Bell Let's Talk Day - Your brain is an organ, you know.

Today is Bell Let’s Talk day – a day where mental health issues are brought to the forefront of the Canadian media, traditional and social.

It’s also Mercury Retrograde, a time where Murphy’s Law reigns supreme, but also a time when the creative and the unconventional also take charge. Most people are afraid of change, of seeing what happened previously, and stall before they can move forward.

Other people think it’s a load of horse shit, this Mercury Retrograde. After all, things just go wrong. At the same time. For everyone.

That’s fine. Believe what you will. But where we usually go wrong is when we start to believe that we know best for everyone else.

If you know me, you know I go in for the whole astrology thing. The occult stuff. I always have. I have grandmothers and great aunts who are obiers. I have family who have guardian angels and talk with spirits. I’ve gone through a bunch of stuff myself that I’m not ready to talk about but may make a good story one day. But I believe.

I have friends and acquaintances who do not. We still get along, even if we broach the subject. I know what I know from first-hand experience; they know what they know from their own first-hand experience.

I have broken off communications with (now former) friends, both believers and non, who have tried to force their experiences down my throat to the point that they deny me mine.  They tell me that what I experienced is “wrong”, “unbelievable”, “inaccurate”, or something along those lines. Because they didn’t experience things the way I did, they believe they are more correct than I am.

Good for them. That’s why they’re ex-friends.

What does this all have to do with mental health issues?

Because we treat mental health the way we treat anything we can’t see. Like it doesn’t exist. It’s not real. It’s nothing to concern ourselves about.

The brain is an organ, like the heart, the lungs, the kidneys… organs get sick. We can physically see the results of what happens when our kidneys get sick, when our lungs collapse, when our hearts struggle to function.

People believe they cannot see what happens when our brains get sick. But we do.

That really nice person you know who works 3 cubicles over stops talking to you. Or gets bitchy day after day. Obviously she must be on her period, she’s not getting laid…whatever comical excuse you make.

There’s a kid in your child’s class that can’t stop screaming. Well his parents must spoil him. He needs a good spanking or something to straighten him out.

Your bubbly friend on social media who loves to chatter and debate with everyone stops returning messages, stops posting witty sayings. You figure they got a real world life so you ignore them and move along.

Your other friend on social media won’t stop complaining about her life. It must be awful to be her in a big house with her beautiful children and her gorgeous purebred dogs. Some people just won’t be happy with what they have. Why doesn’t she just cheer up?

Because you can’t see what’s wrong with them – they’re not bleeding, they’re not pale, they’re not collapsed in a heap on the ground – then they must be fully healthy. Because nothing ever goes wrong with the brain. It’s the only organ that is impervious to disease and degeneration, right?

We would be well to remember that we are not like anyone else we know. We don’t know what people experience, and what they go through, even if we have been through it ourselves. We don’t know anyone’s family history unless they tell you.

For example, my mother had an aneurysm within a week after I was born. At the time, in 1970, she was one of three people on the planet who survived a ruptured brain aneurysm without surgery. They don’t know how. She was comatose for over six weeks, and when she came back, she had to learn how to walk, talk, eat, read, dress herself…everything again. Along with having a new baby. She always had remembering issues, but she would always talk about why. If you met my mother back then, you’d think she was just a little slower than most, but a very kind lady nonetheless.

My son was diagnosed on the Autism Spectrum at the age of 3. People often asked me how did I know. A mother knows when something isn’t right with her child. Good parents use every resource available to them until a solution can be found for their child/ren. Even when people tell you that it’s just a “discipline problem”.

His father’s family has a history of brain disorders, as we came to learn quickly. His father was diagnosed with epilepsy three months after our son was born. Because it was a physical disorder, his family opened up a little more to discuss some of the “issues” that had arisen throughout their history. But before that, nothing had been discussed. My son has cousins who have brain disorders as well, ones that are much more severe than his.

I have never been formally diagnosed, but I know when my brain isn’t feeling well. I know when sadness is just more than the blues, and when euphoria is more than a rally cry. I know how it affects me. I used to hide in corners and say nothing. Now I use social media to vent. I write so I’m not clutching at pain, in a false belief that things will never be better. I found tools to help me, but I also know that when I can’t handle it, there are people to see and places to go where I can get the help I need.

Today is about coming together to see things differently. To let people know it’s okay to be sick. To let them know you believe them, even if you don’t agree with them. As it should be with everything, whether it’s the occult or whether it’s an ailment. Accept the people who come into your life for who they are; offer to help them always. That’s the essence of humanity.

Give mental health the respect it deserves, today and every day. Just like you should do the people in your life. 

All good things, and even not so good things...

I’m not sure how I finagled this invite. I think it was around 2000. I am usually pretty good about remembering dates and years, but you’ll have to forgive me if I’d had a bit to drink that night.

You see, I got an invite to the reopening of the Guvernment Entertainment Complex. It was funny because I knew they had the two clubs, The Guvernment (which I still called RPM at that time) and The Warehouse, which was the part next to it but still called The Guvernment. I had seen many cool concerts at The Warehouse in my day by this point. I’d seen Ministry, Skinny Puppy, KMFDM, and even David Bowie in the intimate venue of 3000. I had been there so often, I’d even had my favourite standing spot – no small feat when you’re 4’11” and going to industrial concerts where the average height of fans was 6’.

So when I got my invite to go, from a family friend who worked in PR, I had to see what had changed. Because it was history. Toronto history, sure. But my history. I’d matured as a concert goer there. I learned how to work the mosh pit and how to minimize bathroom time, and which bar was the fastest.

We walked in to what had been renamed “Kool Haus”. I remember saying “well, this is just the Warehouse with black curtains. Why rename it?”

And then we followed the path.

I’m sure if you’ve gone to the Guvernment recently, like in the past five years or so, you’re probably wondering what the fuck I’m talking about. You see, before Chroma and before Skybar and before Deadmau5 played his first gigs there, the Guvernment used to be connected to Kool Haus through an inside path system, located near where the washrooms are in Kool Haus now, and would exit where the Chillout Lounge in Guv is now.  

That path was majestic and magical and full of class and big lights. Just from those early days, you could see the new owners had real plans. And we hoped that it would work, because, well, this was RPM. It was the club of our childhood. We would be listening to CFNY from the burbs and hearing about Chris Sheppard and all of these cool alternative bands (I won tickets to Jesus and Mary Chain at RPM but was grounded that night, so I gave my tickets to my friends who were witness to the mic stand assault), and we would be dying to go. Those who went to any of the nights, whether they snuck in with fake ID (a notorious problem for RPM and the Guv that lasted through to the very end) or whether you went for your legit 19^th birthday, it was the place to go, to be seen.

The renovations to the Guvernment would bring that back and more. You could see it. And even though that path structure didn’t last (probably mostly to do with the deadly shooting than anything else), the multiple rooms remained. The size of the Guvernment and of Kool Haus remained the same. And the cool factor definitely remained the same.

Over my musical life, I can tell you I’ve seen Ministry three times, the comeback Nine Inch Nails 

club tour, Iggy Pop and the Stooges, the last Sisters of Mercy gig in Toronto, Skinny Puppy four times, KMFDM, Bauhaus, and of course David Bowie. It’s the worst place to get to by TTC. It’s the worst place to be in the winter because the lineup goes down Queen's Quay where you get splashed by taxis zooming over melting snow. 

And then there was this whole EDM thing. Or, as we called it back when it started, dance music. People just wanted to dance. They wanted to party. The Guvernment gave people a place to party that was away from the death of the downtown core – no traffic  by the lake until the cabs all show up at 3am to take people home. That led me to a whole new set of music – Deadmau5, Kaskade, Calvin Harris, Mat Zo, Ferry Corsten, and the master, Eric Prydz.

The Guvernment complex has been hands down my favourite venue to see music in the city. Oh it’s an awful place. The people are terrible, the bouncers are mean, but the memories of who I’ve seen and when I’ve seen them and why I’ve seen them there are precious and irreplaceable.

I still go looking for that path between The Guvernment and Kool Haus. I know it’s behind the wall of Chroma. I know it’s past the washroom in Kool Haus. I know if you give me a hammer and chisel, I’ll chip away at that back wall Indiana Jones-style and find that hidden passage and the summer room with the bright pastel lights and the palm trees.

Goodbye, Guv. Goodbye, Kool Haus. There will never be another complex like you. And that truly is a shame. Lost shoes and all. 

Rediscovery

Purging.

If you follow me on Instagram, you’ve probably seen the pictures of all of the stuff I have.

Let me be more specific – you’ve been subjected to seeing all of the crap I’ve carried around with me since I moved out of my parents’ house in 1992. I wasn’t given it all at once – my parents moved to British Columbia shortly after I graduated university, and before they moved, they made me take all of the stuff that meant something to me so they wouldn’t have to ship it across the country.

My mother came back to Toronto to live in 1995. In the separation, she took everything from the 

house that had moved across the country with them. Including more boxes of stuff that had belonged to me. When she found her own place here, she asked me to come and get more of my stuff because she did not have room for it. I was moving into a luxury apartment with a giant storage locker, so it wasn’t a problem at the time.

Ten years later, when my husband died, I had to  move from the apartment, if only to get away from the memories there. I had just gone through all of his stuff, and was in no position to sort through anything else. I just wanted to go, so I found a place and brought all of those boxes of mine with me.

The next year, I had to find a new place, because the place I did have was too small for me and my new partner and our baby. It was a matter of time being of the essence, and we found a gigantic three-bedroom luxury apartment. So I moved everything with me, boxes and all.

From the apartment, I bought my house, and with house closings being what they are, I had to get someone to take over my lease while packing and getting ready to move 40 km away, and trying to find daycare and school for my son, so I just dumped everything out into bags and boxes, and then carried that along with the already-packed-often-moved-always-unopened boxes with me.

I have a Harry Potter-style cupboard under my stairs, but instead of making it into a bedroom, I put all of my boxes in there, along with my partner’s boxes and our intermingled stuff. Because we were going to be together for a long time, living here for a long while, right?

When we broke up in 2013, the easiest thing for us to divide were our CDs, simply because we had duplicates of the music we had in common, and everything else was either his or mine. So the CDs have been in separate milk cartons and boxes since the end of 2013. There was no rush to do anything else, because he has stayed on here as my roommate for the past year and a bit.

But now, he’s found his own place, and is moving out in the spring. And this year it will have been ten years since my husband died. And I will be turning 45. And frankly, it was time. I mean, I always knew I had a bunch of 80s artefacts, but I always wondered what had happened to them.

So a couple of weeks ago, I started going through my Harry Potter space. I expected to untangle myself from one man. 

By the third box, I realised I wasn't untangling myself from one - I was untangling myself from at least five, and all of the other failings of the past. I  found about 10 printed drafts of my first novel, tax returns from the 90s, critiques of works that were written by other people, bills from 2000 that were hastily thrown into boxes for a move, pictures and writings of exes that I hope are burning in hell or will be shortly, and all of the crap that I chose to post to Instagram. 

In other words, crap that had to be purged. It’s a new year. It’s a new day. It’s a new life. Get rid of the old and not let it burden me.

However…in among the knotted ropes of the web of memories stashed in my Harry Potter space, I found things that made me happy at one point. Things that reminded me of the person that I lost along the way over the past 30 years or so. The person who went to Toronto by herself on the bus on weekends to just walk around and buy imported records and flowing goth clothes. The person who always enjoyed her little nook where she would write a poem dedicated to her amour du jour and pine over why it was never meant to be. The person who used to stay for hours upstairs at Toby’s on Bloor or Toby’s on Yonge in a corner table, smoking, drinking coffee, and writing to try to figure out how to make life work and what I saw around me.  The person who was an entertainment journalist for four years and attended the 1989 Festival of Festivals on a press pass, interviewing well-known French producers and directors in French. The person who went to the opera and fell in love with the medium more than any of the people I ever went with.

I have gone through about 90% of the boxes that have travelled with me for the past 20 years. Some things I have thrown away – I don’t want to see tax returns after I file them, never mind from 1991 – but some things I have kept – the paraphernalia, the newspapers with headlines like “MASSACRE” (about the Montreal shootings December 6, 1989), the magazines with the “Top 100 albums of the 80s”, the scrapbooks with clippings about up and coming bands called Ministry and Skinny Puppy.

I’m coming back to discover those things that are at the core of me. Those things that people rarely understand about me – how I can like music for music’s sake and not confine myself to one or two genres, how I can keep writing without freaking out about not being published,  and why I need so much alone space and time, even from those people who mean the most to me. It’s neat to be able to follow your own journey of development through boxes and boxes of material.

Now those myriad of boxes have been pared down to two so far. I still have the books to go through. As a mom who was an only child who has only one child, there’s a legacy I have to leave to my son; an obligation where I have to explain to him and him alone why I am the way I am. I think and hope that all of the stuff I’ve been able to find will do that. If anything, when I do finally shuffle off this mortal coil, the stuff I have might remind him that this was who his mother was – an uber-passionate fangirl, a writer of feelings in whatever form struck her at the moment, an appreciator of music in all forms, and most of all, everything she gathered, everything she performed, every step and every thing she ever did came from a place of deep love.