I didn't get to Williams College until I was 19.
From 18 to 19, I lived at my parents' house, worked part-to-full-time at low-wage jobs, went to a therapist and a psychiatrist, and took medication.
It's ironic that many of the people who decide what a teenager of adult age whose self-esteem is devastated by the stigma of mental illness, rather than actual mental illness, think that working in customer service is less stressful and therefore more appropriate for that teenager than being at college among high-achieving teenagers who are truly like her would be. They probably think that because they never had to work customer service jobs, or cleaning jobs, or they never had to do that sort of work for a long time.
My being of adult age was also something that my parents and most of the people whom I met in the mental health care system ignored, unless they were angry with me and wanted to throw my age and lack of achievement in my face; that's when they remembered that I wasn't a child. The rest of the time, I was infantilized, condescended to, prevailed over in every conflict with nothing more than a tone of voice or a facial expression to remind me and everyone in the room that I was the one with the psychiatric history, so of course whatever I was saying was wrong.
That's what it's like for mental patients and former mental patients; as soon as you're in the hospital or get a diagnosis or get put on medication, that's what t's like for the rest of your life.
It's also sad that, as beautiful a place as Williams College was, I hadn't wanted to be a student there. It was one of the first college applications that I did, and not only did I not care at all about being accepted, I didn't think that I would be and didn't want to go there. Nobody told me to do the application for it. I did the application in the fall of 1990, just to have done an application; I sweated almost all the others that I did, and the other two that I didn't sweat, didn't care about, and didn't send months before the deadline the way I did for Williams were to schools that answered by waitlisting me. Some schools probably don't care if you don't care, particularly if you're going to be a financial aid student; apparently, Amherst College and Cornell University were schools like that in 1991.
By the time that I was in a psychiatric unit in 1992, and had spent enough time there to know that I was not ever going to be given control over my life, for the rest of my life, just because I'd been in the hospital, I stopped telling anyone that I didn't want to go to Williams. On the contrary, being a Williams student would mean that I was a person again, instead of a disgusting, worthless, drain on society who shouldn't be alive, which is what society thinks of mental patients and how mental patients are usually treated in psychiatric facilities, and so was what I thought of myself after a few weeks in the psych slammer (locked ward). Nobody had bothered to tell me, until I had already freaked out about being locked up, that I was sent to the locked ward because the less disturbed ward had no beds, and not because I "belonged" there. They decided that I belonged there after I started screaming "There's nothing wrong with me!" I had asked for help, I had asked to be hospitalized; I had asked, and what happened after I asked didn't seem helpful to me.
By the time I got to Williams, I didn't think I was capable of anything. I didn't think I'd succeed academically, so I didn't try to do the homework. I was so happy to be around people my own age for a while; that was all I cared about. That was all that I went there for, by the time that I got there. I figured I could have some time around people my age, which I hadn't had for what seemed like a lifetime, and that I would have to leave.
I did leave, and was in the hospital again, and changed to a worse therapist, who sent me to another psychiatrist and got me put on antidepressants in addition to antipsychotics.
I applied to Ithaca College. On the basis of my high school record, I was admitted and also offered a scholarship that took $10,000/year off the price of attendance if I could keep a 3.0 average. Since even expensive private colleges at that time were not yet $30,000/year, $10,000/year was a substantial scholarship.
That scholarship is also something for which the entertainment industry mocked me for quite some time, starting in 2010. That's probably because most of its stars either never went to college or dropped out after a year, and $10,000 for them is what you spend on a night out with friends when you drink yourself into a stupor.
I was at Ithaca College for three years, psychiatrically medicated practically to a coma, 30-50 pounds overweight because of the medication. Being practically comatose and overweight did a lot to make me continuously suicidal; I finally accepted being miserable and stopped talking about it to the therapist and psychiatrist that I was referred to in Ithaca by the therapist in Vermont. I did keep a 3.0 average.
I went to a few parties; I think I only ever went to one party that was at a fraternity. What I can tell you is that there doesn't seem to be a lot of variation to college parties that involve drinking. I didn't drink alcohol at those parties or anywhere else. To fend off people trying to offer me drinks, I would get one of the red, plastic cups that are at every college party and I'd put water in it. If I had to leave the cup of water unattended for as much as a second, I'd throw it out and get another one.
By then, there was some public knowledge about fraternities and about what could happen to women at college. The people who tried to raise awareness should know that they did; they raised awareness. They didn't end the problem, but they raised awareness. There are women who would have gotten sexually assaulted at college who didn't, because of the people who did and who talked about it for the greater good.
Over the past several hours tonight, I read Liz Seccuro's 2011 book about being raped at the Phi Kappa Psi house at the University of Virginia in 1984. I read the entire book.
What Ms. Seccuro wrote about being assaulted in 1984 and what was reported by Rolling Stone in 2014 as having happened to Jackie in 2012 are not all that similar. Some of the words are the same; it could be that Jackie and/or Ms. Erdely had read the book and unconsciously used some of the same language to describe what had happened to Jackie.
How do you talk about something that's so horrific that you never thought it could happen to anyone? If Jackie and/or Ms. Erdely used some of the same language that Ms. Seccuro had written, that's nothing like the malicious, mirthful, relentless plagiarism that the conglomerate has committed against me since 2010, taking words from what I write or say AGAINST sexual abuse and other crimes and distorting them into nauseatingly repetitive code promoting everything that I have protested against. The conglomerate media does that every day; all of the conglomerate has done that to me every day since 2010. There is almost no conglomerate code word, number, or other symbol that the conglomerate didn't take and distort from something that I wrote or said or that had something to do with me.
It also doesn't seem to me that rape is a particularly original crime. How many ways are there, really, to gang rape people in the same fraternity house, century after century?
Gang Rape Quiz:
1) When you decide to gang rape someone, do you plan to have the scene of your crime be:
A) On the first floor of the fraternity house, where most of the guests of your party are
B) On the second floor where there are bedrooms whose doors you can close and where there's less chance that people will hear the victim screaming and all of you and your friends laughing and yelling things about her body and what should be done to her
2) When your victim starts screaming, do you tell her:
A) "Please keep screaming. I want everyone in the house to hear you and I hope that someone calls the police."
B) "SHUT UP!"
3) When your victim resists your initial violence toward her, do you
A) Say "My dear lady, I'm so sorry that I and my uncouth friends have frightened you. Please allow me to escort you, in your tattered and perhaps already bloodied clothes, from this room full of drunken men who will all jeer at me and call me a p---- or perhaps even try to attack me for fear that I'll tell an authority about what has almost transpired. From this room, which was almost the scene of a most terrible crime, you and I shall traverse the hallways and then the main rooms of this house, where everyone else at the party will see us; you, looking as if you've already been raped, and me, looking as if I at least know what has happened to you if I didn't participate in it. Hopefully, everyone has his or her phone and will take pictures and videos of you and me while I'm trying to get you out of the house, and all of that documentation will be posted to social media all over the world before the weekend."
B) Hold her down or have your friends hold her down so you can rape her like you had planned to do. If she gets hurt enough, she'll stop fighting and hopefully will have a nervous breakdown and kill herself or have to leave school so even the slight chance that you might get in trouble will disappear when she does.
4) Should you have the lights on or off during a gang rape?
A) That depends on whether you have to have the lights off to lure the victim into the room so that she can't see all the men who are there to rape her until it's too late for her to get out
B) That depends on whether you had the shades on the windows down before you got her into the room. If you forced her into the room suddenly and without a plan, you might want to turn the lights off until you can get over to the window and close the shades, unless you decide after first turning the lights off that you don't have to worry about people outside seeing you through the window because nobody's going to try to help your victim or tell anyone anything except as a rumor about her later.
C) What? It doesn't matter who sees or hears anything. Rich guys don't get prosecuted for s--- like that. Who's the b----? I'll sue her a--! She's a liar! She's crazy! Nothing happened! She wanted it! I never heard of her! I don't know who you're talking about! I'm calling my Dad!
Copyright L. Kochman, June 30, 2016 @ 5:32 a.m.
