The Birth of A White-Collar Criminal

I always knew something big was off with the world. Always. I remember being a little girl in the kitchen & my mom giving me an empty glass jar with remnants of pasta sauce in it and asking me to throw it away, and I felt the sensation “this is wrong” as I dropped it in the trash can. Seeing homeless people on the street felt wrong. A punishing God felt wrong. “God isn’t like that,” I remember knowing. Everything just seemed weird. It felt like everyone was lying all the time. Nothing made sense to me and no one seemed interested or had any real answers to offer, it was always just “That’s the way it is”. I was always like, “BUT WHY?”. I stayed pretty quiet when I was little because I was so scared but in my teen years, I went into a serious rebellion. I remember the moment, not what happened exactly, but the moment when it clicked for me that no matter what I did, it didn’t make a difference, that I would still be cast as “the bad one” (scapegoat life). My seething anger reached its boiling point. “I’ll show you ‘bad’”, I thought.

“Learning love ain't easy child when all you see is war.”- Angels, Adrianne Lenker

One of my fantasies was for my parents to see my pain & be able to love me. Bethany Webster calls this “The Impossible Dream”.

I would see certain characters suffering in tv shows

Characters I identified with

and in these tv shows,

the parents would see their kids suffering

& they would all heal together, as a family.

I thought maybe this could happen to me.

I thought maybe if I showed my parents how much I was suffering

that they would see me, feel empathy,

realize I needed their love,

and maybe then they would be able to love me.

Like if I showed them I was in enough pain,

Then they would love me.

But in reality, quite the opposite happened.

It only made them even angrier with me.

It only made them blame me even more.

BOREDOM + ANGER: A RECIPE FOR DESTRUCTION.

The Cheater

The Criminal

The Addict

My anger came out in different ways.

“I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous.” - Frankenstein, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

“I fear nothing but letting your meaningless words scare me away from my desires.”- Mary Shelley (the film)

“The years brought puberty. Puberty brought sexuality. Sexuality brought anger and fear and confusion. And when the smoke cleared, where that sweet little girl once stood, there remained only a woman who scared the absolute shit out of everyone.” - Life Itself

“Fuck you I won’t do what you tell me.” - Rage Against The Machine

NORTH NODE CONJUNCT MARS NATAL ASPECT

“The Mars conjunction North Node has the button for self-destruction. If you failed to be understanding, you’d not be able to learn to direct your dark emotions. That is the cause of your self-destruction. Mars Conjunct North Node aspect can experience having an issue controlling their anger.” - https://www.spiritual-galaxy.com/mars-conjunct-north-node/

My North Node is conjunct my Mars in Aries (in the 1st house) & I am an Aries Rising… My rage was a force to be reckoned with and I didn’t have the tools back then to wield this power. My nickname for this precious girl (my Inner Teenager) is My Little Fire Tornado. The photo connected to this essay is me when I was sixteen.

Embracing Chaos & Mess to deal with Trauma

Alcohol & drugs came in as my co-pilots on my mission to self-destruct. First Alcohol, then Oxycontin, then Cocaine, then a combination of all three. Add in some Xanax and Valium and I was good to go.

Reckless behavior became my way to regulate my emotions.

What happens with early-onset Betrayal Bonding is that danger, fear, safety, and love all fuse together… you can’t tell the difference. When you don’t know the feeling of safety because your entire life has been rooted in terror, and you’ve been forced to bond with a caretaker who hurts you, it doesn’t lead to healthy choices.

School felt like a joke. Somewhere deep inside I just knew all the crap they were teaching us was meaningless so I decided to skip class and instead opted to go get drunk at whoever’s house was free from parents. Ideally, a pool was involved. I was truant both years I went to high school. When we went to truancy court I saw some friends there and I remember my mother being mortified. I found ways to cheat to keep my grades up and became a master at the Art of Cheating. Copying answers to homework assignments from the nice guys five minutes before class evolved into stealing answer keys to tests and trading the janitor a bottle of tequila for the keys to the school so we could sneak in after hours and change grades. I was generous with my cheating skills and shared them with anyone interested, of course. Free A’s for all! We had a list going and anyone who wanted their grades changed got it. We could only change the grades in classes where the teachers kept paper records, we didn’t know how to break into the computer system, unfortunately. My mom bribed me to become a cheerleader (I never wanted to be a stupid cheerleader, I hate football and being up in front of people). I got kicked off the squad in both my freshman and sophomore year. Freshman year because someone showed the coach a picture of me double-fisting it at a party (a drink in each hand, not the porn term, eh hem), sophomore year because I showed up drunk to a game. I snuck out nearly every night. We’d go out to “the field” where we’d make a big campfire and drink moonshine, or “the parking lot”, our high school parking lot, which I’ll never understand who came up with that dumb idea but surprisingly we never got kicked out. My parents gave me a ridiculous curfew but they both went to bed early so I would just come home, say goodnight to them, walk back to my room, and right out my window. My friends who dropped me off would just park down the street and wait for me. One night someone locked the back sliding glass door after I had snuck out. I got locked out and slept outside hiding behind a tree. One night I accidentally fell asleep at my friend's house and had to sneak out in the morning while his mom was making breakfast. His older brother drove me home. The plumber was supposed to be at my house that morning, I thought for sure I was busted, but miraculously he hadn’t shown up yet & I made it back in through my window unnoticed in broad daylight. There were also sneak-ins. My boyfriend would show up at my window with nothing on but his gold, terrycloth robe. One night my mom heard us laughing; we heard her coming down the hallway and he hid under my covers. Luckily my mom turned on the hallway light right before she opened my bedroom door and she didn’t see him hiding. When my parents found out I was sneaking out they bought an alarm system. I rigged the alarm so that I could open my window without it going off. When they found my window rig, they bolted my window shut. I had my boyfriend bring over a ladder and snuck out of my brother's window on the second floor. I had sex on a random boat we snuck onto outside of a friend's lake house. I had some fun.

Red Hot Chili Peppers was playing Under The Bridge the first time I did oxycontin. I didn’t even know what it was, back then I didn’t care, I’d take anything. I loved the ritual of rubbing off the pill’s light blue coating, crushing it up with a bill and a credit card, forming the powder into a line, rolling up the bill, and snorting it. I loved the feeling when it first hit, the itching, the numbness (which at the time, for me, felt like relaxation)… it felt like heaven to me. I definitely thought love was in the drugs.

The first time I did cocaine I was at a guy named Seth’s apartment. Another guy named Jared was there, the older brother of a guy I had a crush on. Seth and Jared were older and already out of high school. I saw the coke on the table and asked for some. At first, they didn’t want to give it to me but I acted like I had done it before, like it was no big deal. When I finally talked them into giving me a line, I fell in love at first snort. I remember I was with a friend, I don’t remember who, but she had passed out downstairs and I drove us home in her car. I didn’t even have my license. I felt amazing. Unstoppable. The combination of alcohol and cocaine gave me confidence. Numbed the pain and kept me feeling high while still coherent and what felt like focused.

My Villain Era: Fighting Back Against Authority

(Spoiler Alert: destruction is not fighting the system)

Unlike in school, I felt the criminal world at least allowed me to use my brain.

All I knew for sure was that I did not agree with the people who were running the show. This applied to all areas of life; not only in my own family system but in school & government systems as well. Nothing in the world made any sense to me and not only did it not make any sense, I felt it was an outrage and that the injustices were unacceptable. I wanted no part in school or society at large. I hated all of it. I found a kind of camaraderie in the underground world. The people felt more real, more honest. There was an unspoken understanding within the criminal community, it felt like a sense of loyalty. None of us agreed with how things were, we all knew it was total bullshit. I found community with my fellow disobedients. Also, something about being close to these “tough” guys gave me a sense of being protected.

Now, I first started shoplifting in elementary school. Me and my best friend Lauren would steal jewelry and hair adornments from Claire’s. Lauren was adopted and we were both pretty angry at the world, even in elementary school. I was so bored (partially due to the fact that it wasn’t safe for me to excel at anything due to the whole narcissistic mother situation) and the shoplifting gave me an adrenaline rush. In high school, I took my shoplifting skills to the next level. At first, it was bags of clothes from Nordstrom because they didn’t have the ink & metal detector tags. Then I learned how to remove those pesky tags by creating only a very small hole with very small scissors that I brought with me so that I could steal from anywhere; my one rule was that the store had to be corporate-owned. No stealing from the small mom n pop shops- that was not cool. The first time I was arrested was in high school for stealing from Urban Outfitters. I had gotten cocky, missed a tag, and made the stupid mistake of going back into the store when the detectors went off and an employee called me out. It was only a couple of shirts totaling under $100 and they probably would have let me go with a ticket except that I had zero identification on me & they figured out the entire thing was completely premeditated- I went into the store with no wallet & empty bags. When they took out a polaroid camera to take a picture of me so that they could hang my face on their ‘shoplifter wall of shame’ in the back of the store, I gave them my middle finger. They didn’t think it was funny. I was escorted, in handcuffs, out through the front of the store (they could have taken me out the back way) and spent the night in jail. I remember my cellmate was singing in Spanish and I couldn’t stop laughing so they separated us. I also remember one of the guards bringing me an apple to eat. Interesting that it was an apple, no? The forbidden fruit… I ate it.

The next step in my criminal evolution was credit card fraud. I was, of course, best friends with the girlfriend of one of the guys who bought the stolen credit card numbers from the dark web and put them onto fake cards. The guys would send us on missions to buy things with these fake cards because we were young, pretty, innocent-looking white girls and employees were less likely to suspect us of being frauds. We played it well, being extra friendly and chatty at the register so as to distract from the fact that the last 4 numbers on the cards didn’t match the ones on the screen, or so that when one card didn’t work and we pulled out another one, we were less likely to be questioned. We went wild with these cards. Louis Vuitton, Burberry, thousand dollar dinners and weekends at The Mansion on Turtle Creek. I thought we were stealing from banks. One time we got pulled over with stolen plates on our way back from a booze run. We used to use stolen plates when doing any kind of card fraud and had forgotten to take them off the night before. While we were getting pulled over we came up with a fake story. We knew the cops well by then and knew they would separate us. They did, of course, but we all said the same thing: “someone must have stolen our legitimate plates while we were out last night and replaced them with these stolen ones”. They searched the car and didn’t find anything so they took me home while continuing to question my other (male) friends. Had they just looked under the mat in the trunk they would have found our real plates and our story would have completely fallen apart but they didn’t. My parents weren’t home when the cops dropped me off (yet another miracle moment) and my friends picked me back up half an hour later. I was fifteen years old.

I hit my lowest point early on in life.

The most shameful thing I’ve ever done in my entire life was when I stole a couple of diamond necklaces from the mom of one of my friends. A woman who had let me stay with her and her family. A woman who had stood up for me and tried to help me. An ally. A friend. It was my most desperate moment. My friend's family was very wealthy & I thought they wouldn’t miss the necklaces, & I thought while they wouldn’t be missed by this family, these necklaces could save my life because I thought if I could sell them, then I could use the money to run away. I was wrong (on so many levels). They knew it was me because the housekeeper knew me and saw me in the house that day. When my friend's mom came to my house and gracefully asked me to please give her the necklaces back, I couldn’t face her and I lied. The next day, I cowardly left the necklaces in my friend's car. The guilt, shame & remorse I felt from my actions led to my first attempt at suicide. I decided I deserved to die and took a bottle of Tylenol. You’d think I’d take the plethora of prescription pills I had access to but I never bought my own drugs, they were always just given to me when I was with my drug-dealing friends. There’s no way they would have just given me a handful of pills to take home. The oxys were $80 a pop. When I came-to in the hospital, after getting my stomach pumped, my mother was standing over me telling the doctors I was doing all of this for attention. I think I was. I really needed help. The doctors asked me if I still wanted to kill myself and I said yes. So they sent me to a rehabilitation facility. When I woke up I was handcuffed to a reclining chair. Like a mental patient. I was a mental patient. By this time I was addicted to the oxycontin and went through withdrawal in rehab. I was pulling my hair and banging on the walls, screaming like a banshee. They put me on trazodone. We called it the horse tranquilizer. Not nearly as good as the oxy but it did knock me out. When I got out of the rehabilitation center I was so embarrassed, everyone knew what had happened & I couldn’t bear it. I chose to finish out my high school career at an alternative school; a school for troubled kids. I never went back to my old high school. This was early in my junior year. All I remember from alternative school is snorting oxycontin off of my math textbook in the bathroom stall and finding excuses to be in the library where I would watch Romeo + Juliet and The Patriot over and over and over again. I have no idea how I graduated. My boyfriend ended up getting caught stealing computers from the high school and was expelled and I was fresh out of rehab from a suicide attempt with an oxycontin addiction. It was a rough time. I was sixteen years old.