chapotraphouse

I have actually taken inspiration from it for bits of fiction I've written, using people who were actually involved as characters with changed names and the like, but you have a good point. Stories like this have been told before, but for every one person who's been through this shit or worse religious cult reactionary garbage, who writes a tell-all book, there's a hundred like me who tell the stories when pressed or among comrades, and countless thousands who maybe weren't repeated direct victims or never turned to the very ideology they were accused of every damn month, who don't tell their story, and might be convinced that they imagined it or it wasn't as bad as they remember it being, they were just young and scared.

Finding a way to tell the whole story in a chronological timeline or in an impact severity order, and make it funny and relatable and include my own wondering between incidents of if it was really that bad, then reminded by the next one it was, and the way it changes your understanding of danger and safety and self-preservation to be in the environment of fear that such things on a frequent but irregular basis creates, and the way you don't even consider it abnormal or an environment of fear, you think it's just what church school is like and sure it's psychological danger from the adults meant to care for you, but the public schools are full of worse physical dangers from the older kids (that's what Mum told me every time I told her how much I hated Catholic school, but she never really heard what I was trying to say - maybe a guardian who hadn't lived through the Cold War would have seen it through different eyes and heard me out), might be both therapeutic for me and helpful for other people who've dealt with that kind of thing, whether the authorities were Catholic churchmen, another type of theocratic authority, or some other form of autocrat or authority over kids abusing that position, and whether they were hunting commies, or heretics, or any other undesirables or scapegoats. There's probably a point to be made here about clerical fascism, even.

Maybe what happened to me can do some good, if I can use it to make people laugh and help some victims of similar shit understand "that really did happen, you're not crazy, and you didn't deserve any of it." Or to help people who think this is just what conservative church schools are like understand that it's not normal to be called into the school a couple times a month to be present while their kid's asked the Communist Party question in the main office by someone from church leadership.