Speech at Ryerson: “Too Far From Heaven”

Posted on | February 2, 2012 | No Comments

Sometimes I think tequila is a good idea.

I once got so drunk on tequila in University, that I came up to my residence room, determined to get back to the party when the world stopped spinning, that I turned up Wu Tang Clan’s Ain’t Nothing To Fuck With, so loudly that it shook the walls, simply so that I wouldn’t pass out. I woke up at 5 in the morning, to realize that campus security wasn’t to be fucked with.

Last Friday, I got so drunk I could barely see.

I was trying to forget a Facebook message I received earlier in the evening from someone I knew as a child. She is one of those girls who looked made for giving you a hug on a rainy day. She told me that she tried to kill herself last weekend, by taking a bottle of clonazepam and a bottle of wine.  Then she took a steak knife to her arm.

She wants to tell her story so that she could help other people when she can barely help herself.

She is strong because she’s alive and I’m drunk because I can’t stand the idea of someone who smiles like that feeling this way.

So I am doing tequila shots, trying to get warm because it’s hard to feel anything other than the cold in Toronto in February. And I am talking to a girl with curly eyelashes and red pants, telling her about the letter, wanting to have a stranger comfort me and she tells me she understands.

I ask her if she has received a similar letter.
She says she understands the girl.  That she plans on killing herself in a few weeks. Drunk Mike tries to save her. Drunk Mike didn’t ask for her name, he asked for tequila shots.

My hangover was the type where you can’t drink water when you feel thirsty.

I’m here today and I’m not speaking for the Mental Health Commission. I’m speaking for the people who aren’t ready to speak for themselves.

I’m here because while I was writing this I received another letter from girl who lost finance’ to suicide and doesn’t know if she can live with the guilt and pain. I’m here because in her Facebook photo she is hugging her deceased finance and they look so incredibly young and sweet that I want to force them to live inside that picture, to have pictures of their children, pictures of the dreams they could have lived together. He was 22.

I’m here because these strangers keep breaking my heart and my head feels like it is going to explode.

We need to talk about mental illness and someone more important than me needs to listen.

I miss being a student.

I learned a lot about love at university. I can remember during my Frosh week when the attractive Frosh leader showed me how to fit a condom on a banana and I thought she was trying to seduce me. I remember nine years ago leaning over the railing of my residence building’s second floor, having my first panic attack, heart beating like a machinegun as MSN announced in the other room that another girl considered me as a brother, aka we were never, ever, going to have sex.

I was 18. It was seven years before I got treatment for my anxiety disorder. It was a week before I tried shrooms for the first time and played NHL 94 in the most polite manner. Laughing and passing the puck back and forth unable to score on each other because we were high enough to think we’d found enlightenment and NHL 94 was our Boddhi tree. Downstairs a friend of mine had thrown some mescaline on top of the shrooms and was hallucinating about putting a gun in his mouth and pulling the trigger. That night he started falling and it took him eight years to find the ground.

Mick Ford’s been lived with depression since he was 14. He didn’t kill himself, but he did try every drug in the world in an attempt to run away from his mental illness. One day he stopped running and he remains sober with the help of methadone.

I remember sitting in the chapel, when my friend Jason died.

Weeping with my friends not like babies, but like grown men who didn’t know that such a horrible thing would make them adults. Jason’s funeral was on the same campus where we had an April Fool’s Day water fight and he was the general. Where we surrounded the rest of the school and blasted them with balloons Simpson’s style.

I learned about mental illness by watching my friends die and become addicted to drugs.

I didn’t understand until I was at my first love’s birthday party, holding a heart shaped balloon, posing for a picture, wondering how in a week my life could fall apart. Staring at the camera, thinking, I’m sorry but I love you more than anything and I don’t want to hurt you, but I don’t know to stop hurting myself. When she took that picture she didn’t know what was coming. It was just a bad week. She didn’t realize that our dream would become her sleeping next to an insomniac. She told me no matter what happened we would get through it together. And we did.

People say that mental illness is like a cancer you can’t see. There is a difference. Your love can’t affect cancer cells, but it can help save the people you love.

At 25, I suffered a nervous breakdown brought on by intense anxiety.

I was sent to a self-help group where I was the only person in attendance, where help was a human pamphlet reading a power point presentation without paraphrasing a single sentence. Imagine looking for help and not being able to find it. Realize that 2/3 out of people who suffer from mental illness don’t get treatment.

I didn’t recover because I was stronger than my friends. I recovered because I was luckier. My family was able to pay the 150 dollars an hour that my therapist charged so I had the privilege of getting better.

Everyone tells us to talk about mental illness but we rarely get a clear picture of what life is actually like for people living with mental illness. In the media we almost exclusively tell the success stories of celebrities who accomplish their miracles despite the obstacles in their way. Or we talk about murderous psychopaths who society failed to help or homeless men and women who can’t help themselves. We are either inspiring, terrifying or objects of pity. We are whatever sells newspapers that week.

We need to talk to people who don’t have stories that sell papers. Who get up, take medication, exercise and go to work every day no matter how they feel.

These diseases are more common than most of us realize. So is recovery.  Every day we get out of bed, we take on step back to life. It isn’t a miracle that we get better. It’s an everyday occurrence too boring for most of you to write about. If I had a dream, it’s that we would start speaking about how life is, rather than how it’s supposed to be. Every time you try to make life fit a story, you are just selling advertisements. That there is some easy answer, that everyone who doesn’t find it is a failure. Some people can’t recover and it’s not their fault.

It’s not because they are weak, or stupid or don’t try enough. It’s because this is life, not a movie. You chose to be a journalist; you gave up money, reasonable work hours and a stable job market. Don’t give up your integrity. People buy what you are selling.

Every time we try to build mental health awareness in the media it follows a rare occasion when someone with mental illness hurts someone other than themselves. There is a problem with violence and the mentally ill and it gets worse every time we ignore it. Journalists feel comfortable talking about murder, we can’t talk about suicide. Right now suicide is the leading cause of violent death, not homicide. 4,000 people die of suicide every year in Canada, 32,000 in the United States. Silence comes both before and after suicide and it’s the silence before that we need to deal with most.

We can’t keep our children in the dark for fear they will never be able to emerge from it.

I’m asking you to begin the conversation with our youth to break the shame that is the foundation of so many of these afflictions. To eradicate this phantom idea of normalcy that makes so many of us feel hollow and broken.

I want you to make the politicians to talk about mental illness in Parliament, in cities halls and in cabinet meetings.

And I want their words to mean something.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s speech on MP David’s Batters funeral is some of the most beautiful writing on the stigma surrounding mental illness I have ever read:

He wrote,

“We need to know that mental illness like Dave’s is shockingly common in our society. It affects the great and the small alike despite the stigma that still too often surrounds it. “

The problem is that the same quality of treatment is not offered to the great and small alike.

Our rich can afford the quality therapy our medical system doesn’t offer the economically disadvantaged. Harper plans to build prisons for our drug addicts, who self medicate, rather than treatment centers, to jail the homeless and mentally ill rather than offer them the healthcare services they need. The Correctional Service of Canada reports that 13 per cent of male offenders in federal custody presented mental health problems when they were admitted in 2008. That’s up 86 per cent from 1997. For women, the figure reaches 24 per cent, and 85 per cent increase over the same time.  There are offered to little no treatment. Yesterday Tory Senator Pierre Hughes Boisvenu said.

‘Basically I think that every murderer should have a rope in his cell and he can decide on his own life He advocated that criminals should commit suicide to save the taxpayers the high cost of keeping them in prison. He says to give them the rope.

It takes 6 months to a year to see a state sponsored therapist.

To get immediate treatment you have to be suicidal and have a plan and we clearly don’t have a plan for dealing with suicide when each year more people kill themselves.

Isn’t there more productive use for a rope? We scaled Everest with a length of rope and our belief we can do the impossible. Instead of hanging ourselves couldn’t we use the same rope to build a safety net to catch these angels before they hit the ground? What are our demons but angels that have lived too far from heaven for too long?

Who is to live in this better world Harper is creating, when we build the fences so high, that mortal men and women live their whole lives on the other side.

With ropes and pulleys we built the Wonder of the World.

Why would we use the same rope to protect to ourselves from the people we love?

Couldn’t we build a world they could live in, where they could experience that wonder? Couldn’t the 19 billion dollar that Harper intends to spend on prisons, be spent on building a dream rather than building a wall to protect us from our worst fears? Especially when the people we love are left on the other side.

You are our voice. You brought down the Berlin Wall, you were with Martin Luther King when a million men marched, you were there with Harvey Milk and Matthew Shepherd when they fought for the right to love as they wanted to, and you are here with me right now, ready to declare that we can be loved for who we are. That the one thing, great and small alike deserve is access to the help they need to live.

You are our voice.

Today we are talking about mental illness.

I want you to make the conversation mean something. I went to King’s College and grew up and watched friends become adults and die as children. No one ever told me about mental illness.

It’s up to you to tell everybody.

We Have To Make It Better

Posted on | January 27, 2012 | 6 Comments

On June 28^th, 2010 I came out about my experiences with anxiety and depression.

Any employer  can do a Google search and find out about the battles I have fought and how close I came to losing them.

I write to remind myself that the best of what I am came from emerging out of that darkness. To remember how lonely it feels to live at the end of the world.

I learned about mental illness by watching friends die and lose themselves to drug addiction.

We only talk about mental illness when we have no other choice.

Inside the silence 4000 people die every single year of suicide in Canada; in it lies the 2/3 of people who suffer from mental illness who won’t receive help due to the tremendous stigma.

It’s time to talk about it.

My story isn’t special.

Do I have to tell you about the people I have lost to drug addiction, the children I have loved who never became adults; do I have to tell you about my nightmarish trip through insomnia and anxiety? Do I have to make you feel the tears as they slid down my cheeks or can I trust that you have wept? Must I tell you my story when I know that you have your own?

I know you’ve watched loved ones crawl into the darkness unable to stop them.  I know that you’ve wondered if you could live to see tomorrow.  I know that you’ve run away from yourself and wondered if you could ever get back.

Mental illness convinces us that our story is special. That we alone suffer this great darkness and that we alone are too weak to win it. To feel that you alone are not worthy of being loved.

I called it the Come Out campaign because the LGBTTTIQ community had to deal with a similar stigma when they took to the streets, announced their identity and became a political force that could demand the rights society was denying them. They could have remained hidden, they were an invisible minority. They risked their lives and careers for hope of living the life they wanted without hiding who they were. Nothing could be braver than sacrificing for a dream you can’t possibly imagine coming true.

People tell us it’s 2012 and things have gotten better.  However you merely need to watch a GOP Presidential debate to realize they have a long way to go.

It’s 2012 and the World Health Organization says that depression is approaching epidemic levels.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s speech on MP David’s Batters funeral is some of the most beautiful writing on the stigma surrounding mental illness I have ever read:

“We need to know that mental illness like Dave’s is shockingly common in our society. It affects the great and the small alike despite the stigma that still too often surrounds it. “

The problem is that the same quality of treatment is not offered to the great and small alike.

Our rich can afford the quality therapy our medical system doesn’t offer the economically disadvantaged.Harper plans to build prisons for our drug addicts rather than treatment centers, to jail the homeless and mentally ill rather than offer them the healthcare services they need. The Correctional Service of Canada reports that 13 per cent of male offenders in federal custody presented mental health problems when they were admitted in 2008. That’s up 86 per cent from 1997. For women, the figure reaches 24 per cent, and 85 per cent increase over the same time. It takes a year to see a state sponsored therapist. To get immediate treatment you must be suicidal and have a plan. We have institutionalized discrimination against people living with mental illness.

There is a difference between words and action.

It’s 2012 and Canada’s overburdened mental health system is on the verge of collapse.

People ask me about how I recovered.

The answer is that I was lucky. My parents had money so I could afford to get the help I needed.

Most of us find a way to cope without getting the proper help.

For those of you beginning your journey all I can say is that falling down happens in an instant and getting up feels like it takes an eternity. That there is no simple easy one step solution that works for everyone.  That recovery isn’t writing a blog, doing yoga or even taking medication.  It’s about self-acceptance, realizing that you can’t cut yourself into pieces and live in only the “good” parts of who you are. Realizing that this is part of how you think. You cannot take this feeling away without taking feeling away.

I used to beg just to be free of this pain.

I took drugs, from doctors and drug dealers, I meditated for hours, and I scoured the Internet looking for the pill that would make me a better person.

I couldn’t imagine a life so fantastic as to justify such cruel torture.

Too often we look to forget through drugs and alcohol, we run away from the unbearable beauty of a life worth living for.  We think that if we curl up and die, that if we starve our system of the things we fear, our demons will die.  That if we isolate ourselves so that no one can see our degradation, we will be able to look in a mirror. When it’s only by rejoicing, by ravenously seeking life and the things that hurt us that we can find a reason to be here.

No one was born to sit on their couch and watch Netflix. No one becomes more of a person when they do coke.  No one does honor to the things they lost by trying to lose themselves.

You aren’t broken.

You are whole.  Which means you are filled with contradictions, love and hate so vast you can’t begin to understand it, created to give you the possibility of compassion for a world that is as crazy as you are. The desire to simplify the world, the desire to simplify yourself, is what creates the horrors in ourselves and in our world.  It’s also the danger of awareness campaigns.

Recovery means different things to different people. Recovery is the courage to get out of bed in the morning, it’s looking for help when you need it, it’s going to work, it’s realizing that this crushing pain is something we can live with.

.This isn’t about false hope but a pursuit of real understanding.

All I can do is hope that when you reach out to the world we reach back. Too many of us look for help and don’t find it. In the pursuit of happiness, we have forgotten our right to suffer. No one can tell you that you don’t have the right to your pain.

We have to stop telling people it will be okay and start listening to each other.

Great changes begin with a single step. Until we are comfortable saying what we suffer, there won’t enough beds in hospitals, access to therapy will depend upon economic status not need, and we will continue to lose irreplaceable people. We can’t change the world by hiding from it.

It’s 2012 and the journey is nowhere near over.

This isn’t It Gets Better, there is no better future promised unless we make it.

Until we can admit who we are without shame, things won’t get better.

This is our story.

It’s time to tell it.

 

The Come Out Campaign

Posted on | January 14, 2012 | 3 Comments

I can’t save your life redux

Posted on | January 13, 2012 | No Comments

Dear Michael,

I happened upon your amazing post tonight.  I wanted to contact you to say “thank you” and to tell you that you were also telling my story.  I have bipolar disorder; I’m very open about it and how it affects my life.  My family knows, most of my friends do.

The holidays are a misery for me.  I am almost always suicidal from Thanksgiving through New Year’s, and this year was very difficult.  Thanks to my family and friends (and my doctor), I pulled through without harming myself.  Though I’m beginning to feel better, I am still very fragile right now.  Unfortunately, my “best friend/boyfriend” can’t handle it when I fall into the abyss, and tells me I should, essentially, be “present” and “think happy thoughts.”  I should have shot him, but I just broke off with him.

So, here’s the issue (maybe you have a better take on it than I do) that has plagued me since my breakdown ten years ago:  I know my life has value to others, but why does it feel it has no value to me?  Is caring how my demise will affect the people in my life enough to continually live through these murderous lows?

I don’t have any answers for these questions, and I don’t know where to look within to find them.  Michael, what stays the hand?  Do you know?

I’m not going to pretend to say its easy to come up with an answer to your question or say that your words don’t make me feel infinitely small in my inability to say exactly the right thing.  Not because there isn’t one, but because to pierce through that gigantic darkness requires a patience and understanding of the person that I lack in regards to a complete stranger. And I’m not a trained psychologist. I highly advise seeking counseling and help if you feel like this.  But I’ll say a little something because this is not the first time someone has asked me something like this.  And I mean not the first time today.

So this is me just talking straight with you. I’m a poet so some of that straight talking is going to sound like Radiohead Lyrics, Hallmark Cards and Dr. David Burns masturbating to Ben Harper.  But I’ll try my best.

I can tell you that I have been in the darkness that absorbs the past and blurs any concept of a future. Where I lived in a constant present moment that is made up of only my fears of the past and the future, my guilt and shame, my existence trapped in this ultimate nowhere.  I have been in so much pain that I didn’t want to live or even have been born if I could escape it.

I also know that feeling is strange to me now. That outside of it, I can barely understand it.

You say that you always feel this way from Thanksgiving through New Years. I looked at the calendar recently and noticed there are all kinds of other months in the year. I understand how a person can forget that.

There also isn’t a guarantee that you always return to darkness.  Sometimes things actually do get better.My bipolar friend Alan, said this to me in an email recently:

“I am 48 years old and am a self-employed and own a web design company. I was working on a term job in Canso Nova Scotia when I could no longer function and was later diagnosed with bipolar II (depression) about 15 years ago. Like yourself, I was informed of a six-month wait to see a specialist. Much noise was made to see someone within a month. I bounced around the system for many years before finding a drug that worked for me for many years. I stopped taking any medication in the fall of 2007 after suffering no relapses for well over 10 years.”

Basic summation of my Hallmark story without Full House music: even this can change.

The person you are right now drifts away and though they may come back you get to enjoy things that the dead don’t.

In the darkness you are blind. Recognize that. Rationality crumbles and your brain chemistry tries to take away everything you want and wish for to get away from the pressures of wanting it. Be easy on yourself.  Remember that this feeling will pass. And if it comes again, it will also pass.

In regard to people telling you to have positive thoughts and the desire to commit murder as a result, I totally and completely understand.

You can’t base how you feel about yourself on the ignorance of a loved one. As you won’t understand this person when you feel normal again you can’t expect someone who hasn’t lived through it to understand it. I’d go fucking apeshit on a person who told me to be positive when I’m depressed. May as well tell a cripple to run on broken legs.

However…they know not what assholes they be.

People are raised on happy endings and stick to it clichés. No one knows the right thing to say about mental illness. We don’t have training. Most of them mean well and speak not because they think they know the answer but because no one taught us how to shut the fuck up and listen. Everyone wants to help to not feel so helpless. Read more

Chapter 2: So You Think You Have Anxiety

Posted on | January 12, 2012 | 4 Comments

Chapter 2: So You Think You Have Anxiety

November 3, 2009

I can’t really tell you why it happened.

There is no single incident that explains why I lost my mind on November 3^rd, 2009. I’ve watched friends commit suicide, deal with drug addictions, I fell in and out of love a hundred times and I didn’t break.

When I remember that day, all I can think of is that old alarm clock, and the way it liked to scream me awake.

I’m, tossing and turning. Covering my face with a pillow. Wishing for just a few more minutes where I might actually get some sleep. Mumbling curse words.

7:33.

12 minutes till I have to wake up to go to my internship. Whenever I have to wake up early in the morning I obsessively clock check to make sure I get up before my alarm.

Go to sleep. Just get up. A few more minutes.

My dad used to wake me up by singing in a horrible off-key voice, “Oh what a beautiful morning, what a beautiful day!” He always managed to turn the alarm off in time and wake me up with a goofy smile.

In university I started smoking pot and slept through my alarm. I always hated that moment where that terrible beeping sound broke into my dreams. It felt like life was made of that moment, where as soon as I’m opening my eyes I’m already late for doing what I have to do.

7:39.

I start doing that strange negotiating with myself that I do after a sleepless night. Where you tell yourself to call work and let them know you have caught some variety of Ebola and can’t come in today, “Hi, I’m bleeding from my eyes over here. I’d really like to come in but I worry that…”

You can’t do that. You will ruin the whole internship.

On my clothing covered floor, past the collection of joint roaches, water jug begging to be spilled by my sleepy klutzy self, lie two discarded wigs, one red, one blue. For Halloween, my girlfriend and I dressed as characters from Jem and the Holograms. I went as a bearded Kimber and more closely resembled the dude from Police Academy that set Jay Leno’s set on fire.

7:44. Get up, you fucking moron.

For some reason I can’t. I just watch the clock, waiting for it to go off, wondering how many seconds I have left.

Sometimes I think about what would have happened if I got to it in time. If I turned it off, went to the shower, let the hot water take the tension out of my body and went to work. If I could have just frozen that moment, if I could have whispered in my ear that it was all going to be fine and then I wouldn’t have had to go through all this,  taking her with me.  Unfortunately I lay in my bed, wishing for a few more moments of sleep.

7:45. The alarm begins to shriek.

“Fuck,” she says and turns over, pushing the blanket covers off of her back, revealing the silk-soft skin of her back and shoulders, where her short shiksa blond hair rests in early morning tangle. “That fucking alarm.”

“Good morning,” I say, noticing my voice is shaky and wondering why.

“Can you turn that off please?” The alarm clock continues to punch me in the brain. “Get up.”

“Whatever you say, girl.”  I get up and go turn off the alarm clock.

I can feel a strength surge of adrenaline in my arm. Like someone injected RedBull into my veins. My stomach fills with acid and I know I’m going to throw up.

“Sleepy time,” she says, resting her head back on the pillow. “Have a good day at work.”

I don’t have the time to tell her anything reassuring.

I run to the bathroom and begin emptying my stomach of burning hot yellow bile, trying to catch my breath and finding it impossible.  The muscles in my stomach tighten and seize like I am in the middle of a push up.  My lungs gasp for air. Leg can’t stop shaking.  Cue more vomiting.

This is not a quiet process and when I enter the room she is looking at me with worry filling her ocean blue eyes. The worry is not simply based on how nauseating it is to hear someone puking his guts out.

“Are you okay?” she asks.

Now it feels like I’m thinking in a garbled fast forward, my thoughts going past too quickly for me to process them. I can feel the adrenaline sliding up from my fingertips to my elbow to my shoulders to my neck and directly into my brain. I’m running and standing still.

“I’m fine,” I say and my voice cracks as if I have entered a new and terrifying form of puberty.

My legs shake. WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH ME?

She looks down. “Twitch much?” she asks and I laugh.

Most things can be changed with a few words from her.

She takes my hand and guides me back to bed. “What’s wrong?” she asks.

EVERYTHINGISOKAYDON’TWORRYABOUTITEVERYTHINGISGOINGTOBEFINE!

“Nothing.”

“You sure?”

Before we met, I woke up most mornings with tightness in my stomach and a terrible urge to vomit up my stomach lining.  My roommates Hermit and EMC discovered this upon moving in with me. They briefly thought I had a secret drinking problem. For the first six months of our relationship the problem went away the second I opened up my eyes and saw the most beautiful girl in the world lying next to me.

Only today is not an ordinary day. The season has changed and my mind is experiencing a change in its spectrum of light.

“I don’t know,” I say and I don’t.

It scares me and my heart responds by beating faster and faster. I tell myself there is nothing to worry about only my inner voice doesn’t speak reassuringly, but in a panicked tone racing along with my heartbeat.

“Come on babe,” she says. “Everything is ok.”

I’m experiencing ‘the slide’ for the first time in my life. The process of reassuring yourself into utter panic. My hurried voice, begging everything to return to normal, becomes a preacher of utter and total chaos.

JUSTBREATHEINANDLETITOUTEVERYTHINGISGOINGTOBEOKAYIFYOUCOULDJUSTCALMTHEHELLDOWNANDSTOPBEINGAWHININGCHILDABOUTIT.

“I don’t know,” I say.

“It’s not what we talked about last night,” she says. “You know how I feel.”

“Yeah I know.”

On November 1^st, my best friend and former roommate Herman Dagwood moved in with my girlfriend. His previous slumlord refused to provide his apartment with heat and it was two months before he was given a functioning refrigerator. This has nothing to do with me. However like anyone in a relationship I didn’t go into it without my own fears and insecurities. The last girl I had been in love with fell in love with my childhood best friend. As a result I had an ingrained fear that this girl who I loved more than anything else in the world would do the same with my present best friend. I went to my girlfriend in order to explain my fear and move past it. She laughed at me a little and humoured my insanity as she tends to.  We kissed and we moved past it.

At least I thought I had.

“No,” I say. “I was acting ridiculous.”

There is little correlation between the two situations. Logically I knew the difference. However at the mention of our discussion yesterday my blood begins to boil in my veins.

I sit down. She rubs my back.  Kisses my ear.

It feels like her cool breath is moving through my skin touching my veins and putting out the fires inside me. I believe her and I know what she’s saying is true and more than anything I don’t want to feel like this.

WHAT’S WRONG WITH ME? WHAT’S WRONG WITH ME?

“I can’t go in for work today,” I say.

“Why?” she asks.

“I don’t feel good,” I say. “I feel really fucked up.”

“You can’t go to work?” she asks.

“No.”

As if pleased with my response my body decides to throw another surge of adrenaline at me. My insides are building a staircase to my brain, increasing the pressure with the roof offering no signs of giving way.

WHAT’S WRONG WITH ME? WHAT’S WRONG WITH ME?

“You ok?” she asks.

She kisses my lips and it makes me feel better but it’s like the refreshing feel of rain while you are bathing in lava.

“No,” I say.  “I don’t think I am.”

“We’ll figure it out,” she says and kisses me again. “Just relax.”

I get up and call my work and tell them I have some form of Ebola. Next I call my parents and tell them I think something has gone wrong. The alarm goes off again. My whole body begins to shake. Apparently I didn’t turn it off. I just hit the snooze. Read more

The Cure Chapter#1: Laughing Myself to Death and Life

Posted on | January 1, 2012 | 1 Comment

Note: This is an excerpt from the way updated version of the novel form of the Cure.

Welcome to the worst and possibly last day of Michael Kimber’s life.

I’m getting dressed to exercise in the local Holiday Inn gym and somehow find myself philosophizing with a locker room full of naked senior citizens about the glories of youth.

I sit silently in swim-shorts.

“I was stupid when I was young and I’m stop now that I’m old,” says Theodore, a Vietnamese businessman.  “I use to exercise and feel great. Now I can already feel how much this is going to hurt tomorrow. I’m old. Hohohoho.”

Over the last couple months, our talkative Theodore has wilted from the stereotypical Asian possessing everlasting youth into a raisin-like old man. I wish I could say that I don’t understand how someone can go from twenty to eighty in so short a time. Inside of me a similar process has taken place.

I was born resembling Tweety Bird, with a head too big for my shoulders and eyes too big for my face. The freakishly cute cartoon kid. Nowadays I look like Macaulay Caulkin on a coke binge, with sunken shadows beneath my gigantic chameleon green eyes, mostly skin and bones. My head remains too big for my body. This might explain all the troubles I have with over-thinking everything.

“But what can you do?” asks Theodore. “Gotta be happy with what you have. My dad isn’t even able to exercise enough to hurt himself.”

I’m trying to listen but having a hard time not noticing that his gesticulating hands are attached to some fat on his chest, which is attached to some fat on his stomach which is making his junk shake with each hand movement.

“Still don’t understand women,” says a senior citizen who resembles a combination of Mr. Clean and Captain Picard, while brandishing a towel that could very easily be used to cover himself up. “What about you kid? You understand women? You get drunk, stay out all night?”

I don’t drink anymore. But that demands more explanation than I’m looking to provide so I nod my head.

“No wonder you are look so tired all the time,” says Theodore. “Must always be hungover. Got yourself a special lady?”

It’s hard to think of romance when the room smells like urinal cake and chlorine, “Most beautiful girl in the world.”

“Stay single as long as you can. Best advice I can give you. I wish I was young again,” says Theodore.

“Don’t listen to him,” says Mr. Clean. “When you have the right girl you should do anything you can to hold onto her.”

I want to ask him if that includes becoming so pathetic that she can’t possibly leave you?

It’s at this point that the thought occurs to me, “I don’t know if I can live like this forever.”

That’s how my first real suicidal thought happens, casually in front of a bunch of senior-citizen philosophers sitting with their wangs flapping in the soft breeze of the hotel locker room. There is terror in the idea but also a strange sense of relief.

I make my exit.

As I enter the gym I struggle to get a deep breath and try to find some humour in the ugly teens — as horny as they are ugly — making out in the petri-dish Jacuzzi, bodies covered in the piss, semen, and sweat of old men and traveling salesmen. All I can smell is chlorine.

You are going to be ok. Just breathe. You are going to be okay, just breathe. It’s just a thought. There is nothing to be scared about. Don’t react to it. Just stop thinking about it.  Everything is going to be ok.

Only the self-help mantras screaming inside my head won’t stop. There is rarely a moment when I’m not thinking. Thinking used to be my favorite activity. Now it’s a terrifying marathon with no finish line. Where once I used my imagination to create stories, I now use it to imagine every single thing that can go wrong. When I discover something to fear I plan against it. I have lost my creativity, my kindness, my sense of humor to a security system that is intended to keep me safe from the world but is isolating me, step by step, from everyone I know. All I can think about is what I am not supposed to think about. All of my protections have simply given me a complete and unbreakable focus.

And I can see myself out of the corner of my eye as I used to be. As I really am. I can see how unreasonable I am, I just can’t feel it. This is the terror of mental illness. Being separated by the tiniest and longest inch in the world from everything that keeps me in the world.

I make a little deal with myself before deciding to fight my suicidal thought with everything I have. If my days do continue like this then I’ll give it some consideration. I can’t live like this forever.

I can feel a tingle of laughter jumping through my brain and try to suppress it. There is nothing so poisonous as the sense of relief that there might be some way out of this. Unlike the happy pills, this escape plan is guaranteed to work—especially since I feel as though I already may be in hell.

If this doesn’t change, I’m going to kill myself.

And I can’t help but laugh at the strangely incongruous relief that comes with thinking the worst thought possible. I’ve lost friends to suicide and never understood what this sort of laugh could mean. How the idea of drowning could feel like a life raft.

One way or the other, life isn’t going to be like this forever. Read more

My Success At Failure

Posted on | November 22, 2011 | 2 Comments

I fear a lot of things.

Some of them are obscure and weird. For example, I ate Lobster last night. I fear that one of you might want to shake my hand. Only trace remnants of the lobster remain but you might be deadly allergic. I think about what it would be like if I killed you. Then I think if I should have mentioned the lobster in this speech. It costs a lot. Maybe the Mental Health Commission will think I just ordered it because they were paying for it.

I fear that right now you aren’t going to pay attention. That you are going to be lost in sexual fantasies about your classmates or you are going to take down a lot of notes you’ll never look at and forget everything I have said.

I’m not here to talk to you about journalism.

This won’t be on a test.

(Apparently this will be on a test)

I figure most of you won’t become journalists. I figure now is my chance to talk to you while you are young and say somethings that people never said to me.

This is in the hopes that you all become adults. One out of five of you will deal with a serious mental illness this year. Two out of three won’t go forward to get help due to the idea that you failed at being a person and getting treatment would be admitting that failure.

I’m here to talk to you about my success at failure.

I’m not going to tell you about how I failed Grade 10 math because I was a puberty explosion and my teacher was hot and I spent my time thinking about things that would get poor Miss Delaney arrested. That’s irrelevant.

My greatest fear is that somehow I won’t become what I was supposed to be.

I’m sure you have felt it to. That somehow you could make your life exactly the way you want it to be. That you just weren’t trying hard enough.

At 25, I worried until I was worried about how much I worried.  I was so scared that I wouldn’t be able to sleep that I couldn’t sleep. I went for months on two hours of sleep a night. I wanted to be normal. Just normal, able to eat, sleep, work and love.  I prayed to lose this thing that was killing me even if it is the same thing that made me a good person. I wanted to be normal even if that mean I’d no longer be special.

I was stuck in a negative cycle where thinking became torture and all I could do was hope for an escape. I know what it is like when the pain was so bad that you forget the world. I understand what people who commit suicide are thinking.  Suicide is the failure of all language to reach you. It’s like selective deafness. Where you can only hear yourself and you don’t have any good things left to say. I never knew the world went away. I was lucky to have people in my life that reminded who I was when I forgot. I got to see the world return and nothing is more beautiful.

No one ever told me about mental illness, not in all my years of school.  I learned about it from watching my friends weep and hold each other in the King’s Chapel, when a brilliant boy named Jason Lionel Walsh didn’t get to grow up. Seeing how much one person could affect hundreds, living with his absence, as my friends used each other as crutches for fear we would become dominoes. I learned about it from Aaron when we did mushrooms in Middle Bay and he added mescaline and had a hallucination where he stuck a gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. I watched him disappear behind pills and powders. And I was lucky enough to be there when he finally got the help needed. One of my best friends got returned to me.  I learned about mental illness from watching my friends commit suicide and become addicted to drugs.

I have to believe there is a better way.

I think a lot of us believe that we aren’t what we should be. That we live each day mourning the fact that we didn’t grow up to become the people we thought we would.  You know that inner child that keeps bothering you. Kick his ass. He is just a kid and he doesn’t know any better plus he’s small. You can’t learn without making mistakes.

On the topic of making mistakes, a week ago I was hanging out with a friend of mine. The mistake wasn’t hanging out with my friend.  We used to go to karaoke together but my rendition of Hulk Hogan’s “I’m real a American” involved tearing off my shirt and has led to us no longer being welcome at said karaoke.

She was telling me about how she read an article about how our memory is changed each time we recall it. To her the horror was the idea that every single moment of your life changes your past, that the twisted little monkey that exists in your brain, fucks with the works and changes Mona Lisa’s into monsters. Part of me, being an optimist, saw something hopeful in this. That the meaning of the past can be rewritten. We are not bound by the past, the past is bound to us. It’s a fiction that suits whatever you believe at the time. And oftentimes it’s full of shit.  It means that you don’t ever truly know what your life is, that your brain is too flawed an instrument to measure your own worth.

Read more

Monsters Don’t Hit Women, Our Friends Do

Posted on | November 17, 2011 | 1 Comment

I’m at an art gallery, drinking before I have eaten, trying my best to look sophisticated. I see pictures of Bill Clinton tenderly kissing Hilary on the lips, love in his eyes, staring at a woman he will disgrace and throw into the upper echelons of American politics. I see Michael Jackson on a swing set, looking like an abandoned child. I see police officers holding hands as Bobby Kennedy makes his way through Chicago.

But mostly I hear about Mel Gibson.

“So you are Jewish and like Mel Gibson?” I say, hoping to point out the obvious contradiction.

“What does that have to do with anything?” asks Nero, my friend I met while ordering a drink.

“Well he said some very anti-semitic things to that police officer,” I reply.

“Was he drunk?” asks my new friend Nero .

“Yeah.”

“And you never made off color remarks when you were drunk?” asks Nero.

“I think there is a difference between making off color remarks when you are drunk once and doing it constantly. He said that the Jews started all the major wars,” I say. “There is also the making of the Passion of the Christ.”

“What was wrong with that movie?” asks Nero.

“Have you seen it?”

“No.”

“It was long. Very long,” I reply.

“Lot of movies are long,” offers Nero. “The Godfather was long.”

“The Godfather didn’t feature Jesus saying that the Jews were to blame for his crucifixion and would suffer until the end of time for their sin,” I reply.

“That would be sort of off topic for the Godfather. Was it good?”

“I didn’t see it.”

“Why?”

“I’m Jewish.”

“So you don’t like him because of something you haven’t seen?”

“It’s more than that.  I mean there is a ten-minute whipping scene. Graphic pointless stuff just to mock the Jews. The whole thing puts the blame for Jesus’s death on the Jews instead of the Romans.”

“I have seen ten minutes of whipping and rather enjoyed it,” says Nero.

“Different type of whipping I think.”

“What about his wife?”

“His wife?”

“He punched her in the mouth while she was holding her baby,” I say.

“How do you know this?” he asks.

“The recordings. The ones they put online.”

“You think she didn’t set him up?” he asks.

“She did ask him if he remembered when he punched her while she was holding the baby. He seemed to have no trouble recollecting it.”

“He punched her?”

“Yes.”

“Did he break her teeth?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Then he didn’t punch her. A man of his build would break teeth. He is quite a good fighter.”  Nero shrugs his shoulders like he has proven his point.  “William Wallace would have broken her teeth.”

“He slapped her then…”

“There is a big difference between punching and slapping.”

“He hit his wife.”

“So did Gandhi. Hit his wife, hated black people and hung out with naked 11 year olds. People like him.”

“Gibson isn’t Gandhi.”

Why do people like Gandhi? I think about this often.  I should probably stop referring to myself as the Gandhi of Mental Health. People might start assuming these sorts of implications.

“He has a very serious drinking problem.  90% of people in prison commit their crimes when they are either drunk or on drugs.”

“He is a shitty drunk who hit his wife.”

I have a lot of compassion when I drink and don’t eat.

“A lot of people want to hit her their wife. They aren’t necessarily bad people,” says Nero.

“He is.”

“Have you met him?”

“No.”

“Did you like Mad Max?” he asks.

I nod.

“You like Braveheart?”  he asks.

“Yup.”

“The rest is just fucking conjecture.”

This article is not in defense of Mel Gibson and his drunken slandering of my people.

It is about something significantly more awkward.

We are sitting in a Starbucks and I’m assuming a reasonable explanation will be forthcoming.

“Nelson” got in touch with me on Facebook to inform me that he would be in my neighbourhood soon. Having not heard from him for quite sometime I assumed we would be talking about Jesus as recently this had become his favorite topic.  It quickly became clear that was not the case.

I asked him how he was doing.

Nelson said he was going to jail for hitting his wife.  That he was in Ontario because he wasn’t allowed to be anywhere near her. I asked if he was guilty. He said he was.  I asked why. He provided short hand of mental illness and a significant drug and alcohol problem. He also wondered if I still wanted to go grab some coffee.

There is something about the way he volunteered the information that made me curious. I have known other people who have hit their spouses, including a few women in the practice of hitting men you’d never suspect they’d be able to. This was the first I have ever heard someone admit it. What’s more it was Nelson.

So I am ordering an Avanti sized green tea and trying to put things into some sort of perspective. I am contemplating Gandhi as I often do. Trying to make sense of the idea of a leader in non-violence hitting his wife.  You figure someone like that would take their work home with them.

Within a minute he arrives breaking me from my reverie.

I like punctual people.

Nelson isn’t Gandhi and is no longer well liked. This is not helped by his honest desire to tell everyone about what he did.

“Hey man,” I say.

We hug for a moment.

We sit down in the plus leather Starbucks seats and look for an opening line.

“So….how you been?” I ask.

He shrugs and we begin talking.

When I first met him he wrote poetry like Kerouac and had a drinking habit I assumed would be the death of him. He dressed in hipster hats and denim jackets. It was rare to see Nelson without a half empty 26er of rye and a handful of magic mushrooms.  He was one of those people you wouldn’t assume actually exist outside of movies and good literature.  He was Hunter S Thompson without the politics and his stories involved debauchery and the type of shit you don’t believe happens in real life. He did poetry that pissed people off and he shouted it like we were all going deaf and he had something important to say.

See Nelson had an obsession with farming and digging a hole that he couldn’t dig himself out of.  Before I met him, he was slowly dying on that farm, as a lack of feed back, left him alone with his delusions, without a world to bring him back to sanity.  Somehow he dug through the center of the earth and found himself in China, or rather, my hometown of Halifax. He sold the farm and was living a rather confusing life in the big city

When he offered fresh milk to a female friend of mine I wasn’t sure if he was offering sexual favors until he pulled out a gigantic container of cows milk from his backpack. He has the type of passion for life that was like a firecracker, half lit ready to explode in everyone’s face.

He started filming my freestyles and captured a lot of strange things on tape.  Including a five-minute film of my very determined attempts to sleep with a rather horrible girl.  This passion for film led to a short and unfulfilled dream to make porno movies with couples that care for each other.

I remember when the experiment collapsed.

“The whole porn thing was a test from the lord,” explained Nelson.  “The whole idea was a test of my spiritual beliefs, my book of Job.  I could turn to the Lord or turn away.  I was really lucky that I didn’t end up filming anything. I would have shamed my family.”

Next he was sober seeing signs of Jesus, dressing like a 1920s businessman in suits with tails and falling in love shortly after. He didn’t drink, do drugs and every conversation became about the Lord. In the IMF, my rap crew that included mostly atheists and poets, he tried to make us see the face of God.  From most it would be incredibly obnoxious and hard to deal with. In this Nelson was not an exception.

Soon finding God led him to finding her. She was also very into the Lord and him.  Suddenly they were married and he couldn’t stop smiling or sermonizing. He had a strange sense of stability that seemed like he had stepped out of his past into a future he could live with.  We didn’t see him very much and it didn’t matter because he was happy.

Unfortunately his greatest addiction called him away from his happy life.  He went back to the country to start a new farm with his new wife. With trademark obsession he ripped life from the earth and himself. Gradually all human contact ceased except for his wife.  His life became fishing and planting, growing beneath the earth and withering above it.

It was his Noah’s arc and the world he escaped lead to the edge of himself.

When love begins you shut out the world to experience it in its totality, and to protect the people in your life from the absolute nature of your addiction. For a while you survive, like man walking on the moon with one last hit of oxygen as you hold your breath and hope the asphyxiation lasts forever. Eventually you need the world again. Because bullshit is the foundation of every relationship and without other people to make fun of, world events to mock and stories to share, you become Romeo and Juliet stuck in hell, proclaiming your love with nothing left to say but beautiful soliloquy’s, trading a perfect script for the world. Without bullshit we die.

It was Nelson, his wife and his farm and the Shining effect started to kick in.

Booze and drugs entered the mix. He turned against himself and he gradually turned against the only person who had ever brought sense to his life. He has always been imaginative in regards to his sanity.  Nelson is the sort of guy who has visions of God and you wonder if he might be schizophrenic. He certainly had a bad case of depression and an extreme sense of reality.

It’s not easy being with a person when they totally and completely lose their mind.

On the farm, there was no one else to lean on. Things started to go bad with her and there wasn’t anyone else. No one should ever become your world. The world is a horrible place.

I always thought he would kill himself. I never thought he would hurt her.

It could have gone the other direction fairly easily. When you are young your stories aren’t set in stone.  A few small coincidences and you die before anyone gets to know who are you. A few small steps in the other direction and you ruin your life and have to live with the shame.

He spent the afternoon in his barn with his neck in the noose shortly before the incident that would lose him a wife and most of the friends he had.  When she found him, hysterical, she didn’t know what to say to bring him back to himself.  In an argument without sanity to govern its border, he beat her.

I can’t say what he was thinking during those moments.

I know that when I was on the furthest edges of my own process of falling down it was hurting the woman I loved that brought me back. Instead of violence, I acted with extreme jealousy and made someone who walked me through hell feel unloved. It was seeing her tears that led me back to myself. Showing me that I had a choose in how I lived.

Hurting her is the moment he relives a thousand times a day. A completely stupid irrational moment where he lost control of himself and lost the one person who was important to him.

Nelson tried to get help and was told he had to wait between six months and a year. He was told that he wasn’t sick enough.  He tried to get himself institutionalized and they wouldn’t let him stay. When his wife pressed charges he was relieved that his actions would have consequences. He believes that God wants to help other people before they reach the same place. That maybe some good would come out of the hate that lived inside of him.

He hasn’t talked to her since the charges have been laid and hasn’t been able to say sorry. Most of the people in his life have given up on him. One by one he has lost most of his connections that keep him in the world.

He might have expected to lose me as well.

Hypothetical Michael Kimber wouldn’t be a friend with anyone who could hit a woman. However my logic for my friends is not the same I apply to Mel Gibson. It’s hard to hate someone for a principal when you look them in the eye and they look exactly like someone you love.

To hurt the person you love most is the most horrible thing a human can do.  Something we all do to greater and lesser degrees in the relationships that are most important to us. I don’t think I have that sort of hate in me.  Neither did he.

There is a desire to demonize people who show us what we are all capable of.  To rid ourselves of reminders of the incredibly fragile nature of our existence as the people we would like to be, we decide what actions can come from people we love and what actions must engender a holy form of judgment. There is this sense that if we acknowledge the humanity of an abuser, we take away the humanity of the abused. I think that we do as much harm to the victims by denying the humanity of their attackers. We make it a game of good and evil and it doesn’t happen in real life. This is not a problem the victims can solve. This is not a problem we can solve by giving up on people like Nelson. We all wish we lived in a world where it was stupid to love someone who would hurt us. Where it was easily predictable and you could divide the good from the bad and walk in a straight line from birth to love to death to heaven.  Unfortunately a lot of people who lived fucked up lives passed that onto other people. Broken begat broken until our history was a fist that moved like an arrow through time.  Most of us have some sort of scar that we pass onto the next person we love.

I have to believe there is a way back, even from this.  I have seen drug addicts whose lives became lies, fight their way back and become people I deeply respect. Self-destructive people live until that part of themselves that try to kill them dies and they get a moment of crushing calm. I have seen people get help and come back from extremely dark places.  They needed help and the system isn’t set up to help people like Nelson.

I am not trying to justify his actions.  Mental illness isn’t an excuse. Nor is booze and drugs.  There is little he can do to get back the love that meant so much to him. I think you have to take responsibility for your actions. Nelson hasn’t run away from that. He wants to do his time. I know he means it because he doesn’t hesitate to tell you what he has done. He doesn’t try to justify it. He wants to change himself and the first step in doing so is acknowledging his problem.

I know we can get better. I also know that we need people in our lives to do so.  That we need a reminder that someone who remembers the best parts of us.

1 in 4 women will be a victim of domestic violence in their lifetime. We can’t deal with it by pretending that it’s one guy named Tregar who is doing it. They aren’t hit by monsters. They are hit by people we know.  I have known a lot of people who have been crushed by their demons. Done things they never thought they were capable of doing. When we saying that a terrible action is inhumane, we deny our own human possibilities.  By restricting domestic abuse to evil people, we stop ourselves from doing anything to improve the situation in the future.

I don’t know Mel Gibson. I do know Nelson.

He isn’t a monster.

He is my friend.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Book of Job Chapter 1: Loving Kindness Meditation for Motherfuckers

Posted on | November 7, 2011 | No Comments

Free at 23

It was the summer of Arab Spring where a few thousand Western Jerk offs claimed responsibility for changing the world with their twitter accounts. Where Arabs fought and died for a dream of a democracy we’d long since abandoned. Where a famine struck Africa and a few people wondered why there wasn’t a dislike button on Facebook.

Where for a moment the mind blowing apathy of my generation ended and we took to the streets to see if we too could grasp that dream of democracy and tear it out of the hands of corporate fat cats and unreliable government bureaucrats. It was a time of fires, floods, plagues and apocalypses predicted that came and went with little lamentation. The economy had AIDS and rock and roll had Justin Bieber.

My barber gave me a fade and I was feeling bad to the bone.

I was currently living the dream of my generation, working at a job that allows me to get by, pay for rent, food and some drinks with my friends, so that I could forget about my future for a while.

It’s April, 2011,  a few days after my 27^th birthday and everything I’ve built for myself is about to fall apart.

I’m sitting in my underwear staring at the wall, with my legs crossed, my back straight and my mind focused on the misery of others.

I’m determined to become a better man and I have been told that compassion for others will turn into compassion for myself. Technically I only need to focus on wishing people well. I find that compassion works better when there is a little sympathy involved.

It’s called the Loving Kindness Meditation and it involves four steps.  The first is calling to mind a teacher, someone you love that has guided you along the way and you wish that they don’t suffer. Take into account their life and what they have had to go through to inspire you.  The second involves an acquaintance, someone you barely know who has little effect on your life and you try to get a sense of what makes them tick, what problems they have overcome and you wish them well. Many find the third stage as the most difficult and it’s finding compassion for the people you have the most conflict with.  The fourth is the most difficult for me and involves finding compassion for myself.

For the last two week step 3 has been the most important.

But let’s start at the beginning so you can breath deeply and feel your pulse slow with mine.

I strip out of my clothes.

Too tight, too binding.

Gaze in awe at my finely toned muscles and abs of steel.  When you dream, reach out and grab a hold of my pelt of chest hair and know that you are loved. Smell the old Spice that reminds every girl of the last dude they fucked.

I tightly close the door, which the cat somehow manages to open more regularly than I would like him too. Thankfully this hasn’t happened after I freshly emerged from the shower or during the portions of my day when I violently praise the beauty of naked women on the Internet.

I grab two pillows and plant my ass on them.

I stare at the wall and let the flurry of thoughts and tension pass into the stillness of my body. Some people close their eyes when they meditate but I have too active an imagination.  So I stare at the little dots on my wall until they form some sort of meaningful pattern. I focus on my breath without doing anything to change it. Just paying attention to the feel of hot air escaping my nostrils and the cool air as it runs down my throat, into my lungs and makes me live.  Someone once told me that when you hold your body still enough, your mind has to follow.

I’m not thinking about my future. I’m just letting all thought slide across the screen, making no effort to catch and hold, words of a script I don’t need to act out.  Each time I grab onto a thought, I let myself ride for a moment or two and then casually disengage.  Thoughts are like astrology, little tidbits that only change your life if you let them. Not a secret code to unlock your existence. Just a bunch of neurons firing out a game you make deadly serious.

I’m there. In the quiet that’s peaceful enough that I can begin to care.

Step one involves thinking of my teachers. It’s my parents. I contemplate my dad’s calm and my mother’s courage.  My dad is the relaxed voice that talks me through my problems. Both sides of my family tree have dealt with crippling anxiety disorders and he sits apart as the calmest person I have ever met in my life. I think of him driving me to the hospital the first time I ever had a panic attack, which at the time seemed like a heart problem. How he pushed so hard on the gas that we were driving 150 kilometers an hour down Robie Street, until my mother had to tell him to slow down. I remember thinking about how love can break down any wall if it pushes hard enough.

And I wish him well.

My mother is the shotgun of heart that lies beyond the chaos, that desire to care for her people and destroy any world that would threaten their happiness. She is the woman who came to my high school graduation and asked for me to point out the kid who bullied me in junior high school so she could finally have her chance to beat the shit out of him.  She is the woman who dealt with the issues that left me paralyzed in an age before they knew how to help someone with anxiety. She is the voice of Aslan, reading me bedtime stories when I first dealt with insomnia as a small boy.

I wish her well.

My acquaintance is the woman who makes me two for one falafels every Tuesday. The hippies turned me onto it.  She is a beautiful brown woman with expressive eyes who no longer asks me what I want and simply begins constructing me a falafel with extra hot sauce and no taboulei. I imagine the first Falafel she made. How she struggle to get it just right. Then the thousandth Falafel with extra hot sauce.  Then the ten thousandth. What her feet must feel like after a full day standing up.  Just the idea of her arms performing those same mechanical actions over and over, each time with a different thought, each time she makes the falafel it isn’t the same. How the sound of the falafel being deep-fried must become a song that she can’t get out of her head. I wonder what worlds she thinks about when she creates the meal that nourishes me throughout my day. I imagine sick relatives back in wherever she is from and how she works at the Falafel joint to support her little cousin who’s too young to work and how leftovers must taste like champagne and caviar on New Year’s eve.  And I understand this is all make believe but there is more to her than I can see. The meaning of her life isn’t 2 for 1 Tuesday. That’s just the meaning of her life to me.

I wish her well.

We’ve arrived at the toughest part.  Part Number 3, where I to find compassion for someone I intensely dislike.

Her name is Samantha and she works with me at “Fantastic World Books”.

All physical descriptions of her must be entirely fake as I must make it clear that I never talk about the people I work with. So I will try to paint a picture of her that is as inaccurate as possible. Her smile lights up the room.  She looks like a 1970s Pornstar that became a single mom and still dresses like Kelly Kapowski.  She has gigantic horn rimmed glasses and resembles a librarian with hipster children.

When not thinking about her during moments of meditation, I might be drawn to describing the way she speaks to everyone as if they were five years old, her rigorous sense of right and wrong which comes down to she’s right and you’re wrong. I might even mention that she constantly mutters to herself as she works.  But those aren’t the right thoughts to be focusing on while thinking compassionately about her existence. I think about her laugh. It has that same manic energy that draws you to look back at the Movie Theatre and wonder how you can get that good shit she’s on.  You can forget all her neurosis while you listen to her laugh.  It’s so unabashedly unashamedly her, neurotic, frenetic and honest.  Whatever else you can say about Samantha, she doesn’t lie.

One could describe her as murderously OCD.  I’ll go with particular. I try to imagine myself through her eyes, doing things outside of the righteous order that brings sense to the bookstore and to her life.

I try to put myself in her brain where everything is going too fast and life won’t fit into the proper order.  I can feel that twittery anxiety where you think people are watching you and you have no control over what they think. That sliding hot wave of lava that comes every time you make a comment and people aren’t sure how to react.  I can imagine how someone becomes socially awkward to the point they appear abrasive. Trying to carefully package your words and finding they always jump out of your hands and down the throat of others.  I also know that she has no bad intentions. She just can’t quite figure out how to connect.  I know what it’s like to say the wrong thing, to be impulsive and reactionary and have to apologize,

I can feel the love flooding my brain.

I can care about her. I can train this rage to compassion. I can smile when she follows me around the bookstore, correcting each thing I do, I can nod my head when she talks to me like a child. She just wants to do her best.

I don’t have to hate her.

I’m so filled with empathy that I let my imagination run wild. I’m twirling above the ground, dancing past homeless people, taking them into my heart. Seeing visions of their lives of abuse and the system that holds them down. I care. Watching Japanese Doctors with radiation victims, feeling the pain in their throats as they lean in and wonder how long they can stay in the field before they become infected.

Seeing how small my own problems are compared to those that crush these strangers. I can feel my own place in this world. A foolish 27 year old with a shitty dead end job and no real problems.

I get up and stumble around trying to get feeling back to my legs.

Ending meditation is like looking like down at the toilet and realizing how much shit just came out of you. Only it’s from your head.

Where are my pants?

I just have to get to work.  And find my pants.

Yes!

I found my pants.

Unfortunately today was going to be a bad day. I hadn’t solved the problem of Samantha. Read more

The Anniversary of My Mental Breakdown and the things we can’t replace

Posted on | November 2, 2011 | 4 Comments

You ever wonder where you are going to be in five years?

If you are like me you don’t have the slightest clue.

That idea used to scare me.

My friend told me that my nervous breakdown baffled him because it was  not about who I was but who I would become and my fear that I wouldn’t like the answer.

He told me I didn’t need to worry about it. No one could predict the future but he guaranteed it would be a surprise.

November 3^rd, 2011 is the two-year anniversary of that breakdown and he is right.

I never could have predicted I would be here.

Last year at this time I was celebrating signing with a literary agent, sure that I would be able to cash in the worst moments of my life for my dream of becoming a published author.

I was living in the basement of a neurotic Jewish author who I would soon get into a life and death confrontation over Internet bills. Where she would decide that my overuse of her limited Internet plan was a nefarious plot to destroy her.  Our relationship would dissolve over my refusal to pay for the Internet since it was covered in our lease.  She would stomp above my room and lose her hair over little more than a hundred dollars.  Eventually she would forbid me from having overnight guests in an effort to get me out of her house. She would succeed and I would move in with a couple of eccentric hippies with a chore wheel and I would leave after setting the house on fire and flooding the basement. Now I live with five wonderful people who came to Canada to learn English. I have learned of the wonders of Lollipop Land, gotten soused with a German who knows how to use a grenade launcher and learned that French men liked to have couples sleep over in their rooms.

Things change rapidly and new joys and pain enter your life and change you without asking permission.

During that year many of my friends from Halifax would come to Toronto try to find a new life and end up becoming my tequila heroes in an orgy of karaoke songs. Where at the zenith of this era, I would tear off my shirt in a room full of karaoke freaks and salute my new life with a spirited rendition of Hulk Hogan’s “I’m a real American” shortly before we were banned from ever coming back to a shitty little bar known as the Abbey.

Things have changed a lot in a year, even more in two.

At this time, two years ago, blue and purple wigs littered my circus red room; I was deeply in love and on the verge of losing my mind. I was fresh from University and had finally finished the book it took me eight years to write. I had no idea how I was going to grow up.

But let’s not go back that far back.

This is about the difference five years can make and the moment of weakness where I derailed my happy train of positive karma and brought about the shit summer that followed.

Come with me into the land of accidental arson and chore wheels.

It’s the middle of March 2011.

I live with hippies and have yet to become the worst roommate they have ever known.  A day or two earlier I lit the kitchen on fire. They aren’t sure if they can trust me but decide to give me another chance, which they certainly will live to regret.  The explanation of this fire is simple.

There was no salt for the ice on our front lawn and the mailmen wouldn’t deliver much needed checks.  So I decided to boil water in a nearby kettle, pour it on the ice and use a shovel to remove it.  No…please don’t bother explaining that even if this plan had worked it wouldn’t have been particularly well thought out.  Let me continue.

The kettle had no cord and I assumed it belonged on the stove. To my surprise the plastic base burst into flames. The clean up took several days of scrapping with a razor to get the plastic off the element.

As a result I was at the library so as to not smell the stink of burnt rubber that Febreeze was not qualified to eliminate.

This was the day that my music video was to be released.

This was the day that all of the work was supposed to pay off.

This was when I made mistake I’ll have to live with for the rest of my life.

In the span of two hours I had sent hundreds of emails, private messages via Facebook and alerted my whole network to share Cure A Visual Poem and spread my message. Hundreds of people were sharing the video on their Facebook walls and twitter let loose an orgasmic wail of support. Ideas of hundreds of thousands of views danced through my head. Book deals I would sign.  This was going to be the thing that made my name known.

Yes I wanted to get people to come out and share their stories of mental illness. Yes, I think the system is horrible and worth fighting against.  Was it mostly about me?  Of course it was.  I was high on visions of becoming the Gandhi of the mental health world.

Only…

I watched the video again all the way through to revel at my acting talent, the fact that somehow I taught myself how to be rhythmic and the strange vertigo you get from seeing your most fucked up moments cued to music.  I marveled in the he utter weirdness of seeing the love of my young life portrayed by someone who is absolutely nothing like her. Laughing to myself a little bit at the fact that the girl who was declared best Halifax actress by Faces Magazine would play my girlfriend. Remembering how they smeared fake sweat on my face to create the imagined tension, to pretend that the worst moments of my life were captured by the amazing camera work of one of Halifax’s best DOPS.  And then I see it.

At the very end of the video there is a glaring mistake. The video is dedicated to the memory of a friend of mine named Jason Lionel Walsh who lost his life to mental illness in 2005.  The inscription was supposed to read In Memory of Jason Lionel Walsh 1985-2005. Unfortunately it reads In Memory of Jason Lionel Walsh 1985-2010.

“What the fucking fuck fuck, fuck,” I shout at the library.

It’s dedicated to his memory and we didn’t remember how long he was alive for?

Slowly heads turn in my direction. I was violating the unspoken rule that if you are going to be in a public library you are not going to freak out and start swearing at old people or waking up the homeless who came to sleep off a good drunk.

“Fuck….”

An old man leans over and gives me the shushing gesture.

I immediately begin firing off emails that echo the same sentiment of rage without necessarily the proper amount of respect for a man who had gone out of his way to create a beautiful video out of my poetry.

I was pissed.

This mistake had been discovered in an earlier draft of the video.  Apparently when I sent the dedication after three days of shooting, I had typed it in wrong.   My reaction had been of a similar but more subdued nature. The change had been made and the crisis averted.  Apparently in the rush to get the video out, the editor had made a mistake and included the old dedication in the final draft.

I flipped out on said editor and demanded his company post an apology.  He refused to do so.  After all the point of this video was to reach out to people who had mental illness and show them they weren’t alone and the dedication was something I forced at the last minute. It wasn’t the point and this was a small mistake.

I had made the original error and he was sorry that it hadn’t been corrected when he promised me it would be.   The video wasn’t about this small mistake and they didn’t want to spend their time apologizing when we should be celebrating what we accomplished.  After all they had gone out of their way to make this video happen on a shoestring budget and it had been accomplished with the love of thirty Halifax professionals giving away their labor for free.

Two hours later he sent me another email, aware from the tone of my previous messages (IE THE MANY EXPLETIVES) that I wasn’t happy about the situation. He offered to take the video down and put in a new dedication. He noted that this would make the 500 links that had been put up on Facebook utterly and totally useless.  Essentially everything we had already to launch the video would be wasted.

I saw the rising momentum and didn’t want all the work to be for nothing. I made a choice I will always regret. I let the video stay up and made a public apology for my mistake.

When I confessed my self loathing to my parents over this decision they told me that my gesture still had meaning.  Few would notice the mistake and those that did would understand.

The thing is I wish it hadn’t been a mistake. I wish we got those five years. See there is a big difference between going crazy at 20 and going crazy at 25.

When I was 20, my anxiety manifested itself as what seemed to be a heart problem.  As a result I was placed on atenolol and the seething pressure in my chest became a blank hole in between my impulses and my actions.  My anxiety disappeared and my issues lived only inside my head.

Jason had his breakdown when all of his friends were still children.

When he started talking about world changing philosophies and his concept of the Universe we were high and mumbling similar nonsense. We were taking philosophy at Kings College and such talk was normal.  Doing too much drugs wasn’t really much of a cause of concern either.  Many of us had spent a week straight on magic mushrooms, blabbering revelations and confessing our innermost feelings about a world that felt so close we could touch it, manipulate it and make it our own.

We didn’t know anything was wrong when he started wearing those shades that kept us from seeing his pupils.  Sure he smoked weed all the time and said things I had trouble understanding. I did the same.

He was Jason; he was a brilliant beautiful boy that I was just starting to know when he went away.

Jason was too young to know what suicide was.  I remember being inside the chapel of King’s College with my best friends weeping at my side. I can still remember that horrible keening sound where our posture of adulthood fell out from under us. When all we could is weep.  When life seems like a joke because you have no idea how it was possible to go from A to B and he doesn’t exist anymore.  When we were children who needed to lean on each other for any hope of standing up again.  He had no idea how large his life was even in its infancy.

I remember seeing pictures of him when he was a kid and he had ridiculous haircuts. I remember thinking how young he looked.

How young we all were in our black suits and white shirts.

I remembered thinking how strange it was that we were only a hundred feet from where I got to know him.  On the third floor of Middle Bay when we had ciphers and he astounded us with his miraculous freestyle capability. I remembered the taste of the Fireball he gave me as it burned down my throat. How he performed the miracle of making Chris Rice break his silence and rap with us.

 

That funny day where Dave and Jason took an empty suitcase with them to talk to the Dean of Residence about setting up a rap show and somehow convinced her that rappers weren’t thugs and the wimpy intellectuals wouldn’t be beaten the piss out of by Jesse Dangerously.  It was here that my friend Hermitofthewoods rapped for the first time in front of a crowd and gained the confidence that would lead him to become Halifax’ s premier rap scholar.  I remember the way Jason smiled at me and called me Mr. Kimber instead of commenting on the heart monitor I rocked during my set during said show.

Years later I would be in that same chapel to see my sister married.

Just across the Quad, there had been another marriage between my friend Jennica and Dan that couldn’t have happened without Jason. Drunk mid afternoon, the wedding march came from a Fisher Price turntable. The idea was based on a simple joke. How funny would it be for one of us to be able call the other their first wife. How hilarious would it be if two of our friends got married. As always Jason provided the how to our crazy schemes.

I walked the Bride down the aisle of hastily collected flowers. Jason was the Priest. He found a Church on the Internet that would allow him to perform a perfectly legal marriage that could be annulled at our earliest convenience. He was the most memorable Priest at a wedding I have ever seen. He quoted hilarious portions of the bible as it described marriage in times far more brutal than our own.  He did it stone-faced, letting us do the laughing.

From this same location, a little north of the school’s sundial he led Middle Bay to a historic victory in the April Fools Water Fight.  He collected hundreds of water balloons and filled them in the secrecy of our residence, each of us eager soldiers ready to do his bidding. He sent our girls out to provide a bag of balloons to our enemies in the hopes they could be lured out into the slaughter. At midnight twenty boys took on a school of hundreds of children and subdued them. We conquered Alex Hall and Radical Bay, Cochrane and Chapel. You could hear the monstrous cheers of “Middle Bay, Middle Bay, Middle Bay” up and down Coburg Road as we bombarded our enemies and conquered King’s College. You could hear Jason leading the charge. We took no prisoners and had no mercy.  No one has ever won a war so decisively and with such joy.

I have a hundred memories and his friends and family have thousands.

At the age of 20, the King’s Chapel was packed to the rafters with his friends weeping. That night we held each other tight and stayed up late into the night.  He never would have imagined how many nights would be spent trying to survive his absence. How many drinks would be poured and how many times my friends would almost follow him. We were dominoes, stuck together by the idea that we couldn’t lose another person like him.

The thing is we didn’t get to experience the best of him.  20 years old is still a baby and I want a thousand more of those smiles that cracked the borders of his cheeks and seem to stretch on forever. I want to see more girls dance up on him and see him go completely still.  We never got to see him fall in love.

I have too few memories of him and all of them are as a boy.  He was 20 and he was talented as hell and made music that could bring tears to yours eyes.  After he died, we tried to find all the music he made. And we couldn’t find it. Little of it remains to this day.  He was going to produce an album for me. He was working on tracks with Dave, Jus and Cal and everyone was waiting for that moment when he’d take the Halifax Hip Hop scene by storm like he did the night he beat White Mic at the DJ Olympics, smashing the old champion no matter what biased judges would say.

When I lost my mind, my friends were able to help me find it. Most of them had gone through something similar and knew what it was like to fight with yourself and lose. They were with me when I went through therapy, when I entered the world of medication and found myself zombied out and when I started being myself again.   In February of 2010, I reached my lowest point where I didn’t know if I wanted to live or die.

I remembered Jason and the horrible winter of 2005 and knew what leaving would be like. I got to see the weight a single life could carry.

Suicide is isolation where you can’t feel the world and your delusions are louder than your reality. When all you can feel is your pain.  I was 25 years old and I was lucky enough to never be allowed to be so alone.

It wasn’t his fault.  He had a schizophrenic break and none of understood what that meant.

We were all just kids and it’s no one’s fault that he didn’t get to be an adult.

I wish we had those five years that exist only as an error at the end of a rap video. I wish I had five more minutes with him. Anyway to drag him out of there and back here with me.  I don’t want his picture at the end of that video. I wanted him to produce the beat that was on that video. I want an album of my poetry over his music.

Twenty years was nowhere near enough.

My life is strange and I have had to deal with a lot of suicidal people.  By confessing my struggles with mental illness, I encouraged hundreds of strangers to confess their own most fucked up moments to me.

Every couple of weeks someone I haven’t talked to in a while will hit me up on Facebook at 3 in the morning having a nervous breakdown.  Sometimes they are suicidal and have a plan.  Sometimes they just need someone to talk to. The last person wanted me to give them some reason not to cut their arm up with a big knife.

I told her that she didn’t need to be so scared.  I said that you’ve forgotten that you have been here before.  That as horrible as it is when you feel like it is all falling down, you got up again and you lived long enough that you forgot what this like. You don’t live here permanently and you’ll move on. Right now it’s up to you to suffer until you can stand up again. There’s nothing terrible or tragic about it. It’s just your life. Some people walk with a limp and you have a mental illness.

If it doesn’t feel like you can live with it, call the Emergency Room and tell them you are suicidal and have a plan. Works well. Promise you.

She could have responded that I’ve never had bipolar disorder. Anxiety is different and you don’t what I’m going through.  And she’d be right. But I saw Princess Leia onstage, drunk as shit in Toronto, telling me about all the weird and wild years she has had and how many times she wished she was dead and was glad that she didn’t give in.

Another friend of mine had a schizophrenic break around the same age as Jason. She was lucky enough to survive it even if she sometimes feels that medication killed the best parts of herself.  I don’t think people know the best parts of themselves. People have loved her since then and she’s written poetry that  made a palpable difference in the way thousands of people deal with their own schizophrenia and the way the world looks at people who live with it on a daily basis. Not to say she solved it but she made it better. I’m not trying to say that everyone with a mental illness will be inspiring, or will speak out and try to change the world one voice at a time. I’m saying that none of us have any idea of the good we do in this world. Of the people we help to live just by being ourselves. By making a joke and sharing a smile.

Jason was 20 and when he left us he shook our world to the core. Hundreds of people gathered in that chapel and wept like the world was ending. Because in a way it was. Something irreplaceable had been stolen from us. No one has that smile; no one else could have been our general in the April Fool’s Water Fight, no one else will make his music or tell his jokes in exactly the right way.

Whenever I see his sister Corinne I try to be like an older brother to her. Once I threatened a friend of mine with physical violence when he was talking smack to her and treating her like she wasn’t the amazing woman I know her to be.  Just like I know Jason would have done. I could never be one-tenth the brother to her that Jason was.  Somethings can’t be replaced.

We need to make sure that in the next five years we start teaching children what mental illness is.  Corinne is working on psych degree to help people like her brother.

I went through all of my years of schooling and never once was taught about the strange tricks your brain can play on you.  We were children and no one properly educated us on what can happen when you become an adult. I found out about mental illness by watching my friends kill themselves and lose themselves in drug addictions. There has to be a better way.

I wanted the video to be dedicated to Jason, because I wanted in some small way to make note of the most amazing person I’ve lost to mental illness.

I wanted to play some small part in a few people like Jason getting to live long enough to become an adult. Because five years is the difference between my living and his dying.

Time is the only thing that can save us and he didn’t get enough of it.

The error on the dedication wasn’t a small mistake.  I should have been better and gotten the video removed and put up with a new dedication.

It shouldn’t have been a mistake on the video, it’s a mistake that he didn’t get those years.  His friends and family should have been given five more years with him.

The world needed those five years, just as much as it needed every second of his young life.

November 3^rd is the second anniversary of my mental breakdown.

I want to take this opportunity to say thanks to my friends, my first love and my parents for keeping me alive when it was difficult for me to live.

I can’t wait to see what the next five years will hold.

 

Read more

keep looking »

Search

Search for:

Facebook

Categories

• Book of Job (1)
• Colony of Losers (50)
• Come Out Campaign (3)
• Complicated Compassion (1)
• Complicated Kindness (2)
• fiction (1)
• For-Four Samples (4)
• From the Colony of Writers (2)
• Heroism of the Happiest Homeless Man (1)
• Making of a Martinez (4)
• Music (1)
• surrounded (7)
• the cure (37)
• Uncategorized (21)

Introduction to the Cure

Peter Diamond Gallery

About

Michael Kimber is a 26-year-old journalist who suffered a nervous breakdown on November 3rd, 2009. On March 28th, 2010 when he recovered from mental illness, he began writing a blog called Colony-of-losers. About falling on your face to figure out who you are and the hilarious antics of a blond jew. What began with a few friends and his mother reading has become a cult phenomenon, averaging 10,000 views a week, receiving praise from Commonwealth Award Winner Shandi Mitchell and many others. On, November 3rd, 2010, the one year anniversary of his mental breakdown he signed with Anne McDermid and Associates, the largest literary agency in Canada. In a year he went from wearing pajamas, making his couch depression HQ to leaving his hometown for the Toronto, where he exclusively wears business suits and the armor of ancient Greeks. Don't worry, he's still choking on the feet he contently sticks in his mouth and making moments awkward just by being part of them. During these struggles he met other talented bastards and drew them into his circle. Peter Diamond became his illustrator. Patrick Campbell his video editor and part time photographer. He recently added the incredibly talented John Packman as Colony of Losers Toronto photographer. Without the support of the Colony of Losers, Michael Kimber would be nothing. Welcome to the losers and the success that comes from utter and complete failure. You aren’t alone. Follow him on twitter.com/colonyoflosersand twitter.com/quimbo. If you’d like to hire him for a public speaking engagement for mental health events in Toronto, like to arrange an interview, offer millions to publish his book or for another reason contact Michael please email him. And join his facebook Colony of Losers.

Really obvious disclaimer:
I’m not a trained psychologist. Just a fellow traveler. If you need help seek it from the professionals. The Canadian Mental Health Association provides a help locator. You can find crisis resources provided by the Canadian Association for Suicide Prevention. If you are in the states check here. It will give you services by zip code. I’d also recommend checking out Mindyourmind.ca. I think they do great work and have been a help to me personally.

Archives

• February 2012 (1)
• January 2012 (5)
• November 2011 (4)
• September 2011 (1)
• August 2011 (1)
• July 2011 (1)
• June 2011 (4)
• May 2011 (7)
• April 2011 (4)
• March 2011 (7)
• February 2011 (2)
• January 2011 (6)
• December 2010 (8)
• November 2010 (13)
• October 2010 (12)
• September 2010 (5)
• August 2010 (8)
• July 2010 (11)
• June 2010 (4)
• May 2010 (6)
• April 2010 (9)
• March 2010 (2)

Fantastic Thoughts of Quimbo

Michael Kimber
I suffer from anxiety, being a twenty something and having an awesome blog. Check out colony-of-losers.com
Sign this petition and support Halifax artists.
http://t.co/XQd6UA3r
We have to make it better #letstalk #mentalilness #depression @DebMatthews @CTVAtlantic
http://t.co/cxnmuxqy
Hey Twitter homies. Check it out. #letstalk #ryersonstigma #camh
http://t.co/EbEOjBM7
#ryersonstigma
http://t.co/EbEOjBM7
This from a speech I gave today at Ryerson.
http://t.co/EbEOjBM7
We need to make it better. Spread the word.
http://t.co/cxnmuxqy