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.

TEN YEARS?

Holy shit.  I've had this blog for 10 years.  I haven't used it a great deal in the most recent years, but I never plan to delete it.  Maybe I'll back-date my old livejournal entries into it.  Maybe one day this will form part of my memoires.  I don't know, but I'm amazed I've lasted as long as I did, even though I naively thought I would never call it a "blog" when I started. 

I was studying computer animation when I began this journal.  The world had changed a month and a half before, when icons of my childhood came crashing down.  I was living in Toronto, working at the ROM and at Heretic and just barely existing at the poverty line.  I was dating Rick.  This blog would see me through that relationship, which taught me how to love a man and how to respect him for who he was, and then it would see me through the tumultuous long-distance affair with Gareth. (By the way, Rick, congratulations on your upcoming marriage to Kat !)  It saw me in Toronto, working for a politician, and selling my art (or not selling as the case tended to be) at conventions.  It saw me go back to school after a period of finding myself.  It saw renewed enthusiasm for learning and direction and personal ambition.  It witnessed death and loss, anger and joy and contentment.  It saw me abandon security for risk as I moved first for an internship to Winnipeg and then terrifyingly far away to Whitehorse.  It followed me back to Ontario into the life I now lead.  I can look back and see constants relected here, and the changeable, and the things I thought would be forever that ended up the least permanent of all.  I can see myself growing into my skin and becoming a person I both respect and admire.

A toast, then, to longevity and commitment, and the written word.

Not so festive spirit

This time last year, I was struggling with spending my first 'stmas away from home, up in the Yukon. It was a nice enough time with friends up there, but I desperately missed being surrounded by old friends and family. As you can imagine, I was quite excited for this year's holidays because I'd be home again. Unfortunately, my delight has been tempered by a schedule too busy for card-making and most recently, sad news.

Two close friends of the family are in hospital. One is in varying health, up one day, down the next. She might be dying. It's unclear. The other is my mother's best friend, Julie, who has always been like a close aunt to me. She was just admitted to hospital with kidney stones for which they may have to operate. This is the same Julie who had the massive stroke a few years back. Julie's latest health concern was almost too much for my mother to process as only two days before, we'd heard from another close friend's husband...

Saturday morning, we lost a close friend to what was apparently cardiac arrest. While none of us were surprised by her death - alcoholism had been taking its toll for some time - the timing and how quickly it happened were pretty shocking. We have been estranged from this friend and her husband for a couple of years now as the drinking was almost intollerable. In recent months, there had even been discussion among other mutual friends about an intervention. For almost a decade, my family, another family and this couple had done Christmas dinner together. She was welcoming to my mother when my mom first moved to Peterborough and helped my mother when she had her stroke. It's been a tragic decline watching as the booze changed her. An autopsy is being conducted on her and I won't be at all shocked if it comes back that she had more than just alcohol in her system. You don't drink the way she did if you're happy with your life. What a terrible waste of an intelligent, funny woman.

I pray that our hospitalised friends regain their health and return to their normal lives for the new year. It might be selfish, but I admit I don't know if I can handle more than one funeral over the holidays.

Other than that, I'll be spending my time with my mother and with close friends. My cats are already in Peterborough visiting their 'cousin' Willy. Apparently, they're getting along all right. I plan on writing my final paper of the taught portion of my degree, which is due the 7th of January, as well as putting together a workplan for the upcoming exhibits at ML. I should probably write my draft for the exhibition, too. So, I'll be busy, but at least I'll be able to sleep in.

I sincerely hope your holiday is full of love and good health. Merry Christmas, happy Hanukkah, etc.

B:38 Something a bit more serious

I promised I'd talk about some of the things that have effected my life over the last few months. Hell, I never even finished writing about my holidays with Gareth or anything. I've been a shitty blogger in the last couple of years.

But in the more recent past, the last entry I posted was about nasty Mr. Jerry Falwell who died. More importantly to my life, a very close friend of the family died in May. Some of you may remember in 2003 when I went to New York because Robert passed away. His father, Alfred, was one of my mother's closest friends and she was a foundational person in Robert's life.

Alfred died in May. My mother went to New York in the last two weeks of his life. Initially, it was to help get his place cleaned up for his return in case he needed to get in home care, etc., but by the end, it was clear that he would not be coming home. He died the night after she left.

I dropped everything and got a travel agent to find me a "reasonable" flight from Whitehorse to New York. It was very expensive, but less than had I booked it myself. Half the price, in fact.

Going back to New York, staying in Alfred's apartment... without Alfred... it was very discomforting. I spent nearly no time in the living room because that is where he and I would have been hanging out laughing and talking if it were a normal visit. I stayed holed up in the guest room, formerly Robert's bedroom. There was no Alfred, no Robert, no cat... it was so strange.

And it was not only a goodbye to a beloved friend, but to a neighbourhood. A home away from home. I might write more about this... I don't know. I still hurt thinking about it.

In the last couple of weeks, Don, Alfred's close friend, and ours, too, closed up the apartment and turned in the keys.

It hurts my heart. I don't think I can write any more about this right now.