Paradise Lost
Paradise Lost
It occurred to me, as I put away my government laptop to open my own and begin writing this piece, that none of the things I’m about to talk about should ever have happened, really. I mean it. Not only the government laptop, and its accompanying access card and VPN-protected email account, but the varsity jacket slung over the chair beside me, the open copy of Paradise Lost that I’m slowly making my way through, and even the text messages from friends about friend things. None of this was anywhere along my path, yet it all exists, here, in my world, where I live. If I were 20 years old, and of better judgment, these things would all be as normal as the snow on the ground in February, as there is nothing particularly remarkable about unpaid internships or rugby or social interaction, but I’m not 20, and certainly not, until quite recently, of anything remotely resembling sound judgment.
As it is, the pride I feel in these otherwise simple facts of my day-to-day being is of the sort that never quite settles in. It is not yet the nature of my conscience to accept stability or success. I often wonder when it’s going to happen, when I’m going to fuck this all up for myself again. I’m not though, because this is me and these are my things. I just need more time with them. I’m not the only one who appreciates the novelty of my situation. There have been many articles and interviews put out concerning me and my unprecedented ability to simply exist in society. “Local Man Uses Brain, Results Will Shock You!” isn’t maybe the most compelling headline, but again and again it draws kind words and passing recognition, and maybe just the right amount of affirmation to keep me moving in the right direction, or at least not the absolute wrong one.
I have existed between two worlds for most of my life. Not to say that I’m special, rather maybe that I either wanted very much to be, or not to be. I remember my dad telling me over and over that I was going to regret pretending to be stupid, but as a kid with a lot more questions than answers, I found solace in aligning myself with the lowest common denominator; joining what I couldn’t beat. There are two ways of going about dealing with being treated poorly. The first, and most respectable way is to carry on, to prove them wrong, and to rise above. The second way, which, spoiler alert, I accepted and dedicated myself to rather quickly, is to become what you fear, and slip into the masses in hopes that they will not eat their own. They will. And you will become a cannibal as well as a masochist.
I’ve dipped my toes into the pool of reflection many times, but never jumped in. Most of the time, the reflection came as a result of finding myself in situations beyond my control. Hospitals, jail cells, and cold nights outside have a way of making a person question themselves, but when one has a predilection for dishonesty at a fundamental level, the reflection only lasts until the desensitization to consequence does its unholy work. It’s more common than not to place onus for misfortune on the heads of the unnamed ‘they’ that pulls the invisible strings of fate within a society not quite tailored to the needs of the weakest of mind.
We often consider the plight of the unfortunate to be unavoidable, and for the truly unfortunate, it is. What do we make of one who discards fortune in favour of cheap acceptance, driven by a cowardice so destructive that to curl at the feet of the system in a pair of Timberlands and a flat-billed cap seems a better way than truly appreciating the situations of your peers and using God-given ability to pull them to their feet? As my old friends and enemies (very fine distinction) die one by one, taken by the unforgiving life that I once cast aside hope, ability, and love to embrace the image of, I look hard at myself and my situation, and I feel gratitude, and I feel guilt. Pride has no place where shame has never been. Pride can never replace shame, so long as pride is honest.
I once relished the idea that I was a success story. I proudly detailed my arduous rise from the ashes. I was a phoenix, and it got me things. I’m a fucking pigeon. I eat the scraps and get fat off what others deem unworthy of consumption. It’s time to be honest.
Honesty is relatively new to me. A big part of the wall I built between myself and the light was an intricate net, woven together with appropriations, exaggerations, and imitations of all the things that scared me into the dark. People talk about a thing called imposter syndrome, where a person feels like they’re in a place by accident, and pretense is all that’s keeping them in place. Take that idea, twist it until it’s the worst version of itself, and consider that I existed like that, in a world that nobody belongs in, for most of my life. One step at a time, I consciously at first, and purely by backward momentum afterward walked myself down that path until I was lost, trapped, and completely unsure of who or what I was. I assumed the role so perfectly that by the time I realized it wasn’t real, it was.
I remember the first time I got kicked out of school. I thought my life was over. I was terrified of what would happen at home. I apologized, cried, and blamed everyone around me. I was eight years old, sitting in what I remember to be a French class. I needed to use the bathroom and had my hand up to ask. The teacher passed over me for what seemed like an eternity, but who knows how the memory of a child can convolute the facts. Either way, I’d gotten to the point of frustration, having pissedmyself at school once before, where I decided to get the teacher’s attention by jabbing her in the leg with my pencil. I succeeded in getting out of the classroom, but not quite in the way I had hoped. I was marched to the principal’s office and my parents were called. I had committed my first official assault. I alternated my story, depending on who was hearing it, between “I didn’t do anything” to “I stabbed a teacher!”. The latter version would eventually become engrained in my autobiographical account of how I started out as a hard case. Looking back, I was the furthest thing from hard when I was bawling in the school office waiting for the wrath of Dad, but we narrate our own pasts, and as long as no eyewitnesses are present for the recounting, we can be the version of ourselves best suited to our audience. I certainly applied principle to the construction of my other self, and can look back on this as my first concrete venture into the bad part of the hall of little things.
I remember the first time I was held by the police. Once I was locked in the dirty, cold, dim cell, I cried. I prayed to God to not let me stay there. I had learned my lesson, I promise. As soon as they let me out a few hours later, I strutted back to everyone I knew a changed man; a hard man. I’d been to jail. I wore that momentary incarceration like a teardrop tattoo andembellished the story to the point where anyone who heard me talk about it would have thought I’d just done a dime in Riker’s. That fear and regret that a person feels, and maybe should feel when they’ve been locked in a cell vanishes the moment the doors open. The lesson is forgotten, and the imposter swaggers away. Over time, I became desensitized to the dread of incarceration, as the sentences got longer and the rude sounds of keys, doors, and resentment faded to the periphery of my consciousness. The swagger became more natural, and the imposter became the man. It fucking hurt a lot.
The violence that once terrified me when I had been subjected to it at school as a kid became a point of pride. I was finally the tough guy I always wished I was, and there was not a thing good about it. The looks on normal, decent peoples’ faces as I’d recount my heroic street fighting tales, showing off my scarred knuckles as though I were the Achilles of the back alleys of Fredericton never stood out to me as anything more than an indication of what a specimen I was. I guess really the only thing I had in common with Achilles was that I would eventually come to realize that I’d have much rather had a quiet life, but only after walking among the dead for so long. I was never as tough as I thought I was, but I’d go quite far out of my way at any given opportunity to prove that I wasn’t scared. Whether that was a self-destructive way of addressing the shame I felt for running away from fights as a child, or if gangsta rap really did make me do it, either way, it was a foolish endeavour that landed me in the hospital more times than I can remember.
It’s not entirely untruthful to say things like “more times than I can remember”, because there’s an intersection between drug use and self-inflicted trauma that eventually turns memory into ashes. I have an even tougher time distinguishing between things that actually happened, and the embellishments I cast around my actions and milestones. The real take away from all of this, I suppose, is that it doesn’t really matter, the real and the fake. It’s all a collection of relics from the forgotten saint of shitland, best moved on from. Growing up is understanding that you don’t have to hang on to things or put a concerted effort into letting go. Sometimes you can just keep going. I’d like to stop imagining myself as some sort of hero for literally just growing up. We all do it, if we are fortunate enough to have the time. In reality I’m a normal man, a bit short, a bit heavy, covered in ‘job stopper’ tattoos and scars to remind me of all the times I just didn’t think hard enough.
Before we start to talk about whether I’m being too hard on myself, full stop. I’m not. This is a conversation I have desperately needed to have for a very long time. The catharsis that comes from being honest has a definitive healing quality, and healing is what I’ve been doing. I don’t say that in a melodramatic sense, but in the most solidly practical way possible. I was sick. I did things that set me back in innumerable ways, and could have killed me. I never had to do them, but I did them because I wanted to be a person that I was never meant to be. I can best sum up my relative success as a series of individual exchanges. I’ve traded old things for new, and bad things for good. I’ve traded noisy, stale day rooms for quiet, comfortable living rooms, and stone walls for softer ones. I’ve traded heavy hands for soft words, and fear for comfort. I’ve traded the thrill of cheap fun for the stability of quiet nights on the couch, in front of a TV that won’t be pawned. I’ve slowly created an environment free from the need for dominance. The food chain has faded into obscurity, and the guiding ideal of simple survival has given way to the steady evolution of the self. I am now at least a form of the person that I should have been, but the door to the past needs to be talked closed, and as I look around where I am now, and see the life I am building for myself, and put these words together, I can hear the noise on the other side of the bad, bad door getting quieter. The light that used to be sucked out of the room is still here, and it’s not going anywhere.