May proceed, but not

The other day I came across my final exam report from the University of Waterloo. In my second term there, I failed three of my five classes: Calculus, Algebra, and Physics. I had gone to Waterloo with $19,000 worth of scholarships, a congratulatory letter from the Prime Minister of Canada, and the expectation that I would be a brilliant success. I left sixteen months later under a cloud of depression, the copper taste of failure in my mouth.

I was there to study Mathematics, with the intent to specialize in Computer Science. If you had asked me when I was thirteen where I was going to go to school, I would have told you Carleton, to study journalism. Same thing if you had asked me when I was fourteen. I was going to be a writer a writer a writer; it was the only aspiration still standing after I had given up on being a rock star, a helicopter pilot, and an astronaut. But when I was fifteen, I encountered a teacher who sparked in me a powerful love of mathematics: the joy of solving a problem, creating a proof, seeing the way numbers underpinned the entire world. After that, my goal was Waterloo, and math.

There are those who blame that teacher for throwing my life off course. I’m not one of them. I loved numbers as much as I loved the written word. The thing is, the depression had already set in before I ever left high school, and by the end of it, I already had one hospitalization under my belt. When I received that final exam report, I was on my second work term, working in a government office, with a supervisor who had told me that my project had zero priority. The depression deepened. What the report said was this: “MAY PROCEED BUT NOT IN A COMPUTER SCIENCE MAJOR PROGRAM”.

I finished the work term, but it did not go well. My depression got worse and worse, even as I was falling in love over the Internet with a stranger on the other side of the world. I started missing work without calling in. I started sleeping all day. I started to believe that when my golden boy came to visit (he did), he would take me away with him to a new world, a new life (he didn’t). There was another hospitalization.

At the beginning of my third school term, with my golden boy gone home, I tried to switch from math to English. It was too much. It was all too much. After a third stay in the hospital, I withdrew from university. Just for one term, I said. But I never went back.

I wish I could say that was the end of my involvement with Waterloo, but my subconscious had other plans. And it has been torturing me for nearly a quarter of a century now. Every two or three nights, while I’m asleep, I find myself back at school: trying to understand a lecture, trying to find a class, trying to register, trying to find out what my schedule is, trying everything and failing at everything. Lately my dream-self has been trying to figure out how to work four months on, four months off, while finishing school. There is a part of me that cannot accept that not only did I fail in my university career, I actually could not have succeeded at that time. Because I was ill I was ill I was ill.

Even harder for me to accept is that I am still ill. That many of the difficulties I’m having right now are coming up because I am ill.

Because I feel like less of a person. That the scars on my body and in my mind make me less of a person. I so often feel like I have failed my life completely. Despite all of the evidence to the contrary. Despite all of the things I have that I wouldn’t have had if life had gone according to plan.

Three beautiful cats that I wouldn’t have had in my life were it not for my fourth hospitalization. A man whose love is slow-burning and steady, who will not consume me in his own fire. A handful of published stories, essays, and poems. Freedom to create the art I want to create. A home. A job where I am sometimes able to make things better for other people. Friends who make me laugh until my ribs ache.

There have been more hospitalizations, and in my heart of hearts I don’t believe I’ve spent my last night on a locked ward. There has been electroconvulsive therapy, which may someday have to happen again, but I’m hoping not. But there has also been beauty, such beauty that I can’t believe my luck that I still exist to witness it.

I shredded the final exam report, along with the pink copy of the form that explained why I was withdrawing from school. I have destroyed the evidence, two sheets of paper that weighed on my heart like boulders, when they should have been feathers.

This is what I wish my dream-self to believe: the old plans are gone. I will never be that person, and I am so incredibly lucky to be the person I became instead. The time for grief is done. It’s time for you to let my life proceed.

 

 

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