My Black Dog: a coming-out story

Nevermind those pesky life decisions.  I stopped blogging not because I didn't have stories and updates to share, but because in spite of the good and exciting things that were happening, I slid into a more profound depression than I've experienced in a long time.  That's the way of the black dog, you know.  It sneaks up on you and catches hold, backing you into a corner, and before you know it, you're living life hesitantly, with trepidation, going through the motions but never overstepping because that dog is there, baring its teeth and growling as it glares at you.



Long-time readers, if there are any of you left, know that depression is nothing new to me and I have struggled with it since I was a teenager.  I was diagnosed, officially, just after my 25th birthday, put on a treatment plan that was closely monitored by my family doctor (I had one then), which included both medication and life/attitude coaching.  She was not a shrink or psychologist, but she was far more effective than any therapist I have ever seen.  Although she retired from active practice the following year, I continued my treatment and maintained my thought and behaviour modifications until they became my dominant patterns.  For nine-and-a-half years, my prescription never changed.

Until February.

If you do not know what bullying is like, you won't understand the anger and agony its victims suffer and the pain and anxiety they in turn may inflict upon their loved ones.  Bullying happens in every facet of life from childhood to old age.  Bullying is something that we're supposed to grow out of, but in reality, many bullies become what they are during their adult lives.  Positions of authority, perceived inadequacies in their jobs or at home can turn anyone into a bully, and that goes for past victims of bullying, too.  Wherever there are groups of people and hierarchies, inevitably there will be a bully.  Sometimes that bully comes across as perfectly normal to most, except to that one person they set their sights on.  Sometimes the collective can rise up and unseat the bully, but when the collective is segregated and played against one another, it may prefer, instead, to do nothing, to pretend all is well, if only to avoid the bully's attention.

As someone who refuses to fit in and keep her head down, but instead chooses to be herself and speak out, I am an easy target for bullying.  When I was a child it was because I was unabashedly creative and very sensitive.  I was easily manipulated in my quest to be like the other kids, and yet, I couldn't keep my true self down and failed to play the game.  For some children, this breaks them.  They turn to substances, or crime, or try to kill themselves - anything to escape their victimised identity.  Sometimes they become bullies in order to feel powerful.  I could have been like any number of damaged kids, growing up (maybe) to become damaged adults.  Instead, I found other, healthier outlets for my rage.

Or did I?

While I was living my straight-edge life, riding and working with horses, doing my art and playing my role-playing games, I was quietly seething inside.  Bottling it up, mixing it with the grief of losing first one, then two, then five family members in a three year period and shaking it into a frothy concoction, and unleashing it on my mother.  In public, my pain was contained, but at home, it was a bottle of Coke ready to explode.  By the time I was 17, the foam was leaking out in public, too, not often, but when it did, the ferocity of my anger was both unexpected and terrifying.  At home, I became a bully.  I didn't know it then, but I came to understand.  The thing that I swore I would never be, intentional or not, was what I had become.  What I did know is that I didn't much like myself and didn't like being an asshole, and I came to resent the good things because I believed I didn't deserve them.

It took moving into residence for my undergraduate degree to break the pattern.  I made a conscious effort to break the push-pull response of fighting with my mother.  I made a conscious effort to be a better person.  And I was.  Except that I was unable to shade the feeling that I wasn't worth.  I spent a lot of time coasting and doing the bare minimum, relying on my intelligence and charisma to keep me moving along.  A success was a surprise because I always expected the worst, and I took pride in my fairly poor grades.  On the one hand, I always knew I wanted a PhD, and on the other hand, I was doing the utmost to sabotage any future efforts.

When my mother had her stroke in 1998, I just about lost my mind.  I stopped fighting for grades I did deserve, fell into an apathetic state, and started escaping the unfairness of it all.  Never a big drinker, my drug of choice was a text-based RPG that was essentially a forerunner to World of Warcraft.  I escaped into a spectacular world imagined into life through the collective efforts of many other story-driven roleplay addicts.  I thought it was all good fun, because it was creative, intelligent, literary - but it was manipulative, hurtful, and petty.  Alliances were formed, cliques, people were excluded and feelings got hurt and we - I - didn't care because it was all for the story arc.  I was again becoming the bully.  And I couldn't stop.

And I couldn't see the problem.

Frankly, it's a minor miracle I managed to get out of university with a degree in hand.  I didn't even end up on academic probation like so many of my friends.  Two wins, even though I probably didn't deserve them.  But out in the real world, things didn't look so good.  I went back to school for computer animation - which is when I began this blog.  That college course taught me that I could do well in school if I tried.  But I couldn't get work, and I'd racked up a debt I had avoided in undergrad.  I began to feel despondent.  I was working part-time at two jobs and barely making ends meet, but I put up a happy front.  At night, at home, I would cry.  I tried my hand at selling my fantasy art, which, again, you long-time readers will remember, and was constantly frustrated by the fickle market that didn't want well done, unique works, but always the fairies, the terrible Star Trek montages, the kittens and the baby dragons.

I was in debt, I was addicted to a game that was becoming increasingly unsatisfying to play (in addiction terms, I kept looking for the high and it was becoming harder to reach), I was doing fun stuff but getting no joy from it, and it was impeding my ability to have a meaningful relationship with my boyfriend and I felt shitty about myself.  I was a loser.  I was a failure.  I could not see a future for myself selling memberships to a museum or gothic clothing to people like myself, which was the work I was doing.  I continued to struggle with art and graphic design.  I continued to doubt my abilities.  I was unable to break the cycle and nothing helped.  All that rage accumulated in my childhood and adolescence - being made the outsider, losing half of my family, and all the while undermining my own efforts by some secret hidden belief that I wasn't good enough - was eating away at me from the inside and a growing anxiety was strangling me at random, but ever shortening intervals.

And once again, as I had been as a child, I was emotionally vulnerable.  In my workplace, I had a change of supervisor and he made my life very difficult.  He instilled in me self-doubt and degraded my abilities.  He questioned my skills in front of my co-workers.  Instinctively, I fought back at the injustice, but inside I believed that if it weren't true, at least at some level, I wouldn't be doing this shitty data-entry job and if I were just a better person, I would be achieving things by now.

Somehow, from the time I was 21, when my previously sporadic feelings of depression, which I had linked to grief and mourning, first began to settle on me like a light snow, until the day I walked into my doctor's office shortly after my 25th birthday, covered in an invisible avalanche, no one had noticed that I was faking it.  Even my mother, who knew me better than anyone, had no idea how despondent I had become.  Good things were mere momentary, fleeting distractions which would soon be overtaken by the despair; that black dog would snarl if I looked like I might leave my corner.

The day I levelled on my anti-depressant felt like nothing less than a miracle to me.  I remember looking up, startled and wide-eyed, and saying to my roommate, "Oh my God.  I remember this feeling.  I feel so..."  He looked at me and finished my sentence, "Normal?"  "Ya.  Normal.  I forgot what it was like."  Sure, the side-effects of the drug played havoc with my libido and my dreams got really bizarre, but for the first time in my recent life, I felt I could go somewhere, do something, maybe - just maybe - I could succeed at something.

And I wasn't going to take crap from bullies any more, and I made the horrible realisation that in my despair, I had done my share of bullying.  I grew less and less reliant on my roleplaying game, instead throwing myself into new, real adventures (politics, if you remember), and I started applying for jobs again with the conviction that I deserved them and I could do them and that I would be an asset to my employers, not a hindrance.  Not a punching bag.  I threw myself fully into the final year of my relationship, so that when I knew it was over, really over, I could honestly say that I had tried and had given it my best shot.  That final year was worth more than the preceding four years, even though it ended in a break-up.

At 26, I figured out what I wanted to do with my life and put myself on the path to making it happen.  I came to the museum field, where I had already been working for six years, with new eyes and a burning passion.  I threw myself into risks.  An internship in a strange city, a passionate long-distance love-affair, a job in an even more distant, stranger place, taking on challenges, extending my reach, and travelling to meet those distant horizons.  It was not always easy, and I struggled often, but I pushed through it and relished it.

Some of my friends felt I should let go of my "crutch" and stop taking my anti-depressant.  I said no.  I knew it wasn't a crutch, but the real deal.  It didn't make me feel like a million bucks, it gave me the ability to cope with things that previously were crippling.  When I cried, it was because I was sad, not because I was falling apart.  I handled grief in a mature fashion and reconciled myself with the past deaths during my adolescence, particularly of my nana and my pop.  I grappled with renewed loss in the passing of a beloved father figure and came through it after a while.  In essence, my medication gave me normalcy and I could experience life as it came, the good and bad, with healthy emotional responses and a clear head.

Fast-forward to February of 2012, four years later and things are no longer so rosy.  I have a good life: a wonderful partner who loves and supports me, a house (yes, we'd just purchased one), friends, and a good career.  So why was I routinely incapable of getting up in the mornings?  Why had I suffered mystery ailments that kept me out of work for a week at a time, where nothing was apparently wrong, other than I couldn't get out of bed?  Why was I crying in the shower for no reason?  Why did I feel like I was a failure, inadequate, and a fraud?  What had changed?

For reasons I cannot go into I'd allowed someone to undermine my confidence and then expected it to just go away.  Instead, it got out of hand, increasing so gradually that I didn't see the damage it was causing and when I did, I was in the thick of it and virtually powerless to stop it.  Those old patterns of doubt and anxiety were coming back.  My temper, so long asleep, was waking and I could hear myself snapping at my loved ones.  Honesty was becoming brutal, criticism was taking a cruel turn.  I became aware that some of my thoughts were soured by resentment and my curiosity and creativity were unquestionably dulled. The signs were there.

But this time, unlike when I was 25, I wasn't waiting around to solve the problem.  I won't go into the gory details, but I am dealing with it.  Like hell am I allowing the situation to drive me, like hell am I letting it strip me of my love of life, family and friends.  I am putting that damned dog back on its leash and clapping a muzzle over its fanged and snarling mouth.  And to keep the metaphor going, I am sending the dog to obedience school.

House Hunting

It wasn't really intentional, it just sort of happened.  One day, my casual, occasional survey of homes for sale in London became a real interest.  I found myself contacting the realtor who helped my friend buy her home and suddenly, casual glances became active house hunting.  How did this even happen?

When I was at the cottage with Glenn in the week leading up to Thanksgiving, I heard the words come out of my mouth that I could conceive of staying in London.  There are good people here and I have an excellent job in my field, even if it is flawed (aren't they all?).  It's very difficult to get meaningful work in the heritage sector right now so I am grateful.  I get good press and I am feeling a level of satisfaction with my work that I didn't necessarily feel in the past.  So, sure, it would be nice to be closer to the cottage and to my mother, but if I can't be, London's okay.  Glenn was pretty stunned to hear me say this and I was surprised, too.  Some time in the last six or eight months, something happened.  Previously, my emotional world turned around Toronto.  I visited over night regularly and thought nothing of killing a weekend in London to be in Toronto.  I have been in Toronto all of two times since April, and not once for an overnight since then.  My world now rotates around London.  I can imagine myself staying here.

So, we come to the question of how do I want to stay?  Do I continue renting?  Personally, I don't have a problem with renting.  I'd like a slightly larger place to live than where we are currently.  I have a lot of art that can't go up on these walls.  I'd like a bit of space in which to entertain.  I'd like to be able to do Hallowe'en for neighbourhood kids and have, you know, kids come to my house because they live nearby, rather than university students coming by and smashing my pumpkins.  Does this mean I want to settle down?  Not quite.  I like the possibility of packing up my family and travelling around the world (cats and all), but I want something more stable.  Something bigger, at any rate.

Glenn is of the opinion that if we are going to get a bigger place and potentially spend more money in rent, then we may as well own the house.  I hear that.  I get it.  But I'm fearful of things like property taxes and home owners' insurance and replacing windows or roofs at my own expense.  There's also my own level of snobbery.  I want a house that I feel reflects my values and my class.  I can live in a working class neighbourhood if the neighbours take pride in their homes, but I want more than a little cottage.  I want a house we can grow into.  I also want a house that is more move-in ready than less.  To me, the point of buying a fixer-upper for less and then spending two years fixing it up, only to sell it again, doesn't make sense.  I don't want to live in a house that needs work or that we're always working on.  The outlay of time and money, though perhaps one I could get back in a future sale, doesn't entice me.  I have a hard enough time keeping my house nice.  Living in perpetual renovations is not appealing.  So, I want a house that is ready to go right now.  Then I realise that to get a house in my financial range, which isn't very high, in a neighbourhood both central AND pleasant, might be tough.

So, we're house hunting and I have patience, but at the same time I find it very frustrating to see a house that I really like, only to discover that there is no way we can swing it.  My credit is bad.  My debts, while not insurmountable, are not good, and I have a hard enough time budgeting.  Is home ownership really appropriate for me?  I have no idea.  I guess I'll find out.

Life Decisions and a Very Nice Holiday

If you're a friend on my livejournal, you know the gist of my academic intentions up to this point. If not, well, allow me to summarise.

I had an awesome time in Halifax and fell in love with it. I also had the opportunity to meet with faculty in two departments: Interdisciplinary PhD and History. I hadn't initially planned to visit the History Department, as I had no intention of applying to it. Unfortunately, every part of my visit to the InterDiscPhD co-ordinator made me uncomfortable. Firstly, they have no department headquarters. Dalhousie actually took away their building. They have no office space, which means no space for grad students to work. They don't really assist much in the locating of research or TA jobs. The application process is unfathomably complex and they basically want you to have a fully fleshed out PhD research proposal before you begin. Because of the nature of the programme, it's not unheard of for students with particularly narrow focuses to get stranded upon the retirement/death/transfer of one of their faculty advisors. Plus, the co-ordinator didn't tell me where to meet her, or even remember that I was meeting her. I had to wait half an hour while she was on the phone, after trudging from place to place and asking directions multiple times trying to find where she was located. And then she told me she'd thought she'd cancelled my appointment because she was recovering from being ill. Oh man, every possible negative vibe a person could get, I got. I was happy she was so honest about the programme's shortfalls, but I came away from the meeting wondering if I was cut out for doctoral studies at all. It was really disheartening.

In discussion with Deanna (with whom Glenn and I were staying) and Glenn, I began to rethink just what I was looking for in further education and realised that perhaps it wasn't me who was not cut out for it, but that particular programme that wasn't suitable for me. I decided to contact the Department of History and see whether the PhD co-ordinator could meet with me on such short notice. So, I began my visit with a negative experience at Dalhousie and ended my week with an amazing one. I really liked the history co-ordinator. He was approachable, genial and humourous. He clearly articulated the diversity of the programme and the parameters for getting accepted to it. We talked about my interests and they definitely mesh with the larger interests of the faculty and we both got genuinely excited talking about some of my particular areas of knowledge. While I wouldn't be able to do a project-based thesis, they're very strict on that, there's certainly no reason why I couldn't work with material culture and artefacts during my research. Perhaps the best part of the programme, in my mind, is that there is no coursework. The whole four years is devoted to the research and working toward the thesis. I think that's brilliant. The big catch was that I had to apply to SSHRC for funding before my Dalhousie application could even be considered and the SSHRC deadline was a month later.

I tried very hard to meet the deadline. I even managed to get referees on short notice. What I couldn't get on short notice (and short of cash) were the necessary transcripts from my various schools. Leicester, in particular, required me to send a cheque and then wait for the cheque to clear (up to one month), before transcripts could be mailed. Even had I gotten it together immediately after returning from vacation, I still couldn't have made the deadline. I made the difficult decision to delay my application by a year in order to make sure I could have everything I needed and not be rushed. It gives me an extra year to try to get some conference presentations under my belt and fight for a publication at the museum. I'm short on both and they will look at my academic participation at that level in judging my application, both for SSHRC and for school. In fact, this weekend, I am writing some proposals to upcoming conferences to see if I can get myself out there. Exciting.

Halifax was amazing. We pretty much ate and drank ourselves around the town and surrounding country. We took the train from London to Halifax, which took a day and a half and was totally worth it. Waking up at dawn in Eastern Quebec with the Laurentians crimson with changing colours and eating delicious breakfast in the dining car made the whole trip. It didn't hurt that the guy sitting behind us was a guitar wholesaler, either. Well, that part was good for Glenn, at any rate. I got a bit tired of the steady stream of big-eyed oohing over tobacco-burst Les Paul copies... I don't even know what I just typed there. That was from memory, not true understanding. Anyway, we visited many very old cemeteries and historic sites (Citadel Hill, for instance, Pier 21, etc.) and got to enjoy Annapolis Royal on the 300th anniversary of its founding (even though it was actually about 100 years older than that). We ate traditional foods like Rappie Pie and oatcakes and drank delicious microbrewed beer. Glenn took me for a more-or-less-anniversary dinner at McKelvie's (Delicious Fishes Dishes) where he was utterly revolted by my devouring of a lobster. We visited Peggy's Cove and the Swiss Air 111 memorial. AND, I even got to see the grave of Prime Minister Tupper ! I did a project on him when I was 10. He was one of Canada's shortest serving PMs, but he's a hero in Nova Scotia. I have a bizillion beautiful photos, which perhaps I'll manage to upload somewhere at some point. Mainly, life's been very hectic since August and I never have the time. Anyway, our holiday was amazing and the weather was gorgeous.

So that's a brief update on life.

Okay, here's one photo - Tupper's grave !



Is that a patriotic flag flying or what? Timing is everything.

Those Pesky Life Decisions (part one?)

Okay, I admit it, I’ve been thinking a bit about marriage, weddings and babies. I’m rapidly closing in on 33 and I am, for the first time ever, living with my boyfriend. We’re also raising three lovely cats together.

In the last ten years, I’ve learned what it is to experience loving relationships, fall madly and incontrovertibly in love, have my heart broken, and to recover from the agony of heartbreak. I’ve watched the majority of my friends go through engagements, weddings, have children (not necessarily in that order) and, in a couple of instances, go through devastating break-ups and divorces. I’ve been a bridesmaid thrice, maid-of-honour once and once an usher. I’ve worn awful dresses and fantastic dresses. I have done the bridal make-up for friends, their wedding invitations, and taken countless photographs. I have spent money I did not have, and have had others make up the difference when I absolutely could not spend any more money. I have attended stag-and-does, jack-and-jills, a wedding social in Winnipeg, showers, bachelorettes, and engagement parties. I have made ribbon-hats at showers, made nice with judgemental old women and volunteered to help tear-down reception set-ups when the people who were meant to do it simply effed off after the dancing was done. I have attended big weddings, small weddings, lake-side weddings, masquerade weddings, weddings hosted in the parents’ home, church and synagogue weddings and weddings in parks. I have done the Chicken Dance until I could not breathe and steadfastly refused to ever “do the Macarena.”

I’ve thought a lot about weddings, although usually not my own. I have been that girl who stepped sideways in order to avoid catching the bouquet. Even when I was in long-term relationships, marriage was a level of commitment that I never wanted to think about. When Rick gave me a diamond solitaire for our one-year anniversary, I had to stop wearing it on my finger because people kept asking if I were engaged. I put it on my necklace with my unicorn and Star of David charms, which was about as meaningful a place as I could think to put it, and where it could never be confused for an engagement ring. I loved Rick, but never wanted to marry him. Heck, I didn’t even want to live with him. I knew I wasn’t ready to share my life and space in that way, as much as I knew six months into my relationship with Glenn that I did. And I thought all that time that maybe I just had a problem with commitment. No, not true. Had it been possible, I’d have shared everything with Gareth, but with Glenn, something was different. There was a calculated, thinking process behind my increasing level of trust and commitment. He’s good for me and I’m good for him. We get on well. We love each other. We are doing a good job parenting our cats. There is a future there not complicated by distance or fear or whatever else gets in the way of two people being together. Really together.

Friends are irritated when I shrug off their questions about marriage. “Do you think you’ll get married?” “Are you gonna marry him?” I roll my eyes when they make not-so-innocent comments about how cute our kids would be. Ya, they’d probably be adorable, but nerdy and have terrible vision. And I know we’d probably make pretty great parents. Glenn wants kids. He wants to be a stay-at-home dad. I want to be the career-oriented mom, so that’s just about perfect. Glenn’s going to have to learn how to make more than pasta and scrambled eggs, though. The truth is I’m not being coy. I’m not that girl who’s had every detail of her imaginary wedding planned since she was twelve. At twelve, I thought anyone who married before the age of 28 was doing it much too young, never mind babies. I assumed I’d get married and have at least one kid, but I expected to end up a single parent. My mother was (and still is) an incredible roll-model for me and she did an amazing job raising me on her own. I think 75% of kids in two-parent families would be lucky to have half the love and support that I did. Truly, her parenting has been a gift. If I could be half the parent she is, I believe my child(ren) would turn out great. But that doesn’t mean I’m planning on being a parent this instant. Please, I hold my breath before my period starts every month. I read The Saddle Club as a girl, not The Babysitters Club. I’m still that girl, despite my womanly curves and increasingly loud biological clock.

My ambivalence toward marriage has many roots. Sadly, one lesson I learned quite early in life is that even when two people love each other utterly, things can still not work out. Addiction destroyed my parents’ marriage and all the love in the world couldn’t save it, not when one person (my papa) didn’t want to give up his other great love: heroin. I understand that even when everything is perfect, things can still go horribly wrong. Maybe being the child of a single mother in a neighbourhood made of nuclear families made me more sensitive to the fact that these textbook terrific marriages were anything but. Too many of my friends grew up and realised in their teens and twenties that their parents had nothing holding them together but their parenting responsibilities and worse yet, had long ago stopped respecting each other. Marriage is supposed to be “until death do us part”, right? Is that what keeps people together when the can barely face each other at the breakfast table? I don’t want that. I have a very pragmatic approach to marriage: it’s a legal bond that should be the firm foundation on which to build a family. I’m a hair away from not believing it’s necessary at all. I have plenty of friends who have never married their obvious life-partner, and are often doing a great job raising kids. Marriage isn’t necessary. And then, at the same time, I’m still a bit of a traditionalist and a romantic at heart (although I often keep the latter well hidden) who thinks that if you are committed enough to have children together, you should get married and make it “official”, even if it’s at City Hall or an elopement in Turkestan.

And yet, here I am, thinking about all this big stuff. I have managed to come up with a list of things I would certainly not want if I get married. I wouldn’t want a big wedding. I wouldn’t want it to be expensive. I don’t want gifts, just the money thanks. I don’t think a sit-down meal is necessary. Honestly, I don’t even think a wedding is necessary. I do love a good party, though. And I’d want my favourite people to be present. If I were to walk down the aisle, I’d only have one maid-of-honour and she could pick her own damn dress. I want some very basic elements of a Jewish wedding. I don’t need a Chuppah, but I want the circling. I need a glass to be broken. I want my mom to yell “Mazel Tov !” and clutch her hands together in joy. I want to go away somewhere, but I’d want to go somewhere that counts, and the expense that can be saved by not having a big (or any) wedding could be spent on honeymooning. Tuscany. Japan. Dinosaur Provincial Park. Scotland or Iceland, or some place remote and windswept. My needs are pretty simple, even if I’m not particularly sure of what I want. See? I’ve been thinking about this. I’ve been thinking about it in the same non-specific way I’ve been contemplating my PhD. I want it, I just haven’t quite figured out what my research direction will be.

Next entry? Maybe I’ll talk about that PhD.