The Unborn Baby That Changed History

Content warning: death, child loss, abandonment, family trauma, mention of abuse. 

 

I have long wondered why I can be so angry, bitter, and distant. After 2015, that makes sense, but why was I already walking with an emotional limp before that phone call saying my uncle had cancer?

 

The other day, while cleaning the kitchen, I got thinking about my first experience with loss -- so long ago and at such a young age that until this week I had not categorized it as such.

 

In 2000, not long after the birth of my brother, my parents announced they were having another baby. I was delighted. I loved my baby brother, and I wanted very badly to have a baby sister as well.

 

In the fall of 2000, my mother went for a routine doctor's appointment. The doctor could not hear the baby's heartbeat, so she was sent -- with some urgency -- to the local hospital for an ultrasound. In that in-between time, I was told the truth -- that they could not hear a heartbeat -- but I was also told it was possible that something was blocking the stethoscope, hence the ultrasound. This was explained so calmly and in such a matter-of-fact way that while I do remember praying that the baby was okay, I was mostly convinced that everything would be fine -- the ultrasound would find the baby safe and sound.

Someone took me to dance class, I don't remember if my mother snuck me over between appointments, or if my dad or grandma took me.

 

An hour later, I left dance class and headed to the parking lot. Dad was waiting for me -- Dad never picked me up from dance. Even though I thought it was perfectly logical that Mom was still in her appointment, I knew somewhere in my soul that the baby was not okay.

 

I don't remember when or how it was explained to me -- probably on the car ride. But there was no sugarcoating (even as a child, I hated it when people danced around an issue, and my parents largely respected that). The baby, at 17 weeks, was dead. When I asked if the baby was going to stay in my mother's 'tummy,' Dad explained she would have the baby like normal (I was familiar with the concept from my brother's birth), only it wouldn't be alive when it came out. He also told me that would probably happen that night or the next morning, not in the springtime like it was supposed to.

 

I saw my mother only for a few seconds when we got home. She looked terrible (she usually did when she was pregnant -- she never had a single easy pregnancy, and it was only another year or so before I started to wonder why she kept putting herself through all that awfulness). She retreated quickly back to my parents' bedroom, and Dad put us kids to bed.

 

I don't remember much of the next morning. Dad told us (or at least me) that the baby had been delivered the night before. I don't remember if Mom was there at all.

 

I do remember over the following weeks how Dad would occasionally check in with me about it, to see how I was feeling about it. While I was old enough to understand death and emotionally connected enough to know I was sad, I didn't have the vocabulary or emotional awareness to go much deeper than that. He shared with me that he was sad and upset too. He also told us how his mother had also lost a pregnancy when he was young. He invited my grandparents over for coffee one night to talk about it. My grandmother shared that she had actually lost two -- news that surprised even my dad. She told the stories of both losses. Knowing her, she probably offered a lot of comfort and cried with my parents, but I don't actually remember that.

 

A few months later, my parents announced that they were expecting again. The doctors kept a much closer eye on her this time, but things progressed well.

At her 16 week checkup, the baby had a strong heartbeat and was moving well. At 17 weeks, my mother went to her doctor's appointment. The details in my memory aren't nearly as clear. But I remember her saying she hadn't felt the baby move in a couple of days, and then somehow I heard that this baby, too, had died.

 

In retrospect, this was the one that altered my mother forever.

 

I didn't realise that till this week, in 2025. I had wondered for years what had happened to the fun, kind, gentle woman who raised my sister and me, who took us to the library and baked cookies with us and showed us which blades of grass made the best whistles, why suddenly she was replaced by this screaming ball of rage with an absolutely hair-trigger temper. I'm shocked I didn't make this connection before.

 

The next few months were a whirlwind of specialists appointments as the doctors tried to figure out how my mother lost two pregnancies at 17 weeks within six months of each other after having three perfectly healthy children -- the youngest of whom was barely a year old. We, the living children, spent more time at my grandparents' and my aunt's house than we did at home, and as the oldest, I was in charge of my two younger siblings. My parents became strangers to me. After the first loss, my parents had held space for our emotions even while they were openly processing their own. After the second one, they disappeared. I lost them too when that second baby died.

 

By the time my mother's violent morning sickness started again, she was broken and terrified. She tried to hide it, but there was no hiding her symptoms. At eight years old, I was already a veteran of spotting morning sickness. I called her out, and she swore me to secrecy until she was past the 17-week mark. I kept that secret, and it worked... that baby is my little sister, and she is entering her third year of college.

 

It was around this time, I realise now, that the rage set in. She had always been opinionated and a bit fiery (I had to get it from somewhere), but after my rainbow-baby sister was born, my mother would scream bloody murder at anything that moved. In a house of four children under ten, there were a lot of things that moved. I remember writing in my diary many, many times how she would scream at us if we breathed too loudly. I spent the remainder of my childhood trying to figure out the triggers that would set off her screaming rages, but never succeeded in cataloguing them all. Seven months after my sister was born, I developed depression.

 

It's obvious now that that depression came as a direct result of the loss, abandonment, and verbal abuse from those three years. I still suffer with depression today. It has impacted my education, my friendships, my decision-making, my career (both of the ones that I straddle independently), my faith, my hobbies, and my marriage. If the depression doesn't kill me directly in the end, it will still be etched on my heart when it stops.

 

My mother's rages continued until I left for college at age twenty. My youngest sibling at that time was three years old. That was the longest my mother had ever not been pregnant since before she was pregnant with my brother, the one before the miscarriages. My entire teen years had been a cycle of violent morning sickness; long, dramatic, difficult deliveries, and white-hot rage -- all of it hers. I raised all the post-miscarriage siblings because my mother was either too sick or too angry to do it herself and I couldn't bring myself to let those helpless babies suffer for something that wasn't their fault. I'm still not convinced it's a coincidence that the baby factory stopped when I left home.

 

Thinking back on all of this, it's not as much of a surprise why I all but stopped being human after my cousin died. Something in my soul remembered the deaths of those young babies all those years before and remembered how I was left alone, overburdened, and screamed at for every. single. misstep for a full decade in the wake of those losses, and it knew I could not go through that again.

 

This fall is will be 25 years since that first baby died and my life was irrevocably changed for the worse. I don't know what I can do at this point. Knowing why my mother's behaviour shifted so suddenly is helpful, but it doesn't take away the pain of having to choose which of my siblings to shield with my own body and which ones to leave exposed to my mother's rage -- whose cries I had to listen to helplessly as I was only so big and couldn't protect them all at the same time. It doesn't change the fact that my sister and I have basically no relationship because I prioritised the younger, weaker siblings over her and had to harden my heart against her pain because I couldn't handle being helpless in the face of it. It doesn't change how I've spent decades feeling like I wasn't wanted and that my parents were desperate to replace me with the next new baby rather than be content with the ones they already had. It doesn't change the fact that I dissolve into wild, uncontrollable, suffocating sobs the second anybody raises their voice at me or speaks with the very slightest of harsh tones because all my hear is my mother screaming at us that we're all failures and how she didn't want us.

 

It's nice to have a starting point, I guess, but I still don't know where to go from here. 

Nachmo, Day 7 - Two Deep

I've officially finished the first two songs for the show. I'm really proud of the first one. The second... not so much. My brain was very much elsewhere (we discovered a mouse running around our apartment on day 3 and although we haven't seen or heard it since then, we have no proof that it's actually dead or gone and apparently sometime in the past four years my dislike has become a phobia so I'm still VERY jumpy).

 

I may end up cutting the second song from the show entirely. I still have plenty of music, and the song is extremely repetitive, plus I'm not proud of the choreography. It's complete, so I can always slot it back in if I do end up taking it out. I haven't actually taken it out yet, but it's definitely on the chopping block.

 

The next song intimidates me, primarily because of its sheer length. It's just less than five minutes, which I have absolutely done before, but it just feels different somehow. Maybe because it's been so long since I choreographed anything? Maybe because there are no lyrics, and till now 98% of my choreography has been to music with lyrics? Maybe because my self-confidence is still shot from college (read: the prof with no emotional integrity who had absolutely zero business being a performing arts professor)? Maybe because last time I tap danced was when I filmed Inside Of You in October 2023 and am TERRIFIED that I have forgotten all the knowledge I had managed to scrape together about tap dance? All of the above?

 

This is also the song I have known the longest out of all the songs on this list. This shouldn't be this hard. Should I embrace the difficulty? I'm willing to do that but I don't know how. The story of my life. All those times I would go into that gutless professor's office and ask how. How do I 'be more vulnerable' (his main demand of me... me, who was losing friends by the dozen because I was 'too personal')? How do I sing better? How do I improve as a performer? How do I get a role, any role -- especially when he has done nothing but tell me I'm such a talented performer?

 

Despite years of trying to break free from his tyranny, I'm here nearly six years later, still trying to break out from under his thumb. I haven't spoken to the man since 2019. I know, on some distant intellectual level, that he had to be at least somewhat inaccurate in how he viewed me. But I still can't get out from under his shadow.

 

On one hand, it's because my in-laws replaced him within a year of me breaking free. But I've seen this before now, and I know not to buy any of their crap. It's a lot easier somehow to brush off my in-laws' opinions than the opinions of the man who told me in no uncertain terms that he held my future in his hands and never quite artistically mentored me in the way that I still wish I could be. I learned from that professor, and I alienated my in-laws before they could get close to me. But that doesn't help that 20-year-old kid who went to college with a heart full of joy and a head full of dreams and handed them over to the powers-that-be and watched those powers repeatedly dash her contributions against the rocks.

This is exactly the emotional place I probably should be at later in the piece -- once the world starts caving in around the protagonist. Maybe what I really need to do is skip to the end and work backwards. I've been listening to the show playlist as I've been writing this and the darker songs are standing out to me.

Worth a try, I suppose.

Missing Person

Written 4 June 2022, 1.24pm.

Trigger warning: su*c*de

I've been thinking a lot lately about who I used to be. That passionate, fiery, justice-loving, people-loving, fiercely kind, deeply-trusting person.

I keep thinking about when I was eighteen. The friends I had, the joy and the time and the clarity and the passion I had. I'm still in contact with some of the important people in my life from that time; the rest have all died. I was genuinely content to sit in my pink bedroom and choreograph Petra and White Heart songs. That was the time in my life when I felt the most complete and the most spiritually satisfied. I had a thirst for God that I didn't appreciate at the time, and in retrospect it showed. I fell into a couple of traditionalist traps, but by and large I was a fighter for true justice and love even then. A lot of my views at least mildly clashed with the religious establishment, but I was skilled enough in writing to persuade several key figures to at least properly consider what I was saying.

I keep thinking what could have been. What if I had ended up with that guy from youth group? What if my cousin had never died? What if I had never gone to college -- or at least that college?

That's a big one. The day I arrived, my faith started dying. It was slow at first, but accelerated tenfold when Brittney died and none of my college friends cared. And instead of getting out after my second year when I had the chance, I fought to return -- to return to the place that pushed me to such dire depths, spiritually. I was severely depressed, deeply wounded, and grieving, and I ran out of province back to a place that was also abusing me, but in new and different ways.

By the time I left college, I was no longer the happy, joyful, passionate person I had been when I had started. The stress of the insane performing arts course load and the abuse from the director who tricked me into believing he had my best interests at heart had taken a heavy physical toll. I was probably a couple of months away from death, based on my physical health alone (I'm not even thinking about the severe depression I was in when I graduated). Instead of being a launchpad for what could have been a beautiful, God-honouring life, college was the death knell for me. I have so many still-bleeding emotional wounds that can be traced directly to that school, that director. Almost every single one of my dreams have died because of him and his words to me. He would say 'performers have to have thick skin,' but the fact is he is abusive and uses that phrase to justify his atrocities. I had thicker skin before I went to college than I do now. I had courage. I had spunk. I had joy. I had passion. I had LIFE, and now every single speck of all of that is gone.

I miss who I used to be.

In my pain and abandonment from God's people, I pushed away God Himself. And now I'm trapped in a tiny desert town with an absurdly high cost of living, absolutely no emotional support, and 'well-meaning' in-laws who are trying their best to take the place of that abusive man. It used to be nothing for me to jump in the van and drive several hours to do a show, or hang out with friends, or try something new. And now I never leave the house -- partly gas prices, and partly fear. I can feel my soul shriveling up and dying a little with every second I live, every breath I take.

I attempted suicide on 8 March 2017, and now, over five years later, I wish more than ever that I had done it then. I wish my life would have ended that day. But I trusted that things would get better, and five years later, they've gotten worse. My soul is dead, and that's a fate worse that still lungs. Every morning I wake up is the same and that's the one thing I never wanted to happen. I wanted to live with passion and joy and verve and courage and life, and I am doing none of that.

I want to busk. I want to make dance films. I want to make shows. I want to learn new styles of dance. I want to write publicly again. I want to be able to have an opinion and not be literally abused for it. I want to be free again. I'm not free. I am in a prison of 'if you do this, I will withhold the love I promised you and stab swords of stinging words into your heart.' I am in a prison of working eight hours a day at something that's fast-paced, but not intellectually stimulating. I am in a prison of hearing over and over the words 'you're not even trying and you have no business doing this.' I am in a prison of being years behind my peers in terms of experience because I stubbornly stuck to a college that had absolutely no intention of actually training me within the field that I went there for, and I had not even begun to heal those wounds before rushing off into marriage and bringing all of that anger and pain into a relationship that did not deserve such a burden and now is so broken by my issues it may never recover.

I miss who I used to be. I would kill to get her back.

Respect

It's well-known here that I do not get along with my in-laws. Specifically, one particular in-law.

That infuriates my husband to no end. He's long since accepted their abusive ways (after all, for twenty years he had no choice) and thinks they're completely normal, but I, with 1. my strong sense of right and wrong/justice, and 2. my growth-and-learning mindset that my own parents very intentionally fostered in me, do not and will not. I decided after college that I will no longer tolerate abuse, and that very definitely extends to family. Including married-in family.

The problem is, my husband was raised to 'respect his elders.' Not because they have earned respect, but because they 'said so.' Because they're older than him. (This, I've heard, is pretty typical of abusers.) And he demands that I do the same, because they destroyed his mind and spirit so thoroughly that he cannot think of doing anything different.

I, however, have been raised to challenge the status quo. Mind you, I did this naturally anyway, but my parents were smart enough to redirect it rather than punish it. They taught me that respect must be earned, not given, no matter how old they are and how much authority they have. My own parents earned my respect by hearing me out whenever I challenged them on something. They didn't always agree with me in the end (sometimes they did, but definitely not always), but they listened to me and addressed the underlying concerns behind my challenge. (This was the problem with the profs at college... they prescribed quick fixes that treated the symptom, not the cause; they didn't listen and address. As such, I got labeled a 'problem student' and was relentlessly bullied and verbally abused BY MY INSTRUCTORS for the better part of five years because they thought they were better than everyone and couldn't shut up and listen for just five minutes.) My parents encouraged me to think. A lot. 'Critical thinking skills' is still one of my mother's favourite phrases, and it shows in the way she educated us. My husband classifies himself as a rebel, but he's regularly scandalised by the things I say over the course of a normal day because he was severely (I would argue brutally) punished for saying far milder things.

My in-laws have questioned EVERY SINGLE ONE of my husband and I's choices since we met. He and I planned our wedding together and then had the entire thing absolutely destroyed by my in-laws because they actively hated everything I wanted for my own wedding. I actively block out the memory of our wedding day, because it wasn't my wedding and it never will be. It was absolutely not the wedding I wanted. It didn't represent me at all, only them. And I will never get that opportunity again. We will never get to have the wedding we wanted. That's supposed to be a HUGE core memory for almost every married couple and I literally can't even think about my wedding without wanting to scream, or injure myself, or both. I'm crying as I type this.

I used to love posting my art publicly. I loved writing on social media. I loved posting my dance videos. I loved sharing about my life honestly, the good and the bad. I loved interacting with the (many) people who loved my work. All it took was one little 'good Christian' family to destroy all of it. As soon as my husband and I got engaged, every single thing I posted became grounds for World War III. It is absolutely not possible to overstate the intensity of the multi-day screaming matches, the awful words they would say, and the gaslighting whenever I'd call them out on their toxicity. Gas was $1.39 a litre here today. Their gaslighting is so thick they could charge eight bucks a litre. You could power a loaded semi truck for months with that stuff, and it's just as toxic for the environment.

What I don't understand is why I'm supposed to respect my in-laws when they don't do the same to me. 'Do unto others as you would have others do unto you' goes BOTH ways, not just one, and I refuse to be bullied into being a pawn in their stupid little game of control.

I will respect them when -- and ONLY when -- 1. they start hearing me out FULLY instead of bullying me after one (1) word (taken completely out of context), 2. they start realising that they've never lived my life and cannot possibly understand it, let alone re-write it, and 3. they realise I'm my own person and survived the first twenty-five years of my life QUITE nicely without their interference/micro-managing, thank you very much.

And even then... only after they've made a long, consistent habit of doing those three things.

Writing, Escape, and Control

Originally written 24 December 2021, 2.53am.

I started writing very young.

I took to the written word extremely quickly as a child. I was reading competently at age four and by the time I was eight I was attempting to write books of my own. I was constantly narrating the world in my mind as I watched events unfold, narrating as if I was narrating a book. Sometimes, it turned out, I was (though surprisingly few events in my novels have stemmed from real-life events).

When I was a young (and later an older) teenager, I holed up in my room, hiding from my mother's absolutely unpredictable rages and the awful words about any and all my minuscule failures rushing out of her mouth like swords to my battered soul, writing, on looseleaf, on scraps of schoolwork, on typewriters, on my beside table, on anything I could get my hands on. Writing and listening to music became the only two ways to drown out the horrible sounds of my later childhood and early teen years.

When I wrote, the world in my head dampened the sounds of the world where nobody cared and nobody listened. The aural effect of music filled in the gaps that writing couldn't. I stayed up late into the night and filled the silence with music -- music for enjoyment rather than to smother the awfulness -- and spun out dozens of alternate universes from a curious coalition of my brain and my fingers. At age fourteen I completed my first novel draft, and some seventeen more have followed suit since then.

I joined Facebook, then started this blog. My writing, heretofore a closely guarded secret, expanded onto platforms that people could read. The blog especially was a very raw and vulnerable place for me. Facebook, however, gave me a platform to hone skills I was weak on, such as succinctness (remember the 430-character limit?) and clarity. I had a moderately good run as a pseudo-comedy writer who simply spun everyday events into decently funny one-liners. As I aged and my mental health worsened and I started losing friends to depression, I slipped almost unconsciously into a storyteller/advocate style of writing. I told my own story with unflinching starkness, in hopes that the friends and family who read my vignettes would better understand and be better equipped to help their friends and family with depression. There are so many misconceptions surrounding mental illness in general and depression in particular, and I, as a writer on the inside of both, had a unique perspective -- and I thought maybe a sort of obligation -- to bring to the people. The act of writing about my experiences had the side benefit of helped me to clarify them and even to bring some modicum of healing to my now even-more-shipwrecked soul.

Then I met my husband. Or, more accurately, my in-laws.

Of course they were nice at first. They're still decently nice now, however, many wars were had on the topic of my Facebook posts.

To this day, I'm not sure what their issue is. There is a history of depression in the family, so it wasn't like they didn't understand. But essentially they forbade me from posting on Facebook. Not one single post about mental health was allowed. Not one iota of honesty about myself and my life was allowed. I fought this, tooth and nail. There were many screaming matches, and the wedding was nearly called off multiple times because I could not understand how they could say that they wanted me in their family, yet they wanted to chop off one of the very things that made me ME. Without writing, without honesty, I would not be the same person. That seemed to be exactly what they wanted.

Eventually, I gave in. I was just so tired of the screaming matches. I went back to writing on this blog (luckily I hadn't gotten to the point of telling them of its existence yet) because it was once again the only place I would write whatever I wanted to and not be torn to shreds for the next 4-5 business days.

In some ways, I regret that. I regret letting them control me like this. My husband is great, but his family is an absolutely impossible battlefield of land mines -- sorry, I mean unwritten expectations. The blog is a valuable outlet, but not writing as much as I used to makes me feel like I'm only half of a human being -- and a primarily-dead half-human being at that. I was finally beginning to come into myself as a communicator, and they casually stripped 25 years of writing, of ME, away from me like they were putting groceries away after running errands.

For as long as I can remember, crafting the written word has been a part of my life. And all it took were some overbearing in-laws to strip me of one of the three (3) things that has ever consistently brought me comfort over the course of this life filled with an almost-comical and certainly-unbelievable amount of death and misfortune.

They wonder now why I don't trust them. Why I don't talk. Why I come off as so rude, distant, and angry all the time. Nobody ever stops to think that that's what happens when you take away one of somebody's only coping mechanisms.

Too Much

This week I had another close friend suddenly cut contact with me because I'm too much of an emotional drain on her.

I get it. I really do. It seems unimaginable that somebody could have such as long of a streak of abusers, deaths, and bad situations as I have. It's a lot for anyone to carry, including me. And that's why I turn to people for help and support.

Inevitably, though, my despair-ridden life overwhelms them and they 'step back' for their own mental health.

I do get it. And that almost what hurts the most. I trigger people's worst mental health symptoms. I am the reason my formerly happy friends are now suffering. Maybe depression really is contagious. Maybe I really am God's punching bag.

They say 'just be positive,' but as much as I want to, no amount of happiness and positivity is going to stop the abuse and the deaths and all that pain that just keeps piling up with nowhere to go. Forcing myself to pretend to be happy only distances me from myself because I know deep down that I'm just suppressing the pain and not dissolving it. And if I can't be honest with myself and with my friends, then who even am I? Why even bother? They're not my friends if I don't feel comfortable being honest with them, but they also say they're not my friends because I 'overshare' and I'm 'too negative' when I am honest. To me, friendship is when you can talk no holds barred and no punches pulled. If I can't do that, then you're an acquaintance, not a friend.

But if I try to honour them with my honesty, I get cut off. And the stupid thing is, I get why. I get that they need to protect themselves. But then who's left to help me pick up my shredded heart? Who's left to hold my hand? Who really means it when they say they're always there for me?

I feel like I'll always, only be too much for people. There is something fundamentally broken in me and who I am as a person and it will always ruin every person I touch. I am poison, and despite what some people say that isn't a choice. Do you think I chose to watch my family dissolve? Do you think I chose to be abused by a primary caregiver, the church, the director of my college program, and my voice teacher? Do you think I chose for my friends and my cousin to die horrible deaths? Do you really think I wanted all that to happen? If I could do my life over again, I wouldn't even be born. It wasn't worth it. There were good moments, but they don't outweigh all this insoluble pain. I would rather have never existed. Or at least I wish I had died in that car accident, when I still had the hope of a decent life ahead of me -- before anybody else died.

Enough

I'm just so tired of not being enough for anyone.
I'm not quick enough, smart enough, flexible enough, spending enough, saving enough, talking enough, thinking enough, smiling enough, cheerful enough, nice enough, considerate enough, tall enough, friendly enough, and the general consensus is I'm sure as heck not trying hard enough to be any of these things.

Listen to me. I developed an eating disorder at age 25 because I was spending every last single second of my existence in the dance studio trying desperately to prove once and for all, that I actually WAS trying hard enough. I had no time to eat because every SECOND that I didn't spend in the studio practicing was proof that I was nothing but a third-string deadbeat delusional failure and a total waste of skin. I was being told every. single. day that I wasn't trying hard enough and how DARE I call myself a performer. I literally almost killed myself trying to prove that I actually WAS trying.

And honestly, I'm still there. In every single aspect of my life, not just dance.

I'm still bleeding myself dry, hoping against hope that maybe the next gallon will be enough. Or the next. Or the next. And I am stubborn enough to literally bleed myself dry if that will convince someone, anyone that I'M ACTUALLY F*CKING TRYING.

I'm so tired. I'm so, so tired.

The Voice in My Head

Around February I started letting my dance practice routine slip. At first it was busyness, then sickness, then both... then I moved away and couldn't access the studio anymore, and the practice pretty well ceased entirely. There have been a couple of one-off practices over the past few months, but there was no consistency. My motivation was completely gone -- depression and a general sense of purposelessness had eaten it all.

Today I hit the wood for the first time in a while. Nothing spectacular -- some warm-up and improv, some learning (trying to add a new piece into the rep), quite a lot of troubleshooting (where IS my weight after a turning cramp roll?).

Then the stretch session.

Back in January, I had finally gotten my (left front) splits down. This was the culmination of literally YEARS of work and pushing and stretching, often multiple stretch sessions a day. I have footage from May of me in the splits, and that was probably honestly the last time I did them. I knew I had probably lost them, but I also now knew that they were attainable. I did my usual stretches that I had been doing at the beginning of the year, mentally pre-accepting the likelihood that I would not have the splits today.

And it's funny -- the entire time I was stretching, it took me back to that time. And I heard the voice of my program director, telling me I wasn't good enough, nagging me to 'just be more flexible' -- as if that was up to my willpower rather than my horribly short muscles -- all of it, the things I had almost managed to forget, racing back in around me as I stretched, ringing and echoing in my ears as if he had just said it this morning. I had already accepted that I wouldn't have the splits today, but still his voice prattled through my head, all about how I would never be good enough. Not because I lacked grace, or skill, or discipline, or artistry, or ballon, or experience, because I have all of those things (at least on some level), but purely and only because I didn't have a 180 extension. And that was all he could see and all he could talk about, and by extension that became all I could see and all I could think about.

And even now, trying to stretch in order to better myself, because I want to stretch, it just took me back to that time where his voice screamed through my brain about how I wasn't good enough and I never would be and it exhausted me all over again, even though I've graduated, even though I don't have to answer to him anymore, even though I'm not even in the same province anymore. I still carry his voice with me, embedded in my head. I'm damned if I do and damned if I don't -- practice, that is. If I practice, I'm not trying hard enough and I'm not good enough. If I don't practice -- well, then I'm lazy and am still not trying hard enough.

I'm too tired to even be angry anymore. I spent so much energy trying to please him, trying to find the magic bullet to instant flexibility, trying to be good enough to at least get him off my case. It used up my last reserves of energy and willpower and motivation. There's nothing left. I gave it all to this formidable man who could not, would not be pleased with my absolute best efforts. It's all burned away, a flash in the pan. And here I am sitting on the couch, having eaten only three meals in the past week because not only do I not have motivation to dance, I don't have motivation for anything. It's all been used up.

I know it's possible to retrain my brain to think on a different line, to hear a different voice when I'm stretching besides his saccharine sweet, syrupy voice telling me very nicely that I would never be any good at anything if I couldn't do the splits, but that will take a Herculean amount of effort and I don't even have the energy to pour myself a bowl of cereal half the time, let alone retrain an entire thought pattern during an already physically demanding activity.

Nobody here in Alberta knows him. He has little, if any, influence with anyone here. Nobody here knows he thought I was the worst performer he'd ever had in his department, and honestly nobody would care that he thought that because what he thought doesn't matter to them. I have the chance to prove myself here on my own merits, with or without his f*cking approval.

But his voice is in my head, and it's sabotaging my own merits.

And no, I didn't have the splits today.

Day 16 - National Choreography Month

In my psychology class this morning, we were discussing attachment theory. Me being me, I immediately starting making connections between the categories and the people I know in real life -- especially those who have been in positions of authority over me. One of the words the prof used to describe parents of the ambivalent children in Ainsworth's 1978 study was 'unpredictable.'

It was like lightning. That was the word to describe my relationship with almost everybody in my life -- my mom, certain professors, several people I tentatively call 'friends.' It even describes myself to a point. I've spent my whole life thinking -- hoping -- I could trust this person, or this person, or maybe that person, only to have them suddenly turn cold and drop me... then when I confront them about it, they deny it. Yes, this is emotional abuse, but it's also unpredictable. For some reason I needed that word. That is what makes it hell -- the fact that you just never know what they're going to do in any given situation. Will they extend grace? Or will they explode and give up on you?

The whole concept of my relationship with these authority figures throughout my life continued percolating in my brain after class.

We'll pause this thought and come back to it.

Secondary train of thought -- yesterday I was talking with someone and I was trying to describe perfectionism -- how I've internalised the voices of all the people who said I wasn't good enough and would never be and now I tell myself that, I beat myself up for every tiny mistake because so has everyone else. Maybe not consistently -- there's that 'unpredictable' thing again -- but often enough that I am terrified of screwing up because there's a strong possibility that I will not receive a grace response -- instead I'll be screamed at, or worse, tossed aside forever. I've often said perfectionism is like a whip across my back, lashing me every time I try to rest rather than practice, and the whip comes down with renewed fury whenever I screw something up.

Today, as I was pondering my relationship with these authority figures and my perfectionism, the question formed: who's holding the whip?

My initial thought was to draw what I was picturing, but of course I'm rubbish at drawing. But the whip motif -- the whip in the hands of these specific people -- suddenly came to life in my mind and it became a percussion section. And then came the song -- Rose's When Will I Be Loved.

The thing percolated in my mind through my piano and voice lessons, and afterwards I sat and listened to the song and sketched out a general story.

I love it when this happens -- when there's an actual story to the song. Not just a theme, a story -- the passage of characters through choices and consequences. I've only managed it in two other pieces.

This one is dark -- so dark it surprises even me (and I can be a pretty dark person). I had a moment where I thought maybe I should cushion this a bit, but I don't think I will. This is reality for a lot of us, and if you (the viewer) can't handle that, too bad. This dance is a depiction of what it's like to live with the voices of everyone who should have been a stable figure in your life but is not stable inside your head and it touches on the loneliness of having to figure out life completely on your own because nobody's ever truly properly there for you, not consistently. This is what it's like to constantly hear this voice in your head saying you're not good enough and you never will be. It's exhausting to try to keep even a half-step ahead of that voice, that whip. It's exhausting to be beat down by your own mind every single second of your existence. It's deeply, gut-wrenchingly disheartening to have nobody consistent to turn to -- no rock to go to when you're struggling. It's so freaking hard to keep going -- completely alone -- into the storm of voices screaming that you might as well stop trying because you'll never be good enough anyway.

If I'm honest, this is for M. I think the whip came down on her back harder than it does even on mine. It killed her -- this relentless push for perfection at any cost. Who planted the initial seed of that voice in her mind, that broken record telling her she wasn't good enough -- that despite all those hours of relentless practice and effort and time, she wasn't good enough? There's no telling. Even in my life, it's entirely possible that I assumed somebody wanted more of me than they actually did and I just internalised that imagined standard and fed all my subsequent life experiences into it.

I'm excited for this piece, in a weird way. It'll be raw, but hopefully it'll get the viewer's attention. Hopefully it does justice to the dark side of what we perfectionists experience.

Darkness and Creation

Mentally, at this specific moment, I am probably in a better place now than I have ever been since before depression first hit me when I was nine years old. I blame actually tasting my performance dream in real life for this improvement (and probably also being in an environment well away from my negative church/extended family).

Here's the thing though.

After skipping NaNoWriMo last year because I was so uninspired, I'm now wondering if I should attempt this year. On one hand, I haven't really done anything creative in a very long time and I miss that. NaNoWriMo could be just the thing to kickstart my creative brain again.

But... the only story idea I've come up with so far that I might actually squeeze a novel from is a story that basically deals with the subject of abusive churches.

On one hand, it could be good to write this. Having gone through some stuff in previous churches (and heard stories of others' experiences) means I definitely have a place to write from, and goodness knows I feel strongly about this topic. It's possible that writing about the topic could help me deal with my own experiences. Writing is definitely a cathartic thing for me, and the times when I was at my worst emotionally were the times I couldn't write because I didn't have words to encompass the pain.

But on the other hand, I'm actually in a fairly good place mentally. I've pretty well severed myself from the ones who inflicted so much damage on me in the name of Jesus. Dare I dredge all that up in my memory again? I've mentioned before how writing well is not much different from method acting -- the best way to resonate with the reader is to actually feel what the characters are feeling. This includes their pain.

When I was filming Rift several months ago, I was already sort of on an upswing, mentally. But I deliberately sort of 'kept' myself in a dark, frustrated place until I finished filming because I wanted that dance to capture, as authentically as possible, the pain and frustration it was intended to convey. I think the rawness and honesty of the piece did benefit from that and I don't think I regret it. But now that things have gotten SO much better... do I want to deliberately go back to a dark place for the sake of my art? I'll probably end up back there soon enough anyway -- dare I risk hastening it? Is it possible to dip into it for a couple hours each day (during writing sessions) and then 'switch it off' and return to my current content/joyful state? Or is that playing with fire? Will I be able to switch it off?

And if I decide not to risk plunging myself into the depths again, even for the sake of art -- then what do I write about? That's literally the only story idea I have right now. Characters and plots and allegories used to spring to my mind fully formed as I went through the motions of life, but now I can't even remember what it was like to have a story consume me the way stories like Reuben, Rebecca's World, Chasm, and of course, Kyrie did.

I miss that.

The Dance of Respect

Recently I was reading a dance magazine, and this one contributing author was talking about his experiences in contact improv -- specifically, the topic of consent and 'listening' to one's partner during creation/performance. I'm not familiar with contact improv at all -- I've never seen it done and certainly never participated, but one sentence in this article grabbed me by the throat and is now about two weeks into completely altering my life.

'If I know my NO will be respected and if you know I am actively listening for your NO, we can both relax and explore the dance, right to our edges.'

When I read this, I instantly thought of several (non-dance) relationships I'm in.

I can name several people in my life who probably cannot really trust me to listen for their cues (and actually respond appropriately), and this hampers the friendship. I can sense this stunted dynamic in a tangible way in some cases. As a child abuse victim, I'm often so concerned with self-preservation (because several key people in my life didn't listen to my cues so I had to constantly fight to be heard no matter how much they told me to stop) that I often forget others have boundaries and needs too... and as a result I (however unintentionally) perpetuate the horrors that come from not truly listening to the other person.

As this sentence has been seeping into my consciousness, I am struck by 1. how effectively it defines respect (which was an abstract and difficult to grasp concept for me until after I read this), and 2. how beautiful that can be -- to go as deep as possible together, to take the dance of life and (platonic and/or romantic) love as far as it can possibly go while not having to worry about whether or not you're pushing them somewhere they don't want to go, and simultaneously knowing that if you don't like where something is going, you're allowed to say so without reprimand. There's so much freedom in that. Again, as an abuse victim, I've spent 98% of my life not being allowed to say anything if I didn't like where someone was taking me; and not knowing if I'm pushing someone too far until they full-on blow up at me. I was constantly walking on eggshells. There was no freedom, no relaxing, and in a situation like that (especially if you're in it for a long time -- say, you know, twenty years), you get tense and you take smaller, shuffling steps, and you get smaller, as a human, as a personality, in an attempt to do less wrong ('maybe if I'm smaller/not in the way, they won't hate me so much').

How deep and intense and rich life could be if we all lived the way the quote describes. How much freer and happier we would all be because we would all know exactly where we are with each other and we wouldn't have to devote so much energy to trying to read into someone else's cryptic silence or trying to figure out how to say what you want to say without actually saying it.

Yeah, yeah, I know, it's not a perfect world and people are fallible humans that make mistakes and people will disappoint us and all that self-excusing crap... but can we collectively at least try? And if we screw up, try again?


Referenced article: 'Contact and Consent,' Vivek Patel, The Dance Current, May/June 2018, 37.

New Dance Video!

After nearly two full years of work (planning, practicing, shooting, editing), I have finished another tap video, much in the vein of Shades Of Green & Red this past Christmas.

While Green & Red was choreographed in a couple of days, filmed in two hours, and edited in a week, I have had this new one actively in progress since August 2016. Filming alone was five days.

This new project -- Rift -- has more personal meaning to it. The song (which I've discussed before on this blog) deals with emotional abuse, and I created this dance around the time my difficulties with my previous church were worsening. The institution that was supposed to love and care for me, my health, and well-being (emotionally as well as spiritually) was beginning to show their true colours and I did not like what I was seeing. I felt like I had been completely abandoned in my hour of darkness and I was angry. And all of that anger and frustration and loneliness went into this choreography.

From the outset I knew I wanted a stark, dimly-lit set. The fact that it ended up being shot in an old church felt poetic, as the church (as a general institution) makes up a decent chunk of who I'm addressing with this. Though the lighting in the venue was already terrible, I actually deliberately worsened it in post-processing to further create a cold, isolated, abandoned feel.

It's weird to be finished this project. It's consumed my thoughts and planning and practice time and downtime for so long that my life feels a bit empty now that I've released it to the world and don't have to think about it anymore, in any way. In total I probably put in at least a hundred hours on this project between choreographing, rehearsing, location scouting, sound recording, filming, and editing -- not counting all the hours of staring into space daydreaming about what I wanted this to look like and how to achieve that.

On to the next project, I guess... still trying to figure out what that is. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy this one.

Puzzle Pieces of an Epidemic

The suicide epidemic will not stop or slow unless and until people -- we who collectively make up western society -- begin to value human beings again. Right now, we don't.

Examples (and this list is by no means exhaustive):

- Porn. Sexual abuse. Assault. Harassment. (And this doesn't even include how it so often goes ignored.)

- "Go away." "Nobody wants you around." "I don't have time for you." "Later." "Stop complaining." "You're stupid." "You're a baby."

- Expectations of perfectionism in athletics and performing arts and as a child or student (and threats/abuse when those expectations are not met).

- Emotional abuse.

- Being ignored.

- Choosing TV or film over spending time with a friend who's going through a rough time.

- "So what? Get over it."

- "I was only joking."

- "You're not good enough." (Christian church of North America, check yourself on this one.)

- Staring at a screen, scrolling through Facebook  rather than spending time with a precious life.

- Abortion.

- Assisted suicide. 

- Driving like a maniac, endangering the lives of those with and around you.

- Drinking and driving.

- Dealing drugs.

- Tormenting anybody, any age (physically or emotionally).

- "It's all in your head. You're fine."

- Pretending you don't see the tears. Or the scars. (Or even the people.)

- Plopping your kids in front of an iPad/TV or locking them outside because you're 'done' with them.

- Having seven babysitters for your two kids because you 'can't handle them.' Ever. Apparently.

- Ageism.

- Racism.

- Online name-calling.

- Lack of forgiveness.

You should not have to tell us you're a loving caring person. Your love and concern for other people should be borne out by your actions.

Mirror

6 July 2017; 11.19pm.

I've been trying (again) to get somewhere on revising Kyrie -- my best (and favourite) novel to date. I'm beginning to feel a tiny bit like I'm actually progressing, but it's been emotionally difficult.

It's not much of a secret that the character Kyrie is heavily drawn from my own experience, from me. She is, in many ways, the person I wish I was. She is also, however, the person I perceive myself to be within the family unit -- rejected, despised, ignored, abused. She starts the novel as the quintessential Barbie character -- full of life and energy and quickly becoming a favourite in the local social circles. But as the novel progresses, we begin to see that the way her family treats her is smothering her, draining her... killing her.

This novel was tricky enough to write when I first drafted it. But now, to revise it while also dealing with my own (very similar) issues in counselling -- including emotional abuse from immediate family and the church -- is threatening to smother me too.

I know exactly what Kyrie was writing in her journals, feeling in her heart, when she went off her medication. Because I'm writing it and feeling it too.

State of Mind - Intro

I've been working through a lot of things lately. To make a long story short, this past April I wound up in counselling (something longtime readers have probably seen coming since the inception of this blog). One day I'll probably post that story here -- it's all written out and waiting for the right time.

Through counselling, though, I've had to face the issues that I knew were haunting me and even a few that I had nearly forgotten were there... obviously the year 2015 is in there, as well as the youth group I attended as a teen, the trauma surrounding the birth of my youngest brother, and the loss of two of my best friends in the world (one to a significant move, one to death). But in our collective digging, I've begun to revisit my home life during my teen years...

I remember things being difficult at home in those years. The reason I stayed at that horrific youth group was to escape the horrors of home. But while the treatment I received at the hands of the Christian youth remained fairly fresh in my memory, the details of my life at home had not. I was in survival mode for the better part of ten years and did not have the luxury of properly encoding the memories... I was too busy trying to survive.

As a result of some of the things that have come up during counselling, I decided to go back through the draft archives of this blog and see what I had written and never published. I had originally started this blog as a place to escape (however temporarily) from the difficulties of my life at home, so I knew some of those drafts would probably touch on it.

What I found made me feel a bit sick, even though I had already lived it. I had wondered, sometimes, if I was exaggerating when I recalled those days in the counselling sessions. I wondered if perhaps I was being melodramatic -- I am, after all, an artist. But the posts I found proved that I was actually not doing those days enough justice. Things had actually been worse than I remembered them to be.

It's funny how much you can justify. It seems incomprehensible to me that someone would simply stay in an abusive situation and not attempt to get out -- yet I did that very thing. I knew even at the time that something was wrong, but I didn't realise until last week how wrong things really were. I once heard another domestic abuse victim (abused as a child) say, while talking about his experience, "I thought it was normal. I didn't know anything else. What is normal, anyway?" (It was actually hearing about that experience that made me realise that perhaps my own childhood experience had been at least borderline abusive.) Although I knew innately for years that my experience was not ideal, I thought perhaps it was just me being my melodramatic artist self reading far too much into things and being far too sensitive. To realise that it was all real and that something was at least as wrong as I had suspected... that's still kind of a blow. I'm still absorbing it.

As such, I don't really have a proper ending to this post. But I wanted to warn you all that this is where I am right now. Future posts may expand on this.