Dark Comedy

“The story of my life is a two-day Maury Povich Special.”

It’s the line I used to start this story with. I refined those particular words to describe a salacious tale of treachery and deceit, entertaining others at the expense of my dignity. Reducing my whole existence to a wild rollercoaster tale that changed how others saw and valued me, I paved the way for my listeners to categorize me into the crazy column. It really is a good story as long as you’re not the protagonist.

Growing up abused, marinated in abject poverty and isolation, I was nursing a raging case of undiagnosed ADHD. Most days were spent pretending I wasn’t a mixed-race Arab in a sea of third generation European immigrants, holding court in small town Saskatchewan. The core memory line that lives rent free in my brain is “you would actually be pretty if you held half of your lip in your mouth at all times.” Kids are fucking mean.

For extra kicks, I was raised in a cult; hung out there on and off for thirty years. It is rigid, unyielding, and poisonously patriarchal. The word salad they pass off as the divination of God’s will is delivered via a board of old white men who love power. As a congregant, it is mandatory to parrot the words in the noxious literature for acceptance and belonging. It was never literature as we all know it here, it was a prison for the mind and body. Although when you are told over and over the world could end at any second, the capacity of your mind to terrorize you is infinitely creative.

Dreaming up ideas for treehouses, machines, art and songs, I desperately wanted to live in the world instead of hiding from it. I secretly read all kinds of fiction that took me to any place other than reality. I hid from the mean girls on the Bibliobus, reading every Goosebumps issue pumped out in the 90’s. Colours, stories, music and light vividly danced within my expanding inner world. I tried to stuff it down deep so no one would see it, showing that I too longed for pencil skirts with sweater sets and ballet flats. It was like wearing a corset over a parka. Even though I read the bible for twenty hours a week over the span of thirty years, I never found answers to satisfy my questions.

The most favoured mind-control liturgy the organization marinates its believers in is that the world is controlled by Satan, and the only safe place for you is in the congregation. Going door to door to preach isn’t actually about saving souls. The brilliantly constructed psychological mindfuck's purpose is to reinforce the only safe place is in the group, because the world is cruel to delusional women in pencil skirts who knock on doors. They spend their life force handing out little tracts scrawled with insipid phrases. In my opinion, the biggest travesty of all are the pamphlets - truly atrocious, hideous graphic design, but the organization doesn’t pay their designers so I can’t really blame them for their hideous creation.

Leaving a cult is hard enough. Losing faith is akin to dying. Removing the blinders mind control straps to your face is terrifying. I realized I had sacrificed myself; everything I could have become or embraced without the crushing weight of idiotic precepts imposed upon me from birth. Every filter with which I processed the world had to be discarded and rebuilt from scratch on my terms. I grieved the loss of comforting rituals and close friends who still remain ensnared.

I’m glad I never did mushrooms before I found myself, or there would have been no path back to my mind. I thought doing ‘shrooms would be like watching a movie. When I dissolved for the first (and last) time into psychedelic soup, I was startled to find I was a river of movies. The current I became flowed along a winding path through caverns of stalactites and cathedrals. Each room represented a person I loved. At the height of my ‘trip’, the mushrooms told me they were God. They were there to help me, and I didn’t have to do anything but let them. I still do not believe in God, but this narrative still holds more logic than thirty years of bible reading. Nothing could make more sense to me than a vast, interconnected network of life that could revive every dead thing into something new to nourish the earth.

Some women need to be mothers to feel their purpose is fulfilled. I am not one of those women. Transmuting chaos into order has been the great challenge life has laid before me, but it’s a worthy endeavour if one desires to break the cycle of generational trauma. It’s exhausting but I will persist or die trying. Despite the revelations of this darkly comic plot, as enlightenment dawns and purgatory has been left behind, paradise is elusive. The more the model woman, the more invisible. A placeholder, a diner waitress, a comfort. Just a setting for the real protagonist. In an adventure movie, mothers are often sacrificed for the advancement of the plot. It is low hanging fruit. We are the nameless catalysts conveniently removed. We, who would never let our children stumble into danger, tuck them in at night, and make sure they ate their vegetables. Don’t get me wrong, I adore my family. They are great people. I just wish they saw me as a person first before anything else. Before I’m sacrificed for their great adventure. Do I have hopes and dreams anymore? Perhaps, but their voices are so soft. It is hard to hear whispers over the clamour of responsibility.

The language of women. Its semantics and pragmatics are only known by the ones who beat the odds and overcome everything. They scale psychological mountains to cut the crusts off cheese sandwiches. The women who sacrifice everything, rebuild themselves so they can be good mothers, to be at school pick up for 3:19 pm, will know exactly what I mean. I sometimes wonder why Kafka made Gregor Samsa a man, when it is women who feel like bugs. More like ants, maybe. Always moving, always marching, to the rhythm of everyone else’s clock. We forget what freedom feels like - to move, to sleep, to eat on our own terms. If we are good, if we are faithful, if we are model wives and mothers, we will inherit paradise. Win the prize. Be worthy of respect.

Learning how to read (real) literature was the final gateway to complete freedom inside my mind. Slogging through Dante’s Inferno was infuriating, which is irony wearing a smirk, considering it perfectly describes mental illness. There was magic in the creation myths of the Epic of Gilgamesh, before Abrahamic dogma erased all the pleasure to be had. Dostoevsky’s Notes From Underground was the revelation that whispered there is room for me. Never had I read any character before that thought about thinking as much as I do, who questioned the nature of his existence as much as I have. I am no longer lost like the Underground Man, but I know his mind intimately. We have both walked the same neurotic neural pathways in the depths of deconstruction.

When I discover a new word, the universe expands and I am connected over time and space with all those who have taken ownership of it. Like myself, they also spent time rolling the syllables through their mouth, tentatively slipping it into a sentence. Brought it life anew.

Turning forty and in university for the first time, I wrote four terrible essays. Stumbling through them, making wild mistakes and careless blunders, I wrote lines so cheesy they haunt me still. Thousands of pages of secondary literature read to see the facets of the stories we were analyzing. I spoke with an author to get a citation for obscure writings they had made so long ago they no longer had them their possession. In the process, I learned how to think about literature - how to connect thoughts, ideas, form beliefs, and work to defend them. Every gift that widens the world and lets me in will never be taken for granted. I don’t believe my gratitude is overzealous or inflated, because I know ignorance's true darkness and have left it behind.

I could list all my accomplishments to prove I am worthy of respect. I could tell you about loved ones, joys, lines from favourite movies, or the remote corners of the earth I have embraced with fresh eyes and an open heart. The plans I have for my future, (which will be shorter than the average lifespan as a result of complex trauma). Instead, I will leave you now without needing to justify my existence. I have known madness and left it behind. Have held the hands of others as they did the same. Neither fear nor shame burden me anymore with their nasty, whispering monologues. I have forgiven myself for thirty years of wandering in the desert. Just like books, art and music, people are the most interesting when they are complex.