Suis-moi

To the best of my knowledge and accuracy of memories, all of these stories are completely truthful accounts. Names have been changed to protect the identities of those written about, and some information has been omitted, but everything written is true.

CONTENT WARNINGS: This writing contains mentions of mental illness, self harm, suicidal thoughts, and graphic descriptions of suicide attempts and death by suicide.

1.

We tell ourselves stories in order to live. We create narratives for ourselves everyday. Sometimes they are small and inconsequential, sometimes they are massive and filled to the brim with consequences. These stories can be about ourselves and our lives, or someone else and our perception of them and their life. As children, we are taught conflicting things about the morality behind making up stories. In stories meant for children, like Peter Pan or Le Petit Prince, we are taught to never lose our imagination. Playing make believe is a good thing that helps our minds grow. On the other hand, we may be told not to make up stories by authority figures in our lives; a parent or teacher trying to catch you in a lie may tell you to “quit making up stories and tell them the truth.” Sometimes we intentionally make up stories, but sometimes our brain makes up stories on it’s own. Sometimes our brain tells us the same story so frequently that we start to believe that it is true. Sometimes we have to tell ourselves a new story in order to wipe away any bad stories we may have previously been telling ourselves.

Right now, more so than any other time in my life, there are a lot of things to be afraid of in this world, and over the past nine years my brain has tried to tell me a lot of different stories. Some of these stories were conscientiously made by me, while others were crafted inside my head on their own, but all of them were set off by some incident in my life between the years of 2011 and today. During these years I transitioned from elementary school to high school to university, moved across the country for university, came out as both bisexual and genderqueer, worked a few jobs, fell in love, and pondered existentialism.

2.

My roommate Debby usually responds to texts pretty quickly. At least, she is pretty good about that during the summer. During the school year it is more likely that she has stayed at the conservatory practicing piano until midnight, and her phone has died a few hours ago, but she left her charger at home. During the summer however, it is unusual to not hear back from her for many hours at a time. One night in August of 2020, she did not text back for almost 24 hours.

I had texted two group chats I was in with her, nothing important just a joke or a Youtube video, but she never responded before I went to bed. By the time I woke up, she still had not responded or even read the messages, and as the day went on, nothing. I tried to think of reasons she could be too busy to text. Maybe she had forgotten to charge her phone before going to work today? I love Debbie but I wouldn’t put it past her. Maybe she had gotten caught up with family stuff? She lived with a decently large family when she was home. Maybe she had been out late?

Of course. She had had a date. A Tinder date. She had told me and Michelle about it earlier yesterday. We had been so excited for Debby, this was her first date in over a year, but she had been nervous. The guy seemed nice enough but she hadn’t been on a Tinder date in years. We had encouraged her and told her it would be fun; why did we do that? We knew nothing about this guy other than the few messages he had exchanged with Debby. He was a stranger to us and barely better than a stranger to her. Was he picking her up? Driving her home? What if he had cat-fished her, or kidnapped her, or murdered her and left her on the side of the road? Maybe he wasn’t all that bad but what if he got into a car accident? What if he drove her home drunk? We didn’t even know where the date was happening, was it a bar? He could have gotten drunk at a restaurant. But if something happened surely Debby’s mom would have told me, I am her roommate after all. How would Debby’s mom contact me though? Why had I never given Debby’s mom my phone number for emergencies? Debby could be laying in a hospital bed or tied up in some dude’s trunk and we would have no way of finding out.

During the school year I could never truly relax for the night until Debby came home safe. Sackville is a small town and fairly safe as far as crime rates and all that go, but I never liked the idea of Debby walking home alone very late almost every school night. It wouldn’t be so bad if she ever charged her phone but she never did, and she always came home at least an hour after she had said she would. I would sit at home doing work, checking my phone, trying to ignore the time, and our other roommate Kurt would go about his night as if nothing was amiss. Of course nothing ever was amiss but you never knew that for sure until Debby arrived home, safe and sound, apologizing for letting time get away from her yet again. She didn’t know how much I worried at first until she found out one December night. After that I tried to worry less and she tried to charge her phone more, and I hadn’t worried about her all summer until now.

“I hope she didn’t sleep with the guy,” I told my girlfriend Hailey, “I haven’t heard from Debbie all day.” Hailey said, “I’m sure she didn’t. I mean, it’s something she would do but she probably didn’t. Must just have gotten busy at work.” I didn’t tell Hailey how worried I was; I didn’t want her to worry about me being worried. That’s the worst part about being worried, you worry about how other people will respond to your initial worry, which only stuffs more worry into your head.

21 hours after I had last heard from Debby, she texted me and Michelle. “The date was ok.”

3.

My most recent panic attack, of the very few that I have had in my life, was an October night in 2015. I don’t have any mental illnesses like anxiety or depression or anything, but everyone has mental health, in the same way that we all have physical health, and like physical health, your mental health can change and fluctuate depending on what is going on in your life at the time. At the time of my last panic attack, my mom had just gotten off the phone with my cousin Marissa, who had called to inform us that my uncle, my mother’s brother, her father, had committed suicide and was dead.

A month or so prior to this, my uncle had attempted suicide two consecutive times, and was admitted to the Calgary hospital for “treatment and surveillance.” I was 14 years old and had never known my uncle had depression, but I wasn’t surprised my parents had never told me. I only saw my uncle Victor once a year, when we drove up to Calgary to see my mom’s family for a couple weeks in the summer, and since most of the years he was alive I was too young to retain a lot of clear memories with him, we had never gotten particularly close. This was also the first time my uncle had attempted suicide since I had been born. His last attempt had been thirteen years before my existence (if memory serves me right) and I guess my parents had never found a reason or a good time to tell me this story until it became relevant.

My dad cried the whole time he told me. My parents and I were having dinner at a local restaurant after picking me up from taekwondo class, and while I was in class they had gotten a call about my uncle’s first suicide attempt (post my birth). My dad is a sensitive man, and he has zero shame about expressing his emotions, regardless of whether we are in the privacy of our own home or in a public restaurant drinking milkshakes and discussing my uncle’s lifelong battle with depression. Now admittedly, I have a terrible memory. Anyone who knows me will tell you that, so I don’t remember all of the details of the story about my uncles first real suicide attempt, but it went something like this. This is also an extra content warning, graphic depictions of self harm to come. Thirteen or so years before I was born my uncle had slit his wrists, drove out into the middle of nowhere, left his car, and wandered around the highway. My parents never knew if my uncle was planning on bleeding out or being hit by a car or maybe both, but at the time they had both told themselves that this must have been a cry for help more than anything else. There were plenty of quick and painless ways my uncle could have killed himself at home, but to go to the trouble of such a slow and agonizing death in public meant that he must have wanted to be found and rescued; he just needed people to know he was in crisis that was all. Some poor stranger driving by must have noticed my uncle and called an ambulance, and since my mom was at work, my dad had to pick him up from the hospital, and help his family lock up all the knives in the house.

This may sound awful, but I genuinely don’t remember how my uncle had attempted suicide those two times in September of 2015. I remember the restaurant and the milkshakes and my dad crying and my mom waiting to cry until we had gotten back home, but the rest is just, gone from my brain. Maybe I blocked it out due to the fact that it wasn’t a very pleasant thing to remember, or maybe my bad memory had struck again. The way my uncle actually died was a lot worse however, so this is a bigger extra content warning.

My grandpa on my mom’s side had died the year before, or maybe two years before, I really didn’t know any of my moms family that well, but he just died of old age nothing tragic. That meant however that my grandma and her ever worsening dementia had been alone in her house for at least a year. My uncle, being the child who actually lived in the same province as his mother, would go and check on her every once and awhile. Apparently he would sometimes try to tell my grandma about his depression but between her old world conservative Italian views and her dementia she never could provide much in the way of comfort or support. When my mom got the call that her brother was dead, we all found out that the night before he had gone to visit my grandma, telling his wife and three young adult children that he was going to stay the night at my grandma’s, but then later telling my grandma that he was leaving her place to go home. The next day, my grandma had gone downstairs into the basement, and found her son hanging from a noose.

So around 10pm, I remember that detail for some reason, my dad is crying in the kitchen, my mom is booking the next flight to Calgary, and I am sitting on the toilet, panicking, unable to cry, and trying not to puke. I honestly couldn’t tell you if I have ever cried over the death of my uncle, even at the funeral, but I cried for my parents and the unbearable feeling of not knowing how to make them feel better. Less than a week after the funeral, my grandma was moved into a seniors residential home, I was getting ready to go back to school, and my mom had told her sister in law that she never wanted to see her ever again. I could dive into the decades of abuse and family drama that went into my mom saying that to her sister in law a week after she lost her husband, but it isn’t relevant to any of the other memories I am sharing here. You will just have to take my word for it that my mom made the right call. Needless to say that was the last time I saw or spoke with anyone on my mom’s side of the family other than my grandma, whose dementia has thankfully erased all memories of her son’s death.

4.

I have gotten close to having a panic attack since that night in October of 2015, but I have never quite reached full panic since then. I am much better at calming myself down and controlling my worry since then, at least, I have been working a lot on getting better at it. This is going to sound very selfish and perhaps it is, but I was really relieved to make so many neurotypical friends when I came to university. To be clear, that is not because I found having friends with mental illnesses to be a nuisance or a burden or anything like that, but because it made me feel a lot less guilty about being neurotypical myself. In high school I had only one good friend who was also mental illness free, and not to toot my own horn or anything but ever since high school I have always had a lot of friends so being one of two neurotypical people in all of my friend circles combined meant that I had/have a large number of friends with various mental illnesses.

I have always wondered why the friends I had, at my high school specifically, or even just people in my high school in general, seemed to struggle with mental illnesses in such high numbers. There are so many factors that go into someone possibly developing a mental illness: biology, genes, trauma, environment, etc., that it seemed odd that so many people with mental illnesses should turn up in this one place. Not that my high school fostered a very safe and loving learning environment. If you aren’t familiar with where I am from, Vancouver, BC, something you may want to know before going there is that we are fairly prone to earthquakes. We don’t have an absurd, massively unsafe amount of earthquakes, but I have lived through more earthquakes than I can count on both hands. This is important to know because when I was at my high school, from 2013 to 2018 (Vancouver is one of those places that doesn’t have middle school, just elementary school and high school) the building had not had any earthquake upgrading done since the early 1980’s. Ceiling tiles regularly fell down (and landed on students heads on a couple of occasions), the stairs were quite literally held together by duck tape, the lights never all worked at the same time, the heating throughout the building was wildly inconsistent from one area to the next, and one day we had to shut down half the building for a day because a gas leak sprang up in the metal shop after the shop teacher left a machine on all night by accident.

The building itself was a bizarre mishmash of various pieces. The main building was five floors with classrooms, offices, two gyms, a cafeteria, and a library. Then there was the old car garage, which had been converted into a tiny black box theatre, and connected to the main building as well as the choir room, band room, and “new” shop rooms with a couple extra hallways. In the back parking lot there were five “portables” lined up next to each other. The portables were basically glorified storage containers that had each been turned into stand alone classrooms. I had two classes there during my five year high school career, and during one of these classes, my math teacher explained to us that the main reason the school so desperately needed earthquake upgrading, was because in the main buildings current condition, an earthquake of around a 6.0 magnitude or higher would cause all five floors to “pancake on tope of each other and crush everyone.”

Unusually, my high school actually offered an intro psychology class, but it was taught by a man who seemed to be constantly stuck between telling his students that homosexuality was a mental illness, and that mental illnesses did not exist, so the amount of learning happening in that class is questionable. Not to discount the handful of wonderful, compassionate teachers that I did have during my five years there, but there were many teachers who shared similar world views to this aforementioned psychology teacher, either in the homosexuality department, mental illness department, or both. The absolute worst people there were the school counsellors. Too disorganized to offer any useful career counselling and too undertrained to be of much emotional counselling. For example, I have never forgiven Mrs. S for this exchange she had with my friend Eliza:

Eliza: I think I’m suicidal. I keep wanting to kill myself. I think about killing myself almost everyday.

Mrs. S: Have you told your parents about this yet?

Eliza: No. I’ve been too afraid.

Mrs. S: Well there is nothing I can do to help you until you have told your parents. Talk to them first then come back.

Thankfully, Eliza never did go back to Mrs. S, she ended up going to a proper therapist instead.

5.

My high school admittedly has some very cool programs and classes and perks that come with going there. A big reason that I ended up not entirely hating my time there was the massive, fairly well respected choir program. Each grade got its own for credit choir class, and you could audition for one of the two smaller chamber groups for another class credit, which I did for all five years. The problem with the un-auditioned choir classes, and the reason I never want to teach high school choir, is that a large chunk of the class was always made up of students that had joined choir for at least one of the following reasons: they thought the class would be an easy A, and/or they wanted to go on the big senior choir and band trip. There were fewer of these types of students in band, because it is a lot harder to fake your way through caring about playing an expensive instrument than it is to fake your way through caring about singing. In my grade 12 year, 2018, we went on an amazing senior choir/band trip: a performance tour through Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic. I have a lot of really good memories from that trip, but it couldn’t be all good, or else there would be nothing to write about here.

To make a very long story short, there were a lot of strong, clashing personalities in senior choir that year. If you want to know what exactly I mean by this, watch a season one episode of Glee. I’m not joking, that is what some people, three girls in particular (although one is irrelevant right now) were like. One of these girls was my friend Kristen. Kristen had struggled with depression, anxiety, and bipolar disorder basically her whole life, and her mental health was starting to take a terrible spiral downwards while we were on this trip.

Kristen never came back to school after the trip. I heard from her for a little while after she initially left, but for about five months she just disappeared from social media, from town, from my life. I had always worried a little about Kristen and her mental health struggles since we first met five years prior, but I had never been this afraid for her before. Despite her multiple mental illnesses, she was so tough and resilient that I had never really worried for her life until that moment. In the back of my brain over the next year I worried about Kristen more and more, until one day I just broke down and sobbed while Kurt was trying to practice piano. I didn’t know if Kristen was even alive but god I wanted her to be alive and I wanted to see her again so badly.

I was sitting in Kurts room a few hours after my breakdown when I got a notification on my phone and started crying all over again. “What’s wrong?” He had asked. I held up my phone grinning and crying.

Kristen Shen commented on your Facebook status, “GET IT! YAS BOO!”

6.

Maybe this is an exaggeration, but I really think that my mom has had one of the weirdest careers a college professor could have. To briefly summarize, she has technically been laid off multiple times, but has continued to teach at the same college for over thirty years because whenever she gets laid off from one area, she gets rehired by a different one. My mom mostly teaches adult education, and through that she has taught varying levels of math, computer literacy, and her specialty, English. She has been a substitute teacher, a part time professor, a full time professor, and has taught classes at any time of day or year you can think of. From 2011 to 2017, she taught a lot at night.

My mom knew how to drive at one point, but she hasn’t driven or had her license renewed in at least twenty years, and since she teaches in downtown Vancouver anyway, it is easy enough to transit to work. Whenever my mom would teach a night class between the years of 2011 and 2017, my dad and I fell into a pattern. We would have dinner around 8pm (we have always ate at what some people would call too late for dinner, but my mom claims that is when Italians eat dinner so that’s the way it has always been), drive downtown to pick up my mom between 9pm and 9:30pm depending on when she could get rid of the last of her students (although this part of the nightly schedule was not initially realized), and then come home and eat dessert to keep her company while she ate dinner.

I was a weirdly paranoid kid in sixth and seventh grade, which I was aware of even at the time, and my moms night classes did not help matters. For two years, everyday while I sat and waited for the bus to pick me up after school, I would actually count every “good” and “bad” thing that happened to me so far that day, because I was of the belief that you could not have everything be only “good” in one day, so I would make sure that at least one “bad” thing had already happened to me. The logic behind this was that if at least one “bad” thing had already happened to me that day, then my day was balanced out, and I didn’t have to worry about anything bad happening to my mom while she taught in one of the, for lack of a better term, “sketchier” areas of downtown Vancouver at night. I don’t know how I eventually outgrew doing this but I am very thankful I did, calculating each day like that was exhausting. Those two years were the longest amount of time I spent being that paranoid that often, but it didn’t affect my day to day as much as this last year of fewer, larger bursts of paranoia did because I didn’t spend anywhere near as much time on self reflection in the sixth grade as I do now.

Cellphones are both a blessing and a curse. Hot take I know, but specifically in this context I mean that while I was lucky enough to have a device that allowed my mom to text me whenever she wanted, I was also cursed with a device that would instantly fill me with worry if my mom did not text when I expected her to. That first night we went to pick her up in 2011 everything started out according to plan. My dad and I left home about fifteen minutes to 9pm, and I started texting my mom with updates as to where we were on our journey to her workplace. My mom’s class ended officially ended at 9pm, so we pulled up to the parking lot just after 9pm and waited. We waited, and waited, until 9:30pm hit with not so much as a text from my mom insight much less my mom herself. At this point, I started to panic. My dad did that parent thing where he tried to hide how worried he was so that I would feel better, but he was definitely also very worried at this point. By 9:40pm I had left at least three messages on my mom’s phone, crying more and more with each message and begging her to pick up and tell us she was okay. We were just about to go into the college to look for her, when she texted something along the lines of, “So sorry! On my way!”

She ran over to our car shortly thereafter, and in amidst my crying and my dads relieved but frustrated muttering, she explained that she had left her cellphone in her office so that it didn’t go off while she was teaching, and that since this was her first night with this class she did not realize how late students would stay after the class had technically ended to ask additional questions. Needless to say, from that point on my mom started keeping her phone in her pocket while she taught and would always text after the class had ended to let us know how many students were staying behind to get extra help. There was never another night where we had to wait that long without hearing from her again, but for the next six years I could never fully shake the memory of that panicked night.

7.

For someone who tries to get any and every one of their friends to go to therapy, I’ve never properly been to therapy myself. I’ve been to a couple of walk in sessions for Mount Allison’s “mental health week,” but nothing outside of that. I have many theories as to why I have never actively sought out a therapist before. The main reasoning is that I don’t want to take time away from those who really need it. I have a huge issue with being a people pleaser, sometimes to my own detriment, and I never want to be a burden or inconvenience to anyone. Also, access to mental health care is so hard to come by as it is, that taking up a psychologists hour long session with personal issues that generally don’t effect my day to day feels like a waste of resources. Counselling can also be expensive! Why pay hundreds of dollars for therapy when I can cry in my girlfriends bed, eat ice cream and read educational Instagram posts for free? I also make a lot of personal revelations on my own, and if all this writing proves anything I hope it is that I do not shy away from personal reflection. In the past two years of my undergrad degree particularly I have done a significant amount of looking inward in an attempt to lead a healthier and healthier lifestyle. So, for as foolish and incorrect as I may turn out to be, I suppose I like to think that I’m doing well enough on my own that I don’t need therapy.

An example of one such revelation, was one night in November 2019 when my friend Kurt went out to walk to Tim Hortons. I didn’t want him to go; it was late and dark and snowing, but he said he would be fine and wouldn’t be out long. I don’t remember how long Kurt was actually out for, but it was excruciating. I anxiously paced the kitchen and scrubbed dishes and tried not to look at the clock until eventually he came home. As soon as he came into the kitchen I rushed him, grabbing hold and hugging for as long as possible. I think he was annoyed with how worried I had been, which is understandable given that he is an adult who just wanted to get some midnight Timbits in peace. During that long embrace, a memory surfaced. After he pried himself away, I told him I was sorry for not trusting him to get home safe. He had started to tell me not to apologize, when I asked him if I had ever told him about my friend Stefan, and how he used to tell his mom he was going to Tim Horton’s before disappearing for hours on end, and eventually being brought home by a police search team.

Stefan was definitely known as one of the “weird kids” in high school. At first glance he was your stereotypical loner kid with two quirky older sisters and a mom who was kind of bizarre but in a way I could never quite pin down. Kristen once went over to Stefan’s house to hangout, and later said something to the effect of his family giving off “serial killer vibes.” I always had a soft spot for Stefan though. I didn’t really hangout with him a lot outside of him sitting with my friend group at lunch; he was a year younger than me and very much in the “trying to figure himself out” stage of teenage hood, but he was sweet and funny and I genuinely did enjoy what little time I spent with him. It was 2014, a couple of months into our friendship, that I got the first text from his mom:

S’s mom: Is Stefan with you?

Me: No I’m at home, why?

S’s mom: He said he would be home hours ago but he’s still out. I haven’t heard from him and he won’t answer his phone.

Me: Oh no! I’ll try texting him. Here are the numbers of some of our other friends, I’ll ask around too.

This type of text exchange between me and Stefan’s mom would go on to happen three or four times, about once every two months. Every time it began the same, and ended with Stefan being brought home safe and sound by the police. The next year Stefan transferred to a special education school, and our correspondences became fewer and farther between, I think we only talk once or twice a year now. He never ran away or disappeared again after he transferred schools, either that or I stopped being the go to contact person for when he did, but I never found out where he went during those long anxious nights, or what he was up to.

8.

I cannot say that I am now living my life free of stress and worry because that just would not be true. I still worry about my loved ones. During the winter 2020 term my girlfriend had to go to the hospital multiple times for various check ups and health scares (which amounted to nothing worrisome at all, she is fine do not be alarmed!) and I had more than one paranoid sob during those days and the nights that followed. Thanks to Covid-19 I haven’t seen Kurt in person since mid March, and since he still isn’t very good at texting back during breaks from school, I admit I have kept the bad habit of checking to see if he has seen my Instagram story at the end of each day, just to be sure he’s still checking his phone in some capacity. I have had another friend start talking to me about her struggles with depression and eating disorders, and I have days where I worry about her. I just worried about Debby being kidnapped and murdered while on a Tinder date a few nights ago, so I’m not perfect by any means and I never will be.

When I would get sick as a little kid, my mom used to say that she wished she could wave a magic wand and make all my pain go away. Nowadays I still desperately wish I could wave a magic wand and remove all the pain from the hearts of those around me, but, I promise I am genuinely doing better. It may be hard to read all this and still believe that I am one of the “neurotypical friends,” but I honestly have never experienced any of the common symptoms of anxiety (you think this was bad you should hear a person with diagnosed anxiety talk about their day to day worries, it’s terrifying to hear about) and have never been diagnosed with any form of anxiety disorder. No, these fears were not grown out of a mental illness having its way with my mind, but out of the culmination of all these experiences, and more, working their way through my brain and joining up with my on going journey with existentialism. This sounds very cheesy and stereotypical, but I know that just being around my girlfriend more and more has made me less paranoid overall. She makes me feel so safe and happy, it is hard for my old fears to burst through the caring, confident bubble she creates.

Kurt, Debby, Hailey, my parents, while they still see my more paranoid side come out on occasion, I know that all of them would say I have improved a lot in my fear management. I will always worry about them and others because I love them and so many others so deeply, but the time I spend actively worrying about them is slowly becoming less and less. To really love my friends and my girlfriend and my family, I also have to trust that they are adults. They can and do take care of themselves, and they do not need me to keep them safe or healthy. I can support them and love them without feeling personally responsible for their well being. I have only just begun this whole “worry less lifestyle,” and I still have a long way to go before I can get as close as humanly possible to letting go of fears from my past, but I am working on it, and I am growing, and that is important. These days, the story I need to tell myself, and that I have been telling myself, is that worrying is doing me more harm than good; no matter how much there is for me to worry about at any given point in my life, worrying is not a productive mode of making myself and others feel good. Not all of the stories I tell myself make my life better, but so far, this one has.