Showing posts with label family. Show all posts
Showing posts with label family. Show all posts

28 April 2024

Nine Years / Yesterday

Nine years ago my cousin, age nine, drew her final tortured breaths into burning lungs.
 
This year marks the epicentre. She has now been gone as long as she was here.
 
It was about 9.45pm, with the last gasps of a golden sunlight running lazily across the wooden floor when my mother hung up the phone and made the pronouncement of death to me.
 
My cousin left us on the coattails of the sun as it dipped away from us into space. Every year as the days lengthen, so does my dread... more daylight to carry my loved ones away.

It still feels as if I'm sitting there on that chair in my parents' dining room. It's been nine years of sitting on that chair.

I've graduated college. I've gotten married. I've moved multiple times. I've rewritten a literal novel. I'm still sitting in that chair at my parents' house. I'm still seeing the golden sunlight take my cousin away. I can still see her face on the Skype call the last time I saw her at Easter -- you know, the holiday where we celebrate Jesus' resurrection and talk about how He conquered death.

She had two weeks of breaths left in her and none of us knew. My uncle, who had been diagnosed with terminal cancer eight months before and had already outlived his prognosis by Valentine's Day, had another four years of breaths in his lungs. Yet somehow this lively, spirited little girl running around only had two weeks of air left and none of us knew.

28 May 2023

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.

25 April 2022

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.

01 January 2022

An Open Letter To Those Who Love Me

Written 28 September 2013, 8.07pm.

I found this deep in my drafts folder the other day. I thought it was the perfect manifesto to start off this year. It has not been edited since July 2017.

(I'm not actually as depressed as the title makes it sound.)

Dear people in my life,

I think by now ya'll have noticed that I'm not exactly following your dreams for me. You know, the corporate dreams of me being some big-time lawyer or doctor or some other kind of genius. You have told me so many times over the years how smart I am, how smart I am, how smart I am. I get the sense that you figured I was some kind of a child prodigy or something. Cha-ching. Don't think I don't hear those cash registers in your heads.

Now, that may be true. Maybe I am a genius. I don't know. It depends what you're talking about, really (because if we're talking math, I am most definitely not a genius). But whatever the case, you all see me as intelligent. And I am not living up to your expectations of me.

I may be wrong (correct me if I am, I really do want to hear your honest take on this), but it seems to me you expected 'more' of me. I was to graduate high school and then go to college for perhaps a psychology or a medical or law degree. Something that would accentuate any speck of intelligence I possess. Something you could brag about to your co-workers to make you sound like you had some serious connections. And then, after spending four or perhaps ten irretrievable years of my years institutionalised, I would be ready to take on the world, to be the messiah, and you would have the privilege of saying you knew me before I was 'great.'

But it didn't work out that way. I graduated high school with... I don't know, integrity, I guess. I was willing to admit I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life. And, perhaps more damagingly, I was not willing to commit to what I didn't know. I did not want to go to college for a degree that I wasn't sure I wanted, only to decide after three or more years' worth of money had been sunk into it that it really wasn't what I wanted to do after all. And then I would have been dishonest -- to you, to the school that would have had the misfortune of hosting me in such a case, to myself.

And I cannot be dishonest.

For two years you secretly hoped and outwardly 'spurred me on' (to put it politely). And then -- a miracle! -- suddenly the announcement came. I was going to college. Your hearts pounded. You were so excited. Finally I was going to live the life you had planned for me. Finally I was going to make good use of all my brains that I had been wasting for so long...

And now for my side of the story.

I have never been interested in committing more time than necessary to anything I am not fully interested in. Even in grade school: math. Math never interested me (nor did it make sense, but that's a different discussion), so I hated it. I would do whatever it took to do as little as possible... to waste as little of my life as I had to on such a pointless pursuit. (I know now that there is a point to some math, but that was my perspective at the time.) Second example: You all have had the misfortune of trying to make small talk with me. I'm not interested in small talk. 'Share how you really feel or shut up' has pretty much always been my guideline for conversation (for better or for worse). I'm not interested in small talk -- I hate these little social lies we tell each other -- so I don't do it. Like, at all.

By the time I graduated, I was keenly aware of the fact that I have one life to live. I have already used up twenty years of it just getting to this point. That leaves me with roughly sixty years remaining (give or take a decade or so). And there's no promises that I won't die earlier -- say, from an accident or something. Is it really wise to spend four years of those precious remaining years on school? School that I don't really want and may never need?

This was my logic behind not going to college immediately. I wanted to think it through first. I wanted to be sure what I was doing with my life, then decide if college would be necessary for that.

For two years I thought about this -- believe me, I thought about it. Hardly a second went by that I wasn't thinking about my future, praying about it, asking God what He had created me to do. It looked to you like I was just being lazy and mooching off my parents. Believe me, this was not the case. At the very least, it was not the intent.

Two years I pondered this. Two years I agonised. Two years I prayed.

I have to drop this train of thought now and back up a bit.

You didn't know this -- nobody really knew this till recently. You know I have been dancing ballet since I was six. What you did not know was that I have been making up dances in my head since I was seven. I didn't know it until those two years between high school and college, but I had found my passion by the time I was seven years old.

Choreography. Imagining dancers on the stage, coming together as a choir of movement, creating beauty. It captivated me.

At seventeen I began to take this seriously. At eighteen I choreographed and wrote down my first complete dance. Here is where this news began to leak out... that I was doing choreography.

You didn't know it, but I did. I had found my passion. This was my calling.

In those two years, I researched so much about careers in the arts. You have no idea how much I tried to spin it different ways, wanting the worst-case scenario so I knew what to expect, but wanting the best-case scenario so I could tell you something you could be proud of. So you would stop taking jabs at me for being lazy or stupid. Because I was not being lazy or stupid -- in fact, that was exactly what I was trying so hard to avoid.

I will tell you straight. Even the choreographers for big-name TV shows make about $20,000 a year, often less. And it's straight commission. If you don't have a project that month, you don't get paid that month. You are your own boss, and there's not a lot of demand for a choreographer. There's a reason you don't meet a lot of choreographers. It's because we don't need a lot of choreographers. Because nobody cares about the arts anymore. Ballet (true ballet, not this 'contemporary ballet' crap) is fast becoming a lost art, and hip hop, the dance of choice today, is largely choreographed by the performers themselves. When a classical ballet company does tour, they often mount the old classics -- Sleeping BeautyNutcrackerSwan Lake... There is no need for a choreographer; those works already exist.

In fact, this is reality for the arts in general. Artists are overworked (mostly as volunteers), and they are severely underpaid. Some of the most talented artists of the past century languish in a furiously creative flurry... unnoticed. Loved only by a loyal handful, but misunderstood and rejected, then ignored, by everyone else.

This is the life I am called for.

I am called to live a life that not only has no retirement plan, it has barely enough money to buy the groceries every week.

I am called to toil in obscurity, perhaps for decades, not because of the quality of my work, but because perhaps God has seen fit that I choreograph for only a few.

I am called to a life of intense loneliness. No-one can understand what it's like to create a dance from scratch until they have done it. And even then, those without the passion cannot begin to imagine the thrill of the soul that so captures our imagination that we dream of pointe shoes at night; that demands we return, again and again, to the music, to the stages in our imaginations.

I am called to a life that no-one on this planet will ever understand. It will look intensely foolish to anyone who has never tasted the wine of creativity, and in this day and age, that's almost everyone.

I am called to daydream with a vengeance.

I am called to a life throughout which it is highly probable that I will be broke or near-broke, lonely and largely ignored, obscure and taunted by those who do not understand. I will very likely struggle, not because I'm not smart, but because this is my God-given passion and the gift He gave me. And when God gives a person a gift, they can not and will never be truly happy doing anything else.

So I will choreograph. I may dance, I may sing, I may play an instrument. But no amount of criticism from you will make me change my mind. I will not be happy doing anything else. Let me be happy doing this.

Can you live with that? Can you accept the fact that I will not be a doctor or a lawyer with a 'thriving' multimillion dollar practice? Can you accept the fact that I will sometimes ask aloud where my next meal is coming from -- when I know there are other, higher-paying jobs out there?

28 April 2020

I Lost A Bet

On 28 April 2002, I was baptised.

On 28 April 2015, I lost my faith.

No, I do not have the dates mixed up.

You've all heard the story; I rehash it every year. How my cousin suddenly had an asthma attack and was taken to hospital where she died. I entered into the story between the hospital and the death when my aunt called and told us the situation and told us to pray. We did pray as a family that night, collectively and individually. I vividly remember saying to God, "If You love me, let her live."

In the years since then, I've had so many people -- pastors, student theologians, Bible study leaders, fellow Bible college students, even people who no longer adhere to the Christian faith -- tell me how badly my theology was flawed that night. They tell me how ridiculous it was for me to base my entire hope and faith into one miracle. They tell me it was wrong for me to hinge His love for me on one prayer, on one human life.

I can follow where they're coming from, but I cannot understand their logic.

If God really is as great as they say He is, why then can't I do that? If God is capable of using a donkey to accomplish His purposes, why can't He reinflate dying lungs? Even modern medicine can do that nine times out of ten, why can't the God of the universe even manage that 10%? If God is so great, how is it wrong for me to bet the farm, to hinge my entire faith on one crazy possibility? Isn't that the very definition of faith? I believed so much that God loved me that I bet my cousin's life and my entire faith on it. They make entire blockbuster films on the stories of lesser bets.

Oh right -- the ones in the films usually pay off.

I made a crazy bet based on crazy faith -- the kind they begged us in youth group to have -- and lost. Yeah, yeah, maybe it was wrong to bet with God, but if He loved me -- if He really loved me -- why wouldn't He prove it? I have spent the last five years in a pit of numbness, knowing that I should love and serve and be faithful to Him, but also knowing that He was fully capable of saving my cousin and proving to me that He loved me and He did not do it. 'Ask and you shall receive,' my foot.

You know if it had been a degenerate -- somebody addicted to crack who'd gambled his entire life away and made a hobby of murdering children for twenty-five years -- God would have done it. If that 'degenerate' had pleaded for the life of his own nine-year-cousin, using the exact same wording I did, God would have done it. And it would have sold millions of books and packed out arenas to hear that testimony. What makes me any different? Why can't I ask the exact same thing? I'm really no less of a degenerate in my soul. Am I not evil enough for God to bother with me? Is that not 'bad enough' for me to get a prayer answered? What do I have to do? How bad do I have to be?

I've lost many people even closer to me than my cousin, but my cousin's death is the one that I keep coming back to, the one that continues to infuriate and flummox me.

I asked for one thing -- one thing. I had a hell of a lot of faith -- it takes a certain amount of chutzpah to bet my entire faith on one person's life. I didn't ask for new shoes or a better-paying job or more friends or anything frivolous. I begged for someone else's life. Is that not a noble thing to ask? All I wanted was my cousin to live, and I wanted it so badly that I exchanged my relationship with God for it.

How is that not enough? Nothing I do is ever enough for humans; I've known that for years. But they always told us God was gracious and while we would never measure up to His standard, He had this really great thing called 'mercy' because He loved us SOOOOOOOO much. I bet a hell of a lot on that mercy and that love that night.

And it failed me.

15 March 2020

Watching The Walls Close In...

It started to hit home when the NHL shut down.

I watched as every theatre in the province closed ongoing shows and forthcoming ones.

And then, as I sat alone in an almost-abandoned Pizza Hut, staring at the view that defined my childhood, I received a phone call.

I didn't recognise the number, but I knew the area code. And I knew this was the call that I had been waiting for, that I hoped would not come. As a rule I don't answer numbers I don't know, but I answered this one.

"Is this Kate?"

"Yes."

"This is B., director of (my show that's scheduled for May). We have been advised by our board to cancel tonight's rehearsal. I'm really sorry for the late notice... they're meeting tonight to decide what's going to happen moving forward."

I thanked him, we chatted briefly, we hung up. I continued to stare out the window and think upon my breadsticks and pepperoni pie -- my meal now lengthened indefinitely. It had started a semi-quick meal on my way to rehearsal, but now with that commitment gone, I could sit here till closing if I liked.

But I got full. I packaged up the remainder, paid, and left. I bought what I'm sure was the last thermometer in the city and stared in disbelief at the price of fuel. 74 cents a litre. Just two days earlier it had been 84 cents -- and I had been overjoyed at the low price. To lose ten cents in two days -- over the weekend -- emphasized the economic freefall that had been predicted but I hoped wouldn't come. On one hand I rejoiced at the cheap gas (I'll take any financial break I can get), but on the other, I live in a province built on the energy sector. When gas prices drop, that's because we're collectively out of work.

I got home, checked my email. As I expected, given the public health update that had gone out while I was in Pizza Hut, my other show had emailed and cancelled rehearsals for two weeks. Our shows -- originally supposed to be the beginning of April -- were now tentatively moving till after Easter.

And I am the lucky one.

At least one of my shows will still go on, however late. So many of my friends had shows that were cancelled entirely, some after the final dress rehearsal but before the opening curtain. Mine will go on eventually -- theirs won't.

My parents play a game with my youngest brother while we listen to music and several of my sisters work on handcrafts. I solve several sudoku puzzles before tiring of them. My parents discuss the forthcoming 18-hour round trip out-of-province that they're going to have to undertake to collect my other brother from his suddenly nonfunctional college -- his first year of a new adventure truncated just before performance season (which of course is the best part).

Throughout the night, as I ponder the surrealness of it all, I wonder mostly what will happen to me should I fall ill. I fall into the category of 'those with pre-existing medical conditions,' so my age does not mean I'm safe. I'm not worried about my family except my youngest brother (also has a pre-existing condition). He's young enough, though, that he will be a priority. I am not. I'm nearly thirty. I'm also not a 'productive,' 'valuable' member of society. I work part-time at a small-town sandwich shop which may close any day now depending on the next public health statement and, till about a year ago, spent any spare moments I could find dancing or writing. None of those factors make me worth saving -- let alone the fact that now I spend any spare moments either playing Pac-Man on my phone or scrolling mindlessly through Facebook because I've lost the joy/desire/inspiration/confidence in both dance and writing. I don't have any children -- no-one would would actually need me should something happen to me. I may mean the world to my fiancé, my siblings, a handful of friends, perhaps my parents... but when the chips are down,  I won't mean enough to 'society at large' to choose saving me over saving literally anyone else.

For years I wanted to die. Sometimes I tried to take matters into my own hands. There were moments I almost literally stood on the edge of the cliff, and I had walked there myself. But now that it seems like a genuine possibility -- I don't want to. Not yet. I want to grow old with my dear fiancé first -- to have adventures and a life with him, to hold his hand and sleep in his arms while feeling him breathe. I want to see if I can find my old artistic passions again. I want to see what happens after this -- if society in general collapses; if Apple slows down their confounded forced-obsolescence trend because nobody will be able to afford a new iThing every three and a half months in the almost-certainly-forthcoming economic recession (this was an actual thought that I had while staring out of the window over my breadsticks).

Part of me wants to draw on my artistic skills to flagrantly show hope to people through their phone screens. The only thing stopping me is I lost my ability to see hope years ago, and it's well-nigh impossible to give to others something I can't even find.

12 August 2019

Quality Time

In order to understand this post, you'll have to be familiar with the five love languages. You don't need to take the quiz if you don't want to, just be familiar with the five different kinds.

Read the overview? Good.

I am a STRONG quality-time, with a healthy helping of words of affirmation. I scored a perfect zero in acts of service (which explains a lot for those who know me in real life).

On one hand, quality time is the easiest. It requires no money (gifts), very little prep (gifts), not a lot of effort (acts of service), no eloquence (words of affirmation), and no physical contact. Certainly all of these can go into loving a quality time person, but they're by no means requirements. Literally all you have to do is sit with us and talk/listen. Honestly one of my favourite things to do with my college friends was to go to the grocery store. Nothing crazy, nothing fancy, nothing expensive. Let's just get in the car and drive to your chiropractor appointment and the car wash together. We don't even need to get coffee. All I want in my life is to spend time sitting in the same room (or vehicle) as you, with more than 60% of your undivided attention (if you're scrolling through your phone or watching a movie, that absolutely DOES NOT count and in fact actively makes me feel even more unloved because you have a beautiful chance to share a few moments with me as another human and you're deciding that your Instagram is more important).

But on the other hand, quality time is the hardest. You can't just toss us a hug or a pat on the back and we're good for another three months. You can't take out the trash and expect us to suddenly be okay. You can't buy our satisfaction with gifts and you can't smooth over a wound with some nice words. The very thing that makes us easy is the thing that makes us impossibly difficult.

Every other love language can have their needs satisfied in thirty seconds or less. But not quality time. We are not satisfied with a quick 'hi love you bye.' We are time sucks. We are the black hole, the awful vortex in your busy lives that you avoid because you have two meetings and a birthday party and an office dinner and a dance lesson and rehearsal and three classes and you don't have any energy left to give to us, let alone the four or five hours we would prefer -- no, need -- to have from you. God help the parents of the quality time children. You barely have time for yourselves, let alone for us.

And we know that. We know we ask a lot. I cannot even begin to communicate the depth of my guilt that I need you so much and that I interfere with your busy life so much. You have no idea how much I wish I could be as easily satisfied as everyone else. I can't even explain how much I pretend I'm fine or I pretend I'm satisfied with the two-second greeting you give us when everything within me screams for you, for somebody, for anybody, to just spend an afternoon with me, with no limit and no other agenda. I know I'm expected to be okay on my own and so often I pretend that I am, but I'm really not. The need in my soul is vast, and deep, and so incongruent with how our society operates. Nobody knows HOW to just sit and co-exist with another person anymore. We underscore our days with Netflix and Skype meetings and the six o'clock news and sports and Snapchat and Bejeweled knockoffs and the ever-buzzing phone and your quality time friends and family quietly shrivel into dust in the corner, edged out of your lives by f*cking pixels on a screen. In this world of opportunity and money and privilege, the one thing nobody has to give, the one thing nobody can earn, the one thing that nobody can deposit in a savings account for a rainy day is time.

And sometimes I hate that something so impossible is often the literal only thing that I really want from you.

30 July 2019

The Birth of the Curse

I'l just get this out of the way: I hate my birthday.

Not because I'm another year older and closer to death. I hate my actual birth date -- 2 August.

In Canada, the first Monday is August is a statutory holiday. I don't know why they felt this was necessary -- the month of August literally is holiday unless you're one of the lucky few who have actually managed to land any kind of full-time job in this economy. Yours truly was literally born on that God-forsaken Monday. To be born on a holiday Monday -- especially in the summer, and especially the last one of the summer -- is a curse straight from the lips of Satan himself.

Do you have ANY idea how hard it is to plan any kind of birthday party when literally everyone goes camping in the mountains or goes to the lake on that weekend? There are 51 other weekends every year, but all the vacations magically converge on THAT weekend -- the weekend of my birthday.

These circumstances literally incited my lifelong battle with depression. My own birthday doomed me. I was sunk from my first breath.

I was nine, going on ten. My birthday was coming up and I had carefully made up invitations and sent them out WAY in advance -- having learned in the previous three or four years that people apparently make plans for my birthday weekend in April sometime. But it was now late July and the RSVP calls were rolling in -- 'Sorry, Lindsay can't make it, we're going to the lake that weekend,' 'Sorry, Katie's camping with her dad that weekend,' 'Sorry, Brittany can't come -- we're all going to Disneyland that weekend...'

I was with my dad in his workshop when my mother came out and relayed yet another message like this -- my best friend couldn't come. And it was kind of the last straw. I had invited probably about a dozen people, and now probably about ten of them had already backed out. I had long been reduced to inviting even my much-younger and significantly more annoying cousins just so I would be with someone on my birthday.

I excused myself and headed back to the house to process. How could my best friend be busy? She knew my birthday. It happened every year on the same day. How do you not start to remember 'oh yeah, my best friend's birthday is that day, don't book anything'? This was my best friend. I had never missed her birthday party. Why then did she and her family seem to think it was okay to miss mine?

I was walking up the steps to the back door of our house when a solution presented itself to my nine-year-old brain: nobody likes you. Nobody wants you around. And that's why they're making all these excuses. They didn't forget -- they just don't want to come.

And suddenly everything made sense.

The problem was not the date, the problem was me. I was annoying and stupid and nobody liked me.

The knowledge was enlightening. Suddenly my entire life made sense -- my mother's seemingly unprovoked rages at me, my dance teacher's constant needling comments at me about how I wasn't good enough, the fact that every social gathering I ever tried to plan flopped spectacularly, the fact that literally nobody ever talked to me unless forced to.

It was because nobody liked me. It was because there was something wrong with me.

That thought opened up a whole new world of explanation -- a Pandora's box that not only could I not shut, I didn't want to because I would rather know that I was worthless than live under a delusion. I would rather have known the truth -- the truth that nobody wanted me around and would do whatever it took to avoid me. That thought still pervades literally everything I do and everything I think. I know nothing else.

I still had one faint hope -- that when I was an adult and my friends were all more in control of their work schedules, they would know to keep that day (or at least that weekend) free. They would remember that that was my birthday and maybe my adult friends would somehow be able to love me enough to not want to back out of whatever I might plan.

But now I am an adult. I'm alone in a city with very few (and somewhat tenuous) connections. I can't go visit my family because I work two days in a row and can't make the trip. My best friend is on vacation -- her family plans the same stupid trip to the mountains ON MY BIRTHDAY every single stupid year, despite knowing that that's my birthday. I had made plans with another friend to spend the day together on my birthday -- nothing fancy, just literally being in each other's presence -- and that friend just found out today that there's a family event that he can't back out of... on that day.

My one birthday wish -- to spend my birthday with people who care about me. It's not about the event. It's not about the gifts. It's not about the party or the food or the beverages. It's about being with people I love. That's all I want. It's so simple, but it's the one thing I can apparently never have.

Nobody should have to be alone on their birthday. And yet that's my constant reality.

18 June 2019

Anatomy of a Trigger

The worst thing I have ever been told in my entire (albeit relatively short) performing arts career was not "you'll never make it" (thanks, Mom), "you're stupid" (thanks, extended family), "when are you going to get a real job?" (thanks, Grandma), "you'll never pass the exam" (thanks, dance teacher), or even "God can't love you because you're a dancer so neither will we" (thanks, home church).

It was during a meeting with the director of my college program midway through my final year. It's fairly well-known that I'm not a flexible human being. I just wasn't built with long ligaments. Grace, sure, but not flexibility. This program director had been on my case about my (lack of) flexibility for a while by this point so I wasn't surprised when he brought it up again in the context of a course selection meeting. He threw all his old tired phrases at me about how you can't call yourself a dancer if you're not flexible and how I should be stretching more and I said, "I've been stretching every day for two years."

He looked me right in the eye -- pale water-blue eyes right into my blueberry ones -- and said, "You know what? I don't believe you."

I could have slapped him in that moment.

In one single sentence, he destroyed every ounce of self-confidence I had ever managed to scrape together. He invalidated not only my daily two-hour dance practice sessions, he invalidated nearly twenty YEARS of training and practice. I had suspected for years that no matter what I tried it was never good enough, and here was proof of it -- the man who had mentored me, who had called out my ability to act in the first place, who had even saved my life less than two years earlier, had just confirmed it for me. I wasn't good enough, and I never would be. No amount of practice would make up for the fact that I was just destined to suck.

That one sentence nearly killed me.

My depression intensified. I hated myself with a renewed passion and vengeance. I would practice dance until I literally collapsed, then get up and keep going until I collapsed again. And then I would get up and keep going some more. I neglected legitimate academic homework for practice. I went home for Christmas break and took pictures of myself doing a two-hour stretch session on Christmas freaking Day so I would have proof that I was actually trying. I was logging six hours of practice per day, and berating myself for not doing more. My sleep schedule -- which has never been solid to begin with -- slid completely off the rails as I stayed up later and later in an attempt to get more stretching in, to figure out why the heck I couldn't be good enough given the intense hours of practice.

I stopped eating, even though he never said anything about my weight. Partly because I didn't have time to actually make and eat food (that was a waste of valuable time that I could spend on practicing instead), but also partly in hopes that I could starve myself to death. If I couldn't practice myself to death fast enough to satisfy the insatiable need of ABSOLUTE PERFECTION, then I would take away food and hasten the process. And I grew to love that hollow ache in my stomach from the lack of food. It meant I was actually trying. It meant I was sacrificing. They say you have to sacrifice to be an artist and darn it, nobody was going to be able to say that I wasn't making sacrifices. Nobody was going to be able to say that I wasn't trying. Maybe if I starved myself I would be light and lean enough to be a good jumper without being exhausted after four jumps and maybe it would make it easier to get my leg up higher because it would be less encumbered with flesh. I grew to enjoy the feeling of my heart threatening to explode within me, the sound of my own strangled gasps for breath. My hemoglobin levels dropped to half what their normal levels should be and in response I pushed harder physically, because pushing through adversity is what artists do -- you're not a real artist if you're not facing insurmountable odds. According to the numbers I needed a blood transfusion and I talked my way out of it partly because I didn't want to be kept alive. If I died, I died. All I wanted was to be enough for everyone and maybe death was the only way to achieve that.

I was in the middle of a performance run at the time they found out how low my hemoglobin was and at the end of each performance I was coughing so much I would taste blood, so oxygen-deprived that I would start blacking out on the way back to the dressing room -- but every night I would dance even more full-out, push harder, strain further, smile bigger, knowing what the cost would be but doing it anyway because I would rather die than give a lackluster performance. I gave everything -- almost literally everything.

And it still meant nothing.

Nobody even noticed. At the cast party after the show closed, everyone was sitting around the table comparing texts that their friends/family/long-lost school mates were sending them congratulating them on their performance, and I got nothing. Literally nothing. I had friends at the closing show. They sent gushing texts to two of my castmates, fawning over how good they were... and I didn't get a single one. Not even 'hey, good job.' Nothing.

I had almost died to give the performance I did. Was it not good enough simply because I hadn't actually died? What more could I have possibly done? Was it even possible to be good enough for anybody or was the deck just permanently stacked against me? Should I just give up and save everybody the trouble of having to actually tell me to give up because I'd never be enough for them anyway?

I still don't have the answers to these questions.

14 June 2018

Still Memories

I used to do a lot of photography. Some of you old-timers here at the edge of the dream may remember back when I was very seriously looking at doing it professionally. I always, always had a camera in my hand. My parents had bought me a Nikon Coolpix for my sixteenth birthday, and it practically became a permanent extension of my arm.

My specialty was candid event photography. I loved catching people in their natural state -- talking, listening, laughing, playing, working. I suck at posing people (mostly because I suck at interacting with people in general), and I find still life/nature/architecture/animal photography insufferably boring so candid photography was the only option left and I sort of fell into it. At family gatherings, at home, at church, at youth group, with friends -- everybody who knew me for those years of my life was so used to me having a camera in my hand and taking pictures that they barely even noticed the camera anymore. This worked in my favour, as it meant I got even more natural photos of them.

But when I went to college, I suddenly felt self-conscious about the camera. Would people sue me for taking pictures where they happened to appear in the background? Would it be weird for me to walk around a college campus taking pictures of people I barely knew -- at times without their knowledge?

Even as I made friends, I could never sense when would be a good time in the relationship to bring the camera into play. They'd never seen me with it -- not like people back home had -- so they would likely get self-conscious. So I never did.

Lately I've been missing it.

As I near the end of my college years and watch friends leave every year, there's always this part of me that's saddened that I have no pictures of them. I don't mean the posed grad photos the day before they leave, I mean the candid ones, the ones that showed them as they really were -- talking and laughing and listening and concentrating and simply soaking life in; the ones that really showed who they were, their personalities and fleeting facial expressions. I see these things every day now, but the time will come when I won't be able to and my memory will fade. One day I won't be able to reference them in real life.

In my second year of college, one of my uncles walked out on my aunt (his wife of well over a decade). No warning, no explanation, no other woman, no plan, nothing. Just up and left. This event shattered the entire extended family on that side. The extended family had been very close -- we'd regularly get together at my grandparents' house on Sunday afternoons and eat pizza and talk and play the classic unofficial keep-the-balloon-off-the-floor game. We talked and laughed and played games together, and this aunt was a central part of it. She was the fun-loving aunt with a big, ready laugh. But because she had married into the family, when the split happened, my uncle was the one my mother and grandmother stayed in contact with rather than her -- even though they were angry with my uncle, they still felt a blood obligation to keep in contact with him. My other aunt and uncle on that side wholesale ditched. I've only seen that couple, their children (my cousins), and my divorcée aunt once since before the divorce -- and that was at my grandfather's funeral (yet another loss). All I have left of over half of my once-inseparable extended family are the pictures -- the pictures I took of all these Sunday afternoon gatherings with that Nikon. Pictures of my aunt pulling faces, of my grandpa and uncles playing cards, of my grandma in the kitchen, of the cousins playing cars on the floor.

That's all that's left.

When I first joined Facebook in my mid-teens, on a lark, I looked up someone I had been in a dance class with as a child. She accepted my friend request and sent me a message. I replied, and she replied, and I replied again... and we developed a close friendship, sharing joys and sorrows and being there for each other on 'off days.' Our friendship mostly developed and continued through emails, but we did occasionally manage to connect face-to-face. She, too, was an avid photographer, so of course we always took a few pictures of those times (though not many).

Brittney died unexpectedly in February 2015. Those few pictures of those few times we adventured together in person are all I have left to remember her by. Her face, her sense of style, the spunk that shone through her eyes... my only way to see my dear friend again is through those pictures.

On the other side of my extended family, there is a cousin who never made it to age ten... she died suddenly in April 2015. And it wasn't until then that I realised how few pictures I had of her. Though I had my camera in my hand all the time at those family gatherings too, she was such a whirlwind that somehow I never captured her. I went through my entire photo library (probably some 20,000 photos at the time) about a year after her death and found about 23 pictures with her face in them anywhere -- and only about three of those really 'featured' her (and weren't in terrible lighting or motion-blurred). Those three pictures are all I have to remember this spirited child who left such a void when she breathed her last.

As time marches on and I say more goodbyes -- however temporary -- I want to get back into photography again, to capture my newer friends in their ordinary brilliance. Because tomorrow is never promised to anyone.

But how to start...?

11 August 2017

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.

26 August 2016

Music Day - Hero

This song really hit me in my final semester (so far) of college.

I was in the midst of the worst year of my personal life (to that point). Two divorces, both completely out of the blue, came right on each other's heels -- one involved my favourite uncle leaving my favourite aunt. That was the first of two straws that broke me (the second was the death of my cousin). It was unfathomable -- that my uncle, who was so caring and affectionate, would turn his back on the woman he promised to love till death parted them and deliberately rend his children's lives in two.

Not long after that bomb broke, one of the chapel speakers at the college gave a talk that made me realise that my uncle had been one of my heroes. But, as Steve Taylor notes...

Heroes died
When the squealers bought 'em off
Died
When the dealers got 'em off
Welcome to the in-for-the-money-as-an-idol show
When they ain't as big as life
When they ditch their second wife...

It's an incisive look at the despair of a little boy as he grows up and all his dreams are crushed... as he finds that the idol you thought you'd be... was just another zero.

And while I'm not a male in an increasingly feminist world, with all the double-standards and pressure that comes with it, that about sums up how I feel too.

I looked up to my uncle. He was cool, he was funny, he was smart, he was a fantastic storyteller, he was one of the few people who would actually talk to me during my teen years. He still does all these things, but now they reek of insincerity. How can I believe that you will always care for me, your mere niece, when you couldn't even muster up the will to care about the woman you professed to love and the children she gave you? And if I can't look up to my uncle, who else can't I look up to? Who can I trust? At first the obvious answer was 'God,' but then my cousin died -- in spite of our prayers for her -- and I realised even God will turn His back.

Title: Hero
Artist: Steve Taylor
Album: Meltdown
Year: 1984
Label: Sparrow Records
iTunes here; YouTube here.

Plus, it accurately sums up life as an artist: I want to be an artist -- someone who creates things and touches hearts. I want to be a hero.

But the practical side
Said the question was still,
'When you grow up, what will you be?'
...I want to be an artist.

But that's the wrong answer.

29 April 2016

Music Day - Walk Between The Lines

A year ago today I heard this song for the first time.

It was the morning after my cousin's sudden impossible death. The day after God yanked the proverbial rug out from underneath me and I realised that it is possible for even the family of a dead child to pretend nothing happened and carry on as normal. I had never felt so betrayed in my life. I have never felt so much rage as I have in this past year, over that one incident. I hated God. I hated my family. I hated the platitudes my friends gave me in their efforts to shut me up or at least redirect my attention. I hated myself, for living while she died -- more people loved her than will ever love me; if someone had to die, why not someone who nobody would really miss? -- and for not being able to create any art at all after she died. It was like my inspiration died when she did. My one outlet for frustration was gone, and this only added insult to injury.

And somehow this song gave me something to hold onto even though my entire life was falling apart. It's kind of odd, as the song didn't really speak to my situation, but it just happened to be the only thing that my shocked, broken heart could hold onto without wanting to kill it out of sheer fury.

Maybe it was the mood of it. It was dark and moody and raw and emotional, and those were all things I was feeling. For once the lyrics didn't resonate with me (usually that's what draws me to a song) because they felt so far from what I was feeling. The lyrics are actually kind of hopeful, and I was not hopeful. I wanted to die too, just to get away from the nightmare that was suddenly my life.

Title: Walk Between The Lines
Artist: Russ Taff
Album: Russ Taff
Year: 1987
Label: Myrrh
iTunes here; YouTube here.

This album, by the way, is said to be hands-down Russ Taff's best. I haven't heard all his albums, but since this is the only one I like so far, I'm inclined to agree. (Although the reason I like it is mostly because it's more of a rock album while the others I've heard were country. I can't stand country.) The whole album is largely in the same raw, moody, emotional vein, questioning and yearning and hoping and pleading. It encapsulates my thought life in sonic form more than I think any album ever has. It captures, fairly accurately, the weight that sits on my heart nearly every single day of my life. It acknowledges that life can have pain and hard moments (or years, as the case may be...), and especially at the time it was released, this kind of gut-level songwriting was unheard of in the Christian music subculture. Russ Taff poured his heart and soul out for this album, and my soul is better for it.

14 April 2016

One Week

Written 8 April 2016, 11.48pm.

Strange week this week.

Last Friday at this time I was in Saskatchewan, visiting my college friends, excited beyond belief to be able to see so many of them, despite the fact that most of my college friends are performance majors wrapping up all their final performances (and rehearsals) for the year -- to say nothing of all the major papers they were still writing.

This visit came after I stayed up late for nearly four straight days in a desperate attempt to finish my final history paper of the semester for my distance course before the trip.

Then we ended up staying an extra day (Sunday) in Saskatchewan. At first this was okay with me, but then Sunday afternoon my parents texted me: 'Grandpa has pneumonia. All they can do is make him comfortable. You should see him Monday when you get back.' Even through the text I could sense this directive was not a mere suggestion.

We bumped our departure time up to 8.30 (from 9.30) Monday morning and planned to drive straight to his nursing home from the college. Sunday night I went to the final choir performance of the year and all I could really think was 'Grandpa will hear real angels sing like this soon.' But I hoped he could hold on.

I woke up Monday morning to see a text sent at 3.30am: 'Grandpa is gone.'

No point in hurrying now. So we moseyed home. It had happened so fast that it didn't seem real. My friend and I laughed and joked on the way home in much the same way we had on the way to the college. In retrospect I'm glad I was with him that day and not at home -- as awful as it was to have missed saying goodbye by one day, being with my friend, stuck in a vehicle together for the better part of eight hours, was what I needed. Of course it wasn't really his decision whether or not to spend those eight hours with me, but he made the most of it -- making me laugh but also letting me question and ponder. He let me feel a lot of emotions but didn't make me feel guilty for feeling any of them. In spite of what awaited me at home, I genuinely enjoyed myself and I think that time of enjoyment cushioned the blow. I would never have taken it half as well if I had been at home, surrounded by it.

Then came the texts from my mother at the funeral home with my grandma and my uncle: 'We're thinking of having the funeral on Friday,' and 'Grandpa had requested that you sing at his funeral. Your choice of song.'

What?

I haven't properly sung in a full year -- and even when I was actively training, I wasn't particularly good at it. Oh sure, I sing in the van when I'm driving to dance class, but somehow I don't think that really counts. And of course, I was in the throes of a full-on chest infection and could hardly talk without drowning in phlegm. Plus I knew my grandpa had never actually heard me sing. Who in the world had given him the idea that I could sing?

We arrived home. Since my grandpa was already dead I simply went straight to dance class that night -- the first class back after a week off for spring break. To wake up at your former's roommate's house in small-town Saskatchewan and end up at dance class in big-city Alberta over the course of one day always gives me a bit of mental whiplash -- never mind the realisation that I would never see my grandpa again, though he had been fine when I left.

Tuesday I drove my sisters to dance class -- which I don't usually do, but my mother was busy and couldn't take them. Wednesday was my only semi-normal day. Thursday I spent two and a half hours at the dentist's getting two of my front teeth essentially rebuilt and am still getting used to the feel of two teeth without any nerves in them whatsoever. And of course, Friday -- today -- was the funeral.

Because of all the divorcing and petty arguments and crap that's been going on over the past year and a half, I hadn't seen half of this side of the family since before my second year of college. I didn't even recognise my cousin. And we live less than five minutes apart from each other.

I've been to funerals before, but I've never been 'the family.' Some of them have been relatives, yes, but more along the line of 'great-grandmother' or 'cousin.' But when it's your grandpa, you are the family, you are one of the people who sits in the 'Reserved' pews at the front and don't have to stand for the hymns. Funerals are very, very different when you're the immediate family. You are the last in the sanctuary -- parading past all those standing people -- and you are the first to leave it -- immediately into the waiting limo to head to the gravesite. You are given first dibs at standing room at the graveside service and you are one of the people given a rose. The people at the luncheon wait for you to go through the food line first and as they leave they come and speak to you. Half of these people I thought I didn't know but then recognised them with shock. When did everybody get so old?

And to think last Friday at this time, there were no funeral plans. I was watching Doctor Who with my roommate, planning to visit our friends later in the afternoon and evening. My grandpa was alive and although frail and weakened by recent strokes, he was fairly well.

How quickly time moves. How quickly life changes.

21 March 2016

Motivation

15 March 2016; 1.30am.

Is there a place for anger in an artist?

I guarantee I won't figure out the answer in one blog post, but I'm thinking it's something I should consider. I saw a thing on the Humans of New York Facebook page the other day, a quote from an artist, talking about how important humility is in an artist. And I absolutely agreed with him, but it made me aware of whether or not I'm very humble. I don't have to think about that long -- I'm probably one of the most prideful artists ever. (How much do I rail against modern dance and modern music because I think it sucks and I can do better?)

But where did this come from? I don't think I've ever been humble to begin with. There have always been things I hated in art and while I have always wanted to capture what I love about the world, I have nothing but contempt for the things that don't touch me. Is that just me? Or is this normal? Should it be so?

Further down the thought trail I realised most of my art -- indeed, most of my life -- comes from a place of anger. Sometimes it's resentment, sometimes it's jealousy, sometimes it's frustration, but it all fits under the same heading. I always had an interest in writing, but I started writing in earnest in the depths of my self-pity after being told by the church youth group that I was unloveable. So I sat in my room and composed stories, mostly about a lonely, rejected main character who either commits suicide (causing everyone who met her to finally realise what jerks they were), or goes off to college somewhere -- effectively falling off the face of the earth -- and climbs the ranks of society or show business and then runs into her detractors by chance years down the road when she's in a higher social class than they. It was my only way of being vindicated -- in my own handwriting, in reams of looseleaf that no-one has ever seen. Later this started to spawn novels with a more diverse plot range, but it started with my rage against all those who claimed to be reflecting the God of love but spread only hate and favouritism against me.

On a different track: I first realised I wanted to make dances when I was about eight years old. I even made a few false starts in my mid teens. But what finally got a dance finished was this: when I finally grew brave enough to even mention to my mother that this was what I wanted, she took it well -- to my face. But that night, after we were all in bed... I went upstairs to get a drink or something and I heard her talking to my dad about me.

"She wants to be some big-shot choreographer now. I don't know where she gets this stuff from. She'll never do it. She doesn't want it bad enough."

I was incensed. This was my life's dream. For years she had been begging me to talk to her, to tell her what was going on in my mind about something, anything. And I finally decided to trust her with this, my deepest and most precious thought (at the time)... and she calls me stupid?

I don't want it bad enough, huh? We'll see about that.

I made a vow that night. I would finish the next dance I started. And if I couldn't finish it, that would be a sign to me that choreography was not what I was meant to do and I would accept that she was right.

I had spent my entire life being a failure. A nobody. Someone who would be better off dead. I'd already written half a dozen novels by that point in my life, but apparently that didn't matter and I was still a failure. With my vow in mind, I started work on Sing Your Freedom not long after that. I finished it.

And I said nothing about it. I finished several more dances. I'm not sure at what point she realised I was finishing them. But by that time I was beyond telling her about my accomplishments. They were worthless anyway. These were for me now. When they went through my stuff after I died -- whenever that would be -- they would find out what a great artist was in their midst. And then they would be sorry for treating me like that.

Delusional? Almost certainly. But I was blind with rage. I was no longer creating to enrich people's lives. I was creating to prove -- if only in my daydreams -- that I was not as worthless as I felt everyone was making me out to be. And in a final twist of pride, I didn't even talk about my work or my accomplishments outside of this blog and occasionally Facebook. The very people I thought I had gone into art for were not privy to the work that I was theoretically doing for them. My gift -- if I even had one to speak of -- was being used for me only, for my own edification and satisfaction. I told myself 'they'll never love you no matter how great your work is so why bother trying?' So I focused on proving to myself that I was great. And thus I started creating art in a complete and total vacuum.

12 January 2016

Dream Funeral

Originally written 2 January 2016, 11.36pm.

Lately I've been realising how much I think about death, particularly my own death.

I've mentioned on this blog before that I was suicidal for the better part of nine years. That time is past, but even after the suicidal thoughts were gone, I still thought about my own death a lot. Because I'd been suicidal for so long, it seemed normal to me. And because I'm an (aspiring) artist, it also stood to reason that I would ponder my own mortality more than the average person.

It never occurred to me that this might be strange until after Christmas. Over the past two weeks, like five people I know have gotten engaged (and I knew of at least eleven before that), and while everyone's talking about wedding planning and stuff, it began to occur to me that I'd never really even considered my own wedding or marriage. My (chronically single) sister has planned out her entire future wedding down to the amount of seconds it will take her to walk down the aisle, and I'd never thought to work out anything more specific than 'I'll be in white.' This might not seem strange to you until I tell you that I have my entire funeral planned out.

I'm not dying -- at least not of anything chronic (sometimes it feels like it though -- but my rant against the Canadian Health Care system is for another day). There's nothing in my life that is generally a harbinger of an early death. I mean, I could be taken out by an accident or something, but at the moment, I'm likely to live another seventy or eighty years (if the genes are any indication).

The other day I was thinking about this, wondering if maybe it was odd for me to have planned out my funeral while all my friends are planning weddings. Then I realised that in nearly every novel I've written, I make a cameo. And in almost every novel that features such a cameo, that character dies. Usually they die young, and usually they die suddenly -- one was murdered, one died of a virus, another indirectly committed suicide. But they're usually the 'me' character -- the one I identify with the most. And usually that character's death drives the book's plot. I've been dying vicariously through my characters. Why?

Again we turn to Kyrie. Only in Kyrie did I actually write a funeral, but that funeral was almost exactly the one I've planned out for myself. I featured some of the same songs I want played at mine, I featured the 'open mic eulogy' idea I want for my funeral, I featured a dance -- the same thing I want at my funeral. I focused on the heartbreak of the first-person narrator and the dead character's closest friend. It was pretty much my dream funeral.

The character who died was the 'me' character. Her goal was to touch people's hearts and encourage them as they trod the weary path of life -- as is mine. Her goal was to bring truth and beauty to a world that increasingly despises both -- as is mine. She had the courage to pursue her dreams of being an artist and when she died, although she touched the lives of many, and many missed her, there were 'villains' at her funeral: her parents (caricatures of everyone who's ever told me I was stupid and worthless purely because I'm not wired for a 9-to-5) and the director of the show that she was performing in when she died (who, as the narrator noted, mourned only the great talent he had lost, not the person herself).

In reflecting on that story, I recalled how much of my life has been spent in despair over this black hole in my heart and soul of feeling like I wasn't important to anybody. The question that has dogged my entire life since I was about nine years old was, If I died, would anybody miss me? That question fueled the lengthy suicidal episode and it still haunts me now. I asked my mother once and her response was, "Pfft! Of course I'd miss you," but it was so flippant and she seemed to think the question was ridiculous and annoying -- just like everything else about me. I'm not sure that if I died today, anybody would miss me for more than a week. And maybe that's why I took it so hard when my cousin died. After we got the phone call saying she was dead, my parents' reaction was, "well, God's in control," as if that settled it. They didn't ache, they didn't hurt, my mother didn't shed a single tear, though heaven knows my sister and I sobbed until we couldn't breathe at her funeral. They didn't mourn. They didn't care. They literally just shrugged and moved on. Less than a month after her death, my mother actually got upset at me: "Look, I don't know why you can't just move on already!"

Again -- less than a month after the third death close to me in as many months. The death of a child. And we're not counting the divorce-deaths in this tally.

And I'm starting to wonder if that's why every spark of life and joy and peace has shriveled up and died within me -- if that's how my parents react when a child close to them has died, how will they react if I were to die? Would they even care? Would they mourn me at all? Would they even notice a difference? And this is my parents. If I'm inconsequential in the eyes of my parents, how much less am I loved by those who aren't obligated to love me? Would I even be lucky enough to get a funeral? Or would people just send pithy cards to my parents with their regrets because they had work and call it good enough? Do I mean anything to anybody?

Some time ago, I wrote a post outlining my personal mission in life, and I've already alluded to it in this post. I want to touch people's lives. I want to encourage them and bring them a spark of hope or joy, the same way David Meece, Terry Scott Taylor/Daniel Amos, White Heart, and so on have brought to me. But if I can't even manage to touch the lives of my own family, never mind the random people I've happened to cross paths with in my life... then I've failed.

People always say on their deathbeds that the most important thing in life is the relationships you have and the people whose lives you've touched -- your spouse, your children, your parents, your family and friends. So many films, so many books, so many stories have that at their core. I'm one of the very few that have picked up on this long before actually dying, but I'm so inept at it. I want to know that I've helped somebody keep their chin up for even one more day. I want to know that something I created helped bring refreshment to a soul weary of this depressing world. But I don't know that I have. I don't know if I or the work of my brain and my hands have been important to anybody. I don't need to be famous. But I want to know that my life meant something to somebody.

30 December 2015

Dancing At The Edge Of Time And Memory

23 November 2015, 12.08am.

On Sunday we got a call that my grandpa -- already in frail health -- has been diagnosed with a superbug.

He may die.

Apparently the last couple of weeks he's been talking about how he's so exhausted and how he just wants to sleep and not have to wake up.

At first I took this news fairly resolutely -- he's been ill for several years now and it's always kind of in the back of one's mind... this Christmas could be the last.

But then suddenly I remembered that he's been asking for months for my sisters and I to come and do a dance performance in the nursing home where he lives now. I didn't have anything prepared and I wanted to wait until I actually had several pieces in a danceable state. And then life happened and I forgot. When I remembered today that I had said I would -- and especially how he's been looking forward to it -- I cried as if my heart would break. What if we don't get it together in time? What if he never gets to see us dance? He's been so excited to see us dance and I haven't given it to him yet. And maybe now it's too late.

Plus, there's this matter of living on the edge of time, knowing it's coming but not knowing exactly when, walking on pins and needles, knowing he can't live forever but not ready to live without him yet. And what do you say to a person who's close to death? With the three deaths earlier this year, I had no warning, no time to say anything I might have wanted to say. They were just taken and I had to live with the fallout. But now I have the chance to say anything I want -- but I don't know yet. And the stupid thing is, I probably won't know what -- if anything -- I have to say to him until after it's too late.

I do this all the time. Going to the doctor is an exercise in frustration because I have a whole big list of questions going into the appointment but when they ask if I have any questions, every single one of those questions is completely gone. And I don't remember until I get home and start coughing again and go, oh yeah -- I cough until I can't breathe for nearly a full minute. Is that a problem? Same at the bank -- "Do you have any other banking?" "I DON'T KNOW MY BRAIN DOESN'T WORK WHEN I'M IN A PROFESSIONAL BUILDING." And it terrifies me that I'm going to think of something I wanted very badly to say to him two minutes after he dies. And then I'll hate myself for the rest of my life because this time I actually had the chance to put a sentence together and I didn't because I totally forgot every word in the English language and what if that was something he really needed to hear?

30 December 2015, 12.52am.

Against all sanity, I arranged this performance. Yes, over Christmas. Yes, despite not having rehearsal space. No, I have no idea what the floor is actually like in the performing space. No, neither dance piece is really in great shape. We perform in fourteen hours.

I'm so done with everything. I had set aside today for rehearsing, particularly my solo, which I have yet to do full-out all the way through (also I remembered that I still HATE solos). Instead, I have spent thirteen hours going over the house with a fine-toothed comb looking for the power cord for my video camera.

This may not seem like a big deal, but the fact is that if I want to get into the performing arts, I will eventually need a portfolio of my previous work. In dance, that's video footage. This performance will be particularly valuable as it will be me performing my own choreography -- that counts double. It shows both my skill as a dancer (don't laugh) and my style of choreography. This doesn't even include the educational factor for me -- if I have footage of myself performing my own work that I can review later, it will provide invaluable feedback on what worked and what didn't and I can use that information to refine what I do and how I do it.

Except, of course, I can't use the video camera because it can't be charged because I can't find the stupid power cord.

So as a result of this fruitless search I am now frustrated beyond words, I haven't practiced at all, I've lost an entire day of my life that could have been productive, and I still don't have a useable video camera. To buy a new cord for my perfectly good and now utterly useless six hundred dollar camera? $125. For the cord.

My grandpa had better enjoy this show. He's going to be the only one lucky enough to see it.

25 December 2015

Christmas For The Broken (Music Day)

Usually I'm that really annoying hyper-Christmas person who starts working Boney M. and Michael W. Smith into the music rotation in the middle of August. But this year, it's already Christmas Day and I'm still not feeling it.

It was an awful year. It was right around this time of year that I heard from Brittney for the very last time -- although I didn't know it. It was at Christmas 2014 that I last saw my cousin, my aunt, the family friend we lost, and an entire family unit out of our extended family -- we didn't know it then either. I distinctly remember my uncle hugging me after our family Christmas last year and telling me to 'be good' -- his usual way of saying goodbye. Less than a month later, he left his wife, God abandoned me, and so began the Year From Hell.

How do you celebrate Christmas when the loving family who swore they'd love each other and stick together through thick and thin is either dead, banished, or not speaking to each other?

Peace on earth and good will to men.

This year I learnt that despite all my extended family's insistence to the contrary, their love for each other is EXTREMELY fickle. And if these people are willing to leave spouses and children, if they are willing to skip freaking Christmas after a year like this because of some spat with some in-law, how much longer until it's me they're leaving? How long until they tell me they don't love me anymore, the same way they're telling everyone else? How do you expect me, your niece, to believe you care for me and want the best for me when you are willing to walk out on your own spouse just because you decided you didn't like them anymore?

Does anybody not see what is wrong with this?

Title: Where Are You Christmas
Artist: The Piano Guys
Album: A Family Christmas
Year: 2013
Label: Portrait
iTunes here; YouTube here.

This arrangement is a prime example of when the beautiful is so lovely is also makes one sad -- or at least melancholy. It's an experience that's getting more and more rare these days, but one that really should be getting more frequent. There's 'sad because it's so awful,' there's 'sad because the lyrics are sad,' there's 'sad because of extenuating circumstances,' but this is the increasingly rare 'sad because of its sheer beauty.' The piano melody throughout the piece gets me every time. And then the girl's plaintive voice comes in with that question: where are you, Christmas? and it somehow sounds just like me.

What happened to Christmas with all my aunt and uncles laughing, with the voices of all of the children ringing happily off the ceiling? What happened to Christmas where love pervaded the room and not an awkward tiptoeing around pretty much every single subject we always used to talk about?

Death happens. I get that. My cousin didn't really have a choice in the matter. But divorce -- that's another story. That's your own selfish choice. That is a very clear message that the people you said you committed to don't matter. You committed to me. Don't I matter?

I can never be assured of that again.

09 October 2015

Music Day - Dig Here, Revisited

This Music Day will have a slightly different feel to it.
I featured this album once before, upon its release in June 2013. At that time in my life, I had just been accepted to college and I was in a whirlwind of terror as I realised my life was about to change very drastically (little did I know...). I had been a Daniel Amos fan for all of four months.

I liked the album quite a lot when it first came out. As a writer with a literary/poetic bent, I fell deeply in love with nearly every lyric. Terry Taylor has been writing songs professionally for over a quarter century and his ability to turn a phrase, paint a mental image, and/or juxtapose two concepts for maximum irony is very finely honed.

Even the musical backdrops captured my imagination. At that point in my life, I listened to music almost exclusively for the lyrics. If you had tried to get me into a song based on a 'really sweet guitar solo' or an 'awesome' chord progression in the bridge, well... not going to happen. I really didn't care about the music as long as it generally sounded cool as a whole. Of course, two years in a college music program has since utterly reformed the way I listen to songs, but even at the time I loved the music of this album. It was rich, it was lush, it was full-bodied, it was part Dr. Seuss, part brooding Van Gogh, part rock band, part orchestra.

Fast forward two years. Well, two and a half. A lot has happened... my beloved rattletrap gave up the ghost, I graduated from college with not only an Associate of Arts in music, but a lead role in a stage musical under my belt, I lost an aunt, an uncle, a cousin, and two good friends to death of various kinds. For the first time in my life, I have truly known heartache. Depression is one thing, heartache is another. They are intertwined, but I'm not sure they're quite the same thing.

Today I listened to this album for the first time since all those deaths. Different things catch my attention now, and other things that hit me before hit harder now. I had already noticed (how could anyone not?) that this album explores the topic of death quite a lot. On the brink of leaving my family for college two years ago, I thought I knew what that was -- the end of my old life of being surrounded by family, the end of free time. And although I'm back in Alberta with my family now, in a way I was right. Nothing is the same now as it was then, and it never will be.

To hear these lyrics again in this new reality that I can't get away from, this reality that half my family is essentially dead, hits a tender spot I walled off the night my mother texted me that my uncle left his wife:

You left me ruined on the inside
Taught me love's a wrecking crew...

I need to dream again...

So why should we take his big bitter pill
And wash it down with a bucket of our tears?

You hide Yourself away somewhere behind a thundercloud...

My heartbeat is the pounding of Your iron hand breaking me...

In my head
Here it comes
Ruthless hum of dread...

And the spot that still flames red with anger and pain from the night I begged God for a miracle and received only cold static in reply:

We were anxious for our prayers to be answered
But our angels were distracted and so slow...

The same rock that we stood on crushed us...

I've never been more alive
Now that I've died...

Another bad guy wins
More good friends die
They mounted up like eagles
Now they're dropping like flies...

In a pauper's field of dreams
I'm walking in between open-mouthed graves
Anxious to be fed...

Listening to this album today brought me a comfort that has eluded me for a year. It didn't fix anything -- my family is still in shambles. It was a temporary comfort. But there's that... I don't know, camaraderie? that comes from hearing your pain in words that someone else penned. It makes you feel not quite as alone.

Album: Dig Here Said The Angel
Artist: Daniel Amos
Year: 2013
Label: Independent release (Kickstarter-funded)
iTunes here; buy the CD from the band here. Buy the vinyl from the band here.
Lyrics for the album here (click on the song titles).

03 June 2015

A Time Machine of 1/500

I used to do a lot of photography. And even back when I started taking pictures seriously around 2009, it wasn't really about art or money or making a statement (although later it did become those things). My photography mainly centered around two things: people and events.

I learnt about photography principles of course -- the rule of thirds, the power of a wide aperture/selective focus and of zooming in, what sorts of compositions work best, how to use colour and light to draw attention and enhance the mood. My photography grew lovely in its own right, and by now it's so second nature I often barely realise I have a camera in my hand. My Nikon is essentially an extension of my arm. But the subjects are still mostly people and events.

When I started taking pictures, my goal was to capture moments and keep them. It was mostly for my own personal record more than anything. To this day I'll stop to take a picture of something and whoever is with me will give me a strange look -- 'that? Seriously?' -- but because they know taking random pictures is something I do, they say nothing. After all, no harm done. And my friends and family have long since gotten used to me wandering around with a camera at all times.

And now, in the wake of three deaths, one cancer diagnosis, and two shattered marriages, all involving people I love dearly, I'm reminded why I started taking pictures in the first place.

It's like a mini time machine. I was looking for pictures of my recently-deceased young cousin (it was her birthday), and in my quest I found myself scrolling back through 2013 -- the year I discovered Daniel Amos and started college... 2012 -- the year we held our Father's Day party as a barbeque... 2011 -- the year we invited a lady from our church to our family Christmas gathering and our dance school staged Little Bo Peep... 2010 -- the year of my accident, the last family reunion... 2009 -- how tiny my sisters look! the year my sister began ballet classes...

I had forgotten most of this. I had forgotten how my sisters looked so young. It's funny to think how at one time I could not picture them any other way, but five years later I hardly recognised them. Their hairstyles are different, two are now wearing glasses, one has lost a drastic amount of weight. I'd forgotten how short my brother once was. I had forgotten the full brilliance of Brittney's sweet shy smile and seriously cool wardrobe. I had forgotten that once my aunt and uncle would laugh and once they would sit beside each other and hold hands. I had forgotten what my uncle's twinkling eyes looked like -- last time I saw him, only a few weeks ago, those eyes were so lifeless. He was a completely different person from the man who hugged me goodbye last Christmas.

There was a time when things were right -- when everyone was here who should have been, when people were healthy and happy and while there were always smaller problems and the occasional falling out, we were all here. We were together. We smiled and laughed and no-one was missing. I can't bring that back (how I desperately wish I could!). But for a few minutes I can return there and see it all laid out before me, re-insert myself in the space, hear their voices again, if only in my mind.

Maybe it's a waking dream. But it brings the missing ones closer to me.