January 2, 2024

Returning to Myself

Something I’m grateful for is the way that selfies and Instagram have taught me to make friends with my face, with my appearance, which is no small thing when you’re a woman in your mid-40s (and I kind of wished I’d been able to do as much when I was youthful and 600% gorgeous but had no idea of the latter). For a very long time, I’d see pictures of my self and feel bad about not looking the way I thought I looked in my head. But once selfies became a thing, the face in the photo became familiar, somebody I recognized, even if she looked a little bit odd or the light was unflattering, but who doesn’t look odd, sometimes? How tedious to be the woman who freaks out about appearing in photos with the same face she walks around in the world with all the time.

There was also so much that was gratifying about Instagram’s algorithm’s favouring of faces, and bodies. The whole matter feeling particularly subversive since my face and body defy conventional beauty standards in some ways, and so I’d get to celebrate myself, to feel empowered and good inside my own skin, as though I was the one making the rules instead of catering to somebody else’s standard, and I was, I think, for a while.

Or maybe I never was, I don’t know. What I do know, however, is that at some point it started to feel not good. That whenever I needed the dopamine hit of engagement with my posts, I’d post a photo of my face, and the LIKES would start coming. And is that any way to treat my friend? Something that started off feeling empowering and meaningful becoming a cheap kind of gesture, and I became conscious of that. I became conscious of everything, this performance of my self, my life, my tea cups, even. I did not like it anymore.

Instagram wasn’t a performance, in the beginning. Or if it was, I didn’t notice, because it was serving me, and the LIKES came easily, so I didn’t have to think of them. (There were never so many, but numbers aren’t the kind of data my mind clings to.) I’ve spent the last 23 years putting elements of my life on the internet, and so social media feels natural to me, and I’ve always been able to use it in my own way, creating my own template instead of contorting myself in order to fit into somebody else’s, which is part of the reason why I’ll always be obscure, but it’s also entirely the reason I’m still here.

But last fall, it stopped feeling good to me. Partly it was became I was working so hard to try to sell my book (which is to say, to try to sell myself) and the book wasn’t selling. And—not unrelated—I was stuck in a rut in general, doing all these things both in my actual life and on the internet simply because these were things I always did, and while it’s true that rituals add meaning to existence, it’s possible to ritual so much that the life gets sucked out of them. The small ceremony of #TodaysTeacup began to feel rote. Posting my face began to feel rote. And then, even worse, I was doing all these things by rote and getting less engagement than I’d ever seen before, and it made me feel really bad about myself and about everything, and what even is the point of that?

Last year I struggled a lot to feel present in the moment. I think a lot of it was anticipation about my book release, so much set upon that event that every moment before it just felt like counting down the days. In the summer I swam to the middle of the lake in my favourite place in the whole world, and it just didn’t feel like my head was there, which was terrible since immersion in that lake, in that moment, in any moment, really, is so essential to my mental health. Similar to Instagram, it felt I was performing my experience, doing the things I do because these are the things I do, rather than consciously deliberately doing them.

By mid-December, I was pretty miserable. I actually diagnosed myself with a low grade depression, but I think I was just getting my period. Or maybe I was actually depressed after all, but getting off Instagram did the trick of fixing what was ailing me. Instantaneously. I think I’d been exhausted from the effort of trying to promote my book inside my little sphere of influence, like a crazy maniacal tap-dance that absolutely no one on the planet cared about, and once I got to stop dancing, it felt like such a relief. No longer scrolling past everybody else’s literary end-of-year triumphs, all the while my novel hadn’t garnered a single review. (And yes, I know that there are many writers who’d be grateful for the opportunity/exposure/sales I’ve been lucky to have, which is part of the reason talking about this at all is hard, but…that’s not the point?). Being able to just take a mug down from the cupboard without thinking about it. Heading out with friends and family and not taking a single photo, or if I did, not showing it to anybody. Noticing something beautiful, and not needing to share that beauty in order for it to true. Merely living a day, instead of feeling like I had to document it—and there was nothing mere about it. It was so restorative, and meaningful, and felt like I’d got a part of my life back that was only just for me.

And this is what I’m hoping of more of in this new year, to return to myself, to connect with the moment, to live more offline, and live differently on it. To spend less of my time striving for external validation (so much of which is superficial) and more time doing things that are meaningful to me.

August 11, 2023

On Being Out of My Depth

It was story that started it—the kinds of stories we tell ourselves about the importance of being pushed outside our comfort zones, how we can learn and grow from a challenge. I was thinking about my work with writers on their early manuscripts and how scary it can be to open one’s self up for critique, but about how, in avoiding such a thing, we miss the chance to improve and make our work all it can be. I was thinking too about the story I was going to tell at the end of it the night, and how it would be one about triumph, fake it until you make it, about how you just never know what you’re capable of until you try.

I was thinking about how often we tend to underestimate ourselves, and the pitfalls of imposter syndrome, and how essential it is for me to override a tendency to stay small, to stay home. I was nervous, but those nerves, I supposed, were merely a sign that this was important, and that it was time to be brave. Do the hard thing. “Look,” I told my children too smugly. “I’m scared, and that I’m doing it, and *that* is the definition of brave.”

For seven years, I’ve been swimming near-daily, pandemic lockdowns aside, and I’ve come to own an identity as A Swimmer, tearing through Speedo caps, replacing goggles, usually one of the faster people in the pool (now that I no longer swim as the pool where the university swim team trains). And I’ve been curious for a while about trying something a little more difficult, about dipping a toe (ahem) into something with higher stakes, about improving my strokes and having somebody show me how to be better. So I finally signed up for the Masters Swim program at my community centre, drawn in by the suggestion that it would be an introduction to the world of competitive swimming, in which I’d hardly be a foreigner, since I essentially have gills and fins.

Oh, but Reader, it didn’t work out that way. Oh, Reader, I’ve not been so out of my depth (see what I did there!) since the time I decided to sneak a six pack of beer into a Scottish music festival where alcohol was apparently forbidden, and encountered people at the gate pushing in towers of beer cases on dollies. Sometimes, see, nerves are actually our instincts. If underdogs always eventually triumphed, as pop culture might suggest, wouldn’t there be no such things as underdogs after all?

I’d imagined Masters Swim a bit like Old Timer’s Hockey, see, me and a ragtag band of senior citizens. I really thought it would be gentle, an introduction, the name mostly ironic, but it quickly became apparent that it wasn’t. When the coach presented us with our “warm-up” written on a whiteboard, and I couldn’t decipher a single word. And the math! Reader, who would have imagined such math, the requirements delineated in metres, but how was I supposed to know how long the pool was, because I’ve never measured it, and even once I knew, how am I supposed to find space in my brain amidst all the SPORTSING to figure out how many lengths go into 300 metres, just say, and even if I did, how am I supposed to get track of them as I go? Plus we were supposed to be going fast! The whole time! For no discernible reason, because it wasn’t as though any of us were being chased.

I’d really been envisioning somebody holding my hand and showing me how, for once, I might do a proper whip kick. And then when we were waiting for the session to begin and I confessed to feeling like maybe this all wasn’t quite right, the other swimmers—who appeared to be in their early 20s—assuring me that they actually hadn’t swam competitively since high school really didn’t help assuage my fears.

I AM a swimmer. And THIS was the pool where I swim every day, but all the same, I might have signed up for intermediate Mongolian lessons and come up further ahead.

So I bolted. Of course, I bolted. Five minutes after the class started, I was gone, fleeing down Spadina Avenue in my bathing suit, still dripping from the pre-pool shower I’d taken in more hopeful times. Remembering a line from the picture book DOORS IN THE AIR which is one of the essential life lessons I’ve ever encountered in literature: “Remember, you don’t have to stay where you are.” The FREEDOM of that. (The best thing about being 44 is that you rarely have to feel like this ever.)

And so this story has turned out to be a story of abject failure and embarrassment (did they wonder where I’d gone, that weird lady who was only there for five minutes?), instead of triumph. A story that I’m telling because it horrifies me less when I can make it into something, and perhaps it will serve to help you feel better about yourself, because whatever else you got up to this week, at least you didn’t do that. A story about how the universe has a way, always, of keeping me humble. About how sometimes life is just challenging enough, and how comfort zones are fine, and about how I’ll stay in my lane.

June 23, 2023

Happy Birthday, Clarence Thomas?

Before last June, it had never occurred to me that Clarence Thomas had a birthday. That he had not, in fact, emerged into the world middle aged, sitting in a room crowded with concerned-seeming people who pronounced “harassment” in surprising ways while telling stories about pubic hairs left on pop cans that were bewildering to my 12-year-old ears, and that I don’t understand any better today.

But it turns out that Clarence Thomas’s birthday is today, June 23, and also the day before mine, which I discovered the morning I turned 43 while hanging out sheets on my clothesline and listening to @mollyjongfast on her political podcast right before I got the terrible news that the US Supreme Court had ended abortion access for millions of Americans.

Happy Birthday, Clarence Thomas…I guess??

Thanks to @shedoesthecity for publishing my essay on the devastation of Roe vs. Wade falling one year ago, but also about how it made me realize how my new novel (ASKING FOR A FRIEND, forthcoming from @doubledayca on September 5) had to end.

Read the whole thing here.

May 1, 2023

Harper Valley PTA

I had but a single reservation about the film version of Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, which I saw at the cinema yesterday with my daughters whose companionship for such an occasion was such a treat for me. They’ve both read (or reread) the book in the last few weeks, and were as enthusiastic about the movie as I was. We loved it, and to all be able to experience and love something together is a pleasure I appreciate so very much.

But. But. But.

And this is personal. I’ve spent the last few weeks overwhelmed by several things, not the least of which is a fundraiser for my child’s school that has ended up on my plate mostly because I was the only person who reluctantly failed to refuse it. Because I cannot bear to leave a silence or vacuum unfilled. Because while succeeding in leaving such a silence or vacuum unfilled is an act of liberation (which I’ve even managed to pull off once or twice) it only means that someone else is going to have to do it, and that’s not really liberating at all.

It’s a quandary, and I’ve come full circle, and then some. When my children started elementary school (ten years ago!), I swore off volunteering altogether…because I know myself, how it’s only ever all or nothing, and um, I think I was also still on the board of their playschool at the time. And I was also bowled over by the requests for volunteers and funds (and usually both) at my children’s school. It was too much, it was inequitable, they had galas to raise money for the galas! Okay, that last point is an exaggeration, but I put it in my first novel, Mitzi Bytes, whose protagonist was resolutely anti-school volunteering. She values her time too much to go in for any of that nonsense—and oh, I wish I was her with every fibre of my being. The way she really doesn’t care what anybody thinks or about what she should be doing. She’s not doing it, and it’s simple. What I would give for that kind of clarity.

But of course, I care what people think a lot, too much, and I overthink everything about how to be a good citizen, and a good community member (and how to be “good” in general, which my therapist and I will be continuing to unpack for the foreseeable future), and so when my book was coming out, I eagerly signed up for the school council just so now one would think that the book was autobiographical, and chaired that council for two years, taking on duties to such a ridiculous extent that I was sitting in for the secretary sometimes when I was chairing, taking my own minutes, which is nuts. I also thought a lot about the role of fundraising in public education, registering my discomfort, but by this point understanding how school staff count on these funds, which are raised entirely on the backs of moms whose labour is discounted by assholes like my protagonist and other like-minded folks (who were sometimes me).

I managed to step away from school volunteering eventually, which maybe is the way it should be—we do what we can, take a break, come back again (or not). These days I volunteer twice a month at pizza lunch, which I really like doing, and it’s nicely low key. I’m not on school council anymore, because I did my time. It’s other people’s turn—and that’s a wonderful thing to realize, by the way, when we’re feeling all disgruntled, put-upon, why do I have to do everything? When I stopped showing up, someone else took my place, which is also (sort of) to say that I gave someone else a chance to take my place (as opposed to taking my own minutes; all or nothing, remember?).

But then my elder daughter entered middle school, and it’s very small school, oh no, I saw it coming, really. This spring fundraiser that hadn’t been produced since 2019—who was going to do it. It was going to be me. It was always going to be me, even though I’m not really that good at producing events, and I do so always in the most corner-cutting, simple way possible because I’d rather get it done than do it well. Sigh.

And, truthfully, it’s not been so bad, and I’ve only cried about it once, and if the event manages to be a success (it’s the day after tomorrow), which is to say even approaches reaching our fundraising goal, I’ll be glad I did it. Even though I’ve been bothered that more people in our school community haven’t been pitching in, that such a small number of parents (moms!) are usually the ones who do everything, and so many others are content just to not be involved, to ignore my emails, to not respond to requests for help, content to let it all be somebody else’s burden, which is to say mine.

I think what bothers me so much about the situation is not just that people aren’t helping, but that their failures to help makes me feel embarrassed, ashamed. Sending out these annoying emails week after week, all peppy, and knowing such messages must be so obnoxious to receive, so I feel kind of pathetic, like a loser. And that it seems like I have nothing better to do with my time than this—what does that say about me? About who I am and what I do?

(Like I said, this is personal.)

So yes, I was conflicted about the final arc of Rachel McAdams’ character in Are You There…, a bohemian mom who moves to the suburbs and leaps right into the school community because she wants to do the right thing and because for the first time in her life she has the time to, but of course her intelligence and talents are wasted there. The company is terrible, shallow, and the labour itself is totally pointless—she’s charged with cutting out thousands of thousands of felt stars that ultimately end up on the garbage. By the end of the film, she has found better and fulfilling things do with her time, and when she’s called on again to volunteer, she declines, declaring “Because I don’t want to,” and people in the cinema cheered, and I get that, but I also hate that.

In particular during this particular week, as I find myself (metaphorically) cutting out my own felt stars, as I send just one more cheery email urging families to please sign up for the bake sale.

What do we do with this? What do we do with the vital labour of mothers that’s necessity to make up for a public education system that has been hopelessly underfunded for nearly thirty years? What do we do with the fact that it’s often other mothers who are most derisive about this labour? And what do we do that none of this ever has anything to do with the dads at all? (And we can continue—this is about class, of course. About families with the time and resources to commit to school fundraising, which many school communities can’t count on at all.)

These are the circles I’ve been thinking in for almost a decade.

But today I came to some kind of answer, or the beginning of one—at least in my own mind. First, we need schools better funded. We need fathers to be as invested as mothers are in what happens at school, which means less work for everyone. And another part of the answer, which I’ve sort of been onto already, by virtue of being lazy, is my corner cutting approach to things all along. I’m not cutting out any fucking felt stars, is what I mean. This kind of labour is essential, so use it smartly, use it well. Value people’s time. Keep meetings within limits. Respect people’s boundaries. Appreciate people’s talents and skills. Don’t take any of this for granted. And if everyone does a little, that means no one has to do it all.

November 1, 2022

Muffins

It goes without saying that I support CUPE school staff in their fight for a fair deal.

When the world fell apart in March 2020, the centrality of schools to our communities and families was made more apparent than it had ever been, and of course I stand with the incredible people who care for my children every day and help them learn and grow and have kept them safe in their classrooms during the last two and a half years, which has been no small feat in a global health emergency.

It amazes me that, after all our schools have done for us since 2020 and now that we know how truly essential they are, Ontario voters would once again deliver a majority to a government with so little respect for what teachers and school staff do.

I’m still pretty disgusted that this government is offering families $200 a child to pay for education catch-up after learning loss over the last three years, which is barely going to cover two sessions of tutoring. Because do you know what would actually help to make up those gaps? Investing that money in our school system. Giving education workers the pay they’re asking for (especially since this government has currently bagged a surplus) so our kids can finally have a year without learning disruptions.

Oh, but I’m also super struggling with all this. Part of it is that it’s a reminder of the labour disruptions of 2019/2020 that turned out to be a harbinger of such an “unprecedented” time of upheaval and hardship all over the world. When staff and teachers were taking job action in those days, I went all-in with support, baking muffins for the picketers and marching in the freezing cold, organizing walk-ins and rallies, overestimating the impact of my actions, my ability to make a difference, my obligation in the matter, and also whose political ends I was serving. I’ve got to say that becoming so deeply invested, from 2017-2020, in situations that were actually outside of my control, imagining that the free world and the future of democracy (and public education) was riding on my specific shoulders, completely fucked with my mental health.

Perhaps there are people who can engage in politics without losing their minds, but I might not be one of them.

It’s something on the theme of everything I’ve been talking to my therapist about over the past ten months, which is that there are people who are actually being paid to be at that bargaining table, and I’m not one of them, and so maybe I could chill out a bit? That this (among many things) isn’t my problem to fix, and maybe muffins aren’t the answer?

(Muffins were my way to imagine I had any control at all.)

It’s been a hard three years. My littlest daughter had a field trip to the science centre on Friday that’s been cancelled and I’m more devastated about it than really makes sense, except that for me (whose mental health has been precarious, and whose main triggers are those moments where I can’t make the world alright for my kids) it stands for bigger and harder things than that.

I’m fed up with the political scripts from both sides. I resent the way that both are trying to manipulate my anxiety and emotions for their own purposes. I, like so many of us, feel incredibly fragile after these three very hard years.

It’s just difficult. Of course I support school staff, but I’m so tired.

October 3, 2022

Prismatic Thinking

I have a problem with proportion, with understanding proportion. I have a problem understanding just how big the world is and what words mean, and I have anxiety that causes me to leap to extremes, which I think is a more recent development, since everything became so extreme, but I’m not completely sure.

“The town is destroyed,” someone DM’d me last May after a tornado blew through a small town not far from where I live, and I still don’t know what they meant by that, exactly, and I thought about it again while obsessively following the news of hurricanes over the last week and a bit, clicking on headlines with words like “catastrophic” and “devastation”—see my previous point, I have anxiety—and trying to parse the scale.

Everyone I know who lives in places impacted by these storms came through them okay, relatively speaking, some with trees down, one lost a barn roof, another now on Day 9 without power, but still. Everyone I talked to remarked on how lucky they were, which is a human tic I’ve been picking up on since March 2020. Not on social media, where complaints run amok, of course, the common discourse, but in real conversations, these comments immediately followed by empathy for everyone who’d been less fortunate, and it’s patterns like that this make me despair a little less. That make me almost fond of people as a species.

But I still don’t understand what counts as catastrophe, what it means to be devastated, and I think a big part of this is a longing for everything to be okay, for me to find signs of that okayness, to look for the helpers, to quote a cloying phrase. Silver linings. There must be hope, and so there is, and there is, absolutely, because look how much was not destroyed, look at the persistent shoot taking root in a crack in the pavement. There is life, there is promise, but there also comes a point where this becomes denial of reality, a refusal to look upon how high are the stakes of climate change.

All these storms. And there have always been storms. And yet.

But I still don’t know.

I’m bothered by people who flippantly use terms like “the world’s on fire…” Partly because it scares me. I feel like that if the world’s on fire, than it’s not really the time for being glib. And partly because there have always been fires. (I’m doing it again, I know.) But mostly because the world is far too large for it ever to have been one thing, on fire, or otherwise, to be reduced to a single state, and this is what has been racking my brain about these last few months, or possibly forever. How to connect the infinitude all of these dots, this data, especially the parts that don’t connect at all.

I feel like the beginning of possibility for making sense of any of this might lie in the following passage, by Willow Defebaugh, Editor-in-Chief of climate/culture journal Atmos:

“I suppose that’s what it means to see the world through a prismatic lens. It requires us to embrace contradiction and multiplicity, to never be afraid of letting New perspectives read pattern our own. It’s about accepting that life is a kaleidoscope of every human imaginable, in shades of both light and dark, at once disarmingly fragmented and breathtakingly whole. And in those dazzling shards, we find our humanity reflected back at us—jagged, brilliant, and gleaming with possibility.” (Found here.)

June 24, 2022

Take Back the Story

Good morning. Today is my birthday, and the US Supreme Court has overturned Roe Vs. Wade, which makes this birthday even *more* disheartening than the one I spent in 2016 on the day after the Brexit Vote, if such a thing is possible. But perhaps the Supreme Court timed it to coincide with the twentieth anniversary of the birthday when I was pregnant by accident, but didn’t know it yet. The birthday I spent imagining myself on the cusp of incredible new horizons as I’d just graduated from university and was set to venture out into the world with just a giant backpack, but then all those dreams were derailed by faulty birth control, and it was all such a nightmare, so stressful and unbelievably sad, and I don’t remember these emotions at all, but I happened to write them all down in a diary that I was flipping through last night, so there’s evidence. The list of things to do I’d scrawled down around that time included, “Stop crying all the time.” And I eventually did, because I was able to choose my own destiny, to own my own soul, my life. How fortunate was I to be pregnant at a moment some were still describing as “post-feminist,” when it literally never occurred to me that my right and access to an abortion was something that was up for debate. That my reproductive healthcare was anyone’s business except my own.

From my essay, Doubleness Clarifies: It is essential for my purposes that you be able to imagine the desperation of being pregnant when you don’t want to be, of what it is to be staring into that gaping black hole with everything you’ve ever worked and longed for lost inside it.

Here’s what you can do: If you have had an abortion, learn to talk about it so you can speak up and advocate for people like us, even quietly and privately. If your partner had an abortion, speak up and demonstrate that this matters to you. If your ex-partner had an abortion, speak up and demonstrate that this matters to you. Tell your story, and break the stigma that permits abortion stories to remain in the dark, obfuscating the reality that most adult women will have an abortion in their lifetimes. Obfuscating the reality that abortion is normal, and that so many of us have the lives we do because abortion was a gift.

If you’re Canadian, and you have an anti-choice representative in government at the Federal or Provincial level, write them a letter. Campaign for pro-choice candidates in these ridings. Support Abortion Rights organizations in Canada by donating funds. Learn more about why this isn’t just a fringe issue, and why it matters so much—start listening to @aborshpod because it’s wonderful.

If you think this story isn’t about you, your kidding yourself. If you’d like to learn how you might be brave enough to speak out (it took me more than a decade!), DM and I’d be happy to talk.

Don’t be quiet. Don’t be silent. As Ali Smith wrote, “Whoever makes up the story makes up the world.” It’s time for so many of us to take the story back because it belongs to us, and it’s a story that’s proud, and brave, and hard, and real. And I’m so grateful for it.

May 25, 2022

Thoughts and Prayers

I think a lot about sharing space while I’m swimming in the pool. I try really hard and sometimes fail to be patient. My ire is reserved for the people who wait at the wall until I too arrive at the end, and then they take off, and I have to wait. Or the very fast swimmer in the pool yesterday who was so much faster than everyone else, and kept overtaking me at the end of the lane so that I’d have to wait once they’d taken off again, and I wonder if they’d considered how much they were interrupting my flow. But of course my slower pace was messing with theirs. When I used to swim at the university pool, I was on the slower side of medium, but now that I swim at the community centre with an older demographic, I’m kind of a hotshot. I swim at a very even pace, and it annoys me when other people don’t, which is a metaphor for a lot of things. It’s interesting that I find the idea that everybody swim at a very even pace more than reasonable when the fact is that everyone’s in the pool for a different reason, some people with training regimens, timed swims, swimming sprints. How easy it is to determine what you do is reasonable. I want to question those assumptions. But I also think all of us need to be aware of the other people all around us.

*

The other day I was confessing how disheartened I’d become with politics, and the response I got was, “But you’ve still got to keep fighting.” And I think I can’t. I think my problem is with the verb, “to fight.” I’m looking for a different mode of engagement, I think. Keep going, keep being, keep learning, keep changing. But I can’t fight. It’s not me, and it’s not sustainable. And of course, I’m conflicted about this. Imagine if Rosa Parks had decided not to fight, John Lewis, Martin Luther King Jr. Sometimes I worry that 70 years ago against the civil rights movement, I would have still be put off fighting and calling for civility, and that idea is shameful to me. But then I think about our abysmal provincial government, the Minister of Education whose Twitter bio has always read, “Fighting for you…” Because he’s fighting too. Which is weird, because he’s the one in power—shouldn’t he have levelled up from fighting now? You’ve got to wonder about the rules of engagement. What if none of this is actually a game? What if the stakes are real and we all have to work together?

*

I am heartbroken and sad. I am tired of being heartbroken and sad. I am lucky that I get to be tired of being heartbroken and sad instead of being so steeped in sadness and heartbreak that other possibilities aren’t available to me. I’ve seen the photos of the children who were murdered, posing with their Honour Roll certificates issued in a ceremony the same day they died, how their moms and dads came to see them, how hard they worked, their teachers. How hard it’s been to be a teacher…forever, but especially in the past two years. I think of my kids’ teachers, I think of my kids, how fragile and precious all of this is. I am heartbroken and sad. And I am so tired of being heartbroken and sad.

March 4, 2022

Tunnels

I’ve had a very tough mental health week (what I mean by this is that I’ve spent a significant amount of my time experiencing the physical symptoms of abject terror for someone who is not immediately endangered) but I finally slept okay last night for the first time in a week and it’s helping. It is a lot to be a person who lives in the world right now, even if one is fortunate enough not to be a person in immediate danger, but one thing I am grateful for is that when it all fell apart for me in December, it was because I’d finally had enough to looking for light at the end of the tunnel. That light in the distance for me had been the most sustaining force for me, always, but then I’d become so tired of reaching, or maybe the light seemed so far away I couldn’t see it or else I was afraid I’d just imagined it was ever there, or maybe what I really mean is that reaching such light is as far away as one could possibly get from experiencing life in the present moment, and I was just so tired of missing out on that, of always looking ahead for a moment that might never come.

And so this has been my objective throughout the weeks of this new year, to learn to be here now and meet the moment whatever it’s bringing. To be open and strong and brave in the case of whatever fate may deliver, and when I made such plans, it was mainly Omicron I had in mind, and what’s come to stir my soul instead has been so much more messy, heartbreaking, and terrifying. For me the way so much unrest in Ottawa blended right into the invasion of Ukraine is not entirely disconnected, and in some ways, practically speaking, it really isn’t, though of course I wholly recognize the different of scale. But the point is that I’ve been scared for a month, and really for two years now, and now this, terror on such a potentially annihilating scale.

I’m beginning to wholly understand how everyone in the mid-20th century was on Valium…

But I’ve got away from my main point, which is not to say the light will never come. (It does. It’s all around us. We’re entering our third year of a pandemic, and yet hospital capacity is fine, we’re going out for dinner tonight, my kids have been in school since January, we’re planning to visit our family in the UK in April, green things are beginning to poke through the earth—I could not be more grateful for all of this if my heart were tied up in a sparkly bow.) But just that I am glad that I committed to learning to get along in the meantime, to learn how to be mostly okay even when most things aren’t okay, when all of my ducks aren’t in a row, and that I couldn’t have picked a better year to build up these muscles, and instead of trying to rail against reality, I choose to meet it open-heartedly, which is hard, and it hurts, but it’s also so much less impossible.

February 25, 2022

Signs of Hope

I am devastated by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, by the toppling of our world order, and while my mental health is reeling, I am buoyed by how people all over the world, leaders and ordinary citizens, particularly within Russia itself, are standing in defiance of violence and tyranny, standing FOR democracy and freedom (which in this case actually means something, for once). We are all we have, and it’s so very precious, and it’s everything. Desperate for signs of hope tonight, I found this one newly installed on Brunswick south of Bloor, and it meant a lot to me. Sending love to wherever you are. And let’s abolish nuclear weapons so nobody else ever has to be this afraid again.

More:

• On Saturday February 26, I’m walking 5km to raise funds for my neighbours at the Fort York Food Bank as part of the Coldest Night of the Year fundraiser—it’s not too late to contribute if you’re able. You can donate here, and thank you!
• Did you know that I’m one of the jurors for the 2022 Kobzar Book Awards, which celebrates excellent books with a tangible connection to Ukrainian-Canadian culture? Learn more about the shortlist. The award will be presented on March 24.