“THEY” Cripple Society Volume 1: Who are “THEY” and how do they do it? An Expose in True to Life Narrative Exploring Stories of Discrimination. Cleon E. Spencer

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ me. It was another burden to carry that year, and I must say it affected my overall performance. Nevertheless, I had what can be described as a good year, passing with honors. The thought that this was my final year of high school and just months away was my freedom from pettiness helped me to struggle on to do well. In university things will be better than this, I told myself; and then there was my parents - they so wanted me to go to university, and I wanted to please them. Of course I did want to go on to university myself also,” she hastened to add at the end of her statement.

      Owen gave his head a quick twist of admiration. Then he asked, “Gilda, how did your parents figure in your high school years? You mentioned earlier how they misinterpreted events in your grade five experience, but in high school, being much older, you were probably better able to explain.”

      “Yes, I was better able to explain, and I talked to my mother a great deal about it. She developed a sense of sympathetic understanding about the matter. I talked to my father about it some too. My mother suggested to my father that perhaps I should go to a private school. He didn’t agree. He is a self made man who came up the hard way. He felt it would be good for his children to do the same. My brother had done all right. I should harden myself to the knocks and keep pressing on. That was his philosophy on the matter. I didn’t push the idea of private school with him, because I knew it would be a financial burden for the family. We had a good standard of living all right, but I wouldn’t say we were wealthy. My father had not always received the salary he was getting at the time of my high school years, so he was really just then getting financially established at this point in life.”

      “Thank you Gilda,” said Owen.

      Collin asked, “And you really did think, Gilda, that there would be none of this pettiness, as you called it, in university?”

      “Oh boy! was I mistaken on that one,” replied Gilda. “Should I tell about that phase of my life now?” she asked Dr. Eldren.

      “Yes,” replied Dr. Eldren. “It’s all very interesting, go right ahead.”

      “Well,” said Gilda, “I went into university like a butterfly that had just been freed from the cocoon. Little did I know that butterflies have their problems of survival too!”

      “Same problems, just in a different setting?” queried Collin.

      “Yes,” answered Gilda, “the cocoon even with the protection of camouflage often gets trampled under foot and crushed into the ground. But the butterfly with all its openness can just as easily be attacked in flight, brought to the ground again and crushed mercilessly into it.”

      “With all its openness - and color,” added Collin, emphasizing the word ‘color’.”

      “A butterfly is colorful all right, and easily spotted,” responded Gilda as though she could now find meaning in Collin’s statement.

      Gilda proceeded with her story. “The big disappointment of my life came when I was only a very short time into my first semester at university. Where I thought I would be free, I soon learned I was in for more of the same, in some ways even worse. As the semester proceeded, this butterfly was attacked more and more by a hostile hawk who knew every sly trick in the book, and many that weren’t. He tried to down me at every turn.

      Then there was the second one. She wasn’t bright enough to be tricky. She knew her subject well, but not much else. She just brooded and snooted in my presence, pushed up her lip in rejection, sneered in scorn, ignored me passively trying always to make herself feel superior to me. Here was a person whom I would say had spent her years specializing in her subject, the professional student type, earning her degrees, but with little contact with the active world. She was a characterless, socially inexperienced scholar, whom as I said, knew her subject but not the world in which it had its setting. And she had a chip on her shoulder because she wasn’t always the center of attention.”

      “What was her overall appearance like, Gilda?” asked Collin.

      Gilda blinked and puzzled a little as though once again, she was struggling to grasp the full significance of Collin’s question. “Oh, she wasn’t too bad that way,” remarked Gilda casually again. “If she would buy some sensible clothes and care for herself a little more, she’d look quite okay, but you know, she never got out of grade school as far as choice of clothes is concerned. Anyway, I pity her more than anything else, but she and the other guy, the hawk, each in their own separate ways, sent my spirits down so much that towards the middle of the first semester it happened. I felt I couldn’t take any more of this. The disappointment of having to take more of the same in university sent me into despair, and I had a nervous breakdown, if that’s what you can call it; I was totally exhausted from working so hard and under so much stress, a combination of the two,” she added.

      A momentary silence followed. It was broken by an emotional remark by Leo. “Oh-h Gilda, you didn’t let them do that to you, did you? he asked as tears became noticeable in his eyes.

      “I’m afraid so Leo. The butterfly was attacked in mid-air and brought low, but,” continued Gilda in a firm tone of voice, “not for long, not for long.”

      Leo’s face brightened. The other group members perked up.

      “Not for long?” repeated Owen.

      “No, just for three weeks. That’s all I was out - just three weeks,” said Gilda confidently, “and that brief period was the big turning point in my life.”

      “You briefly mentioned this to me before, now tell us more,” urged Owen.

      Gilda pursued her story, “Our family doctor recommended me to a psychiatrist, who in turn recommended that I be admitted to the psychiatric ward of a general hospital. I followed this recommendation, and while there was on moderately heavy medication and started psychotherapy sessions with the same psychiatrist.”

      “It did you good?” asked Owen.

      “Ugh” retorted Gilda with such an emphatic rejection of Owen’s statement that it seemed to be almost out of character for her. “It got my back up,” she said firmly.

      “Oh-h-h,” said Owen.

      “Yes,” affirmed Gilda.

      “Why? asked Owen.

      “It was the whole tone of the therapy that did it,” replied Gilda, now more calmly. “The whole approach of the therapy was to the effect that I wasn’t approaching these people properly; I wasn’t diplomatic enough with them; I was letting this and that disturb me; I was allowing myself to be too easily upset; I wasn’t very effective at coping; I was making mountains out of mole hills; these people weren’t all that bad.”

      “He told you that?” asked Owen.

      “Much of it he inferred. Some he told me outright,” replied Gilda, “but in the course of the therapy, that was the kind of thinking he was steering me into. There I was, after a young lifetime of rather successfully doing battle with these warped characters that always appeared on my horizon, being told now it was all my fault.”

      “What did you do about it?” asked Owen, now with hushed tones of astonishment.

      “One day, after nearly two weeks of therapy, and when I could take no more of his inferences, I screamed at him. I screamed good and loud, with tearful anger saying, ‘Don’t you see what you’re doing to me, you madman! Leave me alone and let me go home.”

      Owen СКАЧАТЬ