Final sentences from Part I: When I graduated I had no idea what I was going to do with my art degree, so I enrolled in a two-year training program at my local hospital to become a radiologic technologist. Bad idea.
I found myself in a class full of mostly girls who had just graduated from high school. I was the only student there with a college degree, which meant that I could become a supervisor if I finished the program.
But I was out of my element. I was in a heavily structured environment where obedience was the rule and conformity was a virtue. It was not just that I had to follow official rules. It was considered odd for me to even walk down the hall alone unless I had an official reason.
One teacher said she was worried whenever she saw me walking down the hall alone, unlike my classmates who traveled in giggling flocks.
The pressure to stay with the group at all times went against my natural tendencies, so I took a lot of deep breaths that year. I had always been afflicted with social anxiety, and deep breaths were supposed to be a simple, drug free way to relax; at R.T. school I needed all the help with that I could get.
By the time each class ended, my anxiety had reached a fever pitch, fueled by classmates who were loud, militantly opinionated, and short-tempered.
They called Shannon Faulkner, the first girl to enter the Citadel, a bitch for “messing with” long-standing traditions. While I admired her courage, they were convinced that she deserved any amount of abuse that she received. Some declared that if they ever encountered her in person, they would abuse her themselves.
Many of them met the world with self-righteous hostility. One girl, Carol, was vocally opposed to the “patient bill of rights” which was outlined as part of hospital policy, such as the right to refuse treatment. “Patients ought not to have those rights!” she said.
When in class, I reminded myself to take deep breaths to clear my mind but even the deepest of breaths could only go so far. Being around my classmates for more than an hour was unendurable. I desperately needed to get away from them.
On breaks I would go to a restroom as far away as possible from the ones the other girls went to. But since none of them had the same need to recharge that I did, my behavior was viewed as untrustworthy.
Meanwhile, the other girls went to the restroom in the lunchroom lobby, and always in giggling flocks. My detour meant that I arrived later to the lunchroom than the other girls did, and some badgering began.
The patient rights opponent Carol said, “Why are you always late for lunch?” There were no rules about what time anyone had to arrive at lunch, but I had broken the cardinal rule of consensus which was “Never do anything different from the group.”
In my absence, the girls had speculated that I was having a torrid affair with an orderly in a broom closet. It sounds funny now, and if I had thought they were only joking, maybe I would have shrugged and laughed. But suspicion, gossip, and fear of being gossiped about fueled the environment.
I learned that in every class, there was a scapegoat. In the class of second year students there was a bullying victim, a pretty and thoughtful girl who was not as outspoken as the others. They put her down, made fun of her behind her back, and were rude to her, saying her name with an exaggerated drawl to show their contempt for her.
Every student was terrified of becoming the class scapegoat. In the classroom, talking to only one person without the entire group being able to hear was deemed rude. Everything spoken was to be spoken loudly. Otherwise, the girls worried that they were being talked about. “What are you saying? Is it about me? Can you talk louder?”
Everything that was said set off reactions from the girls in the surrounding desks, fanning outward until the entire class had heard and had a chance to respond to everything anyone had to say.
The hive behavior went beyond speech. Once, I had taken out my billfold and a girl next to me saw a photograph of me with my boyfriend, and she asked to see it. I passed it to her. She took a long look at it and passed it to the girl behind her, and that girl did the same, until the photograph had made an entire circuit.
Later on a girl said, “You are so quiet, what do you and your boyfriend do, just sit around and not ever say anything to each other? Seems like that would be boring.”
I had not heard those kinds of comments since I was bullied in the sixth grade. In high school and college, I had gotten along with most students.
But the RT students were a radical contrast to my college classmates. I had been a hippyish art major. The art department was a fitting place for a girl who had decided early in her adolescence that weirdness was a virtue and not a flaw.
College had been a place where girls dyed their hair Easter egg pink and chalked animal rights messages on sidewalks. In the art department there was no greater compliment than for someone to call you “weird.”
I had gone from that to this: a place where even going to the restroom alone was considered a subversive act punishable by rumor-mongering and interrogation. How had I gotten to this point?
I had been indecisive in college about how I was going to make a living. I had always wanted to be a writer, but writing professionally seemed to be the equivalent of being a starving street side musician begging for coins with the strumming pleas of a guitar.
A few years after college, RT school had seemed like occupational salvation, and at the time I had no backup plan. I decided that maybe I needed to take in more deep breaths, many more – more and deeper, or I would suffocate.
During the first part of the day, classroom lectures were given until lunchtime. Afterward was clinical training. I loved the lectures. I had never taken a survey physics course before, and physics was part of the coursework. I was excited to get a glimpse of what I had missed in college. I absorbed the lectures and made a hundred on almost every test.
But in clinical practice, I felt lost. There was a pattern of expected behavior, of buzzing purposeful movement. The other girls seemed to know what to do by instinct. When not working, they gathered into gossipy huddles and whispered among themselves. I was no fan of gossipy huddles, which fueled my social anxiety.
Socially befuddled, I had to constantly ask myself what I needed to do next. The machines were daunting metal behemoths, heavy, full of tubes and wires. I have never been mechanically inclined, and the instructions on how to use them were always delivered rapid-fire, and only once.
I got lost in the maze of hallways, was never quite sure where to go next, felt disoriented by the flux of white clad bodies traversing the hallways and behind me, the sounds of giggling and rustling fabric.
In the clinical area, the greater the number students were around me, the more I felt drawn to the empty examination rooms, anxious for a place where I could be alone and gather my thoughts and have peace from the gabbling voices, rising and falling, all around me.
Meanwhile, I was seen as too isolated and quiet to be trusted. When I appeared at the lunch table, sudden silences fell, glances were exchanged, and then the questions came: Where have you been? Who are you having an affair with? What shady thing have you been doing rather than going to the bathroom with us and giggling and worrying about your hair like everyone else?
But my problems went beyond social rejection and mechanical ineptitude. I was alarmed at how callously the students and even established employees treated some of the patients, especially the ones who were the least able to defend themselves.
One incident in particular still haunts me.
(To be continued)