#ae blogs

I remember the first time I was called a slut. I was fourteen or fifteen, I think. It was at my friend’s house. I don’t remember if it was her birthday or a normal day – our group spent a lot of time together during that era – but we had spent all day at the waterslides, and were showering at her house before dinner. We had split up – some of us were in her shower, and the rest of us were in her brother’s shower (he didn’t live in the house any more, either at boarding school or university). I was talking about something with my friend while we showered in our bikinis, maybe about not being popular with boys (I haven’t changed much, have I?) and she said, “It’s because you’re a slut.” Me, at the time, completely virginal and untouched, my romance life not even consisting of those kindergarten kisses, but just a string of unrequited crushes, replied, “What?” She answered, “Have you seen your boobs?” As if she were telling me the sky were blue. Simple adolescent logic: you have slightly larger than average boobs, ergo you must have a voracious sexual appetite to match.

This is the first time I realized how people saw me. Of course I had been subjected to catcalls (which were luckily only ever an inconvenience in my case, never a danger, sort of something I just expected while I was out in public, like sunshine), but those were…men. Those were strange men. This was my friend. It only became punctuated after I did finally get my first boyfriend and, in one of those estrogen-laced battles that occur between mother and daughter during those tender years, my mother told me, “You were probably stupid enough to sleep with him.”

Bodies. Bodies, bodies, bodies. Sometimes I wish I could just slip it off.

Even my hair thing. My hair has had five phases. The first was when my mother would pull it up into a ponytail on my head, and kids at school would always ask why I didn’t wear it out, why I didn’t straighten it. Two, when I finally succumbed. My mother and I textured my hair so I had curly hair to my shoulders. Three, when I shaved it. This was as close as I could ever get to slipping out of my body, but it still subjected me to so much bullshit (speculation about my sexuality, mostly). I was tired of being a pretty girl though. Four, my baby fro. Five, the long straight blonde extensions I wear.

I haven’t talked about going blonde yet, because I wasn’t sure how I felt about it. On one hand I was happy – more of my friends were upset about me going blonde than people were when I shaved my head. On the other hand, I’ve been a little peeved. Here are the typical three reactions.

1.      I love it! It looks sick! You pull off blonde well! (general population)

2.      You look hot. You look better than you ever did. I don’t remember what you used to look like. (some boys)

3.      What the fuck happened? Who did this? Why did you do this? Did you do it to fit in? Are you trying to be whiter? When will your hair be back? I miss it. (close friends, yourself included)

#1 is my favourite reaction. #2 is too be expected, and it’s only been one or two people because I don’t speak to that many dumbasses, so I just chalk it up to a lack of knowledge about socialization and why we value European features over all others. #3 is what pissed me off the most, though. Here’s why:

It takes away my agency.

I love that you guys love my natural hair, but it’s been irritating that some of my friends acted as if I didn’t have a choice in it. As if some mystical force forced me to get a weave.  As if I were passive in the situation. That it was a fun experiment but I should switch back ASAP.

I’m tired of my hair being its own entity. Yeah, yeah, bullshit first world problems. But try to put yourself in my situation: has anyone from North Bay told you that they miss a certain body part of yours? Have people stopped you to touch your hair? Has your hair become your defining feature, the thing that people think of when they think of you?

Similarly: have you ever wanted to change your hair? To be able to whip it back and forth? To curl it like Lana Del Rey? To change the colour without damaging your hair forever? To be able to try a completely new look, new colour palette? To make all your friends gasp in surprise when they see you for the first time after winter break?

This is what I wanted.

There’s this photo on my public Instagram of my boobs in a shirt from V-Day Western that says “ORGASMIC”. I’m not wearing a bra because I was in the house, and I literally never wear a bra in the house (do you do this? Is this a privilege I was afforded because I only ever lived with my mom and never had to worry about potentially arousing the men in the house?). You can kind of see my nipples and areolas. I posted it because I wanted to post a picture of the shirt, and I didn’t realize it was semi-see through till I took the photo and then I did and I was like, “so what, I’m not gonna go put on a bra and retake the picture, plus my boobs look awesome.” Earlier today I was thinking about deleting it, weighing the pros and cons of it being appropriate, blah blah blah. Kind of like when I posted that cute Snapchat of my butt in Panda underwear. Is that okay? Is that too much?

I hate that feeling of second guessing myself. I never used to do it. You know why? Because I never used to subject myself to the male gaze. The first time I think I became blatantly aware of the male gaze, was this moment when my ex-boyfriend, McKenzie, and his friend Dorian were hanging out with me outside, and made me stop moving. “Doesn’t she look beautiful?” “What are you talking about?” “Come over here. From this angle, look at how the light hits her. Don’t move.” And they literally stared at me for a good seconds (albeit they were also high). Despite catcalls or whatever, I had never really seen myself at this thing, as just photons hitting boys’ eyes, to steal Hank Green terminology.

I’ve always had a sort of blissful ignorance to any sort of attention I got (friends would point out people staring at me; both Audrey and McKenzie have credited me for getting more attention from females; and I’ve seen many a girl compliment me more than they would a normal friend would Oh your eyes are so pretty…like a hazelnut…You’re glittering, or just constantly bringing up my body or lingering on my silhouette too longingly). When I dress up, it is the way I like to dress up. Okay, sometimes I’ll wear something a little low cut and tight if I want to get in somewhere for free. But I dress to express myself, whether it’s that skin-tight purple dress, or that white button down I got from Goodwill, or that ugly grey sweater you and Jen hate.  

Another moment of awareness was when I was in Montreal with Daouii, and there was this annoying guy who was being weird and clingy, and he said, “You dance so sexually.” That was just a weird thing to say, but also, I dance for me. I dance for me. Sometimes it’s sexy, but I’m not dancing to arouse anyone. I’m dancing because this is the way my body likes to move. I’m not dancing for you. I’m not dancing for you.

I bring this up because I just watched this video on Buzzfeed about pole dancers trying to break the stereotype, and I relate to it so much. I love dancing. Zumba is the highlight of my week (and now NewBody and Sh’BAM), and I literally just love going to the gym in my sweat pants and sports bra, and losing all my inhibitions, and shaking my hips in front of a mirror in a room full of old ladies. Sometimes I even come home and pull up some choreography on YouTube and dance in my underwear. I love it. I love it. And I’m not doing it for a guy.

I’m just tired of thinking that I should be. When my mom and I were talking about 50 Shades, she was going off about how she hopes Dakota Johnson got paid well because she was so naked. But…Jamie Dornan was just as naked (although she did criticize him for doing this movie while having a wife), but you know, he’s a guy. He doesn’t lose any shame. Channing Tatum can make a movie about stripping and its chill. No slut shaming attached.

But let’s get out of this bullshit white neoliberal feminist view point. I am tired of women’s bodies being ANYONE’S. I started research for my essay on human trafficking in my city, and it’s actually fucking ridiculous that just as I look up this article about a woman talking about being exploited sexually, physically and mentally abused, and having to drink/drug herself to be able to go on stage and dance. She said she couldn’t go a whole day without crying for six months. So, you know, in juxtaposition, this Buzzfeed video seems kind of ironic.

i'm feeling a little down, and I know it's a combo of exam stress, the fact that I haven't been taking my Zoloft with food, reading Gone Girl, all these black people dying at the hands of police, and the fact that I keep waking up at 4 am in the middle of the night because my tooth aches from the filling.

I was talking with some friends that said, "when a person buys you too many things, they start to have power over you," and I think that's how I feel. I think how unhappy my mom was that one night I told you about, and now I think about all the money her boyfriend is throwing at the situation and I don't know how I feel.

honestly part of me would just feel better staying in London or something. I wanted to pretend for a moment that I was the beautiful smart rich girl that I want to be, the girl that casually runs into all the boys of her past light as air, an instagram perfect moment in perfect lighting in brand name dresses.

but the whole thing also makes me want to split up, the part of me that doesn't really want to go to panama for me, but to prove something to everyone else. because there is a large part of me that wants to return to huron, beach-blown and tanned, muscled and slim smelling like salt-water and sunshine, looking straight through all my enemies, straight through every person that probably has something to say about me under their breath.

there's a part of me that's so fucking enraged at this society that I want  burn it to the fucking ground. but there's that other part that wants to join it, all frat boys in ralph lauren, snorting coke and drinking out of champagne flutes. I just feel like i'm coming undone in a sense, and I just don't know when it started happening. I think i'm starting to be afraid of being an activist, because I can't enjoy anything anymore. everything around me is asphyxiating, my hyper awareness of injustice, of the colour of each person's skin and their socioeconomic background.

“Expectation really is the root of all evil.” That’s what you wrote.

I think that’s what I’m finding more and more, lately. I told you how one of my closest friends cancelled on my Thanksgiving dinner, and it really shouldn’t matter, like, at all. I have my two housemates, who are literally like my cool older siblings (last night we got shitfaced and talked about how fucked up America is), my friend Jan who has always been there for me, even when I’ve treated him like shit. He’s the one who helps me do practical things, like move, and put together book shelves, and invite me to family dinners. And Christine, who is this lovely international student, who seems to really appreciate the invite.

But instead I’m thinking of all the people who can’t come (you, Jen, Hamza, & NB co., Bro & Liz, any of my blood family), the people who aren’t coming (Tina, my friend David who has a legit excuse, my friend Fatima who only calls me when she’s bored at work, ergo hasn’t even bothered replying to the texts I’ve sent her about Thanksgiving, the string of people I invited last minute who already have plans or homework).

For me family times are always weird. I’ve always felt on the outside looking in with them. My immediate family has always just been me and my mom. Christmas is always this awkward show of me opening gifts she bought me, like I’m still 3, birthdays and Thanksgivings and Mother’s Days are sometimes just journeys to church and then a fancy brunch or dinner at a hotel or restaurant.

With my “extended” family, that is to say, my grandparents, have always been odd. My mother has five siblings, most of whom are single and childless. The first few Thanksgivings with my Bahamian family, I was always the only person from my generation, with a rotation of super old people who usually didn’t have interest in me. My grandmother always had people around her though, and my grandparents lived in a small house, so things were busy, and it was always nice. Then my grandmother died, and we finally moved into that big house she worked so hard for, and things started to fall away. Without my grandmother’s loud voice, and her cake business, there were never people walking in and out. It was quiet. Two of my uncles sometimes don’t even eat at the dinner table; they’ll eat in the kitchen nook, for some weird reason. My aunt, my mother’s only sister, would cook, but opt to eat in the family room, instead of at the table.

But things got better. One of my uncles got married and had a child, one had a girlfriend. Dinners were a bit better. But the one with the child alternates holidays, so that his son can visit his maternal family, and the one with the girlfriend broke up with her, and fought with my grandfather. In this manner, things slowly whittle away.

But family dinners, have more often than not, felt like looking at some ancient artifact as it decays, and every time they happen, I still go back to feeling like a shy 8-year-old, only at the dinner as decoration, silent in her Sunday best.

The first time people really started inviting me to Thanksgiving dinners was last year. That’s not saying much; thinking back I had only spent two Thanksgivings here prior, one during which I lived with my godmother, and the one which was the massive failure – my friend invited me the night before, and after I accepted, proceeded to tell me it was too late, that she should have invited me weeks ago when her mother told me I could come along. She told me this while I texted her from the grocery store to see if any of her family was allergic to plants, because I wanted to buy plant for appreciation. I don’t know if it was that anecdote, or me opening up about my depression to people, or what, but the next year, I had two invites, which was great. One from my friend Sonja, and one from her ex, Jan, who I still talked with.

The thing about going to other people’s Thanksgiving dinners is that you usually end up feeling left out. I’m a black woman, so it’s rare that I don’t feel left out, but Thanksgiving makes it more apparent.

I went to both Sonja and Jan’s Thanksgiving and I was left out in different ways that were beyond their control. At Sonja’s, I was the only non-Serbian person there. It’s really nice because I love experiencing culture, and her family is sweet to me, but it makes me super nostalgic about not having the same thing. Jan’s is slightly more diverse. His whole family is Filipino, but his sister’s boyfriends are a variety of Asian. Jan himself invited I think three or four friends, myself, and the rest of whom were boys, all of whom were Asian (excluding one), and I had to deal with them playing car video games, and being the only friend of Jan’s who got subjected to the “What are you intentions with Jan?” joke, because clearly, because I am a female, I must have non-platonic intentions.

This year, finally, I can do my own Thanksgiving. I live in a great house with lovely housemates who suggested the idea. My financial situation is a bit better, so I had the money to spend on food. I’m under the influence of our beautiful friend Jennifer L___, who showed me the important link between food and friendship; honestly, I don’t think I would have made dinner without having experienced hers.

I planned it out. I decided on the sides I would make, I went grocery shopping first thing on Saturday to miss the rush. I bought pumpkin cider and wine (which was initially supposed to be a gift, but I changed my mind and decided it would be for my guests). I carefully picked the people I would invite, dreamed of the board games we would play, and the movies we would watch, and the general holiday cheer that would be spread to all. I even knew which sweater I would wear, how awesome it would be to be able to greet everyone and ask them what they wanted to drink. I was planning how I was going to spend last night by keeping in mind the fact that I would have to wake up early to cook! (luckily, I back tracked that and had an amazing night anyway)

But it sort of fell apart, for reasons that I’ve already been over. I mean, it hasn’t COMPLETELY fallen apart, two of my friends are coming over, my housemates will be here, I have lots of food to enjoy (there are going to be leftovers for the whole week!). But having people cancel or not reply or have other plans has kind of sucked. I had this idea that I wouldn’t have enough food or drinks, but now I’m happy that I didn’t buy more stuff.

I think the thing that blows, that always blows, is the not living in the here-and-now shit. Like, honestly? I wish you could be here. I wish Bro and Liz could be here. I wish North Bay could be here, or my mom. Sometimes, I think it’s so fucking pathetic that whenever something happens in my life, the first person I text is almost ALWAYS someone who doesn’t live in the city. It’s you, or Bro, or my friend Ellie who lives in Quebec, or my friend Paige in Michigan. There is a long list of people I will text before I text someone in London.

I always try to soldier through, like my graduation, when the only person that showed up was my friend Heather. I’m used to being alone, and I’m really good at it, so I try to suck it up, but sometimes it doesn’t work.

I told Tina that her homework excuse was dumb, because last night our friend Malena had an event, and she would have gone if she hadn’t gotten back from Toronto earlier. Tina said she wanted to go and comfort Malena over her student Visa getting rejected, or some bullshit, when Tina and I had complained about not being invited initially at all. And the thing is, Malena has a lot of friends. Malena has friends for days. She created an event on facebook, had all the properly filtered photos of her gorgeous china sets, had at least 20-30 people at the dinner, even had a proper performance for the night. This is why I didn’t care. Yes, Malena’s Visa got rejected, it sucks. But she has tons of people who have her back. Tina spends maybe a tenth of the time she spends with Malena as she spends with me. Malena is the girl who posted a picture we took of the three of us on Tina’s birthday, and instead of captioning it, “Happy birthday, Tina!” captioned it, “Friday night! :*”

So why didn’t it occur to Tina, that maybe, just maybe, on some level, I miss a lot of people right now. I didn’t get to drive two hours to see my family for the weekend. My mom doesn’t just pop over with watermelons, and shit, like I haven’t seen my mom since August, and I haven’t seen a lot of people who I deeply care about for longer than that. Why didn’t it occur to Tina that even though, yes, I have my housemates, maybe I wanted a little more, maybe I wanted a nice group of people so that I could feel like people actually cared about me on this stupid family holiday? Tina is usually really good about stuff like that, like on my birthday, so I just expected her to get it. But she didn’t. And it sucks.

I’m sorry, I just want to take a moment to be a brat, but it sucks. It sucks that so many people aren’t coming to my dinner. It sucks that all the people who I wanted to visit me on my birthday/homecoming didn’t. I’m sorry, I am actually really, really bitter about that. I don’t blame you, because it was out of your control, and at the time, everyone’s excuses made sense. But it sucks. I know it was like “high expectations” to expect everyone to go out of their way to come visit me instead of having a reunion in Toronto, but I wanted that. It would have felt really nice.

I’m very talented at not making a big deal out of things, because it’s just in my nature, but sometimes I just want things to be about me, in that really dumb, shallow way. Maybe I’m 20 and should stop expecting that, but it’s like when I turned 18, I spent the whole day helping with my cousin’s birthday, and then listening to my mom and my aunt bitch well into the night, as if it wasn’t my fucking birthday, and as if I didn’t want to celebrate my new-found legality. Now that my cousin was born on the day before me, my own birthday doesn’t even feel like my own, and that used to be my oasis in a land of empty family holidays and holidays about couples (admittedly, though, things like you video made it really great).

Sometimes, like, when I think about how we celebrated Hamza’s birthday, I wonder if anyone would have done that if it had been me instead of him, you know?

I think it would have happened in North Bay – I think we all loved each other so much (and I still feel really proud of when Rafia said that I should be the one who distracts him because we’re the closest). But like, things like that aren’t real life things. You, me, Jen, Hamza, Rafia, Oleanna, Becca…as far as I’m aware, none of us are in a situation right now, where we would have friends kind and considerate enough to sneak into our houses and decorate it and have a surprise birthday party. And shit like that just blows so hard.

It’s so stupid, and sometimes I hate myself for it, but I have this on-off switch of being a super independent bitch, to being this insecure child who’s desperate for love and attention. And I think that’s why I can get so fixated on trying to wheel a boy: because I just want to have someone to appreciate the love I want to give AND receive.

There’s this Australian term I used to hold up as a child: “gone walkabout”. It’s the idea that once you reach a certain age, you have to leave home and travel around until you find yourself. Like your “self” isn’t this solid given definition, this thing you’ve always had, will always have, and have grown up with, but rather this separate entity, like Peter Pan and his shadow.

Getting really, truly fucked up, is the opposite of that. It’s like running away from yourself for the night, losing yourself, giving yourself a vacation, and just seeing where it leaves you in the morning. It’s like switching bodies with your crazy best friend, and then being really puzzled when you wake up and your room is smashed, your bank account drained, and your body aching. There’s this frontier of possible things people will do, these “sane” outcomes, but as soon as a person starts drinking, that’s out the window. Things that seem so laughable so dumb and ridiculous and impossible when you’re sober become realities, whether it’s texting that person you shouldn’t text, or throwing up in your handbag, or stripping naked. I know it’s terrible, but I love that feeling. I love not having to care for a night, and having this simple excuse for acting like a total asshole: I was drunk.

Hangovers always have the same feeling. One of the nice things about me being older, is that now I can separate sadness from myself. It’s just like a pill lodged in the back of my throat, a bitter feeling coating my teeth. I suddenly miss everything in a way totally diametric to how I usually do. When I’m sober I always complain about things not being better, about not having more friends, more interesting things to do, an in-theatres-now kind of life. It’s the sort of missing that gets exhausting, the sort of missing that is rarely truly satisfied (and even when it is, I spent the whole time being so sad about when it will end). When I’m hungover, the things I miss are attainable things, like my mother, being younger, old friends, old boyfriends, just watching movies, or being held. When I’m hungover, there seems to be something quintessentially beautiful about life, and my sadness is that I can’t even see it myself half the time, that there are so many beautiful moments in my life that I don’t even properly appreciate most of the time because I’m so narcissistic.

There are so many things I miss. I think it’s a side effect of how much I’ve moved, and how many lifetimes I’ve jumped through.

I remember two very specific dreams as a child.

One of them I only had once. It was a dream about leaving one of my best friends (I guess, my first best friend, really). I don’t remember the details, but I remember waking up crying. But when the time came to say goodbye I didn’t shed a tear. I remember leaving: it was Halloween. Halloweens have actually probably been the strangest holidays for me: three of them stand out. Not going to talk about them though. It’s just weird, looking back, how my subconscious seemed to be so vitally aware of how much I would miss this friend, and how missing friends seems to be a recurring theme.

The second one is a nightmare. I used to have nightmares a lot as a child. My mom’s room was across this hallway, and I remember walking through it so many nights, and banging on her door for her to open up.

The dream that sticks out is this dream I had after we bought my dog. I had a dream that she had been stolen, and we were looking everywhere for her, and every place we looked, this same man was there, each time in a different disguise, and I knew he stole her, I knew it, but for some reason it couldn’t be proved, and out of some sort of sick sadism he just followed us, to torment me. Looking back I wonder if this is an incarnation of my father. Not that my dog was ever stolen.

When I think about the things I miss and the little memories from my childhood, it becomes increasingly clear how difficult it is to know any one person. I’ve always thought I had a monopoly on complexities, or at least I did when I was younger, but I’ve become wiser now. Especially in the past month, there were two jarring episodes.

It’s like one fucking thirty and I still haven’t written for today, ughhhhhhhhhh.

Okay, so basically, I’ve been talking to you anyway throughout today. And I already told you I didn’t have creative juices for and Andy portrait. And I properly spazzed about some random I met at a party that I don’t even know.

But now it’s almost one fucking thirty and it’s rainy and windy and I think about an hour or maybe an hour and a half ago, I messaged my friend Fatima on facebook and we had this big long talk and it was really good, but I felt really…terrible.

Fatima, who turned 29 this summer, told me that shit had sort of gone downhill since I’d been away this summer. She broke up with her boyfriend, and fought with her sister, and spent a lot of this summer being really fucking depressed because she didn’t have her shit together or whatever.

And, you see, it’s always things like that which put my whole life into perspective about the things I complain about and whether or not they’re really valid to complain about.

I fucking love Fatima. She and I struck up a conversation when she complimented my afro and we bonded over both having done the Big Chop and our mothers’ respective disgusted reactions. Fatima sings fucking beautifully and she’s so fucking smart and non-bullshit. She threw a party at the end of the semester, and we all kind of buzzed around her as the center (the way we used to buzz around Hamza).

Fatima is just hilarious and brilliant and talented, and whenever I see her it just sort of lights me up, and spending time talking with her on the phone (how old school!) while the wind lashed at my curtains and I could hear her trying to spark a lighter, in the same city, but worlds away.

I don’t know. It rang so deeply true. How we went from like, this super light talk about boys and shit, into her talking about not being able to get out of bed for weeks on end.

It’s so weird, because those are things I used to relate to, and now I feel so far away from it. But it just sort of feels like Robin Williams’ death, you know, how the brightest people are sometimes the saddest, and I regret not being a better friend, even though I know feasibly there’s nothing I can do.

She asked me where I wanted to be when I was her age, twenty-nine (Adam asked me a similar question, nearly exactly a year ago: “Where do you see yourself in ten years?”) and before riddling off this fly-by answer about being a rich and famous novelist with lots of hot men throwing themselves at me and lots of drugs and alcohol at my disposal, I took this really long moment. Because I don’t really know.

Me and Bro had this talk about growing up. You probably saw Becca’s status today: “I deleted my tumblr. This is growing up.” Or something like that. Anyway, I told Bro that I felt like I was growing up – I was turning fucking twenty and I had adult friends (like him), and he said, something along the lines of that he doesn’t think he’s going to be a “grown up” until he’s making decisions that line up with his personal values.

I don’t know what growing up means to me personally. I keep trying to think of it, but I don’t really know for sure. And I feel the pressure growing, that whole, “hitting the sweet spot between 20-24”, but, well. Will I? Does it matter? Where do I see myself in ten years?