We’re Back, Baby!

It has been a hot minute! One of the most recent posts was in February 2014 and things were slowing down given the semi-recent foreclosure. A lot has happened since then, and not just Teen Mania related, but with the United States and the climate of evangelical Christianity. This post is to serve as a quasi NAQ (Never Asked Questions) on what has been going on with this site, or at least what I assume would be asked.

So where has Recovering Alumni been all these years??

As previously mentioned, the last post was in 2014. While the Recovering Alumni group remains somewhat active, things pretty much halted with the foreclosure of the Teen Mania campus. The blog stayed up until 2016. There had been some changing of hands in running the blog, but the blog ultimately closed due to the wave of Russian hackers around election time. Remember when that was the big thing?

So the blog came down, but was still accessible via the Wayback Machine. The OG Recovering Alumni moved on and is living happily doing her thing. The new person behind this blog, the one currently writing this post, decided that the Wayback Machine is too cumbersome to navigate and there is too much valuable resources helpful for recovery. So I plopped down some cash and paid a company to pull the internet archive and dump the posts into a WordPress blog. This started early in 2020 before the pandemic hit. But then the pandemic hit so this blog got put on the back burner and fell by the wayside for other projects and a second degree.

Now that it is summer and I have about 3 weeks of vacation left before I start the fall semester, I’ve decided to hit the ground running and try to get this site up to its former glory.

Why bring the blog back?

Mainly for mental health needs. I spent the first couple of years out of HA floundering in depression and anxiety. Once I found the blog and some similar people, my life turned around – I even considered myself ‘recovered’ for the most part. But around the 10 year mark I felt that I needed to dig in and possibly uncover some of the more deeper injuries, go back to therapy, and suss out my experiences. The blog was helpful before and I figured it would be again for myself.

Originally, I planned on having a somewhat live journal (not to be confused with LiveJournal). I was not going to post or update anything, but just have all of the stories and recovery posts handy. But then 2020 happened and a wave of deconstruction and exvangelical movements emerged. There also exists a myriad of HA groups on Facebook. (There’s probably one for alumni and growing succulents!) In one of the lesser….honorable groups there have been posts and discussions on our experiences and how they have been crappy. It then hit me that perhaps I am not the only one who could benefit from having this site go live.

What is the plan moving forward?

That is still yet to be determined. There is an alumnus that has stepped forward and volunteered to help get things back up. There are a lot of broken links so volunteer and I first want to pour through the 670+ posts to get broken links fixed and repost missing posts that didn’t get recovered from the archive. So for the time being, the plan is to repair.

Since the original RA blogger wrote a lot of the posts from a Christian perspective, it makes sense to post another set of recovery posts from an atheist’s perspective. I am an atheist and have been for a decade now. We may move some links around, like putting the ‘My Story’ into the list of former intern’s stories (a patient zero kind of thing maybe) while possibly adding our own stories to be stories 83 and 84. Interestingly enough, a podcast talked about Teen Mania this summer, so that will be an upcoming post soon. If other people start talking about Teen Mania, then those discussion may have posts as well.

If you have a story you would like to submit, we would love to add it to our list and they can be anonymous if desired. I’m not exactly sure how to submit stories yet but it’s being figured out.

So who is the new Recovering Alumni?

First, I don’t know if I feel comfortable taking on the mantle of RA. The job had a lot to go with it for the first RA. I am simply trying to get through my trauma and be a functioning adult in these crazy times. But since the author’s name for this post is ‘Recovering Alumni’ (mainly for simplicity) let’s pretend that I have succeeded at being normal and give a rough summary of who I am.

I joined the HA in January 2007 and left in December 2008 during my third year as a graduate intern in the MA program (the math is funky on that, I know, but TM. *shrugs* ). I regarded my first year as pretty good and I learned a lot, but my second year was a dumpster fire. The gaslighting and emotional abuse was immense. Still, I toughed it out and tried to do another full 12 months, but realized towards the end of my tenure that I was absolutely wasting my time.

My parents held an intervention of sorts and explained to me that they thought I was brainwashed and that I should stay home. I of course dismissed them and returned to Texas, but eventually I saw where they were coming from and left a couple months later.

Since then, I’ve graduated college, after: a couple of major changes, fighting depression, a suicide attempt, getting kicked out of university twice and fighting to get back in, becoming an atheist, leaving the church (a couple of years later), recognizing that I was in a cult, realizing that I am not straight nor cisgender, and probably several other things that my TM-self would hate about me.

I have gone back to school to become a high school teacher after being laid off of a terrible factory job. I work on learning about racial justice and other social issues. The soup d’jour right now is a class on how to run a grassroots organization, a workshop to encourage diversity, equity, & inclusion (DEI) in a physics classroom, and another workshop on encouraging young women to join STEM careers. It has been a busy year for me and have one more year to go before I get a grown up job in some high school.

Isn’t this just rehashing old wounds? (Or, why are you still on this, Teen Mania is gone??)

The real reason for resurrecting this blog has already been stated, but I feel like there may be some people who will have the same objections this blog always had. A lot of people were thankful for their time during this blog’s heyday. I feel like those numbers have dwindled some after the years have passed and introspection has taken place. However, there are still a number of people who are very much pro-TM (like Heath Stoner). In fact, there is a Thankful HA Alumni group on Facebook which has always been in response to the RA community. I obviously am not a part of the group, but I feel like I have an idea on what kind of activity is within that group.

For readers who align themselves more to the Thankful group or are still pro-TM: Hello. How are you? 🙂
Please recognize that this blog still isn’t for you. For some, their time at TM wasn’t great and there are still wounds. That is okay and you don’t have to be offended that someone had a poor or abusive experience at Teen Mania. Just because the abusers are gone does not mean that the impact made has left. You are welcome to stay and I encourage you to read our stories. Let them be cautionary tales on what not to do in your own ministries and whatnot.

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There are probably other questions that would be asked, but this is a monster of a post already. I look forward to seeing where this blog goes and hearing about how it helps people.