David Marchino | This is living

Testing: One, Two: How abuse shapes the college experience

By David Marchino 06/24/15 11:01pm

Getting into Penn was the culmination of a plot hatched many years ago. I remember the moment it became legitimized, the second that fantasy crystallized into a true life goal. My father had just won the most recent custody battle against my mother, and my little brother and I sat in the dining room with hot tears running down our faces. My brother, even then, was a man of action, picking up an infomercial Ginsu knife — the same he swore to slit his thin child throat with if dad got us — and started digging it into our mahogany table. “I WANT OUT,” he carved the words. I watched him do this, this little 7 year old, scrawling with all the desperate might of an inmate, and promised that I would get to some place better. I was the man of thought. I would get a scholarship.

This particular separation of my parents, though especially severe this time, was, like the rest, only temporary. But the continuation of the instability and abuse at home assured me that my promise still needed to be kept. My mother was born with mild schizophrenia and obsessive compulsive disorder, among other things. She is coy about her diagnoses and symptoms. Her medicines and treatment, however, are abundant, her ticks constant, her life erratic. This, compounded with my father’s drug abuse and violent behavior, recalibrated my understanding of education. College was not simply a blessed opportunity — it was my only chance. My life’s focus became survival, maintaining my own health and my family’s by any means necessary. And, in those fleeting moments of peace, I studied.

This is a story that has been told many times. The precocious child from the troubled home perseveres. They get a full ride. They go to college. But, I have found that these stories conclude too early. They wrap up too neatly. I believe it necessary to dismantle the idea that admission to college marks the end of the struggle for victims of abuse. I have been told that college is where one discovers themselves, but I have only discovered that, to explore and develop the avenues of personhood, one must first work to relinquish the painful obligations and practices of the past. And this is difficult. In therapy, I have learned that when someone is exposed to a traumatic environment, they develop a thought process to accommodate their needs in that moment. It is the effort of an anxious, ever-whirring brain trying to create a solution to a conflict it cannot fully rationalize. However, extended exposure to trauma can make returning to normal thinking troublesome. In my case, I had grown accustomed to being the peacemaker or the caregiver. I nursed my mother, tried to calm my father and taught and fed my brother. Arriving at college, I was overcome with anxiety, fearful that without me, my family would fall apart.

I cannot imagine that I am the only student at Penn who has dealt with abuse or has stepped up for their family in such a way to protect the people they love. I address this to those other students who have worked and sacrificed in ways both small and large. I address this to those students who have survived. I address this to all those students who feel the pressure and responsibility of home on their shoulders. College is a time of opportunity and of testing limits, and we must allow ourselves to seize it fully. We must realize that life amounts to more than just being alive. There is no selfishness in self-care, no shame in a personal life that is simply personal. Regarding any abuse we have endured, we must hope to forgive. Accept the beauty that has come of it, with and in spite of the strife. But, also, we must allow ourselves to forget. Allow the anxieties and the precautions that kept us alive back then to be let go. This isn’t just survival, not anymore. This is living.

DAVID MARCHINO is a rising College senior from Philadelphia studying English. His email address is dmarchi@sas.upenn.edu. 

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