Artist’s Statement: Deprogramming

Link to playlist

This piece was born from years of deeply entrenched lies, half truths, false narratives, delusions and hypocrites that continue to be rewarded as they work the system. I, like thousands of others, am a child of the opioid epidemic; I know that my story is not unique and I hope that sharing my experiences can help start conversations and healing for others scarred by the Sackler family. I was born in Everett, WA (a city that would go on to sue Purdue Pharma for the toll it took on its people), to a mother with a “pain management doctor” that had been prescribing her opioids throughout her pregnancy with me. I was kept in the hospital for a few days before being sent home so that they could monitor my withdrawal symptoms, given that I was essentially born addicted to opiates, though I wouldn’t learn this information until I was 24. 

I have continually felt as though I was kept in the dark from the truth; as the younger sibling in a family dealing with addiction, all you get are sugar-coated explanations. I grew up being told/ believing that my mother was sick and needed all sorts of medications when the truth was that the “medications” were just Better Homes and Gardens versions of heroin. I didn’t understand any of this until a few years after my parents’ divorce, when I began working in the kitchen of an inpatient rehab facility. Once I realized that people on “prescription” drugs could also be addicts, I took to researching the drugs my mom was on throughout my childhood. Imagine being a teenager and discovering that what you thought were allergy patches were actually an opiate 50x stronger than heroin (fentanyl). This was the catalyst in deprogramming my brain; I became obsessed with researching anything and everything that uncovered the truth around our country’s history with substances. Just like how the U.S. government flooded low-income neighborhoods with crack in order to police people of color, the healthcare system flooded the market with highly addictive pain pills to turn a profit at the expense of working-class/disabled folks of any zip code.  

 During my time as a teacher, I saw a lot of the ugly truth about how school districts operate. I taught at a school with majority BIPOC/immigrant/refugee students, in a district that was mostly white and upper-class. When I started teaching, our school had an amazing dean of students who knew our community, listened to/validated our students experiencing trauma, and was an all-around backbone of our school. It wasn’t long before the district made a move to make themselves look better rather than serving students; the district re-wrote the title and duties of the position and required higher education accreditation. Now, they would never admit their goal was to increase their stats and brag about being the “most highly educated district”, but we saw through them, just like we continued to see their true colors when they scheduled state testing to coincide with Ramadan each year, transferred the rest of our administrators who had known/worked with our community for years to different schools, and rolled out a dual language model before purchasing curriculum for those teachers (don’t worry, they only had to teach an entire semester before receiving educational materials/curriculum).

  The core of “Deprogramming” is looking beyond the surface, questioning authority figures, forging new pathways,  and breaking free from dishonest/hypocritical cycles of cognitive dissonance capitalism forces us into. As a teacher, I felt trapped in an unending spiral; I was filled with rage that each equity concern we raised was largely shrugged off, yet the district website continued to read “Equity, engagement, and excellence for each and every student”. There is no such thing as equity in a school district where one elementary school’s PTA raises 30K a year while the elementary school further down the road doesn’t have a PTA. There’s no equity in a district that bemoans their retention rate of BIPOC educators while knowingly offering higher pay for bus drivers than for paraeducators. 

At one of my final staff  meetings, we were gathered for an emergency safety training in light of the Uvalde tragedy. A man who used to work in law enforcement stood in front of us and told us that the reason so many children died was teacher incompetence. We had not yet seen the videos of law enforcement standing in the halls of the school, checking their phones, and allowing almost an entire hour to pass before acting on an active threat, but we had read the articles in which other crisis intervention officers detailed the mismanagement of the situation. We spoke up about safety concerns and asked for a fence along the perimeter of our campus (something our school had been requesting for over a decade). The man from the district then took his opportunity to inform us all that our school used to have a fence and that we needed to make up our mind. Our veteran teachers of 30+ years at that building had to argue FACTS with this man. It has become clear to me that teachers are not listened to or respected by the very institutions that claim to value education and learning, because nothing can ever truly be valued over profit in this country. This continues to proliferate as the incoming generations of students are more highly traumatized (by institutionalized racism, the physical/mental aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, inflation pricing people out of their neighborhoods etc.) and schools continue to lower both the number of adults at each building, and the amount of Social Emotional Learning programs/supports. So, with this playlist, I invite you to “Decolonize Yr Mind”and  “Embrace the Chaos” “Without Judgement”.