(2021 Moderator’s Note: Allie’s Story is part of The Vault, a series of drafts that were discovered in a backup file from 2011. These posts were not published for some reason but are now being published. If you are Allie and do not want your story to remain published, please email me at recoveringalumni at recoveringalumni dot blog.)
I’m going to do my best to keep this anonymous, although I’m sure people who were interns with me will figure out pretty quickly who’s writing it. It doesn’t matter to me, but some of the people I mention may not want certain things spelled out, and I’m going to respect that as well as I can.
No doubt I’ll be called bitter. Maybe I am, a little. Or maybe I have been, and I’m finally getting all bittered out, which is why I’m even able to do this. Or maybe I just have a big old freaking mouth. Or maybe all of the above. Maybe I’m just tired of the shame and the impression that I was, am now, and will always be second-rate, “damaged goods,” because technically I am not internship alumni. I was BV’ed literally days before graduation.
I was an intern during the time when Teen Mania was based in Tulsa. Probably about the same time as AB was, if you read that story. Maybe the same year, maybe not…I don’t really know for sure myself, since I can’t remember whether Cameron was born yet or not when I was there. It was during the time of four interns to an apartment. 52nd and 55th floor of Citiplex towers. Pre-Hasz. Classes taught by Ron, in his living room, which we crowbarred ourselves into. You had to be there super-early to even have a shot at a spot other than the floor, but no one ever, ever tried to sit in Ron’s leather chair. And yes, he was Ron…none of us could have called him Mr. Luce and keep a straight face for more than a second or two. He and Katie were pretty present and involved with us, and their girls knew a lot of us at least by face. Ron and Katie knew each of us by name, and we took turns having Ron over to dinner at our apartments to spend a little bit of quality time in a small group.
We had pets, too. I remember a very sweet rat, a gecko, assorted fish, and one (hidden and illegal) puppy. Each apartment had a phone, and it was 2 interns to a bedroom and bathroom. Things were different then, for sure.
My first involvement with Teen Mania was at a booth at a youth leadership convention. The encounter was brief…a handshake, a brochure stuffed into my hand. It wasn’t much, but I was an adventurous type, and the idea of spending a summer in a different country doing street drama appealed to me to no end. I applied, was accepted to one of the more intense 2-month trips, and found myself raising funds with the full support of my church behind me. I was the niece of the pastor; I was also the niece of the youth pastors, and extremely close to my youth minister aunt. I counted her among my best friends. I led worship service with another aunt. I was the golden girl of our little church, held up as The Example to the younger teens, so things like mission trips not only appealed to me, they were expected of me.
Which is why, with that mission trip (which was an amazing experience) under my belt and one Acquire the Fire later, the Teen Mania Internship, as HA was called then, was probably all but inevitable for me. Several of my mission trip friends were interns, or were about to be, including my closest friend (male…no doubt you see where THIS is going a mile away!). I was pretty aimless by that point, except for my heavy involvement in the church. I was still basking in my post-missions afterglow. I wasn’t going to college, I had a job that I despised. I was ready to spread my wings. Go find out God’s purpose for my life? Spend a full year in what was portrayed as an amped up mission trip? With the cream of the crop in young Christians? Honing ourselves, growing in God and being “poured into” by some of the most respected people in Christian youth?? Ummm…yes, please!! I turned in my application to be an intern the following January, which was just a few months away, before we left that ATF. Did I feel particularly “called” to it? I don’t think so, especially. But it fit so well with where I was at that time that it was easy to tell myself that I did.
I honestly don’t remember very much about my first weeks as an Intern. I don’t even remember whether the term Gauntlet Week was used. I remember a lot of introductions, ice-breaker games, mission-statement writing, motivational talks, and that long, boring personality test that they supposedly used to decide what position you were most suited to.
Warning bells, which I promptly ignored but which I thought about plenty later on, went off from the first week. For one thing, I noticed that people only tended to get put into positions that suited them if it heavily benefitted Teen Mania. Otherwise, as a rule, people got put in positions that they not only weren’t suited to, but probably wouldn’t enjoy or have any aptitude for at all. The staff called this “stretching us,” and it became an ongoing theme. At literally every single opportunity, we were denied whatever thing it was that would motivate us, bring us joy or enable us to succeed or feel fulfilled in any way, in the name of “stretching us.” Some of that was fine, but it was literally every time, with everything. They constantly set us up to fail, and the failures became very personal shortcomings. It couldn’t be that Suzie just wasn’t that great on the phones. It had to be that her attitude was wrong, or she wasn’t “on fire” enough and didn’t have “enough of a heart for God,” or she was just plain disobedient.
Then there was the matter of the mock call-center calls. At one point during the first week, we were told very specifically that we would be taking real, actual calls from real, actual prospects calling to inquire about Teen Mania. As the calls came in, it was very obvious that staff members were calling us…I even recognized the voice of my caller. Not even a week in, and they were lying to us? And for no particular reason that I could see, except to try to mess with us? Why add to our stress? And why insult our intelligence? It was a small thing, but both the lie itself and the fact that they expected us to swallow it sat badly with me.
We had to exercise every morning, too. I was not a runner at all…in fact, I struggled with asthma…so the early morning runs felt like torture to me. Alex, one of the staff members at the time, usually led the runs. We were shamed if we were at the back of the pack. He called it “leading the lag,” as though the ones bringing up the tail were somehow dragging the whole group down. No one wanted to be “leading the lag.” The shame!!! But someone had to be last in line, and to keep from being that person, everyone would just run faster and faster. I finally got to the point where I just couldn’t worry if I was “leading the lag” or not. With my asthma and my short legs, I couldn’t keep up with everyone and I finally stopped killing myself over it, although I still tried to make sure at least one person was still behind me. A friend of mine, however, never “led the lag.” At one point, he worked himself so hard he ended up with pneumonia and literally coughed up blood for weeks. He still ran in the Oklahoma wind and winter temperatures. I’m not sure whether he wanted to or not. I never asked. What he wanted to do or would have chosen to run just wasn’t relevant, so it never came up.
Even with all of that, the first several months of my internship were fine. I had a fair bit of responsibility doing a job I really enjoyed, I was working with my 2 best friends (including the aforementioned guy-bestie), and our boss was great. There was plenty of fun to be had, or made, during our spare time. I was excited and honored to be there, and truly felt like I was doing something valuable.
Things started to unravel right around the time when the intern advisors decided that my close friendship with my guy friend needed to be nipped in the bud. We were forbidden from having any interaction with each other at all. I was transferred to a different department, which I hated. I was put in a brand new position that had never existed before, and was given no real training or guidelines on how to do it. The rules changed daily. I also got new roommates, but I never bonded with them because it was pretty common knowledge that each apartment had a “mole” that reported everything to the intern advisors. I was becoming disillusioned and frustrated with the way the staff handled things. Mostly it was small stuff, but it all built up. Once there were 2 pop-tart wrappers in the trash, because my roommate had eaten after we had finished cleaning the apartment that morning in preparation for the weekly “white glove inspection.” Since taking out the trash was my responsibility that week, those pop-tart wrappers got me campused for my whole birthday weekend, even though the trash obviously had been emptied that morning. Constant, petty, nitpicky stuff designed to “stretch” us. It wasn’t consistent, though. You either had to be absolutely perfect at all times, or hope that staff members weren’t looking for a handy scapegoat to make an example of at that particular moment. I became frustrated with the ever-changing rules (most of which weren’t even actual rules) and inconsistent enforcement, and it showed. Friends were told to cut their interaction with me, because I had an “attitude issue” and a “problem with authority” (things I had NEVER had said about me before, and never have since). This hurt me worse than anything else did. I was trying so hard to cooperate and win approval, to the point where I even copied pages of my journal and gave them to a staff member to read to prove my transparency and sincerity. This backfired, as I was basically told that doing this actually proved the opposite. Since I was trying SO hard to please them, and since I hadn’t given them the ENTIRE journal to read, there must be an ulterior motive that I wasn’t telling them about, and I should think hard about whether or not “my life was right with God.” Never mind that they hadn’t even asked for what I had written in the first place, and what I had given them was literally pieces of my soul. I still wanted to trust these people, so this was a slap in the face that stung for years.
My apartment mates were standoffish, although I have no doubt a lot of that was because of the vibe I probably gave off. I had become so isolated and miserable, and I felt like they were watching me and judging me all the time. The apartment, my home, felt like the least safe place in the world to me. I took to mostly hanging out with a girl who had graduated from the program a few months before. She was still deep in it, but she was a refuge when I needed one and a true friend to me.
My trust was completely eroded. It opened my eyes to the absurdity and dangerousness of some things we did. For instance, the annual climb up Pike’s Peak, which would take us above tree-line where the oxygen was thin. This terrified me because of my asthma. I was told that I could take my inhaler with me if I wanted to, but it was strongly implied that I would be somehow wimping out and lacking in faith if I relied on that “crutch.” I was honestly afraid that I was going to die up there if I didn’t bring it, so I did. And I was glad…but when I used it, I went a little ways off the trail pretending I needed to use the bathroom. Looking back, I can’t believe I ever allowed anyone to shame me into hiding something that was medically necessary for me. Someone took it upon themselves to rent an oxygen tank at their own expense and carry it on their back in case anyone needed it. That oxygen tank saved at least one person from needing an ambulance. I heard Teen Mania did start taking oxygen tanks up after that, but I don’t know whether that’s true.
My entire Teen Mania Internship experience could be summed up in one particular exercise we did at Ropes Course, the relatively tame precursor to ESOAL. We were doing a “low ropes” exercise which required teamwork to get from one side of an obstacle course to another. I think we had to walk across the tops of short poles, or build a bridge, or something. It should have taken maybe 5 minutes, but every time a team got close to getting it done, we were given a new handicap. Someone on the team has a good plan in place? Sorry, they’re now mute. Someone else had a good arm span to help other people? Oh, too bad…they could only extend out as far as their elbows now. This person is a great communicator? Well, they now have to repeat everything they say 3 times. Every single time we got close to succeeding, the rug got pulled out from under us. Again. And again. And again.
My last straw was Crosswalk. Naturally, we weren’t supposed to know a thing about it. Naturally, though, we all did, which is probably why they did away with the pretense of secrecy and briefed us on it a night or two before it happened. I was very, very unsettled by the fact that we were specifically instructed not to tell our parents about Crosswalk. I was not a minor, but quite a few of the Interns were. Even if they weren’t, there is absolutely no good reason for being told not to talk to your family about something that’s happening to you…didn’t we all learn that in kindergarten? For me, that set the tone of the whole experience. The morning came, we were all blindfolded, bundled into cars in groups of five or so, driven a pretty fair distance, dropped off with our giant wooden cross and I think a dollar each and one candy bar or something, and told to find our way back.
My particular group’s Crosswalk was uneventful, but by no means enjoyable. I was with a group that I didn’t know well and ended up not really clicking with. They all seemed to think the whole thing was amazing. To hear them talk, they were having one spiritual epiphany after another, walking along with that gigantic cross, growing in Christ with every step. I saw nothing wonderful about it, I was learning absolutely nothing about my relationship with God from it, and I really just wanted it to be over. I was cold, tired, annoyed with my perky, Kool-Aid drinking team members (“It all makes sense now! I just KNOW God sent us this way so that we could pray for that man’s sore toe!!” And yes, that was said at one point), horrified by the necessity and dangerousness and stupidity of hitchhiking back, and completely disillusioned by and resentful of Teen Mania. I said little and thought a lot on that walk, and the conclusions I came to weren’t pretty. And yet I STILL wanted to “succeed” at the Internship, whatever that meant. I STILL craved the approval of those in authority over me.
It turned out one of the other teams had a more eventful experience than we did. It was comprised entirely of second-year interns, so I guess they needed to be “stretched” even further. They (a mostly white male group) and their cross were dropped off twice as far away as the other teams were. In a predominantly African-American area. Did I mention the giant wooden cross? Seriously. Someone thought this was a good idea. They ended up almost immediately getting picked up by the police, as much for their own protection as for any other reason. If I remember right, Teen Mania staff was called and told to come get them. Nothing about the situation was their fault, but it was still implied that they somehow “failed” because they didn’t complete the Crosswalk.
Of course, my friend and I were still communicating. Maybe we should have done what we were told. Maybe we should have obeyed the leaders. I’m not perfect, I never claimed to be. We were pretty careful, using unconventional means of staying in touch, but we managed to talk several times a day. He was one of the few I didn’t feel isolated from. He was also one of the few (as far as I knew) not completely buying into the Teen Mania party line. By then, I was in survival mode. I just wanted someone…anyone…to tell me I wasn’t crazy.
One day, just before we were all due to leave on yet another retreat of some sort, I got called into the Advisor’s office. On her desk was a giant stack of phone records…and I mean GIANT. Inches and inches thick. On the top page, a single number was highlighted. A call to my friend’s home, on my call-out code. Made months before. Less than five minutes long. If I remember right, I had needed to know where a particular item was in the office, or something. I knew which call it was, because it was the only one I ever made after we were instructed not to interact.
That one call got us both BV’ed. About 10 days before our Internship was over. And many months after the fact.
Later on, I heard what had happened. One of my roommates was this Advisor’s assistant. For days and days before that, she had made my roommate scour those phone records, specifically for the purpose of finding any proof that he and I were still communicating. She was actively looking to kick us out, and putting quite a lot of effort into it, too (or at least delegating that effort to someone else, and probably making her own work load a lot higher while her assistant was going line-by-line through the phone records). Why it was THAT important to her that we leave in disgrace, not even 2 weeks before we were supposed to leave anyway, I don’t know. Maybe she wanted to make an example. Maybe she wanted to make a point. Even though I had never allowed myself to become close to my roommate, she was a decent girl, and it tore her apart to have to be part of that. Of course, she couldn’t say a word about it to me. She had just as much pressure on her to be The Perfect Little Intern as the rest of us did.
It was deliberately timed so that there would be absolutely no chance of our getting to interact with or say goodbye to the other Interns. It was announced to them on the retreat…we were the only two left in the apartments as we packed up our things. Of course, the way it was spun made it sound like they had caught us doing the nasty on Ron Luce’s desk, or something. Communication with us was forbidden. We were shunned like an Amish girl with an iPod. Loaded with gangster rap. And porn. And of course, it was implied that since the non-disgraced Interns should be maintaining their high standards after graduating, they shouldn’t interact with us then, either. I’m thankful that there were several people who ignored this and did reach out to one or both of us, albeit mostly tentatively. Not a single call from a staff member, though.
I felt used, and dirty. I felt like a failure, but I didn’t quite understand where I had failed. I felt railroaded, but everyone else acted like I’d had it coming. Even my family, loving as they were, thought I must have done something terrible, even though no one was really clear on what. I didn’t talk about it until, years later, I told my mother the whole story. She was understanding, and we both wished I had talked about it sooner. The full extent of it still hadn’t hit, though.