November 4, 2025
Wanting It All
It feels good to be part of a beautiful story, which was a chief appeal of jumping on the Blue Jays post-season bandwagon this year. The bandwagon has been an experience that echoed last year’s of Tay-ronto, when the Taylor Swift Eras tour arrived in our city and the vibes were so electric that one was even able to be a functional human being in spite of an American election outcome concurrently that was just devastating. Both of these collective experiences were so restorative for me, and when I’m called on to articulate why, the image comes to mind of boarded up windows across downtown Toronto in June of 2020 in the wake of the George Floyd protests after we’d just lived through a season of lockdown, the insult and injury of all that ugly plywood, and then eventual weekly “convoy” protests just blocks from my house that were loud, mean, and as antisocial as they were stupid. It’s been a hard five years, a hard ten years, and things are still hard, and scary, so much of what we feared at those election results last year having come to pass, and then some. And along the way I’d lost my faith and trust in community, and in any certainty I’d had about what our story was and just where we were going.
It’s been a long time since I’d dared to #WantitAll. Or even dared “to live for the hope of it all.” To provide some context, when I had a mental breakdown nearly four years ago, we’d known something was up when I was expressing secret desire “to just be put into a coma for a few months,” which I thought sounded perfectly reasonable at the time. As recently as last April, I was having conversations with my therapist about how I might manage to avoid the gutting disappointment of yet another electoral result that felt like somebody was stomping on my face, wondering if there was any way I could just cease feeling altogether—until I realized how ridiculous that sounded, and remembered the central tenet of therapy, which is that feeling things is unavoidable (I KNOW, SO UNFAIR).
And so spending the last month cheering for the Blue Jays has been kind of a wild experience, daring to hope, daring to want. Taking part in the collective joy in loving the team as well, as the wonderful example these players have set for what healthy masculinity is all about, including teamwork, and friendship. Sitting with the uncertainty of what baseball offers us—oh, those last few innings Saturday night were just agonizing, the worst. But also the best. So exciting.
As Gillian Deacon writes: I’m going to go so far as to call this wild ride of the Blue Jays’ post-season a love affair with the unknown. The stakes are a lot lower for the viewer in a ball game than in much of the rest of life, but it bears pointing out that the very thing that draws us to watch the World Series—or any other sporting match—is uncertainty. It’s the not-knowing that draws us in; it’s the possibility of what may or may not come that makes our hearts soar (and makes sports betting scandals so offensive). This exciting few weeks in Major League Baseball has been a great reminder that we have not just the skills for handling uncertainty, but an appetite for it.
And I’ve needed that reminder. I’ve spent the days since listening to “Didn’t We Almost Have It All,” by Whitney Houston (along with “Centre Field,” by John Fogerty), and relishing the line, “The ride we took was worth the fall, my friend.” Yes, I’m being dramatic, but it really was. And I’d forgotten that was even possible.
It feels really good (and hopeful) to remember.
