Wilderchild: A Biography

My life has been less than graceful, to put it nicely, so I'm going to be following my pattern by writing this in a less than graceful way. I'm not going to worry too much on being chronologically correct because I don't even really know when certain things happened in my own life. So I guess just sit back and enjoy the roller coaster.

When I was 16, I was an angsty little brat. I struggled with drug abuse, an eating disorder, and a handful of mental health diagnoses that didn't actually fit. I had already been hospitalized twice of suicide attempts and my worst attempt would be happening relatively soon after my birthday. I had been in two very messy relationships and was onto dating a new girl every month, just wasting my time until I hoped my life would end. Like I said- angsty.

Eventually I'll go into more detail about my life before I was 16, but for now this is what you get since it's the most exciting, yet awful part of my life. On October 27th of 2017 I was sent to wilderness therapy. Now, in case you have absolutely no idea what wilderness therapy is, I'm going to explain it to you in the simplest way I possibly can: I was sent to survival backpack through the Utah desert with a group of strangers at 16. You will definitely learn more as these stories go on, but that's at least a start for you.

Just like the rest of my life, the way I was taken into wilderness was not graceful. At 2:07 AM I was awoken to my dad telling me that it was time to wake up, which of course I tried to ignore, thinking he was going to tell me it was time for school. Then I noticed two strange women walk into my room. They began to give me orders, like telling me to get dressed and find my shoes, before they each took one of my arms and walked me out of my house and into an all black car.

Now one thing you all need to know about me is that when you wake me up in the middle of the night, I will do anything you ask of me as long as it means I get to go back to bed. So my survival skills are definitely not where they should be. I did not realize that I was being driven over an hour to an airport to be flown across the country until we were about 30 minutes away from said airport, all because these two women kept telling me I could sleep when this was all over. But once I realized what was going on, I went catatonic. I was screaming and crying, just begging for a chance to get to talk to my parents, my boyfriend, or my best friend. I promised I would change, that I would get help at home, that I would do anything they asked as long as it meant I didn't have to be ripped away from everything I knew and loved. But there was no point.

My transporters(or "goons" as I came to know them as) managed to get me on the flight on time, with relatively no problems. I knew my only way out of this was to go through, so I bit my tongue, refuse to talk or eat, and tried to silently signal to others that I wasn't where I was supposed to be. My Goons were very little help when it came to finding out where I was going, too. They could only give me small clues like "make sure you drink lots of water, it's easy to get dehydrated out there" and "you'll only be there 6 to 8 days, don't worry". It was not helpful.

We landed in Los Vegas around 8 AM, I believe, but honestly you could tell me I got there at 5 in the afternoon and I'd believe you. I had never seen so many slot machines or people in one place, coming from the rural Midwest, and I immediately knew that I never wanted to go back there. We somehow managed to work our way through this giant airport and to our rental car before heading out into the desert. Seeing so much sand and red landscape was shocking to me, and the dry air made me sick, so I laid down and pretended to sleep, hoping that my goons would give me some sort information as to where I was going. They didn't.

We ended up in a town named Saint George, Utah where I was told I had to get a physical before we reached our last destination. We went into a building I thought was a chiropractor's office, but we all make mistakes in stressful times. While we waited there for about an hour, my goons somehow got me to eat half of a Jimmy John's sandwich which I am very thankful for now. After my physical was over, I was handed a paper with the name "Wingate Wilderness Therapy" on the top and a list of terms I had to agree with. After signing the paper, my Goons wished me good luck and sent me off with a Native American woman, who I unfortunately can't remember the name of but who was very kind, yet stern, with me, and a man named Rob.

During our hour drive to Wingate's field office outside of Kanab, Utah, I had a massive panic attack after being told that I would be in the program for 6 to 8 WEEKS. Not days, weeks. My 16 year old brain could not comprehend the idea of being away from my life for 6 to 8 weeks, and I was very vocal about how long I thought that was with everyone I came into contact with. After we arrived at the field office, I was brought into a room on the second floor and told I had to strip out of all of my cloths, down to just skin, remove all of my jewelry, and that I had to put on the clothes they gave me. The most protest I gave was when they told me I had to remove the necklace my boyfriend gave me or else they'd cut it off of me. I felt horrible and degraded, completely stripped of everything that made me who I was and forced to fit their mold. It was definitely one of the biggest reality checks I had going into my treatment journey.

Side note: While I was getting changed, I was asked multiple times by different people if I wanted any of the pizza they had in the staff office before taking me out in the field, and was even told I'd regret it if I didn't take some. I declined every time and that is my biggest regret of treatment.

After getting dress, they took me downstairs into what looked like a storage room and started pulling things off the shelves. I got a huge red backpack that dwarfed my tiny, 100 pound frame, a giant sleeping bag, a bag of food, a bag of clothes, a blue tarp, some pink paracord, a silver pot, a notebook, and a pen. These were all I had to survive with for the next 96 days of my wilderness journey. And after they taught me the correct way to put my pack on, we started the long drive out into the never-ending Utah desert.