sagewalk part one

One of the things that I remember most about wilderness camp was the "impact letters" we all received. The impact letter was obviously supposed to make an impact on us, but it was more an outlet for our parents to describe the effect our choices had had on our families than a tool to help us feel compelled to change our lives.
After about a week of being out there, your "parent(s) and/or guardian(s)" sent you an impact letter. This letter described to you all of the bad things you had done and how they had negatively affected your family. Each girl had to read their impact letters aloud. The first time our eyes touched the paper, we had to instantly convert what we were seeing into something everyone else had to hear. You tried to be strong, and mostly you tried to remain unbiased, but often times, our voices betrayed our reactions.
I remember hearing the other girls' impact letters. They were pleas for their daughters' salvation, in a way. They read more as poignant narratives, no emotion betrayed. "This is what made me fear for your life. I want my daughter back," the letters would say. "I remember the first time I ever held you in my arms, the way your eyes lit up, how big your smile was. All the nurses said you were the first smiling baby they'd seen in years. I don't know what else to do." The girls' voices would crack or waver, but they would plow through because they had to. I remember crying indiscriminately at each letter, until I read my own.
My impact letter came late, at the two week mark versus the one. It met all of the criteria, and the instructions were well-adhered to. It's hard to describe it as a letter, though, because it was more like a list, an accountant's tale of my systematic immorality. These are the things you did: one, two, three, four. Each instance was separated by dashes and bullet-points, in almost an outline form, one, two, three, four. You started cutting; you became sexually promiscuous; you began abusing alcohol; you got beat up in the park and the police brought you home. These are the things you did: one, two, three, four.
I read it just like the way I'd read newspaper articles in class, because I wasn't really reading it, and I didn't really think about it until I saw the way the other girls looked at me. I was, at that point, happy to see any letter at all, and happy to see the familiar circular script of my mother, but even a counselor admitted to me that my letter wasn't quite what they had hoped I would receive.
I want to take some of the blame. If I had known at sixteen my wantonness and selfishness would have impacted the functionality of my already desperate three-member family, maybe I would have reconsidered my actions. Maybe I would have felt as if I held a little more weight in all of the other family decisions that I believed I had no voice in. But at the time, I truly felt that everything I did affected me, and only me. I know now that I was wrong. I needed to hold myself accountable, and I made many mistakes. It was hard to fully accept the responsibility that the horrible decisions I made when I was sixteen determined the outcome of a family, but it did. And that is my burden.
But if I am truly honest, I guess I can't help but think that it's funny. And I realize that I'm bitter, but I think it's funny that the way that the parents raised us girls, who were sent to wilderness camp, was neatly paragraphed and eloquently formed into a letter that attributed it all to our own choices. It seems that we are the mutations in what would have been a spotless gene pool. Thank you, impact letter, and blizzards and tepees and coyotes and bow drills, or else I would have never realized the travesty that is my position within my family.