Taking Advantage
A long haired blonde human, wearing a denim jacket, leans forward with their hands and faced pressed into a mirrored outdoor wall.
By. Tanya Ruckstuhl, LICSW
At the awkward age of fourteen, I found a surprising refuge in delinquency. Let other girls excel with good grades or athletic prowess: I took pride in my ability to shoplift a button with the words “problem child” from under the nose of a shopkeeper.
My best friend and strongest influence at the time was Kim. She was two years older and exponentially cooler than me. A pretty Latina with shiny brown eyes and glossy hair, Kim drove like a maniac, skipped school, lied shamelessly and didn’t care about academics or the future or her family. What she did care about was boys, and to this lone category she brought the intensity of a freshly converted fundamentalist. Boys in parks, at the army base, skateboarding on the sidewalk, in the parking lots of convenience stores; she was a boy-seeking missile with night vision and unlimited fuel. Until our friendship, I never noticed how many boys there were, much less how to meet them.
When I wasn’t following her around and watching, blushing, while she flirted, we stole anything not nailed down, took a hard stand against drugs and smoking which allowed us to feel principled and therefore superior to the other wildlings we ran with.
I was friends with Kim for the same reason a kid from a wealthier family might study abroad. I was bored and lonely and hungry for novelty. She filled a need I didn’t know I had until I knew her.
I became cool in Kim’s company. Like the clown fish and the anemone, we were symbiotic: I needed Kim to show me how to loosen up while she needed me to remind her not to drive drunk, or to sleep with violent drug dealers.
My grades slipped but my social opportunities soared. We flirted and stole and adventured together, seeking trouble under the surface of every activity like truffle sniffing pigs. Eventually I was caught switching price tags on a skirt at the thrift store. I received a stern letter in the mail warning of dire legal consequences if I continued. And I did.
The second time I was caught stealing sunglasses from Sears. This time there was a reckoning in court. The judge sentenced me to a fine, 60 hours of community service, and to attend a day long rehabilitation workshop with fellow shoplifters. If this sentence seems extreme for a pair of sunglasses and a used skirt, I will point out that while I was caught twice, I stole daily—sometimes more than once-- for months.
I was the youngest person at the shoplifting workshop. The others were all adults who varied from sweet and sad, like the seemingly confused elderly woman we all pitied who said,
“I had no idea how the earrings got into my bag…”
Then she later told a small group of us in a hushed, private voice that this surprise jewelry-into-the-bag-thing happened “all the time.”
There was comedy too: A dapper and wiry Black gentleman who complained that he always got caught stealing cheap suits.
“And what has this experience taught you?” The eager facilitator asked, her face all raised brows and wide eyes.
He replied, “I aint never stealing cheap suits no more. Me. I’m only stealing the good ones.”
A group of us went out to buy lunch together at the grocery store. Our driver and self-appointed den mother, an attractive middle-aged blonde advised us all to walk together and keep our hands in our pockets.
We see an arm reaching into a denim clad shorts pocket from above. The person wears a brown leather and gold watch, and a white shirt. We can see their legs, sandal clad feet, and concrete below.
“I’m putting this fork in my pocket,” she said at the salad bar, “this fork is free.” She, like me, fessed right up that she could not stop stealing. We were the most honest kleptomaniacs in the room, which is something if you think about it.
After my day at shoplifting school, I nearly looked forward to community service. New people! The great outdoors! What next?
I arrived at the park punctually at eight in the morning. None of the other juvenile offenders were there yet. The community service supervisor was a big, burly white haired man with a protruding gut. He told me to ride along in his truck to check park toilets for supplies. As he drove, he talked about having sex with prostitutes at the bar he used to own.
“My wife walked in and saw me screwing her on the pool table. She walked out again and I finished what I was doing. Cause I already paid for it.”
He glanced over at me and then looked straight ahead. A ring of broken capillaries encircled his nose. He said, “You give me fifteen minutes and I’ll give you a hundred bucks and you don’t have to come and pick up trash no more.”
My hands crept to the door handle, and paused. I could jump out, but then what?
I sat mute, watching his hands through peripheral vision. The truck growled as he turned out of the parking lot. I tried to sound casual. My chest hurt from the defibulation of my heart misfiring. My voice came out as a small, wavering thread.
“Ahh…uh…ummm…I think I’ll just stick to picking up trash.”
I wished for a tape recorder or weapon or witness or several continents between myself and this man. He looked over at me and read my thoughts.
“You try and tell anyone. Who they gonna believe? You’re just a thief. You got a criminal record. Me. I’m a respected member of the community.”
And he was right.
I didn’t tell my parents. Was afraid he was right. I had been sneaking out, stealing, and shirking homework.
I picked up trash for sixty documentable hours, careful to never be alone in a room with the supervisor. I warned the other girls to stay away from him.
In the space of a single sentence fragment, “Who they gonna believe?”
I made a choice.
I resolved to never put myself in a position where a creepy slime ball could simultaneously try to exploit and silence me.
I have since learned those words: “who will believe you?” are the refrain of perpetrators everywhere.
It’s a hypnotic statement, casting self-doubt in the mind of the victim, and this alone is enough to silence most of us.
Decades later as a therapist, I’ve sat across the room from countless women who were sexually abused as children. One, as a teenager by her psychiatrist. For six months, she couldn’t sit in my office without furniture between us. She sat perched by the door.
She told her story, slowly, in fits and starts, because trauma is like vomit: it hurts coming out. She ended one session with these reminiscent words:
“He told me, if you tell anyone, who’s going to believe you? You’re just a mentally ill girl and I’m a respected medical doctor.”
“I believe you,” I say simply.
I am grateful and humbled to learn how to take advantage of being taken advantage of. There is a grand symmetry, a hidden pattern that I occasionally pick up in certain light. It is quiet and lovely.
Tanya stands tall, hands resting on the wooden fence in front of her, with green leafy and pink flower blossom trees behind her. She wears a fuscia shirt underneath a white long sleeve sweater. She has red, shoulder length hair.
Tanya Ruckstuhl is a clinical social worker in Seattle and mother of eighteen-year-old identical twin boys who beg her not to sing out loud. She writes an award-winning mental health blog, https://seattletherapist.wordpress.com/ and is working on a social anxiety self-help book.