23 years ago roughly in 1999, I recall an attempt of suicide, thanks to testosterone, taking Paxil and a botched transition to the local Middle School in ltown. The location? It was Seacoast Learning Collaborative, a private school, I believe acting as a non profit entity, off Exit 8 what was then the new extension of state highway 101, (IIRC the 4 lane highway was just completed either weeks or a month before.) I recall the construction and being stuck four years before in traffic going to Hampton Beach. Ironically seeing the Castles of Brentwood, where many local shops got displaced when 101 was completed. When I left Seacoast in 2002, virtually they had all units of about twentysomething at The Castles. Two other programs were not affiliated, but rented it. The New England Dragway owned the building; unsure what the status is as time goes on, the tress cover up the visibility of the Castles, of which I think is a good thing.
I have not discussed SLC as a separate blog post, or the details of my experience; but basically a private school doesn’t have to comply with state rules, and SLC’s ethos is to straighten troubled kids because because students like to blame their disability for everything not that the disability is truly controlling them unfairly. The two most outrageous students I recall aren’t on Facebook. Perhaps they see a therapist like the one I see because they break the law or go to jail or do stupid stuff, making me perhaps a more saner of the bunch of the PDD program of the ol SLC.
Trauma takes years to process, but the SLC and the Dreaded Private Sector approach to teaching with left leaning teachers who forget to put their politics at the door, but we are expected to do that, was the start to the end of my life. A boy that couldn’t do anything right, a boy that would struggle into manhood, because they couldn’t leave the prejudices to themselves. They would later get married and have children, and they would kiss their babies goodnight while they would wash their hands of figurative blood of all the guts they would rip out of students on a daily basis. Some had left or gone to other fields or gone to other districts.
On an overcast day in December 1999, I bolted out of a classroom trying to run for my life trying to go onto oncoming traffic on the ol 101 (now known as state Route 87), I wasn’t a fast runner, and they got me probably by the point where the fake gate was, which really was 100′ in retrospect.
the “flash of light” was the part where you could see the present day 101 and the skies more distant. If you are going westbound on 101 towards Manchester, just under 1/4 mile to the Exit 8 offramp, you can see the facility and where I saw that “light”.
While the chances of self-harm would be very low, I still considered why I didn’t go faster. My life was starting to degrade from within. The experience of 2 1/2 years at Seacoast was one of many experiences of which I had destroyed and shredded. There was a lot of physical trauma too; I broke glass windows with my bare hands. I was restrained million times.
The saddest part is how the staff would just put those experiences in their boxes and just move on. This is something you expect from someone with a narcissistic personality disorder that was there for a career experience that wasn’t worth their time. There was a couple good people, those I tried to find on Facebook to no avail.
While I do not intend to dread on the past, the attempts to heal this trauma years later is something that’s hard to do. This was the place where I started to get written off, then others had to pick up the pieces they broke. While I may had literally broken school or staff belongings, the material stuff was always a concern not what they did to me on an emotional level. The “professionalism” was off; they were such sociopaths that if they did harm a student emotionally, it was just more power for them.
I guess it was another way of saying “Welcome to Adulthood 5 years Early”.
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