The Quiet Room

TRIGGER WARNING!

The following story is a true accounting of events that took place in a special education classroom at Cory Elementary in Denver, Colorado*, during the 1990s. Neurodivergent readers and those suffering from PTSD in particular should proceed with caution.

*location added since time of edit on 11/15/21. Decided I don't mind stepping on a few toes over this.

A small, wooden booth with a door and a knob stood in the corner of the classroom. The "quiet room" was what it was called, it was a place for troubled kids to go isolate themselves and calm down. My understanding of it is that all special ed classrooms had one. Kids with learning disabilities, behavioral problems, or mental issues were all put in the special class, all had access to the quiet room to cool off if things got hard.

How ironic that a place for quiet was where most of the screaming came from.

In the beginning, I was in a program for gifted students. Life took a hard left turn at fourth grade when I was diagnosed with depression and put in special ed myself. Mom went right along with it, no doubt hoping I'd get the help that she never did when she was diagnosed in her youth. Learn coping mechanisms and reintegrate back into the mainstream classes in a safe environment, that was the idea, the big sales pitch. It was a lie.

The teachers would only use their physical submission techniques on us if we were a danger to ourselves or others. Another lie. They had some funny ideas about what counted as dangerous.

Talk out of turn? Off to the quiet room. Raise your voice? Quiet room. Spend too long on an assignment, linger in the bathroom, tell a funny joke or laugh too loud, these were all the reasons they had for ever sending me in there. And every time I emerged from that place, part of my innocence was gone.

Into the box with the teacher I would go, and as soon as the door was closed, I'd be face down in the rug, legs crossed and hands forced up behind my back between my shoulders, screaming and crying into the floor. She would whisper into my ear then that she'd let go if I stopped, while pushing my hands up further all the while. Sometimes it would be her, sometimes it would be her big bruiser of an assistant, sometimes they'd both go in with a kid together. Oh, I'm sure the poor lug was just following orders, but then, so were the Nazis.

I can't say for sure what happened to the other kids in there. In a way, having to listen to them was even worse than experiencing the abuse first hand. We were all grade school kids, all with unstable, fragile minds and great, irrational fears to contend with, we could imagine all kinds of things. I figure the screamers still had some fight in them. There was this one girl, I think she was autistic or had ADHD, possibly both, who would be very loud and exuberant most days. Irritating, but harmless. Every day she'd act like that, and every day, she'd be taken to the room, and we'd all get to hear her cries. Occasionally, the teacher would get her meathead accomplice to do the deed outside the quiet room, like some kind of sick demonstration or statement. You know the definition of insanity, right? Doing the same thing, over and over again, expecting different results. We were all supposed to be there to heal, and the woman in charge of that was utterly insane. We stood no chance.

It wasn't always screams we heard though, there were times when all we'd hear was quiet sobbing, the sound of defeat and surrender. The victim would just give up and take it. But the worst sound of all from the quiet room?

Silence. The silence of being broken completely, resistance gone, can't even cry anymore. By then, we'd gotten to a point when we could listen to what's happening in there and only think how grateful we were that it wasn't any of us this time. I was broken that badly, over time. At first I shrieked and fought, I even publicly called out my teacher for the monster she was. I was the kind of kid who stood up to bullies, and I learned the hard way what happens when the bully you stand against is one in a position of authority. With my spirit broken, I couldn't fight anymore, but at least then she didn't make it hurt as much, unless she was angry, or feeling bored. She seemed to enjoy "sitting" on kids. The time that I auditioned for a talent show and did an impression of her threatening to do just that in her subtle, creepy way, she flipped out so hard, I thought my arms were going to pop out of their sockets.

You'd think that my getting out into mainstream classes again would fix everything. No, not by a long shot. The special ed classes were mixed grades, what we "studied" was busy work, for which there would be hell to pay if we didn't color in every inch of those picture with our crayons, so I had fallen far behind the other gifted students. My grades went to hell, and I was treated like a subhuman idiot by my classmates and the other teachers alike. My eyes were opened to the fact that those adults running my little world knew what was happening in the quiet room, heard the noise coming from within whenever they walked by in the halls, and they did nothing. It was all normal to them, it was all by design, and I had to stand by and watch my classmates be conditioned to accept and normalize it in the same way, from that point forward. One way or another, within the special class or without, we were all subject to being conditioned to go about our busy lives as if we couldn't see the little kid being tortured right in front of us. It was like being betrayed by the whole world, all at once.

I couldn't trust anyone, anymore, not even myself. My sense of personal value and purpose both died. I wanted to die. Start over again, in another place, as another person. Hit the reset button on my life. But life wasn't one of the video-games that I loved, and if it weren't for those games, I would've killed myself a long time ago. I spent my teen years distancing myself from life and people, pushing away family and lashing out at anyone who dared to be a friend. I never dated, never had a social life or a job, never learned how to drive, either, just played my games and waited to die. Went to college later on, tried to rise from my self-imposed grave, all for nothing because I didn't know what I was dealing with.

Over six years ago, I started therapy and learned that, in the special ed classroom where I was supposed to be learning to cope with depression, I instead walked away with social anxiety, PTSD, and acute paranoia. A little over a year ago, I spoke to an intuitive and took an interest in Reiki and energy work and really embraced my gifts as an empath. I'm still in therapy, still learning about additional sources of trauma in my past, but I'm working to get past these things. There's a lot of lost time for me to catch up on, and I am currently living my life as best and as full as I can, with the hope of becoming a Reiki master to heal minds and hearts damaged like my own, and publish epic science-fantasy books to inspire those I help to kick ass and take names in life. Together, someday we'll change the world. If there isn't much I can do on my own, fine, then let me be the butterfly that triggers hurricanes with the flapping of my wings. Don't look for an ending here, this story is long from over.

Unlock strength within/

Rise in defiance of fear/

Way of the Seeker.