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A question posed by HSBF Scott after reading my last entry:
I'm also quite curious about your diary entry. It occured to me after reading it that I never understood your reasons for not participating back then.
I didn�t answer him right off. I had to put myself back in my 13-year-old self first. Not always an easy thing to do. And truthfully, although I�ve thought about the incident on many occasions, my thought process is something I�ve avoided.
For the majority of my childhood, far into the age where I should have been past it, I believed there was evil lurking in my bedroom. I made a deal with the nameless, faceless monsters I knew lived there. I had until the count of three once I hit my threshold to turn on the light. If I made it before three, they had to leave me alone. If I got to three and the room was still dark, I was fair game. Many times, I ended up running back to the other end of the house, breathless and terrified. It would be hours until I�d try again unless forced. When forced, I always made someone else go first.
When I was about eight years old, I saw the first half of a Hardy Boys two-hour episode about voodoo and New Orleans. For a good two years, I couldn�t fall asleep at night. There were creatures in the bushes outside my window, in the frilly white curtains that covered them, in the shadowy corners of my room. These were different from the light monsters. These were voodoo creatures.
Even Fantasy Island was suspect. I was way too suggestible and way too skittish.
At 13, I could manage to walk into a darkened room, but just barely.
Enter Mr. Berkowitz and Facing History and Ourselves.
The first night, after the deer movie, I had nightmares about getting shot and witnessing people get shot and other horrible, violent things. In Social Studies the next day, we moved on to the actual Holocaust information. It horrified me.
I know. It�s a horrifying topic. It would horrify me even now, as a 32-year-old woman who is mostly no longer afraid of the dark. But at 13, although I was a very mature kid in so many ways, I wasn�t ready for it. And the only way I could fight back, try and protect myself, was to withdraw.
Mr. Berkowitz wasn�t a good enough teacher or a smart enough man to recognize what was happening. Instead, he never asked. He just assumed I didn�t �feel like� doing the work and gave me an F-.
I do not count him on my list of excellent teachers, although I did learn something from being in his class. Just not what he expected.
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