It’s the beginning of September and the leaves fall into a sleepy dance of ballerinas on opioids. Everything on campus looks like a movie set meant to capture the fleeting thrill of back-to-school commercials: instructors with satchels chatting with one another, overfed squirrels darting between golden leaf piles, and undergrads, breathless and excited, clutching their laptops and phones, earnestly engaging in conversation comparing new professors and syllabi. Among them is me, 40 years old (since I stopped counting), widowed, long hair, blue jeans, and a black cardigan, which seems to me a staple outfit that can belong in any decade.
When I look in the mirror I see a face that has seen too much. My cheekbones have carried the weight of compromises. My mouth can still laugh loudly like a young girl, but the eyes above it look out with the caution of someone who has experienced most of the kinds of heartbreak. When I walk onto campus I often feel like an imposter, a character in an exciting story, rather than the woman who had been someone’s wife for almost a decade and then suddenly wasn’t.
I decided to enrol in Camosun’s Mental Health and Addiction program back in 2015, after I realized that living life to the fullest wasn’t fulfilling after all. I came back to school finding it was crawling with teenagers dressed like ghosts from the ‘90s, all hoodies and oversized headphones. I didn’t tell most people my real reason for going back to school. It wasn’t just because I wanted a new career or because I regretted not finishing my degree in my 20s. It was because I was exhausted after two decades of bouncing about through different jobs, and filling time with excessive drinking and substance use. So I chose to sit in a classroom and be confused, challenged, inspired. I chose to start again.
I was also exhausted from my father and stepmother’s never-ending drama. So what better way to end exhaustion from substance use and family freakiness? The answer was clear: get right to the source. Learn all about what made me messed up in the first place, get to the Freudian thick of it and have a really good answer back the next time I felt a hint of criticism from my father.
I thought I’d just be doing the one program. I knew I was book-smart enough. I had always loved to read and I came from smart genes. My father was an art historian with a PhD from Harvard, and his father was a medical scientist who was angry at his son for not going to Yale. My mother is the most literate person I’ve ever known, with a vast knowledge of different reading material. I’ve never known her not to have several books going at the same time I had years of solid genes to either motivate or collapse me, but I had dealt enough with the latter and now knew somehow that I had messed up enough to satisfy my curiosity. I had to try and make or break my own way. The thing is, I thought I’d do badly. I thought I’d be a repeat of what I was in high school and get distracted and give up before I could do anything good enough for some teacher to take notice. But I was 34. I was already settled down, finally, with an actually good guy who loved me and was going to support me through my dreams, if I ever found out what they were. So I owed it to myself, and to him, to try to see if this was something I could actually do.
I knew the first day that I was up shit creek. I wasn’t quite the oldest person in the classroom, but I was by far the most computer illiterate. I didn’t know what this D2L thing was, or how I was supposed to find it. I barely even knew how to find the icon on the screen and log in to my account, and when I knew I’d have to ask for help, my voice was refusing to come to the surface. I couldn’t breathe, I felt that humiliated, and then, all of a sudden, one of these bright and sparkly hipster students was at my side, and she spoke under her breath so only I could hear; she helped me log in so I was on the same page as the others. I allowed myself to feel totally humble and grateful to that person in that moment, for she had not only saved me from possibly walking away forever, but she had also changed my opinion of how I felt about technology-attuned young people forever. I didn’t have to feel alienated from them; they were going to be friends and colleagues, if I let them in.
I didn’t believe ever that I would “get along” with going to school. As a child I was distracted, a good student when it came to classes like English, but my menial efforts in math would pull my other grades down, stopping me from pursuing my talents elsewhere. I was the type to stare out the window for a whole term then turn in a carefully crafted and beautifully written story for my final exam and scrape by. ADD as a diagnosis was not explored yet; when I finally got my diagnosis it seemed like both a badge of truth and of failure. Now I had to be real. Now I had to let them really know me, let them really know how scared I was.
So I did. I embraced that program, Mental Health and Addictions. I had never enjoyed learning before. But there were aspects of the program, like when I had to choose an elective, where I knew I was suddenly enveloped in something I had to pursue. I became one of “those” students, someone who asked a ton of questions and stayed behind after class to talk with the instructors. I learned about literature and the human psyche. I had fun.
Two-thirds of the way through the program, it was absorbed into Indigenous Health. Suddenly I was really learning and feeling the depths of colonization and the genocide that took place in the land that I had learned to walk on. I felt the instructor’s own pain and passion and I felt grateful that I was able to learn from him.
One class project was to research and write down our family lineage. It was called a “self location paper.” I found out things from my mom that I’d never known before; I heard about a relative who took draft dodging to a new height by deciding to hide out in a hollow tree and accept meals from his mother during the American Civil War. I would like to think he was a conscientious objector, but in all honesty he was probably a teenage kid scared out of his mind. However, he stuck out proud and true as a staple in my family tree. I found out that the great-great-aunt my mother was named after got a tuberculosis (known as “consumption” then) diagnosis, and instead of getting into bed and waiting to die, she hopped on a wagon train and travelled from Pennsylvania to Ohio. She was 17 years old. She survived the trip, fell in love, and had babies, a situation which would end up with her being my mother’s namesake. She died in her 90s, and I never would’ve found that out had I not gone to Camosun. When I turned my self-location paper in I got back some of the most valuable feedback ever: “You have a gift for storytelling. You need to foster this.” It was something that I had needed to hear for a long time.
Another elective I took was an English class focusing on literary genres, and I found myself immersed in books again, and it was in this class that a visitor showed up. Greg Pratt was an advocate for Nexus, Camosun’s student newspaper, which I had glanced at while frequenting By the Books (Camosun’s pre-COVID coffee shop; God, it wasn’t that long ago, but COVID really messed things up, didn’t it?) So there he was, standing tall at the head of the class, telling all us English students that we could be real writers if we wanted, we could learn about journalism, and maybe even get a little money.
I didn’t care about money; I wanted to see my name in print. I wanted to write something and have someone other than my teacher or my mother respond to it. I also was intrigued about the inner workings of the actual newspaper itself. So I walked to the Richmond House, went up the stairs, and found three white, dark-haired dudes all packed in on a couch together. They looked startlingly alike. Three generations of one man, really. I said to the one who looked like he might be the oldest one, “I’m here to talk about joining the campus newspaper. I don’t know who to talk to, you all look very much the same.” It really was an iconic moment, seeing at the time the student editor, features writer, and newspaper editor all together like that at the same time. I didn’t know then that I was meeting people who’d be on my chosen-family list.
My happiness wasn’t loud. It didn’t announce itself with laughter or selfies or sudden clarity. It was quiet, like the feeling of putting on a pair of wool socks that have just come out of the dryer. It settled into my life gently, changing nothing, and changing everything. I started humming again. I found myself crying, but in a good way, during lectures on tragic heroines and resistance narratives. I learned how to do interviews with other artists, who were out there tackling the world barehanded.
I got to go to prison. That’s what’s called an opener: to write something so provocative that the reader cannot help but be engaged. But it’s actually true: I was getting a bit known in my role as a reviewer of the local theatres, and that’s when I heard about the theatre program at William Head Institution. I knew I wanted to check them out. I got the whole experience. After arriving to the jail, I was transferred by van to the part of the institution where the shows were held. My purse, keys, coat, phone, and shoes were checked. It was just me watching, and trying, somehow, to make a connection with the actors onstage, who were inmates. I felt so honoured to be able to be a part of their process. I loved doing those reviews, because I could actually be a part of the art that was keeping these men going. I got to witness their passion and their pain firsthand.
In November of 2019, we started hearing about the coronavirus. One of the Nexus doppelgangers, Adam, had said several times that he thought that this coronavirus was going to get big. My editor wasn’t overly concerned, and I had observed Adam reading conspiracy headlines here and there so I paid no mind. Biggest overlook ever. Two months later, school was online only and all our legit newspaper jobs were done. We couldn’t be in the office anymore; that’s all there was to it. We had to fight the fight at home; we had to try to reach people without actually being with them.
I started a column called An Inside Voice, because in the midst of this atrocity people still had to try to get their little voices heard. I wrote about still being a Camosun student and trying to get through my studies while the world had been put on hold.
The pandemic had already taken away our safe space. The campus, which was once a strumming organism of shared anxieties, was literally off limits. By the Books, the student coffeehouse that knew my order by heart, was gone. It was all gone. I thought that by writing this column that maybe things were going to be okay. After all, it was a routine. But in February of 2021 my father died (which I had prepared myself for) and then in April 2021, my life partner died (which I was not prepared for). Ironically, neither of these deaths were from COVID, but they may as well have been. I was not ready to grieve this hard; it felt so unfair.
But Nexus supported me. I was having, understandably, a pretty difficult time after the deaths of my father and husband. I knew writing could help. I wrote two articles honouring them, and my editor published them that year. I was able to respect both their deaths (and lives) and have my feelings published. It means more to me than I can ever begin to describe that I was able to have that outlet for my grief, and reinstated my knowledge that I had found family in my Camosun journey.
Having Camosun as a constant by my side, whether it was online or in person, has been one of the only reasons I’m still walking upright, honestly. Things have ironed themselves out again in my life, but I like knowing I can decide to take a class that will stimulate me, get my juices flowing. I love getting to know new students, and I love tending to my long-standing relationship with Nexus newspaper. Sometimes happiness is a cheap pen, a blank notebook, and an unfinished story that just needs one person who is interested to take a look and open it up.