At least there is a path.  Five years ago, I didn’t have one, and life felt meaningless and empty.  Now I have direction and meaning, and it all feels impossible.

What I’m clinging desperately onto these days is my curiosity to know how the stories end.  Do certain initiatives begin to pay off, or do they continue to suck me dry?  Will I reach the next milestone?  Or any of the ones after? Will this effort all have been for naught, or will I someday reap the rewards of the pain that I currently endure?

Only time will tell.  I just wish I had a spoiler.

Anyway, that being said, I didn’t always feel this way.  I used to feel as though I had done something wrong, or as if there was something I could have done to make him happy and to make things work.  Once Upon A Time captured the short-lived existence of this youthful, romantic, self-deprecating girl.  She’s dead and gone, and the memory of her makes me sick.

Destined to err… fine.  Doomed to bear the burden of my folly?  No longer.

I remember hitting 16 and knowing where exactly it was that I wanted to go – no more random crap shoots.  Most popular were all of the major malls that were on subway lines: Eaton Centre, Scarborough Town Centre, Yorkdale Mall, and Fairview Mall.  Then there were all of the parties that everyone would hit up.  Primarily I think I went to Jamestown.  As I grew older, I’d meet more and more people who could drive and had cars so my string of small radii that dictated my hangouts (i.e. subway stations) collapsed and then expanded… but until that time would come, this was it.

It was on a subway ride that my sister and I were first flashed.  I say ‘first’ because it would turn out not to be the last time that it would happen.  And of all of the possible times that it could have happened, I would never have expected it to have been on a nearly full train during the evening rush hour.  Sitting side-by-side in double-seats at the back of a train, the flasher seated himself in front of us, held up his coat and suitcase to block us from running and to cover himself as he masturbated while staring at us.  Because of the way we were seated, we couldn’t reach the emergency strip – it was over his head.  We just waited it out and ran when we got to our stop.  I considered running off the train earlier, but experience has taught me that running off a train because of someone following you on it only creates the potential of being trapped alone on an unfamiliar subway platform with that person.  On the train were tons of people and attendants and potential help if he tried to touch us, and at my subway stop, I knew where to go.

Anyway, we’ve seen and experienced a lot by taking public transit.  This is just one example of one of the kinds of things that you can encounter when you’re a teenage girl on the subway.  Fortunately, we were neither raped nor killed.  I used to wonder what we could have done to prevent these things, such as not dress provocatively, but we didn’t, so I don’t feel guilty.  We were just two young females and we let him get away with it.  That’s why it happened.  I stopped letting people get away with their offenses, and they magically stopped happening.

//

For work, I rent out a parking spot south of my office.  It is 2/3 the cost of parking at my office.  The hospital that my dad is in is several blocks away from this parking spot.  I haven’t wanted to pay for parking downtown that’s closer to the hospital partly because of cost, but mostly because I already pay for parking.  So, I’ve just been dropping off my mom at the hospital so she wouldn’t have to do the grueling walk in the cold, then walking to and from the hospital from my parking spot.

Yesterday, on my walk to the hospital from my car, three men asked for my name and number.  The first one made it a point to note that he sees me often and wants to know where I go every day.  The second was polite.  The third tried to grab my hand.  This was when it was bright outside.

I have typically walked over alone to get my car when we leave the hospital in the middle of the night.

I wasn’t before, but now I’m scared.

I was 13 and my grandmother was 78 when she passed away.  It was a December when the ambulance came in the middle of the night to take her away.  She was unconscious and remained in the ICU for a couple of months.  I remember spending Christmas in the ICU.  When the money got tight because of all of the extra taxis getting home (we didn’t own a car), we took the bus.  And when we could no longer afford even that, we walked.

She was really weak and had been losing her memory for perhaps a year prior to her going comatose.  I remember being about 12 when she was no longer able to do all of the things that she liked to do on her own, such as garden and cook, and even longer since she’d done things that she didn’t like to do, like walk me home from school or play with me.  She was so serious.

My sister and dad suffer from the same core of afflictions as my grandmother.  Perhaps about a year prior to my grandmother’s admittance to the ICU, my dad had been going through the worst case of his eczema.  At the time, it was the first I’d ever seen it flare up at all.  He couldn’t move without making his skin crack.  I’d seen it with Marlene throughout our childhood, and it was a real surprise to me when I saw him with it.  Anyway, after a while without any improvement, our doctor had him hospitalized.  He was eventually able to come home and we all took care of him.  The doctors had been unable to pinpoint the cause.  All we knew was what we always knew: that it was an allergic reaction.  We blamed his work.  He worked in the factory of a printing company.  The company paid out disability for a while, but eventually stopped.  He wasn’t sick enough to get Ontario Disability Benefits, but was not well enough to make it through a full work day at a new job without being sent home because his employer could see that he couldn’t handle it. This after years of OT and hauling himself across the city by public transit to get the bills paid.  He was only in his 50’s, and he didn’t know how he would make it to retirement.

My mom couldn’t do much better.  She had been laid off from her job years earlier after she took bereavement time to attend her brother’s funeral in the Philippines. She returned to be laid off.  It made for an awkward situation for my sister who would wind up – by a twisted stroke of fate – doing her OAC Co-Op term in our mom’s old department with our mom’s former co-workers.  Anyway, my mom was well into her 50’s by then, so being hired for a long-term continuing position was difficult.  She wasn’t physically equipped to do labour, but she could do a lot of things, and I know she always tried.  Primarily, she did temp work in accounting.  And she put her crocheting skills to work making kippot for some evil man she called “Barrack” who was so rude to her and made her cry that even though we needed the money, we begged her to stop making them.  She even did call centre work in the evenings – there was no shortage of call centre work.  Out of an eagerness for workplace resiliency, I learned to do it myself.  I learned a lot of things from my mom.  Because who knew?  Maybe there would come a time when it was the only opportunity I had at my immediate disposal to make ends meet during times of crisis.  (For the record, such times existed.)   So she applied for hundreds of jobs and got a lot of interviews.  It was hard to watch her.  She was the sort of person who identified herself by her job.  And with every failed opportunity came more and more frustration.

It’s hard to pinpoint the moment things became irreparable for us as a family.  There were hints of self-destruction much earlier than this.  However, I do remember being 12 and being proud as the low-points brought us closer together.  And then I remember turning 16 and writing The Dancing Princess.  It’s scary now when I look back and read A Peek Through Tinted Glassed and The Days of Grey – words I strung together when I was 18 and 20, respectively.

I’m fine now.  My biggest problem then was that I couldn’t control anything.  Now I control everything.  It’s exhausting, and I get really frustrated on days like today when people assume that just because I’m the younger daughter, that I hold no responsibility.  I’m irritable enough without having to deal with ignorant people thinking they have me and my situation pegged.

[Today, today is a special day.  Today I posted explicitly how I felt about something.]

I started out this post with the intention of discussing the large discrepancy that exists between one’s online persona and his/her face-to-face one, but instead managed to veer off into the ugly world of regret, where some of my most shameful moments reside.

Warning!  Wheels have been set into motion.  There can be no going back…

I still remember auditioning for this event.  After having been called “too operatic sounding” in my then-most recent audition, I was really nervous as I walked into a room to sing for the Principal and the Chemistry teacher.  They were, after all, tremendously talented singers, themselves.  But I did it.  And I got the ‘ok’ to perform in the show.

I was so excited and nervous that all I did was rehearse.  The trouble was that I had an English paper due on the same day as the performance.  My choice was clear when I performed preparedly, and afterward asked my teacher for an extension.

This is the first memory I have of failing to meet a deadline.  I risked my average for a performance.  I was lucky that time because my teacher enjoyed my performance and she gave me the extension without penalty.  She said she understood.  I felt guilty at the time for asking for and accepting her mercy, thinking I deserved the consequence of a penalty for the late submission.  I had this crazy idea instilled in me that the “real world” (i.e. life after high school) wouldn’t afford me such leniency, and that I shouldn’t get used to it.

I’ve found that high school, through its [seemingly] arbitrary rules, deadlines, and punishment, gives us a false impression of life afterward.  There is perhaps utility in their enforcement, especially on impressionable youth and adolescents.  However, the truth is, it’s only ever become increasingly clear to me how institutions are all run by people, and all people have the potential to be very understanding…

For the longest time, I just ignored them, irrationally thinking they’d eventually stop.  Then I began to actually set rules and filters so that the newsletters would be marked read upon arrival so that I could ignore them.  And for while, I actually just read them and tried to consider them useful.

But, … I just spent the morning unsubscribing myself from a dozen newsletters.  Maybe things aren’t so bleak.

I’ve been focusing my energy on finding the perfect balance between being easy-going, open-minded, and having a ‘take no shit’ attitude. That is, I have to defend myself (so as to never become bitter), but also know when to step down (so as to be fair).  I have to be ready for life as it comes (and be easy-going), and not reject it when it’s not what I hoped it would be (because it’s so easy to be hard on people for not giving you what you wanted from them).

It’s the only way to go forward that makes sense to me.  But it’s hard.  Sometimes I don’t know if I’m being unfair when I’m defending myself, or letting people walk all over me when I don’t.