I needed help. At 15, I was on the verge of collapse. It was the self-loathing, the feeling of loneliness that ate away at my spirit every day as I lived a lie.
When I found the bravery to speak my truth, to say “I’m gay” to the people that I loved most, the world lit up for a moment, then burned away quickly. I found myself inside a cold room in a psychiatric facility. After a week there, parents let me know I would be leaving soon. What I did not know was that two men would shake me out of bed early in the morning. I did not know I was about to embark on an 18-month journey, more complex and painful than anything I had experienced prior. I was naive to think I understood loss and pain before. Everything I had was taken from me.
Wilderness therapy saved my life. It broke me and almost broke my body, and some moments it felt impossible to breathe, but watching the boys around me find strength while walking beside me, mile after mile, inspired a fight in me. I washed my face in an ice-cold stream after a 15-mile hike up and down off-trail hills overgrown with rhododendron. I listened to a boy cry for the first time as he understood that he is worthy of love. Those moments stand with me and I remember those who were around me, fondly.
However, the 77 nights I spent hungry, my body becoming wiry and thin, haunt me. As do the days we could not create a fire because our bags were soaked the day before, and the staff let us eat ice-cold, hard rice and dehydrated beans, as they sat by their gas stoves and chowed down on ramen. The 8-hour “testing” and psychological evaluation we were all subjected to. The strip-search at 15. Being forced to read a letter from my parents, that was full of their anger and tainted perspective, in front of 12 boys I had not been allowed to speak to for the three days prior.
Things were not right there. It saved me but I understood that I was being forced to endure something I should not have been enduring. It made me tough and resilient and I needed those lessons for what was about to come.
The Monarch School stole a year of my life; stole the lives of those I loved. I felt the evil under the smile of the woman who greeted me. I saw the intrigue in the eyes of all the others when I walked into the main building for the first time. I heard the “poor kid.” I saw a girl outside sweating, using a small tool to dig dirt around a massive tree stump. Two kids sat alone in the back of the dining room. One of them cried for the first three days I spent there. Those moments of confusion became moments of empathy and rage. “Seats” took our ability to speak and were supposed to be reflective time. When the girl I saw digging the first day spent the next two months there doing the same thing every day, I realized that it was never about reflection. It was about control.
They took our clothes. Our piercings. They took our friends, our ability to speak freely with our families. They took my books if they mentioned the touch of another. They kept us in groups of three. Alone-time did not exist. They silenced us. Blacked-out our letters. Pulled phone plugs when we attempted to show our pain to anyone outside of the bubble they trapped us under. We were outsiders. Everyone in the town looked at us with sullen eyes. And eventually, it all felt so normal. I stopped questioning it, realized my head needed to face the ground so that I could get home. I did my best to avoid trouble.
They rewarded us for snitching. I actually felt good about “holding kids accountable” to a set of rules they called “The Agreements.” Agreements were quite flexible, and if you asked for a list of them you were scolded. There was no master list of punishments, they were random. But you always knew you were about to do some labor. In the kitchen, scraping the dining hall floor with a butter knife, chopping wood, or digging up stumps. We worked because we were the workers. We had no maintenance staff, nobody tamed that land.
We, the original students of CEDU, worked the land and saved the owner millions of dollars. He was a man that loved to take the kids out on the boat, bought with our parents’ money. A man that loved to bring a special group of kids to his added house on campus. Somebody that looked me in the eyes as I broke down crying, after the student that sexually assaulted me was detained and sent home. Somebody who never delivered the detailed report I was asked to write by the police, the day after the trauma. Somebody who destroyed our transcripts and stole our money, and reveled in the joy of breaking us.
I could spin stories about Monarch all day. It felt like a never-ending nightmare drama show. That nightmare follows me. It has for the last six years. I wake up covered in sweat, head to toe. My dreams are vivid and dark, and I see the dirt on my hands and I feel the hands of that boy on me.
I feel there are two parts of my brain. I have my natural way of being and this learned way of being. This learned, manipulated version of what it means to be “good.” What it means to be right. It haunts me every day. It manifests as trust issues in friendships, romantic relationships, and random outbursts of anger at my parents, who really loved me, and did not understand what I was being exposed to. It is haunting, and it almost broke me.
I saw the light as soon as I left. I finished up high school incredibly well and made it out to my dream college across the country. Now this passion in me has been ignited me to do something.
I made a life for myself that I love but not everyone is as fortunate. So many people I knew are now gone. Too many. All under 25. So I will spend my life exposing the evil that has attempted to infect my space.
I make TikTok videos @danielthemammal every week, bringing awareness to our fight, and I have reached more people than I ever could have imagined. I see fellow survivors doing the same, and we are so beautiful and so strong.
I am proud to be a survivor. I survived and I do not see myself as less-than for that. In fact, in my vulnerability, I have found more love than ever. So for those we have lost and those we are fighting for, I will embody love. And I hope you can too.