Immediate Aftermath

[u/Ordinary-Sea6539]

When I turned eighteen I hadn't had a math class in all of high school and middle school math was extremely inadequate, I got the highest in the math workbooks of anyone in my group at my middle school program but when I was eighteen I couldn't long divide, I didn't know how to ride a bus from point A to point B, or drive, I was so unused to talking at all that I kept losing my voice at my first job, I had almost no experience of normal socialization and wasn't even sure if saying hello was generally considered doing something wrong, when my roommate stole my money over and over I thought I must be counting wrong until my other roommate told me he had stolen from her and from someone else, I was so convinced that I was bad that when an aquaintance pulled down his pants and masturbated in front of me I was relieved because that meant I wasn't the bad one and didn't have to feel guilty or avoid interacting with him and so I could be less lonely, I delayed telling the doctor when my medication gave me hallucinations and made me randomly have electric shocks in my brain and collapse because I thought anyone official and educated wouldn't believe me about almost anything, I had panic attacks where I shook for multiple days, I had nightmares where I woke up screaming with tears running down my face and couldn't move, a boss forgot to give me my pay for the week and I assumed I was being punished for something and wasn't allowed to ask what,

I got abused over and over. I kept trying to go to school or educational programs but physical and mental disabilities and being behind and people hating me and me not knowing how to stand up for myself would combine so that for the most part, I wasn't able to progress and was just wasting money or picking up stalkers or picking up anger at community colleges and so on.

I was really into Little Shop Of Horrors and not quite as much into Come From Away and Matilda The Musical and Les Mis and I used to carry around Audrey II all of the time. Because it was a sense of being doomed from pretty much every direction around me but still dancing and singing and falling in love.

I also liked a lot of books that helped me take a perspective outside of normal human society, particularly the Collected Poems Of Mary Oliver and Hello Cruel World by Kate Bornstein.

I would try to frame everything as an adventure and I still have a lot of notes and pictures that I like from adventures I was having in very chaotic circumstances.

I haven't found someone who understands what I'm talking about exactly.

[u/Environmental-Ad9406]

I see you survivor. I’m sorry that you have experienced all of this too. A lot of us can relate to what you went through. You are in good company on this Reddit community. I guess in some ways I was lucky that I only lost two years to TTI programs, but you’re right that school is an absolute joke in places like that and you come out of there traumatized and unprepared to deal with the real world. This is why it is important to speak out about your experiences and shine a light on the abuse and the abusers, so it is harder for those abusers and those abusive programs to continue to get away with harming other kids. There are too many TTI survivors who end up dead or disabled because of the abuse, and I want to see an end to that abuse in my lifetime.