Monthly Archive

You are in high school and acne is a big concern. So are girls. What a surprise. You are just like every other boy, except you feel that you are not like every other boy. You are still fresh out of England, the country of your childhood, and only in retrospect will it become clear how much this shapes your identity. Many of your schoolmates have already formed lifelong groupings based on the shared experience of summer camp, scouts, sports teams, grade school, watching the same TV shows. A lot of their common experiences are alien to you.

You always feel like an outsider. You won’t make peace with that for many years. At the very moment that you realize that there is not any particular social group you can call your own, you will find yourself with a richer social life than you ever expected, among the best group of friends you could want.

You are not an Albertan, not yet a Canadian (not officially, anyway) and it still gives you a quiet thrill to travel to Europe and skip the long airport line-ups, thanks to your British passport. You fight hard to maintain this difference in your everyday life. Some people claim you are faking an accent. This weird trans-Atlantic intonation – you really think somebody can fake this? What a relief then, when back in the so-called homeland, a few days of pubs and chippies brings back the accent even stronger than before. At least for a week or two of holidays. Briefly, then, you don’t feel so fake.

But with every passing year, you are more Canadian than English. Look, you’ll soon have a Canadian girlfriend. Then another. Through them, and friends, you’ll share festive moments with other families and learn how “normal” Canadian families work, or don’t work.

The sports team closest to your heart is the Edmonton Oilers. Cheering for them in 1990 as they hoisted Stanley Cup Number 5 could be considered a formative experience. Although now – now you are the wise age of sixteen – your tastes have changed. Going to an arts school, all that boyish whooping seems juvenile to you. But it’ll return – that longing to lose yourself in a sport – to lose all your terrible self-doubts and second-guessings and for just a minute become something bigger than your lonely self.

You write in your diary of girls you think you love. You imagine them naked and try to crudely draw them. Sometimes, that need to be part of something bigger than yourself is satiated in the company of a woman. Sometimes it’s satiated in the crazy antics of male friendship: the drinking, the pot, the wrestling, the music, the long nights and sleep-deprived dawns. Finally, you know people that you will know forever and who will help you endure the next sixteen years.

What a blessed relief not having any inkling of what is coming around the corner. If I were to tell you how much worse life will be at eighteen or at twenty-three, you might choose not to stick around to see it and live it and endure it.

You will suffer from many, many delusions. Chief among them will be the delusion that you are someone else, or that you need to become someone else. You will convince yourself that you are far more important than you really are, and just when you’ve leaped the furthest from your own identity, you will be in the most peril. You will forget the childhood that made you; the family that raised you. You will forget that life, before it is about anything, must be a series of simple acts repeated daily. I mean sleeping, eating, drinking, and breathing. You will feel close to dying several times. Thankfully, after all that, other personal problems will seem manageable by comparison.

It is in the quiet moments that you most feel yourself. You can legally buy cigarettes now, and so you do, and occasionally, in the company of the drifting coil of smoke, you contemplate a tree or a hillside or something else, and you feel at peace with yourself. You feel every muscle of your body stop resisting the moment and surrender to it.

At these moments, you feel you are learning something about life. You sense there is something mysterious and inexplicable about the way you are and the way the world is. And to convey this mystery, and the excitement and thrill of it all – that is what you most want to do. Because in the same way that you have never felt you belonged to any particular group, you have also never subscribed to any particular way of explaining the world. You know the causes and people that you hate: conservatism, Margaret Thatcher, Ralph Klein, violence; but you are less likely to declare what it is that you are actually for. Because of this, perhaps you can come across as an incessant critic or a contrarian.

But I’ll be kinder from my vantage point of thirty-three. Ideology doesn’t interest you. The lives of people and their relationship to the environment are what interest you. This interest will be a constant. When things are especially tough, don’t look to the Bible or to other so-called authorities. Those things work for lots of other people but they have never worked for you. Reach out for those things that embrace the confusion and chaos and merriment and misery and contradictory impulses of human beings. Read Dostoevsky and Oscar Wilde and Michel Houellebecq and Saul Bellow and Mordecai Richler.

Then stop, and breathe, and eat and just let the world be what it is, and let yourself be what you are. Walk down the street after a rainfall and smell every new odour; the world suddenly transformed in a moment. See the bowing trees and the solemn clouds and the moods of millions of people abruptly altered. Feel your own parched tongue in your mouth; a reminder that you too need to drink something.

And then write about everything that cannot be endured any other way.