was just a question of one obviously emotionally unstable child making claims against parents who provided an awful lot of carefully-selected medical testimony that I was not at all well and had behavioural problems. (I should mention that my parents deliberately doctor-shopped for someone who would slap a mental illness diagnosis on me and that this took some time--many of the doctors I remember seeing I also clearly remember remarking on how normal I was. It took a lot of work for my parents to have me labelled mentally unstable.) The whole thing was a mess and ended up with me spending a month confined to a juvenile mental hospital where I was housed with other psychiatric patients far more disturbed and violent than I ever was, making me fear for my life as well as being treated like a prisoner.
I was only a few years from being able to take control of my life as a legal adult so from there I made the decision to play by the unfair rules until I could finally play by my own. I was never institutionalized again and just before I turned seventeen I managed to strike a bargain with my parents that allowed me to significantly decrease my medication; when I was eighteen I stopped it all together, but by then the damage had been done. Whether or not I was sick before is a moot point because now I most definitely am. I never again sought the help of another adult or mentor. I never told another person about my situation until I was much older and that part of my abuse was well behind me. The combined abuses are cruelties from which I have never really recovered, nor do I trust people as fully as I would like--even when I know there's no risk, I'm always terrified that something will somehow go horribly wrong.
But I don't blame Ms Dacek for any of this. It isn't her fault. I feel nothing but gratitude to her, for her kindness and her efforts to help me on my terms, not based on what she thought was best for me. Even though it went horribly awry, I still think of her very fondly, even though she herself felt very guilty about what had happened.
I had her as a teacher just once for one semester before I graduated and shortly after that she moved to a different school. At the time I was still going through a lot of problems so I never managed to stay in contact with her. I never got to thank her.
So, Holly Dacek, wherever you are and whatever you're doing with your life now, I want to say this:
Thank you. Thank you for trying to help. You have no idea what you meant to a frightened child who had no idea where to turn, and that kindness has never been forgotten.
(Anyway, that's my story--if you have similar stories regarding someone's past kindness, I encourage you to share them here. Writing them out can sometimes be pretty therapeutic.)
