The Time Gap

We've all talked, heard, or at least felt this dissonance regarding time in the past few years. It's as if we all fell asleep when everything shut down in 2020 and now we're all waking up again to realise that three years have passed without us even feeling them. I've heard people of all age groups, religions, genders, and colours say this -- that time simply... disappeared.

But I've felt this before.

In 2014-15, in the span of six months, my best friend, a family friend, and a cousin all died. My uncle was diagnosed with terminal cancer and given three months to live. There were two ugly, out-of-the-blue divorces in my extended family (both marriages were well over a decade old). My college roommate and good friend abandoned me when I needed her most. I was almost literally drowning in homework at college, all with little sleep and no nutrition because performing arts profs don't care that the cafeteria (the only food option in a small college town) is only open for four hours a day. Half of my mother's side of the family stopped talking to each other about some financial dispute that I'm STILL not clear on the details of nearly a decade later.

I returned to college after Christmas 2014 secure in the love of my family and the loyalty of my friends. When I graduated four months later, not a single shred of it remained. It had all been bombed out from around me as I floated in some parallel universe in a different province, unable to protest anything that was happening.

Time stopped for me. 2015 through 2019 was a blur of... nothing. Time did not exist. In late 2019, my concept of time was still shaky.

Then the pandemic hit.

As it stands now, I have no explanation, few anchors, little memory of anything that happened after January 2015. I still, now, today, fully expect to wake up and have it be 17 January 2015. The clock stopped, the tape paused... and yet things kept happening, as if in a dream. It's 2023 somehow. I'm not old enough to be asking, 'where did the time go?' and yet somehow I'm asking it. How am I married? Who really is this guy in the bed with me? Where did all those friends from college go? What shows was I in? How long has Brittney been gone? What novels did I write? And M and Grandpa are gone too? Why am I living this is dusty, scorching, one-note town? How did I get here? It's almost like amnesia, or like my brain was switched into somebody else's body and now I'm living the life of a person I don't even know. And this is exactly how I've felt since 2015.

I've never had the words to explain it till now, and even now, I feel they're not adequate. But now that everyone else in the world has that shared experience of losing two years to lockdown... at least they can understand too, even if none of us are ever able to put it into words.

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.