Q&A for Liz

I was recently asked some questions by a Patron and I wanted to answer them publicly so that everyone could see it. Sorry it took me a little while to answer but finishing this last chapter on time had me wrapped up.

1. Did you ever see or hear of anyone who was ever able to convince their parents to pick them up and take them home?

Elan was really good at controlling the information that came to us inmates. So only after Elan, looking back, was I able to infer that this did indeed happen. Because while in Elan, for example, even if Bill's parents did pull him out, the Elan staff would always cover it up. They would make up a cover story as to why Bill needed to leave, or in some cases, Bill would just disappear and it would be against the rules for any of us to talk about why it happened. This was a very scary aspect of Elan, they even could have killed someone and none of us would have had any clue.

So yeah, looking back, I can say that there were quite a few kids who simply "left" without any real explanation. I can guess that some of these kids must  been pulled out by their family. Maybe they were able to send a secret message to their parents somehow (through code words?) or possibly the parents did some research and/or were warned by someone else.

I do know that it was forbidden to speak in another language with parents once you had earned your weekly phone call. A kid told me once that they made that rule because an asian boy had been in Elan and he had been smart enough to sneak in words in Chinese while on the phone. And by the time they figured out what he was doing it was too late because one day everyone woke up and he was gone and then a new rule about foreign languages was suddenly made. So people put 2 and 2 together.

But it was definitely a rare thing. Out of maybe 300 kids, I would say 10 would be lucky to be suddenly pulled out for some reason or another. And I base this on the idea of being pulled out within your first year or 15 months. Lots of kids left Elan without being "graduates" but that was usually after 2 or 3 years. After Elan had gotten their money's worth. So any kid leaving within that first year was super rare and must have had to do with something happening behind the scenes, like parents finding out about Elan.

2. Did you ever see or hear of anyone who was able to not allow themselves to conform to the program? 

Yes, there is something amazing about the human will. There will always be some people who, for whatever reason, will simply refuse to conform. Maybe it doesn't necessarily have to do with a personality trait, as much as series of things. Like having a certain personality AND being at a certain point in your life AND making some early decisions that you end up sticking to out of spite or revenge or stubbornness.

Sometimes I wish I would have been one of those kids, when I look back. But other times, I am very glad that I was in a different place mentally. But yes, I know of at least 4 kids who simply made it their life's mission to not give Elan a single inch, and unfortunately I saw those kids end up completely destroyed and detached from reality after spending the better part of 12 - 18 months in The Corner. Yes, you read that right. I saw kids do stretches in isolation as long as a year. And Elan isolation was 24 hours a day, no school time, no outside time, nothing, just the corner of two walls.

Elan had a very heartless and methodical approach, so if you didn't get with the program, you would simply be thrown into isolation until you did. And if this robotic approach to punishment met a kid who had an equally strong/stubborn will, then they ended up spending month after month in an isolation room, until more than a year passed and those kids became more animal than human. They would jerk off openly, they would throw semen, piss and shit and spit at the poor kids forced to watch them, kids who were also Elan inmates. They would talk to themselves and rock back and forth and find opportunities to physically attack those us unfortunately enough to be ordered by staff to watch them.

I watched a lot of kids like this. That was one of Elan's most evil tricks, staff members were never put in harm's way, it was always us kids. We were forced to be the guards of other kids, whether we wanted to or not. And we saw some things. Things that we can never forget. Because you would see the progression. I saw kids go into isolation normal and over the span of a year, I watched that same kid turn into something... different. Something broken. Something sad. Deeply disturbing things that I have created a mental block for.

3. I noticed on the resident sheet you showed, that some people were 18 or over. What was keeping them at Elan at that point? Were they just so brainwashed that they wanted to stay? Were there kids who left on their 18th birthdays?

Turning 18 was a pivotal moment in Elan life. So every new resident was kind of categorized into how long it would take for them to turn 18. If it would be within a year or two, they were given more attention (brainwashing) concerning how they would survive if they left Elan without "graduating". Now if a kid was 14 or 15 when they got to Elan, they were certainly brainwashed and tormented in other ways, but not in the same way as that older new resident.

They were really, really, really good at this brainwashing aspect. I will get into that more as the comic unfolds, because I have really barely even touched on it. Seriously, out of 10 kids turning 18 in Elan, I would say that 2 or 3 had a strong enough head to go through with the "sign out" procedure. But again, it is not like that happened on the morning they turned 18, Elan would, illegally, continue to treat them as a prisoner. I even saw kids thrown into The Corner because they wanted to leave because it was now their right as a legal adult.

Another reason a lot of kids stayed past 18 was because Elan had ingeniously worked out agreements with school districts and court systems that forced kids to stay past 18 based on a "graduate" or "be punished" system. In other words, let's say that Jane was expelled from school because they caught her selling LSD. That school district had a deal with Elan and when Jane was sent to Elan, the agreement was that the school wouldn't press charges if Jane "graduated" but if Jane signed out at 18, then she would be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. 

So that was a shitty decision, because basically not only would Jane be charged with a crime she may have committed years ago, it would also make her entire time in Elan null and void. So she spent all that time in the Elan hellhole for nothing. Elan was smart like that, they had convinced many school and court systems to buy into that logic: "the offender graduates Elan or they leave to face their charges as if not a single day passed by (even if years passed by)". 

But the very short answer is yes, brainwashing. Beyond everything I have written to this point, the brainwashing was heavy and was the #1 reason people stayed past 18. It was full stop. It was "if you leave here you are going to die" and that message was screamed at you daily, month after month. And not just by staff, but all of the other inmates. Your friends would say it, your enemies would say it, it was literally written on the walls, you would have weekly groups where multiple people would focus just on you "signing out" and how you would immediately end up as a drug-addicted prostitute who would be dead within a year. They would spin almost fan-fiction-like stories of how it would specifically happen to you. 

Now take everything I have written and add sleep and food deprivation in an environment of never-ending peer-pressure, public humiliation, and cult-like punishment.

Yeah, they were good. They were very, very good at what they did. They destroyed you entire sense of reality. It wasn't about "oh, I am a strong person so I would never let myself get lost like that", it was more about the very real physical aspects of being hungry all the time and never getting enough sleep. Those things make your mind soft.

I am sure aspects of Elan, or the programs that eventually evolved into Elan, were based on studies done to Nazi and North Korean war prisoners. Because there was a certain systematic (and evil) logic to everything that must have been very well-researched. Who knows, maybe Elan was also collecting data on us to be gathered or sold to the next one down the line.

I have always been interested in picking apart the logic behind systems, it is just the way my brain works, even as a teen. So I always had a kind of third-person sight in my head that was analyzing these things, even as I survived through Elan in the first-person. 

I guess this comic is kind of like the final "product" of all those thought.