La vie en rose

I remember sitting around in the living room with an old friend, empty beer bottles and caps strewn about, smoke hanging heavily in the air, and Edith Piaf crooning away, that 1940’s crackling vinyl sound despite modern CD technology.  My friend insisted on showing some old home movies, and by old, I mean black and white, silent, converted from old Super-8 reels.  The videos showed various scenes of a toddler waddling about on a beach, or in a living room, with family reaching to pick him up, smiling, and happy to share a tender moment with their young son.

“That’s me,” my friend sighed through the exhalation of a cigarette.  The videos were equal parts charming and haunting.  On the screen, we saw the embodiment of William Blake’s ‘innocence’, a child filled with wonder and amazement, adored by a loving family, in what would surely be the happiest of times.  The man slouched in the big arm chair, in a cramped apartment littered with empty bottles, pet hair, and unwashed dishes, was so completely removed from the boy on the screen, you could only take his word for evidence that he and the boy were one and same.

You see, we had just spent the day sampling from a selection of craft ales from both home and abroad.  We had a great time.  A buddy had managed to secure unlimited sample passes, and we didn’t hesitate.  By supper time, I was probably more incapacitated than I’d ever been in my life, all from shot-glass samples consumed far too quickly, and no food to counter-balance.  The plan was to enjoy the festival, crash at my friend’s apartment and watch some movies for the evening.  All in all, it was a fairly harmless evening of relaxation.  And it was, if not a bit disconcerting.

At the time, I thought the combination of distant childhood memories, especially of a simpler time, mixed with alcohol, smoke, and depressing music could only lend itself to heightened depression.  I reminded myself that some people struggle daily with depression.  My friend was no stranger to vices.  He was a good man, in a noble profession in which he helped others through their own difficulties.  How ironic it was for someone who offered hope to so many to have needed so much for his own.

The older I get, the more obvious it is to me that I have lived with some form of depression for most, if not all of my life.  In recent months, I’ve been more open about it, with myself as well as my friends.  I’ve taken steps to try to combat it.  I’ve learned that it’s likely something I’ll face for the rest of my life, and that much like the first 37 years of it, during which I’ve developed all sorts of coping strategies, I’ll find more appropriate and effective ones so I can maximize my own happiness for the next 37. 

Here are some moments I have identified as indicators that I’ve been harbouring something that has held me back or hindered me in my own personal growth:

Ø  In play-school, way back when I was four years old, we had wonderful teachers.  I learned my alphabet, numbers, how to tie my shoes, and made friendships I still keep today.  We made lots of crafts, some of which I still have (no surprise there).  We also played games.  One game, which I think was ‘Mother May I’, or some variation, involved trying to reach the other side of the room on silly commands, such as walking backwards, crab-walking, scissor walking, or whatever else.  It was a fun game, and completely harmless.  And I wanted no part of it.  The problem was, I found myself extremely uncomfortable with all my classmates watching me.  We played all sorts of other games that were similar, but in this one, I was absolutely terrified.  I remember the warm feeling when I finally played, how everyone cheered and encouraged me.  I was equally terrified the next time we played.  As a teacher today, I still won’t play this game with students.

Ø  I have always adored sad music.  Even on the old Sesame Street records, the slow child-chorus songs like ‘Somebody Come and Play’ and ‘Sing’ were my sentimental favourites.  My favourite Burton Cummings song was ‘I’m Scared’, and from his earlier band, The Guess Who, my favourites were ‘Undun’ and ‘Sour Suite’.  You can look up the lyrics if you’re unfamiliar with them.  As I grew older, I found great solace in music, through both the melody and the lyrics.  Now, just because a song is sad or depressing doesn’t necessary mean I have to love it, but I always go back to the emotionally-heavy tracks.  To this day, people have jokingly referred to the mellow, indie bands I follow as ‘slit-your-wrist music’.  I can see where they’re coming from.  As I’m writing this, Sigur Ros is in my CD player.  Again, if you’re unfamiliar with them, look them up.

Ø  In one of my earlier blog posts, I recollected my struggles with the Kamakaze slide at Magic Mountain.  There is a really steep water slide at our local water-themed park, and to conquer it showed you were brave in the face of such a staggering obstacle.  In Grade 11, and was determined to give it a try.  I was all the way to the top, and was even hanging from the support beam, dangling over the gaping mouth of this terrible beast intent on swallowing me.  Thoughts of those two or three people over the years who had been injured on the Kamakaze were strong enough to cause me to haul myself up and unceremoniously walk back down the stairs to jeers from the crowd waiting in line behind me.  We bought Magic Mountain t-shirts that day, and I wore mine for almost fifteen years afterwards.  Even when it was faded, stained, and stretched beyond recognition, I kept it.  It was a reminder of my failure.  I never realized why I had kept it so long until long after it finally got cut up for spare rags, pieces of which I think I still have.

Ø  Speaking in public has never been my favourite thing to do.  Granted, many people feel the same way, and for someone who decided to become a teacher, you might think I have it licked by now.  Hardly.  I still get butterflies before I begin a lesson, less now than before, since I know my students pretty well and am comfortable teaching them.  One time, in anticipation of being evaluated by a university professor during my internship, I felt so nauseous I very nearly drove past the school driveway with the intention of quitting altogether.  I didn’t, of course, and proceeded to deliver a great lesson.   

I trace this back to a public speaking event for which I was chosen to co-represent our school with three others.  It was in French, and it was about a subject of my choosing.  I chose fly-tying, because at that time it was among my favourite pass-times.  I had done so well with my speech in my own class that I took it for granted I would do equally well at the competition.  Naturally, I scoffed when Mom urged me to practice.  

When I took the stage, I partially froze, and when I did speak, my speech was full of mistakes.  I was humiliated.  Now, when something like that happens to you, one of two things can happen.  You can learn from it, pick yourself up, and improve upon it.  Or, you can be completely scarred to the point it becomes a monkey on your back.  Three things happened that day:  I became very reserved when it came to speaking in front of an unfamiliar audience; I became very insecure about my ability to speak French, and my enthusiasm for learning it began to wane from that point forward; and I also started to lose interest in fly-tying.  I continued to tie, but it wasn’t the same.  I’ve made several attempts to pick it up again, and it is lots of fun, but the same passion I had when I was younger isn’t there anymore. 

Ø  Skip ahead to spring, 2013.  I decided to take my son skiing, since it was a sport I had never tried before, and he was really excited to learn how to snowboard.  A snowboard enthusiast friend of mine came along, and we went to Crabbe Mountain for a relaxing day on the slopes.  Having cross-country skied most of my childhood, I was comfortable on the bunny hill, picking up really quickly how to control my speed, shifting from side to side, and stopping with that slow-arc shower of snow that you see from professionals.  My son took the snowboarding lesson and showed real promise, mastering his balance and tackling the hill with ease.  We took on some more challenging courses, and with a few scary moments, I felt quite confident I could at least ski on the basic hills.  That’s what I decided to do, keeping it simple as the weather was warm, and the snow was starting to get sticky with ruts from dozens of other skiers carving up the mountain side.

Making our final run of the day, I navigated my way down a hill I had done a few times earlier without incident.  This time, however, I hit a ridge unexpectedly and tumbled.  I was holding my ski poles tightly, and when my right hand collided, my grip on the pole contributed to the snap at my thumb joint.  At the time, I thought it was a bad sprain.  The x-rays two days later confirmed the fracture.  My son was horrified, and for a time he blamed himself for my injury.  I assured him that one day, I would bring him back and try again, because I didn’t want him to harbor the same anxiety I do. 

A year later, almost to the day, I brought both my sons back to Crabbe.  We tackled the same hill on which I had fallen before.  My snowboarding pro had no trouble at all, but my youngest and I decided to take it safe midway down.  I saw the part of the track where I fell.  He asked me if this was where I fell, as though he was there when it happened.  We took off our skis and walked down the steepest part, then put our skis back on to finish the rest.  No one got hurt that day. 

When we got back to the bunny hill, I felt the anxiety rising in me again.  Having successfully descended it dozens of times at this point, I couldn’t understand why I was still so scared.  I smiled, giving the boys the thumbs-up and made my way to the base, and for the last time.  Possibly ever.  You see, I felt good about facing my demons.  I gave it another try, but at the end of it all, the echo of something now long-past still rings inside me.  It’s the inability to find a way to overcome these things that makes me feel that there is something more afoot. 

There are days when it is all I can do to slide my two feet over the edge of the bed to start my day.  When I don’t have any commitments to keep, I sometimes curl up in a ball and stay under the covers longer than I normally would.  I could be in the middle of listening to a catchy, up-beat song and suddenly need to turn it to something more mellow.  Sometimes, within a matter of minutes, I feel the need to just be alone, and if I don’t, I find myself becoming more irritable than I have any reason to be.  There are days when I even feel like I’m a fraud, and that the successes I have achieved in life really aren’t mine.

Now before you start to panic and plan an intervention, rest assured I’m doing fine.  I love my job, and apart from professionally writing, can’t imagine anything else I’d do instead.  I’m raising two wonderful children, and am trying to be aware of my childhood anxieties as I help teach them how to become confident young men.  I’m single now, for the first time in over seventeen years, but I’m looking forward to the next chapter of my life.  I always used to joke that I would one day end up buying some small cabin in the woods where I could just spend my day with my thoughts, writing, and maybe fly-tying.  I think my desire for that kind of solitude just couldn’t wait any longer.  

There are two types of days.  There is the kind when everything comes up roses.  And then there are the rest.  Maybe depression or anxiety can be calculated by the ratio of one type you have to the other.

To Wit:

It’s funny how completely integrated the computer has become in our everyday lives.  Mine was the generation that first got to experience the arrival of the home computer, back when most of us who had one couldn’t do much more than type a letter and play some pretty crappy games.  I remember visiting a friend who had some archaic brand, which was as technologically wonderous then as an iPad is today, and being able to do nothing but actually type letters on the black screen, the letters glowing green trailing behind the cursor.  They didn’t even have Pong.  I was bored within about thirty seconds.

Sometime in the mid- to late-eighties, Mom and Dad bought our first computer.  It was a Tandy, and it was one of the first I can remember that took 3 1/2 “ floppy disks.  It had no modem, and even if it did, the World Wide Web was still in its infancy, and not yet accessible by the mainstream for another few years.  Still, the gaming industry had caught up to the burgeoning market for the personal computer, and I found myself trading with my friends games like Kings Quest, Police Quest, Space Quest (I enjoyed quest games apparently), and some of the more kid-friendly ones like Carmen San Diego, Jeopardy, and Wheel Of Fortune.  In junior high school, I convinced my parents to let me get Leisure Suit Larry, a legendary and infamous game franchise in which the titular character was a swinging bachelor with a raging libido on an adventure to find true ‘love’.  They finally gave in and let me buy it, but only the second edition because it was less controversial than the other titles in the series.  I always wanted to get the third Leisure Suit Larry game:  “Passionate Patty and the Pulsating Pectorals”.  I still have my original copy, but no computer I own or have access to can play it.  I think I sold my cousin the 5 ¼” disks that came with it.  If it was a potential source of income, I would try to exploit it.  I would have sold the Chihuahua if I could have gotten away with it.

Computers were little more than fancy word processors and sophisticated gaming consoles before the advent of the internet.  I was not living at home when Mom and Dad upgraded their computer to one that could access the ‘net’, but in the fall of ’93, when I started university, I had regular access to the internet for the first time.  Most of my closest friends were also making the same discovery, and within days, we were talking via email to each other.  Those few of us who didn’t have their own email were begging to use someone else’s account to keep in the loop.  I can’t remember how email worked back then, how you accessed it, or what the screen even looked like.  I remember being able to find information about my hobbies, printing out everything from song lyrics to corny jokes on dot-matrix paper.  I recently found a folder full of all sorts of junk like that among my university keepsakes.  Most of them I tossed away.  Of course, I kept a few, being the archivist I am.

Within that first year, a few of my acquaintances began to spend an awful lot of time in the computer lab.  There was a small room in the basement of the Edmund Casey building at St. Thomas, and if you were able to get inside before they locked the doors at 11pm, you could stay as long as you wanted.  You just wouldn’t be able to get back in if you left.  My friends, and a few others that shared their passion for the internet chat groups, would stay overnight, jabbering away online with their early social-media peers from various corners of the world.  What they had found online were people just like them:  people who were slowly forsaking the real world for a person they had never actually met in person, and for all they knew, might not even be whom they claimed.  At least they were happy, I suppose.  Or were they?

Fast forward a generation.  In the years since those fledgling days, computers drew more and more of us into their social network.  There was ICQ and MSN Messenger, neither of which I fell for, the memory of my awkward friends becoming specters in shadowy basement computer labs fresh in my mind.  MySpace and YouTube began to pick up steam as the millennium turned.  The term ‘social media’ was probably being used by people in the know, but it wasn’t until the advent of Facebook that the general public really began to understand how vital the concept had become.  ICQ was about as obsolete as the telegraph by the time Facebook started to spread, exponentially until it seemed like within a few months, just about everyone was on board. 

I was at a friend’s wedding reception when some of my friends from back home, the same ones that I used to email with such enthusiasm about fifteen years before, convinced me to give Facebook a try.  It was the spring of 2007.  I was skeptical.  I wanted to believe that I would never attach myself to some lifeless electronic box, and for sure I would never forsake real life contact for strictly digital communication.  I had long since lost contact with those old acquaintances from back in the day.  I remember when one of them had met a ‘friend’ online and they began dating.  She even paid his bus fare to visit from the US.  When he arrived, she was less than enthused.  The parameters of the relationship had changed.  Suddenly, she had to actually talk to him live in person.  He stayed for a few days before he quietly went back to wherever his console was plugged in.  Maybe they got along better that way.  I remember feeling sorry for the both of them. 

People warned me that it was addictive.  I scoffed at them.  Addictive?  Coffee, alcohol, cigarettes, gambling—now those were real addictions.  Who lets themselves get hooked on computers?  No logic in the world could convince me.  I told people I would check in on Facebook every week or so, just to say hi and then be on my way.  Within days, I was completely taken.  Before Facebook was riddled with useless games and applications, I was immediately drawn to the instant connection I had found with people I had long lost to either time or distance, or often both.  Within a span of a few short weeks, I was using my Facebook as my primary means of communication.  I can count on one hand how often I’ve called some of my friends since 2007, although I may speak to some of them daily online.  In some instances, I can see that some of my relationships have strengthened due to the new technology.  In some, I can see that it has regressed, or in some cases, dried up completely. 

We would have been foolish to think that the advance in social media would have stopped with Facebook.  There are dozens of them now.  I opened a Twitter account about four years ago, because everyone was predicting that it was going to be even better than Facebook.  I signed up, then sat back, unsure what to do next.  I ‘followed’ a few friends, some of my longest-standing Facebook-ers to start with, then found myself completely bored.  I was away from Twitter for about six months when I decided to check in.  Somehow, I was being followed by several people I didn’t know.  They must find me a boring guy to follow, since I hadn’t tweeted in months.  I logged out and haven’t checked it since.  I’ve long since forgotten my password.

I’ve dabbled in Edmodo (the Facebook for teachers), Pinterest, and Google Plus in recent months.  They’re all fine, I suppose, but Facebook remains my primary distraction.  You can use Linkedin or Instagram, depending on what you want to do online these days.  There are social media sites that are only popular overseas, and you have to believe the next big thing is already starting to take off as you read this.  I was browsing MySpace the other day, and couldn’t believe how archaic it had become.  Even Facebook isn’t the same anymore.  It isn’t just for the young anymore; parents and grandparents, now more adept at technology are logging in, and are still enjoying the honeymoon stage I was experiencing in 2007/08.  Because parents are now able to peer in on the kids, Facebook is reportedly not cool anymore.  It occurs to me that I am a parent, with children on the verge of having Facebook accounts of their own.  Will they be the first to skip Facebook altogether, pioneers of their own digital indulgences?

I’ve been thinking of giving Twitter another go ‘round.  I could just launch a new profile and start fresh, especially since so many more people use it now, and it can be used for so many more purposes.  Still, the thought of following celebrities I don’t care much about makes me cringe.  Why should I have to update my status on two different sites now?  Instagram is no good to me since I don’t take many pictures.  Which technology should I pursue?  It’s like trying to decide which gaming system I should buy.

In regards to game systems, I could get a Wii, an X-Box, or a PS3.  My kids have a Wii, but apart from that, I prefer none of the above.  When I want to play a game, I go back to the tried and tested option, my good old fashioned board games.  They don’t need an expensive computer, but they do need people to be present, in the flesh.  You have to make the effort to coordinate them, but when they come together, there is nothing quite like the social aspect you can only get from a good board game.

Maybe I should apply this logic to my social media.  These days, I’m so entwined in Facebook, I can barely stand to use the phone anymore.  Why does it feel like picking up the phone is like rereading the old instruction manual of a long-forgotten board game?  Maybe the solution is to buy an old dial-tone phone again.   What differs from my generation to the current one, it seems, is that mine remembers how to read the manual, while this one isn’t aware of the existence of the game itself, let alone how it was played.  One thing that remains is that we still have a choice.  If you’d like to set up a game sometime, give me a call.  I can’t promise I’ll call you back.  #leisuresuitlarry