STOP THAT, MISS BRIGGS!

Healing is Justice

The results of tracking Miss Briggs down while going from one online source to another helped me to see her in ever stronger stages over about a year as a real person with a life, which provided the first loosening of the Magical Thinking noose, a process that accelerated when I re-visited the classroom.

Finally sending her a letter telling everything -- my sharp memories of the incidents, the long-term damage they did and my current belief in restoration instead of revenge – produced no response from the former teacher. And though writing that letter did not bring closure, it was still very good to understand that she likely had read it.

Oh, regarding any chance I had contacted the wrong Gloria Briggs – skill at scrutinizing public records is the biggest side effect of working in journalism. And reporting for AP and UPI up through the late 1990s gave me a head start developing internet savvy, because wire services were the internet for the 150 years before that technology arrived on everyone's desk.

As I have moved from seeing Miss Briggs as some mythical being to a truculent mortal, and her treatment of me as sabotage of the very system I was sure had arranged it, I have reached the point where the fear boilers on in me since 1967 are starting to lose their steam.

I can look at videos of the Astrodome game without immediately clamming up, though the jitters still come a few minutes after the opening tip off. My tendencies toward suspicion and an alarmist outlook on many matters, which her tactics engendered, are starting to wane.

What hurt me is not so much what the teacher did. It's what she launched. And at such an impressionable time -- the age when a child is just developing a sense of their social role in the group.

So, I must focus on the effects, not her actions, so that she does not keep her power over me.

Understanding her motive as just professional vanity -- indignation over having to pay special attention to one child – douses the nearly 50-year notion that Miss Briggs possessed ethereal or supernatural traits.

I'll be honest -- something in me misses the intrigue in the longtime theory that I was involved in something otherworldly going on in that classroom. Only a little something, though -- what Miss Briggs did was malicious and very harmful to my mind, social skills and academic work and, worst of all, it undermined my trust in my family.

Doubtless my confusing the 4th grade teacher's abuse for affection sent me into adolescence and beyond laboring under a dangerous inability to distinguish between the two. Deep inside, I unconsciously was still affected by the belief that some power had taken me, alone among the whole classroom, on a strange ride. I had been a chosen one, but in a manner which made that distinction seem one and the same as vulnerability.

Today, I am learning that a world of justice and love doesn't mean that everybody will be safe from evil, or that those who harm innocents will just explode, ending suffering as if by divine intercession.

Some people will be victims of harm doers into whose way they are placed through random misfortune. Though we as individuals can do much to safeguard ourselves, and our society must make laws and policies which fight abuse, there are no guarantees in life.

What I experienced is certainly not as horrible as the sexual abuse or beatings some people suffer, yet it was its own kind of awfulness, made particularly difficult to grapple with because it is undefinable in the modern terms we hear.

No one deserves abuse, and it is unevenly dished out to some. For those who survive, the true reservoir of justice is the ability to heal. That is everyone's.