I am mostly love now
CW: sexual assault + Degrassi spoilers.
I don’t remember the fall of last year. I remember summer because it was hot and busy. I remember winter because it was too long. But when I try to think of fall 2019 I don’t remember the colours of the leaves or when they started to change or when they finally fell. That period of time, which, in my own personal lexicon is referred to as Last Fall, was solely about three things: what happened before Louis C.K. performed in Winnipeg, what happened during, and what happened after.
I already wrote a piece about this. You can read it here. What you’re going to read isn’t that - and it probably shouldn’t be because I’m sure the people who I think should read it are tired of people writing about it. This is about the last year and some things I’ve had stuck in my head since then. This is a collage of moments and feelings that are extremely relevant to me right now only because it’s been one year. Do Big Life Moments (or “trauma” as my therapist calls it) get birthdays? Maybe not in a celebratory way, but maybe in a here’s-looking-at-you-and-how-you-flipped-my-world-upside-down-kid kind of way.
I don’t know how much sense this is going to make to anyone but me. And maybe that doesn’t matter. I’m just tired of dreaming about the people who were involved in what happened during October 2019.
I have said both that I was forced out of the comedy community and also that I left. I don’t think one is more true than the other. But I do think if an environment has been made inhospitable, your best chance of survival is to leave.
Over the last year I have lost: sleep (lots), Instagram followers (many), faith in humanity (overdramatic, but true). I spent days at school trying to concentrate in class. I spent nights wondering if someone I love would kill themself.
I hate hate hate the idea of being corny but I really do feel that in the character arc of my life, Last Fall was the moment when I lost ~my innocence~. The only way I can make this less cringey is to bring up Degrassi. It’s like, you know in season four when Emma acts out of character and hooks up with Jay? It’s obviously because she’s not dealing with her feelings about the school shooting (or, for your common folk, the episode where ‘Drake’ gets ‘shot in the bum’). Or remember how, in season three, Manny grows increasingly anti-social after her abortion? (Side-note: It’s fine if you disagree that these were the plotlines that caused these characters to ~lose their innocence~! I’m open to further discussion about this.) Everything that happened Last Fall felt like a turning point in my personal development. When it was all over, it suddenly felt like my resting state was heavy - as if I was a piggy bank slowly filled up with pennies and now I couldn’t move unless someone broke me open. There was a heaviness that followed me from my home to the bus stop, to work and to school, to the store for groceries and back home again. Looking back on it now, I know the heaviness was because I quickly grew to have a lot of anger inside me, and I just didn’t know where to put it all.
The thing about morals + ethics is that proximity to the questionable thing makes all the difference. When it was first announced that C.K. was coming to Winnipeg, there were people who rallied with others against him. They were pissed off and frustrated because they thought it was wrong for him to perform here. And then, when his openers were announced, and these openers turned out to be these people’s friends or collaborators, the once clear waters grew murky.
And then, when The Statement/the truth came out, the once murky waters turned to mud. It’s one thing to not want a famous abuser to perform in your city, it’s another to find out a local abuser has been performing in your city for years. And it’s another thing entirely to know, but not really do much, because their life has been intertwined with yours for over a decade.
Part of what I’ve learned in therapy is that I’ll always be disappointed if I expect people to have the same moral compass as me. “People can only meet you as far as they’ve met themself,” my therapist tells me after I spend forty minutes telling her I’ve never felt so much anger in my life. It’s been exhausting to keep track of who has performed with C.K., who has performed with the people who performed with C.K., and who knows but continues to support these Bad Men. All of these, to me at this time, become synonymous with being a bad person. Someone’s proximity to the bad thing didn’t matter as much as the fact that I could even link them in the chain.
It’s October 2019. At break on work I check my phone mid-pee in the bathroom stall. I refresh Twitter - there are two notifications. One is that someone has liked my Tweet calling out (IN?) a local comedian who’s opening for C.K: [redacted] there are members of the comedy community - a community WE SHARE - that are disappointed in you. We are upset. You are being talked about because you did something wrong. The other notification is a tweet from a stranger. you’re a pretty big cunt, hey mate? I first thought it was tweeted by a pirate, but then my reflexes kicked in and I blocked the account/reported the Tweet so fast I didn’t have a chance to verify if my suspicion was correct.
I came home from work and asked my roommate if I could borrow the car. There was something not entirely pressing but semi-important I needed to pick up from my parents’ house. My roommate was hesitant - she never outright said no, but had to think twice because it was her brand new car and I seem like a bad driver. I took her hesitation as her saying I DO NOT TRUST YOU BECAUSE YOU ARE A BAD PERSON. “It’s cool.” I told her in a tone that suggested I was not, in fact, cool. I fast-walked to the couch in the living room and flung myself down, my face in the cushions. “Hey,” she slowly approached. “Are you OK?” I have no other way of saying this: I was not OK. I was really upset that a stranger called me a cunt on the internet. I was upset that an entire community was failing my friend. I was upset that no one was doing the things I wanted them to do. I cried and tried to tell her all of this through tears. Maybe 20 per cent made it out coherently. It didn’t matter what she understood. She sat with me and rubbed my back anyway.
A phrase I was drawn to during this period of time was karmic retribution is real and will come for us all. I would say it almost every day and on the days I didn’t, I read it in a framed painting above my dresser. Karmic retribution was the closest thing I had to a religion. I felt a naive sense of invincibility: I have done the right thing. Karma is on my side and it’s absolutely not on theirs. I was expecting a cartoon-like lightning bolt to strike the Bad Men in the coming days. Boom! Karma delivered. Just like that.
I have waited and I still wait.
The time has come to tell the truth. Again. There is no love without justice.
- bell hooks
On a walk with my friend Kristen I tell her I think I have anger problems. Not in an I-punch-dry-wall sort of way, but in an I’m-obsessed-with-vengeance-once-I’ve-been-wronged way. She calls me a justice vigilante. I ask her what she does when someone hurts her. She tells me she tries to see where the person who hurt her was coming from. I ask her how that could possibly be her first reaction, considering mine is to aggressively defend myself. She tells me it’s not her first reaction (that her first reaction is the same as mine), and that it’s not about your first reaction at all: it’s about the reaction you choose.
I cut my hair because it was too hard to look at its length and think about all the things it had seen. I figured if hair grows an average of half-an-inch every month and I hated everything that happened the last ten, I only needed to cut five inches off. I really liked my hair long. But I thought of it as a chance for a do-ever: one where ten months from now I could hold my hair in my hands and be proud of how we’ve both grown.
“Clothes are a better place for girls to keep their histories than stories. Stories betray girls by saying what we really were according to the rules of some game we had never agreed to play. Stories are about the painful aporia of having to both appear and exist, the things done to us, what we are trying to cover up by getting dressed.”
- Anne Boyer
THERAPIST: I don’t believe people are just good or bad.
ME: Please elaborate.
THERAPIST: I’ve worked with men who’ve assaulted women and there are good parts to them and there are also bad parts.
ME: I guess that makes sense.
THERAPIST: You haven’t been an entirely perfect person.
ME: This is true.
THERAPIST: You make mistakes - so do others.
ME: Right.
THERAPIST: You can forgive yourself when you make a mistake. You can forgive these men if they make one too - but only if they’ve taken accountability for their actions.
ME: But what if they’re not taking accountability in the way I want them to?
THERAPIST: Then you do your best to support your friend and yourself. And you find a way to move the anger through you so you don’t have to live with it. At a certain point, holding on to it only hurts you and they come out unscathed.
Sometimes you do the right thing because it is the right thing to do, but also because you maybe think that someone somewhere is keeping tally and that, like in all the movies you saw growing up, you’ll be repaid in some way. I laughed really hard the other night and I thought to myself that it was the first time I laughed like that in a long time: and then I thought about how funny it is to laugh and how much I love making other people laugh and how I used to spend my Sunday evenings laughing and planning to make other people laugh with my old sketch group. And I thought about how it had been over a year since I left and how I don’t regret leaving but I do maybe regret believing the small voice inside me that told me I would one day have it all back.
“You know, even if we succeed, some of them aren’t going to want to come with us” - adrienne maree brown
Sometimes I think about The Catcher in the Rye. I’m not saying it’s my favourite book or even that I really like it (I also am not not saying I was president of the Holden Caulfield fan club in grade nine). There are probably many things about the book that aged poorly (I do believe in 2020 Holden Caulfield would be considered a bit of an incel). But the idea of an older person being there, observing and waiting in the rye to catch kids from falling off the Cliff of Life, makes me very weepy.
Like a middle-school bully, what was underneath my anger was profound despair. I wished there was someone there to catch my friend that day, and all the times after when she was treated so poorly. I wished there was someone there to catch me on a night that I don’t like to think about because it hurts too much to. And then I think about all my friends and all the things we’ve seen and all the men we avoid on the street and all the words that have been yelled at us, the things done to our bodies in the dark of night, the things we never consented to, the things we once dreamed about that, once looked straight in the eye, are nothing but pure evil.
Maybe there isn’t good or evil but there are choices. And maybe people can’t be as evil as the institutions they’re apart of, but it doesn’t make it wrong for me to want to burn them down.
Sometimes I think about these men who opened for Louis C.K. I wonder if they shook his hand that night. I wonder if they told him “great set” when he got offstage. I wonder if they could look him in the eye. If they did, I wonder how long they stared for.
Art by mothcub.