Raw (Winter 2023 Magazine)

Feature

Byline

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Table of contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 2 Letter from the editors 4 The anatomy lesson 5 Reaching the dripping point 7 Six shovels 10 Loss, love, lineage, language 13 Body and silhouettes 14 Pray don’t talk to me about the weather 16 Bodies 19 Pulling back the sheets 22 Yearning for stasis 25 The root of it all 28 When I fall in love, I risk drowning 29 The case for emotion in a rational world 32 Shoulders worn raw 39 Tattoos

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40 Dissecting death 44 Houses in the snow 46 Mother 48 Broken record: A disability retrospective 50 Misery meat 52 Being on the right foot with someone who’s missing one 54 On death cafés and how to live 56 I’m cracked 58 Going nowhere to get somewhere 60 Purple hyacinths 62 The flavour of favourites 64 Lending an ear 67 On the inside 71 End credits

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Letter from the editors

As an artist, there is something so unsettling about leaning into authenticity over aesthetic. I like it when art’s pretty. I want people to look at art and think it’s beautiful — I don’t want them to look at it and think they know something about me.

The creative process of making RAW was a journey that took leaning into the unfiltered truth. That’s uncomfortable, because the unfiltered truth doesn’t always look nice. Authenticity can mean ugliness, and that wasn’t the kind of art I want to make.

When assigning visuals for this magazine, I wanted to make sure all of its aesthetics were still traditionally pretty — and part of me, as I’m writing this, still wants to go in and make it more polished. However, finding beauty in authenticity is an art in itself, which is something I’ve discovered along the way.

I wasn’t originally expecting to make any of the magazine’s visuals. But after a last-minute design crisis, I found myself illustrating an article that I’d never read before. It was a personal reflection, and it was so incredibly vulnerable — but I related to it much more than I expected. It was pretty, but the authenticity of it also made sure it would stick with me. I decided it might be time for me to give this kind of art a chance.

While making this magazine, I’ve had the chance to understand contributors’ stories through an incredibly direct lens that I wouldn’t have had access to otherwise, and I’ve had the privilege to interpret those stories through my illustrations. It was eye-opening.

My perspective has shifted, and I’ve realised that sometimes the unfiltered truth is more impactful than an ideal image. Now, when I’m making art, I want to offer readers the most “real” design and visuals possible to accompany the stories they’re digesting. I want the intimacy of this magazine’s pieces to translate into their visual representations on the page.

So when you pick up this magazine, I want to challenge you to shift perspectives like I did. I want you to seriously really contemplate whether you’d rather pick up: something that’s real, or something that’s pretty. ­— Makena Mwenda, Creative Director 2

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If you want the truth, making this magazine has been brutal.

It hasn’t been brutal in the ways that former editors have described to me, like sleeping on the floor in the hallway because you’re starting production at 8:00 am the next day, or cramming all the magazine’s copy editing and design in the week before it’s supposed to be sent to the printer. It’s not the kind of brutal that I promised myself I would avoid when I went into this.

It’s been a new kind of brutal. The brutal of perfectionism: of spending too long editing a piece because you want it to read the way you know it can read, the way it sounds in your head. The brutal that comes of every page being its own living thing.

Ultimately, the reason I cared so much about making this magazine beautiful was because I wanted to make it something that inspires you to write. I’m a creative writing student. When I was on the GO train this morning, one of my friends sent me a piece she’d written for an upcoming workshop, and when I saw it I couldn’t believe that she had written something so beautiful. When I finished reading it, I immediately got out a piece of paper and started planning what I was going to submit for the workshop, because I wanted to make something beautiful enough that it was worthy of being published with her piece.

Initially, RAW was supposed to be about exploring topics that might be more taboo, that people might not pay attention to. And I thought

that exploring these niches would be something you couldn’t find anywhere else, and that’s what would make this magazine raw. But going into the process, I learned what raw really meant to me — going through the process of creating things and knowing that you could have done certain aspects of them better, and having to realize that and still put it out in the world.

You have to get rid of some of your standards when making art. That’s something I haven’t admitted to myself before this semester and before starting this magazine. What we create doesn’t have to be perfect — we don’t need to be satisfied with every word, with every pixel. Sometimes things can just exist, and we can be happy with them — and people can still take something from them.

Even though you might not be fully happy with what you’ve made, someone else might come along and think, “This is incredible, I wouldn’t change a thing.” Just because you notice problems in your own art doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a place in the world, and you shouldn’t deny someone else a chance to see it Whether it’s a picture, an article, or the magazine’s design, I want you to find something in this magazine and think, “Wow, this makes me want to write something.” I want you to write that something — and I want you to put it beside your copy of RAW. — Alexa DiFrancesco, Magazine Editor

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The anatomy lesson

The anatomy lesson Writer: Andrea Zhao Visuals: Jadine Ngan and Andrea Zhao Yesterday, I started my surgery rotation.

At four in the morning, they cracked open a boy And nothing but goodness spilled out; He was little more than a bleeding heart, Open wounds and sorry fissures, Pulsing veins cerulean cold; I watched the real doctors at work, Exacting glistening shards Of white-glass windowpane; I watched him on the table, Anesthetized and tender; Pictured gentleness seeping from his body With his saccharine youth and his headstrong hope.

I wonder if he ever became a man, Yearning for formula cars and football floodlights, Downing gasoline, crunching cigars for breakfast, If he grew too old for woodchip playgrounds, Monkey-bar blisters and half-winged toy planes; I wonder if he had a father to shout and spurn, To teach him violence as the greatest love; As if mine had ever chased the fondness from my bones Ever killed my listless longing; Now that I hold heartbeats in my freezing hands He tells me he is proud at last, In staccato syllables, discontent and bitter; I smile back even though I know better.

I had a body before the absolution of my very being.

A vessel of pre-packaged scalpels, Painting tape and cold-drip coffee, Sugar-scorch charisma and futile hubris.

I know now that blood is just a metaphor They did the wirework when I was seventeen; Left me with circuits for veins, Steel hammer for a heart, My pulse a mere physiological calculus, A kick at the hinge of my ribcage Where my body meets my bones.

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Reaching the dripping point

Writer: Maya Morriswala Illustrator: Jessica Lam I would characterize myself as a lonely person — a shadow of a human being, incapable of maintaining social connection and unsure of whether it is the other person’s fault. That’s not to say that I’m not a good time; on the contrary, I could give Chandler Bing a run for his money when it comes to one liners.

Still, as I watch my acquaintances chat in front of me with ease, make plans together, and comfort each other, I can’t help but feel out of place. I’m Chandler, a sit-com character, a fish out of water struggling to make friends in the real world. I’m stuck on a level that everyone else passed ages ago. I never was — and will never be — enough. I’ve felt this way for as long as I can remember.

I’m a glass of water. People think the glass is empty because the water is so clear.

In April 2022, I began volunteering for a text-based crisis line because I thought I had conquered these feelings and could help guide others through theirs. In my mind, I had mastered emotional

self-regulation and coping.

Whenever I would start feeling sad, I’d distract myself. I felt as resilient as I appeared to be. I bought the perception of myself that other people seemed to have.

On the crisis line, I text people who reach out for support on a variety of issues, from homelessness and trauma to mental illness and general stress. Most of my interactions involve affirming the texters’ feelings and simply being a good listener. This volunteer work has been deeply rewarding, and it has provided me with a sense of purpose.

Because the lifeline serves primarily marginalized groups, including LGBTQ+ individuals, I can connect with many texters and their problems. When a nonbinary person reaches out about gender dysphoria around their voice, I can more easily validate them in relevant and meaningful ways than a responder without that lived experience.

However, as I have completed more interactions, I’ve realized that what I thought was sympathy for the texters is more like empathy. More often than not, my inner monologue

isn’t, “What does this person need to hear?” but rather, “What would I want to hear if I were in their situation?”

Drip.

Adopting this mindset can be helpful as a crisis responder because your responses can feel more personal and real.

On the other hand, however, feeling empathy is energy depleting and troubling when you resonate with darker thoughts.

Boundaries are the foundation of an effective relationship between a crisis responder and a texter. Texting provides a physical boundary, but emotional boundaries can be hard to maintain.

Drip.

Reading someone’s thoughts — rather than hearing their words — can make passive negative emotions like hopelessness feel all the more hopeless. When someone verbally tells you that they hate themselves, you can distinguish their self-loathing from yours. You hear it in their words, their cadence, and their voice — not yours. However, when someone texts you the same thing, the emotional line between you and them blurs.

You mentally read their words

— but it’s in your cadence and voice. It’s much harder to push down any feelings those words trigger.

When texters tell me they feel unseen, unheard, and ignored, I don’t have to pretend.

I don’t have to take the time to figure out how to put myself in their shoes. I experience their feelings as I read them. The words on the screen mirror my own internal dialogues.

Drip.

Drip.

Drip.

It is one thing to fill a glass when it’s empty. It’s another to fill one that is already full.

Being a crisis responder did not cause my mental health to decline. It expedited the inevitable — a few seemingly inconsequential drops of water in a glass already threatening to spill over.

By October 2022, my glass overflowed. I felt worse than ever before. I realized that I had merely acclimated to — not overcome — the lonely feeling. It never left. I had ‘thoughts and prayers’ regarding my mental health, refusing to solve, or even acknowledge, the root of the problem.

Some people told me they

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Helplines

still thought my glass was empty because the water was so clear. Others said that a little extra water is okay — healthy, even. It motivates you to excel.

What successful person hasn’t been waterlogged every so often?

I tried to convince myself that there was no such thing as too much water. After all, spilled water does not make a mess. Maya, you were raised feeling dehydrated, so why are you complaining about having a little too much now?

I felt every negative emotion under the sun, putting me in the same dark space many of the helpline’s texters found themselves in. Few people seemed to notice and even fewer seemed to care — though this may not be a reflection of reality so much as my fear of a recurring pattern repeating once again. Often, feeling down isolates you as much as you already feel isolated.

So, no, I have not conquered my fundamental unhappiness; no, I have not mastered emotional self-regulation and coping; and, no, I am not all that resilient.

That being said, my crisis response volunteering has also been a saving grace. Anyone can use the strategies and resources that I give to texters

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— including me. Who would’ve thought? I’ve learned to recognize the signs of ‘bad’ turning to ‘worse,’ and worse turning to ‘worst.’ I can monitor how much emotional turmoil and stress I’m under and ensure my glass doesn’t overflow.

My lows are less low, and I have learned to celebrate and savour my highs.

But, Maya, how does learning emotional regulation solve the melodrama you described in the first two paragraphs?

Well, it doesn’t. I still feel like Chandler Bing without a laugh track, like I’m invisible.

The difference, however, is that I’ve finally put my thoughts into words. The crisis line’s texters may thank me, but they are the ones who’ve shown me the courage and value of sharing feelings. They’ve inspired me to finally put into words what has been ricocheting in my head for as long as I can remember.

I know someone reading this feels, has felt, or will feel the way I do. This is your sign to confide in someone.

The weight of your feelings lessens considerably when they’re not stuck in your head. And maybe your courage will inspire someone else to engage with and share their feelings.

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Writer: Alexa DiFrancesco Illustrator: Makena Mwenda Content warning: This article describes death.

When we get the call that my aunt Cathy has died, my mother screams until her throat becomes sore. It’s just past midnight and my brother and I are walking upstairs to our bedrooms; we hear the concealed noises of her screams.

We whisper in the hallway, considering that my mother’s had a nightmare, refuting that she and my father could be having sex.

I get into my pyjamas with my bedroom door closed to drown out the sound; my father calls me outside into the hallway. My family stands together and they tell me and my brother that our aunt has passed away. In between choking, my mother asks if I want to talk about it.

I don’t. Five years after I was born, Cathy received a lung cancer diagnosis; she was given eight months to live. 15 years later, the cancer spreads to her other lung. She tells the family that she’s in remission; as she coughs at birthday parties and barbecues, we speculate about whether or not the cancer has returned.

Cathy opts to live out her final days at home instead of at a hospital; months after her diagnosis, the tubes of an oxygen tank sprawl across the floors of her house. When we speak with her, she rocks from discomfort; my mother, the one who shops for groceries for her, has bought Cathy and her husband, my grandmother’s brother, three jumbo bottles of Advil in the past month. Her husband takes them to sleep.

Cathy passes on the second day of February. She collapses when trying to climb the stairs to bed. On her last day, my

grandmother brings Cathy the cell phone that she’d gotten for Christmas and Cathy gives her a tutorial on how to use it.

Cathy’s best friend brings Cathy her favourite meal, a lobster roll from Subway. My mother and I arrive with groceries and offer to return unwanted Christmas gifts to Costco. Cathy’s daughters, both my age, have returned to their university towns for the winter term; it pains me that my last conversation with her happens after her daughters’.

Hours after her death, we’re alone in her home. My uncle has given my grandparents a key to his house and his alarm code.

They’ve been staying there all day in case the phone rings; we relieve them of their guarding and let them go home to shower.

My father takes out the garbage while my brother washes dishes.

We hear the stroke of the clock in the living room; my mother says that whenever she visited, it reminded her of a countdown.

I sit on the step that Cathy died on, swinging my legs.

We wear red, her favourite colour, to her viewing. It happens one week later, on Chinese New Year, so it feels like we really aren’t mourning, but celebrating new life. My mother attempts to buy red roses, but her daughters tell us that they want the bouquet they bought to be the only red one. We gossip about it on the car ride home.

People tell my uncle that Cathy looks good, lively even.

The cosmetologist has done a good job. I wonder if they’re lying, or if they haven’t looked close enough. Her once puffy stomach is flat, but appears to have been padded with flimsy material. The roots of her brown hair are white, seemingly from visible dry shampoo. Her complexion has a grey tint, and whoever moulded her chin has made it seem like she was a botched

Six shovels

plastic surgery patient. But she’s wearing her reading glasses and her signature scarlet sweater, so I try to ignore the fact that I’d read online that dead people’s clothing is stitched onto them.

Cathy’s funeral is the next day, on my brother’s birthday.

“I’m sorry for ruining your special day,” my uncle apologizes to my brother at the cemetery.

We’re standing over Cathy’s grave, waiting for the coffin to be lowered. My brother blushes, embarrassed to be born on the only day that our city’s cemetery had an opening.

— My boots are full of snow when my grandmother calls about Robert, Cathy’s brother in law.

I’ve just bustled through the door, having gotten home from a 10-hour workday. I ask my mother whether or not the leftover takeout is still in the fridge.

“It’s going to be an awful year,” she responds.

Robert’s not my family — I’ve mingled with him before, at Christmas and Easter parties at Cathy’s house. I’ve made fun of his illegible tattoos with my cousins, mocked the biker gang that he’s part of, and gossiped about how his only daughter brought home men ten years her senior. Most recently, I’d seen him at the open house after the funeral. He’d helped make sandwiches and wore an oversized black fedora indoors.

My grandmother tells us that Robert’s had a heart attack at a motorcycle show; he fell forward onto the bleachers and landed on his head. He is being treated 200 kilometres away from home, but the family will sleep over at the hospital, because the next 24 hours are crucial.

“He’s not dying,” I say, but less than an hour later, we get the call and we know. No one screams or cries — partially because we didn’t know him

well, partially because we’re too exhausted. Instead, we turn to the calendar and count the remaining months of the year.

— On my one-year anniversary with my boyfriend, my father’s sister calls the house. She lives in Grand Bend with her husband, where they could afford to move to because of an inheritance they asked for prematurely. It’s 2:00 pm on a Tuesday; my father is at work, but my mother is working remotely, so she picks up the phone. I’m lifting weights beside her; thanks to COVID-19, my makeshift gym is beside her makeshift office.

“Lia?” She’s calling from her cellphone and her voice is so frail that my mother is unsure whether or not it’s her. My mother asks if everything’s okay; my aunt insists on speaking with my father. My mother repeats her question.

My aunt had been experiencing minor shoulder pain since the previous November but we chalked it up to her working at Sobeys at the age of 66. My dad, 13 years younger than her, told me she’s always spent money recklessly — years ago, she and her husband opened up an antique store, which they later sold because they’d spent all their sales money at the casino. Two decades later, their house is cluttered with stock they couldn’t sell before the store closed. To regain their income, Lia has been working well into what should have been her retirement age. When her husband became handicapped,she opted for double the hours.

Lia’s symptoms weren’t of old age — they were of cancer in her liver, in her kidneys, in her lungs, and in her bones. She quit her cashier gig to focus on treatment at the London Health Sciences Centre, a hospital 45 minutes away but still the one

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Six shovels

closest to her. My mother is in denial and wants Lia to call my father after work so he can know the details.

“I can stay home tonight,” I tell my mother after the call. I’m supposed to have dinner to celebrate my anniversary, but now I’m heating up. A glance in the mirror tells me that my skin is angry and patchy bumps have formed along my cheekbones. My mother offers me milk, but tells me to get dressed.

“I can stay home tonight,” I repeat to my father before leaving the house. My winter jacket is zipped up and my boyfriend’s car idles in the driveway. But I’m worried; my father’s sister is the only living family relative he has — he’ll never express whatever emotions he’s feeling. I want to be physically near him, to watch him and somehow protect him, as if my presence would stop the cancer from eating his sister.

My father pauses, kissing me on the forehead. Tears are forming in his eyes as he says, “You can’t put your life on hold because of other people.” This is a phrase he’ll repeat weeks later, too, when Lia’s oncologist informs her that her body isn’t responding to chemotherapy and she has one month to live.

It’s April then, and he’s asked me and my brother to make the trip with him to Grand Bend to say goodbye. In the car, he grumbles about how irresponsible it was for his sister to move away from family. To distract him, we crack jokes about the San Pellegrino and fried octopus she’d requested at the hospital. “She can’t be that bad if her priorities are straight,” we say, remembering the time that she’d yelled at a waiter for bigger plates at Congee Queen. We sign her get-well card and doodle a bottle of champagne on it.

But when I say goodbye to Lia, I don’t see a hungry, frivolous woman; I notice the weight she’s lost and how her legs boast yellow rings. I see that she’s unable to sit upright without help, and I ignore when she soils herself because she’s unable to hold her bladder until the nurses can carry her to the washroom.

And when I leave, she reaches out to me.

I’m reluctant to take her hand. I’m scared that it won’t be strong, like the hands that used to shamelessly flaunt their blue-painted fingernails at funerals. “Let her hold your hand,” my father urges, and I’m immediately ashamed. Her fingertips are cold; it’s as if I’m already touching her shell.

“I love you, Aunty Lia,” I manage to get out. I want to continue to protect myself, to 8

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convince anyone who’s listening that she will recover. “I’ll see you soon.”

Nine days before her death, she calls me for my birthday. She’s strong and energetic because her doctors have prescribed her a daily dose of fentanyl, but I don’t mind that it’s because of the drug. This would be the last time I’d speak with her, but I’ve convinced myself that she’s healing, that she’s grown more resilient, that soon I’d have my

aunt back. “I love you, hon,” she answers right as she ends the call. I don’t have time to respond. “I’ll love you forever,” I think.

— From Monday to Friday, at exactly 12:30 pm, my mother phones home. In her contract, her lunch break runs from 12:00–1:00 pm; because she prefers her afternoons to be shorter, she’s somehow convinced the ladies she works with to cover for her until 1:30 pm. I receive the daily call as soon as she

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reaches the parking lot, either driving to Loblaws Superstore or the Oshawa Centre.

“Hi, pretty,” she’ll say, using her nickname for me. I’ll know she’s distracted because I’ll hear her turn on her car engine.

“How’s your day?”

“Good, how’s yours?” I’ll answer back, just as distracted.

Sometimes, it’s because she’s called mid conversation, other times, it’s because my father’s working from home, and I’m waiting to use the microwave at a time that won’t interfere with his internet signal. Either way, it’s because I secretly wish she’d stop calling with nothing to say.

“Colleen died,” she answers, and I don’t know what to say.

For years, Colleen shared the same office room as my mother; until her retirement last year, my mother would often telephone or return home crying, often asking for my father’s blessing to switch companies because she was being bullied by Colleen.

Today, my mother doesn’t cry from frustration or self sorrow; she cries to mourn. I listen to the static on the other end of the line until her car’s engine falls silent.

— I’m sitting in a Jack Astor’s booth when my childhood best friend tells me that there’s something I need to know. It’s the middle of July, and we’ve been passive-aggressively fighting since my birthday because she’d cancelled on celebrating with me at the last minute. I’ve been avoiding looking at her all evening; I’ve only spoken directly to our two other friends who have accompanied us. One of them leaves for the bathroom, the other suggests that we plan a trip to Canada’s Wonderland together. My friend bursts into tears. My eyes flutter to the pad thai that’s sitting on the plate in front of me; I know that once I look up, my world would never return to what it

was in that moment.

“He didn’t want anyone to know, but my dad died on Monday,” my friend says, and for the first time, I glance at her.

My arms have become stiff, but I hug her. She slowly tells us the details; that his symptoms started with a cough, but progressed into a cancer diagnosis. That he’s been on palliative care since Christmas, and that she’d wanted to visit me on my birthday, but he was still living at home and she wanted to spend as much time with him as she could.

I buy her boba tea that night. I listen to her describe how she and her boyfriend are on a break, and I remember her recently added Instagram photos which captured the two of them at her home. I hear about how he’d asked for permission to download dating apps while she chose photos for a slideshow for her father’s funeral. I sat in masked fury.

My mother drives us — the same girls who’d been there that night — to the funeral. I dread telling my mother about the death; she’d attended high school with my best friend’s father, and the deaths that she’d witnessed so far in the year had almost broken her. But then, I felt the pang of guilt again — I would announce news to my parents, both of whom would look at me attentively, both of whom were still alive. My friend could no longer do that.

While driving home, I practiced how I’d phrase it. I couldn’t say “Neil died,” because Neil is also my mother’s brother’s name, and I didn’t want the confusion to distress her further.

Instead, I text her in fragments throughout the night, alerting her that I have news and that I wanted to leave a day later for the cottage trip we’d planned that weekend because of unforeseen circumstances.

L ater, my mother makes me tell my uncle too, the one who was married to Cathy. I call him the next day, and I text his daughters, because we’d all been in the same elementary school classes. They accompany us to the funeral home, the same one that their mother lay in, and tears well in their eyes when they offer their condolences.

At the burial mass, my best friend sings the communion hymn. “I hope he liked it,” she tells me as we wait for the hearse procession.

— I think of all that I know like this: everyone that I’ve met is hanging from a coniferous tree. Its branches are heavy and lapsing further than a space that I know I’m aware of. I’m at the bottom.

I don’t know who’s above me, but I know that they’ve always been above me. This is how I understand myself: existing in relation to those around me.

I’m proud that I’m so sensitive

that when a branch dies, I feel it. I’m proud that, when I learn Cathy’s gone, I throw up for the next hour and shiver under my bed’s duvet until the sun rises.

This is how this piece was supposed to end: the sixth shovel was supposed to be for myself, for the slowly collapsing tree, for the burning in my chest. I finish writing in November; between that time and Cathy’s anniversary, four more people have gone. I debate whether to update my work but decide against it. It’s not that the deceased weren’t impactful — one of them is my grandmother’s brother, a man whose coffin I never thought I’d be able to look into. But I do, with a clear breath. I’m just as I was on the second of February, without thought.

“Six shovels” rolls off the tongue, right?

Sometimes, a story can just exist. This is one of those stories.

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Loss, love, lineage, language

Loss, love, lineage, language Writer: Kyla Cassandra Cortez Illustrator: Makena Mwenda Content warning: This article contains descriptions of verbal and physical abuse, and suicidal thoughts.

My heart, I never feel / I never see / I never know.

I am convinced that I am living in a simulation. Like my parents, I am incapable of feeling. Grimes captures it perfectly in “Genesis”; sometimes, I can’t tell if I’m in a dream, or if I’m living a real life. Hence, I frequently dissociate.

I begin doing or saying things that I don’t recall — and often regret. I forget to start assignments or to spend time with people that I care about. I forget that my current actions

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usually precede unsavoury consequences.

My feelings, emotions, and thoughts don’t feel real either.

I’m in a coming-of-age movie that is produced by the studio A24; the main character is cruising through the plotline with ease.

Then my emotions go off, colliding with one another. I start to believe that I am the good guy, even if I’m not. I mute the world around me.

I do things just for the sake of doing them. It’s only after everything goes wrong that I start noticing the extent of my actions. I ask myself, “What have I done?”

I can’t handle change.

From an early age, I’d been taught that any change is scary and detrimental. It must be the reason that I’ve been playing Roar’s “I Can’t Handle Change” on repeat for a while.

Every approaching day scares the shit out of me. Life’s unpredictability haunts me — not knowing if it will be the day that I get hit by a car or earn a scar on my face. One day, I’ve gained an acquaintance, then

the next day, I lose someone I care about. Some say that every day is a new beginning — yes, it is, but with significant losses.

I don’t know how to deal with change without feeling like I will make my situation worse. I digest changes like they’re losses that I can never take back or make up for.

But life changes, and I should change with it. When I do, will I lose myself again?

Will my new outlook be for the better or for the worse? Will I be able to handle what’s happening? I have a lot of questions that I can’t answer. I wish I could.

I need help — is that a bad thing to say?

I truly am my parents’ child.

I’m observing life from a new perspective now. I’m figuring out the roots of my toxic behaviours. As a child, I promised myself that I would never turn into my parents, but there’s a reason that I listen to Conan Gray’s “Family Line.”

My parents’ manipulation and violence were embedded in my mind — I thought it was

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normal. I thought that all parents repeatedly hit their children, violently curse at them, and blame them for every little problem in the world.

I’m not alone. My other relatives have gone through shit like me and even worse.

They’ve been obsessed with someone they loved, and when that person left, they were never the same. They’ve had outbursts of rage, attempts of taking their own life.

My relatives had a victim mentality growing up, and I think it’s one of the reasons why I have it too. I’m not blaming my parents or any of my family members.

It’s disheartening to know that I’ve repeated the cycle and I’ve hurt others outside of my family because I couldn’t resolve my trauma. To say that I am ashamed is an understatement, and it’s a sign for me to take accountability. It’s important for me to know the cause, so I won’t do it again.

I’m the problem, it’s me.

It’s not just my parents who are toxic — I am, too. I self-sabotage. I don’t become aware of my actions until I either realize I’ve fucked up, or when someone calls me out.

So, when I hear Taylor Swift’s “Anti-Hero,” I sink into my seat with a heavy, palpitating heart.

Am I proud that I relate to this song? Absolutely not.

It’s nice to know that I’m not alone, though. At the end of the day, celebrities are still people, and anyone can be toxic at least once in their life.

I take my anger out on others, and I feel guilty about it.

But, if I’m the problem, I must find a way to be a solution.

I’m going to have to follow through on what I say I’ll do.

Maybe I should purchase those self-help books and journals, to be aware of what I’m doing wrong. But would

they work? They do sell, so they must work somehow.

I lost a friend / I lost my mind.

Losing someone you love is painful. Living your life like they never existed is too. When I first listened to FINNEAS’ “I Lost A Friend,” it struck me hard. The person who was once my confidante is now a mere stranger that I don’t want to encounter.

Not only did I lose them — I lost myself in the process.

That’s the worst part. I wish that I could travel back in time, but I can’t.

The pang in my heart remains for a long time, until time flies and it slowly heals again. That’s what I keep telling myself — that any pain is temporary — but it’s so hard to believe because it feels so infinite. It feels like there is more fuel being added to the fire, and it’s still burning. A wave of remorse, suffering, and self-hatred intensifies by every little hurtful action I did.

admitting when I’m wrong.

Billie Eilish’s “Getting Older” has gotten me through some tough times. Admitting my mistakes is a hard thing to do, let alone making up for them. Listening to selfhelp and self-improvement podcasts is comforting, but sometimes their messages are harsh and hard to digest.

As it turns out, the victim mentality is a learned behaviour and an unhealthy coping mechanism to deal with personal issues.

Did I want to learn it? No. Did I learn it when I was growing up?

Possibly, yes.

Do I want to change that cop-

ing mechanism? Yes. I wonder if I’ll ever reach a point in my life where I can admit my wrongdoings without any overwhelming feelings of guilt. Hopefully I do, and I’ll be a better version of myself, one in which I don’t have to always think in black and white. It’s so easy to blame others, but when I’m the one to blame, I

I’m gettin’ better at

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Loss, love, lineage, language

or have changed over time, and it would be foolish of me to believe that I can revive any of them to their golden states.

I hate even thinking about it.

I hate that I have to face this version of myself, so I can heal and become better.

I hate that I have lost what were once my sources of comfort and peace, because of all the bullshit I could not deal with on my own.

That’s just how it goes I’ll give ROLE MODEL some credit here: “that’s just how it goes” helps me accept losing people.

How do others move on?

Seriously.

Do they just keep facing the sour emotions until they become numb to it all? Do they just forget what happened, and live life normally? Can I ever do it?

Is there a formula, or some kind of checklist?

have a hard time accepting the blame, and then forgiving myself. That’s the weird part of healing; knowing that I played a part in some painful experiences in my life.

Look at the stars / Look how they shine for you Everytime I hear Coldplay’s “Yellow,” I can’t help but cry. I am reminded that I’ve hurt people who didn’t deserve it, and I resort to thinking that every happy memory I have is useless, as the people I spent it with aren’t in my life anymore. A supposedly happy song can 12

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make me cry, as it causes me to look back at the past, knowing that I can never replicate the same experience.

To know that the people I spent those moments with are distant or completely gone from my life hurts. I used to think that any kind of relationship I had would last for a long time, and nothing would break it.

I miss when my life was pure fun. I wish that I could relive those moments again.

I want my old life back, when I was still okay. I want the peace I once had, the relationships I built, and the con-

tent that filled my heart and soul. I want to be happy again.

I lost the joy in my face Every year, as I look at my old photos, I’m reminded of Rex Orange County’s “It’s Not The Same Anymore.”

The simple life I led ceased to exist, and somehow, I believe that I’ve changed for the worse. I wish I could be my old self again, but I still wasn’t okay then.

This is probably one of the lowest points in my life.

I know that I have to start from scratch, all by myself.

Most of my interpersonal relationships either died,

You’re on your own, kid / You always have been No one can heal my trauma but me, as Taylor Swift reminds me through “You’re On Your Own, Kid.” I’ve always used “alone” and “lonely” interchangeably.

If someone isn’t spending time with anyone else, they must be living a sad life. But, even when I was in the presence of other people, I still felt intense loneliness and isolation.

Maybe being alone isn’t as bad as I initially made it about to be. Perhaps becoming completely independent is something I should have done in the first place. I never knew how calm my life would have been without the stress and the emotional strain of others. But, you have to live and learn, right?

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Illustrator: Maria Vidal Valdespino

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Performative pain

Pray don’t talk to me about the weather Writer: Marta Anielska Illustrator: Makena Mwenda Photographer: Jadine Ngan

During the first act of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, Jack turns to Gwendolen — who believes him to be Ernest — and says, “Charming day it has been, Miss Fairfax.”

“Pray don’t talk to me about the weather,” Gwendolen responds. “Whenever people talk to me about the weather, I always feel quite certain that they mean something else. And that makes me so nervous.”

Gwendolen is the literary winner of this exchange — acting as the mouthpiece for Wilde’s notorious wit — but in reality, she would have broken an unspoken golden rule. We don’t engage in small talk to hear what people really think. We do

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it to get through polite social interactions as smoothly as possible. Gwendolen is disrupting the status quo; she is looking Jack dead in the eye, saying that he is being disingenuous.

And yet, Wilde isn’t criticizing the performative dimension of social customs. After all, Gwendolen herself engages in plenty of artifice; she plays with words and delivers long, eloquent speeches. Her meaning isn’t hidden behind pleasantries like Jack’s, but it is, inevitably, performed.

Of course, Wilde wasn’t making a new observation. As Shakespeare wrote, “All the world’s a stage!” Our feelings are abstract and we make choices when expressing them that we hope will get the message across to others. There is always a level of disconnect, even be-

fore interpretation.

So if both Jack and Gwendolen are performing, what gives her the right to criticize his lack of authenticity? If all expression is, to some extent, performative, then what does it mean to authentically express yourself?

What is authenticity?

All art is emotional manipulation — but let’s rewind a little.

It’s 1988. Ronald Reagan is still president after nearly a decade of expanding Richard Nixon’s war on drugs, further criminalizing youth in African American communities and stoking tensions between them and the police. Meanwhile, in a small and impoverished community in California, six young Black men decided to start a rap collective that will become one of the most influential in the

genre’s history.

N.W.A’s Straight Outta Compton is undeniably graphic, discussing the United State’s oppression of African Americans and the violence that permeated Compton. Given such heavy topics, it seems only natural that the hip-hop community is focused more than other genres on authenticity. How can you describe such raw and traumatic experiences without having really experienced them?

On the other hand, hip hop is also one of the most performative genres of music. Take N.W.A’s “Fuck Tha Police” as an example. The group stages its condemnation of the police as a court trial, before Ice Cube starts rapping explosively about how “Police think / They have the authority to kill a minority.”

And the result was the rise of a

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someone “sells out,” with the most recent manifestation of this accusation being the “industry plant,” an artist whose movement is backed by a major label, but presents themselves as a start-up to create the illusion of an organic following.

Changing your sound in order to make more money is a very clear way of telling your audience that you’re compromising your message. We then feel vitriol toward our favourite band that created a shitty pop album after signing a new record deal because it’s the artistic equivalent of talking about the weather. Just as the Victorian social script permitted Jack to shirk his responsibility of authentically representing himself, the streaming-driven and homogenized music landscape provides artists with a list of artistic elements they can check off to produce a certified hit.

Of course, nothing is ever quite that simple. For every national sensation that brought real attention to African American issues for decades to come.

Though they were performing their pain, it still always felt like the truth.

Of course, N.W.A’s performativity seems like nothing in comparison to modern hip-hop groups like Death Grips, who lean just as hard into themes of violence and insurrection while touching less frequently on social justice. The result is a Fight Club-esque persona, outlandishly rapping disturbing lyrics over a distorted production. Yet, if you asked me whether Death Grips or Maroon 5 is more authentic, I’d answer with the former every time.

The reason why I think so gets a little more subjective.

When I listen to a song I like, I clock the delivery, the production, and the structure of the song, all in relation to its lyrics.

I judge whether Death Grips is trying to emotionally manipulate me toward accepting a truth

Maroon 5, you have a Billie Eilish, who creates interesting, influential pop music, all while being called an “industry plant.”

Other artists, like Tyler, the Creator, have only gotten better with mainstream success, despite making music that could have been compared to Death Grips 10 years ago. It actually is possible to make good music while also making money.

But I would argue that none of the artists I’ve claimed create ‘good music’ are ever just following a social script. They, like Gwendolen, are aiming for disruption. They collect the disparate elements of artistic expression and align them with their own ideas in order to produce something that makes their audiences think.

Meanwhile, when listening to the radio, I’m often left rubbing the back of my neck nervously, wondering what these artists aren’t saying.

they actually believe. In other words, I’m gauging whether their intentions align with their artistic choices.

When I listen to “Hacker” again and again, I believe that Death Grips refused to compromise their central message for any irrelevant reason, whether that be creating a less controversial piece or a more consumable one.

But as you can probably tell, figuring out whether someone is ‘being authentic’ or ‘telling the truth’ is more difficult than it seems. And authenticity matters to us precisely because art is manipulative. “Fuck Tha Police” is trying to convince you of something, and it would be a lot less effective at doing so if you felt the artists were lying to you.

So how do we figure out whether they are?

Judging authenticity In a hyper-capitalist artistic landscape, we primarily judge authenticity based on whether

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Bodies

Writer: Mekhi Quarshie Photographer: Vurjeet Madan

What has curves and grooves and bumps and angles?

What has toes that curl and hair that dangles?

What has lips that smile and legs that pace?

What makes your stomach flutter, your heart race?

If one is rarely like another, Why are you so keen to cover What’s inside?

As Eve cried out and Adam listened, We ran to our clothes to cover what glistened, Now, being vulnerable hurts, it makes us sweat, Because our bodies never seem to forget.

But when we free ourselves, when we break that moral law, That’s when we truly know what it means to be Raw. 16

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Ella Freeburn “I definitely have struggled a lot with my confidence. [It started] from being anorexic in the sixth grade, and working out every day, because I thought I need to be skinny. I look back [now] and I’m [thinking], ‘I was so thin and I thought I was the fattest bitch alive.’

So now [I’m] trying to work on just loving my body as it is and realizing that I don’t need to change for other people. The only reason I would want to change would be for myself.”

Anya Carter “Consider your body as a neutral thing, rather than force yourself to have a positive outlook on it.”

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Bodies

Nandini Jain “I like the way my body curves and the way my body moves. I really love to dance, so I love that my body is able to do that and express myself through [that] art form.”

Amber May Stiles “Confidence… is an aura, it’s an energy, it’s something you give off… it’s something people feel when you walk into the room. Take it slow.

You’re going to see a lot of things on TikTok [and] Instagram about, ‘This is why you should love your body,’ or ‘This is why you have to do it.’ Do it at your own pace. It’s a journey and it’s a different time set for everyone.”

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Pulling

A bedroom is like a time capsule, each carrying its own story.

It tells you about its inhabitants, encapsulating what can’t be fully decoded from the outside.

The bedroom is for young adults what an entire house is for new homeowners. By 2030, buying an average house in cities like Toronto, Vancouver, or even Hamilton will require a $230,000 yearly salary and, already, 35 per cent of Canadians in their twenties or early thirties live at home and 15 per cent live with roommates. Much of this is from the higher property prices that prevent people from moving out, so whether we’re living with our parents or roommates, the bedroom can be a space we have ownership of.

s

Writer: Cherry Zhang Photographers: Cherry Zhang, Zed Hoffman-Weldon & Rachel Chan

ba e e h s t ck the

If you were to walk into my bedroom and take a look around, I think you’d get a pretty good idea about the kind of person I am. I’m currently living with my family, and this little corner I call mine is drastically different from the rest of the apartment. It has my belongings, sure, but it also encompasses my personality. It is full of memories documented in polaroids, art, and plushies that take up more space than I do.

So far, this is the bedroom I’ve lived in for the shortest time — around a year and a half. Oddly though, it’s also the one that feels the most like mine.

Throughout most of my life, I’ve always lived with the understanding that I wasn’t settled yet because I always knew I would be moving out to another country for university. Now, even though I may be graduating, as long as the next big move to a new place isn’t determined, I still feel tethered to this place.

An important reason this room feels like mine has to do with the time I’ve spent on it. The tufted rug on the floor. The collage of prints slowly accumulated from months of shopping at local markets. Even the music box on my desk was painstakingly put together from miniature parts. It’s as if this entire room has been woven together as a timeline of my life.

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Pulling back the sheets

Interestingly, those are all things that have been recently acquired. There’s no real history to anything here, so it’s not as if a shared past is what makes it personal. And it’s all very temporary too. Everything is held up by a removable putty, so when the time comes, it’s almost as if the essence of my bedroom can be taken down, packed up, and relocated with me.

— Zed Hoffman-Weldon’s bedroom is a cozy, organized space — a respite in, or despite, Toronto’s rental market. They moved in last May. And although they’re planning on moving out soon, there’s still clear intention behind the space.

After moving in, they set out to acquire a bookshelf. It’s an OMAR shelving unit from IKEA, and although it’s not the most well suited for its purpose, as books have a tendency to slip through the wireframe, it accomplishes its task. The shelf is integral to Hoffman-Weldon’s ownership of the space. They said, “I want to have a space that is presently my own and not in transition constantly. And having a bookshelf, which has my books on it, is one way of doing that.”

One of the central features of their bedroom is its organization.

“The organization is definitely intentional on my part. I can’t stand having a messy bedroom,” they commented. The shelf serves a practical purpose, the papers on the floor will be cleaned, and overall, everything has its space within the given limits.

Practicality plays a big role. On the bed is a pillow that’s been flattened by time — it’s been with Hoffman-Weldon for their entire life. “I think it was my parents’ pillow when they went to grad school together. So the pillow is older than I am,” they said.

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“I’ve never really liked sleeping with a lot of pillows,” they added, so the lack of fluff isn’t important, so it’s certainly no reason to go buy another.

Also conspicuously missing is a desk, which wasn’t a huge necessity for them. “I was just looking at the bedroom, and I was like, there’s not a huge amount of space here. I don’t want to pay for a desk, and I don’t particularly want to take this broken-down desk from the old apartment… I don’t need a desk.

I’ll just work in the library,” they said.

I was also surprised by Hoffman-Weldon’s remarks on the simplicity of the space. While the things in the room, their posters and books, are a symbol of ownership, they aren’t everything. “I don’t know how much I want to place emphasis on decorating it,” they said. “I think that if I had nothing, and I was still basically sleeping in the room every night, I would still call it my bedroom.”

Still, the bedroom is markedly their own. There’s a plant on the windowsill that used to get a lot of light, now struggling in the basement apartment. A giant goldfish — the album cover of Big Fish Theory by Vince Staples — is stuck on the wall. It is an “undefeated staring contest champion,” they say. Even if only for a year, the room has been infused with their personality.

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Rachel Chan is hoping to move out in the next year or two. “I like this room,” she said, “but I kind of want to have my own place.” She’s been living in the same place in Mississauga for around eight years now, having moved in before starting high school. This year, she’ll be graduating from UTM. Her bedroom hasn’t changed much since moving in. The furniture is still in the same place; the walls are still the same shade of yellow. What’s made the space feel more like hers over the years, though, are the additions of little decorations around the room.

The miscellaneous objects in Chan’s bedroom represent memories accumulated throughout high school and university. Even the things stuck on her closet door have a story. She recalled, “In high school, you would decorate a locker for your friend on their birthday. So I took those decorations… home.” This, she thinks, is indicative of her ownership of the room.

There are also subtle intentions that wouldn’t be easily noticeable by outsiders. For example, there’s a method for the placement of her stuffed animals.

“Sometimes I’ll cycle my stuffed animals that are sitting on my bed, and they each get a turn,” she said. “And they’re pairs like they have names. I can’t separate Sunshine from Chocolate because I got them at the same time.”

I asked her if she would be conflicted over which ones to feature on her bed in the photos she sends over. Her answer was, normally, yes, but a new addition made the decision easy.

Now, her most prized possession is Maxy the axolotl, acquired at the end of 2022. It’s a Build-A-Bear online exclusive that normally only ships from America, but she saw it displayed in store at Square One. “She is the moment, she is the centrepiece,” praised Chan.

Based on her descriptions, Chan’s room radiates nostalgia and comfort. “I sleep here. I cry here. I laugh here.

I chat with my friends here. I keep my valuable stuff,

like Maxy, in here,” she commented. “It’s so cliché, but it’s an escape, right?”

That’s also why she’s hesitant to leave, she said, “because it took so long to make it mine.”

For her, there’s a sense in which a bedroom is a space for anything. “It’s like a dream,” she described. “It’s like, I walk into my room, I could do my makeup if I wanted to. If I’m not going anywhere, I’ll just take it off. Or I could sit on the floor and read a book, or I could take a nap, or I could sit here and do my bullet journal.”

— Chan’s remark particularly resonated with me because I’ve always thought of my bedroom as more transitory. It’s simply a place where time passes in between activities. Perhaps, instead of it being where nothing happens, it’s where anything can happen.

My takeaway from these interviews is that a bedroom is never truly defined. At its foundation is a blank slate, a neutral space built upon throughout time and through memories. It is made and remade as we exist within and outside it. Like the way a person’s scent lingers on their bed, their entire being seeps through in the bedroom.

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Yearning for stasis Feature

Yearning for stasis

Writer: Chelsea Wang Illustrator: Makena Mwenda

Content warning: This article contains brief mentions of racial and sexual harassment.

When I was eight, a boy named Jason moved into my apartment complex. The first time we met, he smiled at me, like any stranger would — and somehow we became best friends forever. If we weren’t at each other’s homes, we’d be at the park, pretending to be anyone other than ourselves. One moment we were safari rangers escaping the world’s largest snake nest; the next, we’d be cave explorers, discovering the rarest jewels on Earth. We were often farmers; I would harvest crops as gigantic as Jack’s beanstalk, while Jason sowed magical seeds and chewed on a piece of straw, making it look like the tastiest thing that could exist.

On our way home from school, we’d buy 50-cent freezies and sit in his dad’s car, sucking on them as the plastic cut into the corners of our mouths. After picking up Jason’s baby brother Johnny from daycare, and suffering through a 10-minute drive that became a Chinese oldies concert by their dad, I’d play at Jason’s until my mom dragged me home.

But then Jason moved away. He disappeared, just like the snake nest that was actually a tangle of dead plants, the cave that was really a hollow tree, and that random weed he’d put in his mouth, pretending it was straw. Just like that, forever turned into never.

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— If time were a person, I would beg it to leave my clock alone.

That way, I could miss out on the accumulation of little despairs that make someone an adult. Finding more fallen-out hairs on my pillow, watching my favourite hole-in-the-wall bakery open its doors for the last time, booking my own doctor’s appointment — who is ever ready for life’s devastations?

My favourite summertime ritual was going on bike rides with my mom. I loved the wind caressing my hair, the laughter in between gasps for air, and the scars painting my knees, reminding me of each ride. But at some point, I started loving these moments less. Maybe it was after a group of young adults drove by in their gold Toyota Corolla, rolled down the windows and shouted, “ching chong!” at seven-year-old me while I rode my hot pink bike home, a few feet behind my mother, both of us still giddy from the summer air. At the time, I knew what happened was bad, but I didn’t understand it.

Soon, I abandoned my bike for public transit. For the first time in my life — moments after getting off the bus from having spent the day with friends at the mall — a man, most likely in his 20s, whistled at me. I was wearing a black t-shirt and relaxed-fit jeans, and since I’m as flat as a board today, I must have been concave back then. Maybe that man was a ‘derrière’ kind of guy — but I’ll never know, nor will I ever care. I just hope he didn’t know I was 13.

If I were a Disney character, I’d be Peter Pan. My favourite activity isn’t battling pirates and I, unfortunately, cannot fly — but I sure as hell don’t want to grow up. Maybe I sound like some overgrown kid who wants to ignore my adult duties and break adult rules, but isn’t that everyone’s desire?

Adult-

hood is the threshold in our messed-up world, and I hope you’ve buckled up for it because, dear adult, it will take you for a ride.

Put your Pokémon cards away — instead, get your calorie tracker out to mind every gram of sugar you consume.

But I guess it doesn’t matter, since the heaviest weight you’ll ever carry is from expectations.

No one cares about your superhero t-shirt; it’s your stocks that matter.

Plus, that outfit is… well, words can’t describe it, but numbers can: two out

of 10.

Maybe it’ll mean your nosy aunties can gossip about your fashion sense instead of your nonexistent love life. Oh, and while you’re shopping for a sliver of hope at the mall, remember to pick up some anti-wrinkle cream. You’ll need it. Plus, you must not only worship the nine to five, but also the five to seven and, of course,

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the seven to nine. And don’t get me started on ambition.

If you’re passionate about something, that’s great, but can you make money from it? Your endgame should be a corporate job in a massive grey building that provides stale coffee.

— Peter Pan is terrified of what it means to grow up. And to be fair, who wouldn’t be? I’m still waiting for my Hogwarts letter, although it’s extremely late — the Muggle post must’ve lost it. Everyone wears themselves down day by day, waits for the weekend like a dog for a treat, and prays that Monday never comes. Imagine Peter Pan as a Gen Z, living in this modern world. That experience definitely wouldn’t change his mind about growing up.

Sometimes I feel like a goldfish released into the

ocean. I was the bright kid who knew everyone in my grade, but now I’m just one of thousands of university students. I study my ass off so I can get a decent job, I apply for hundreds of internships so I can get a head start, and I drown myself in extracurriculars so that being smart isn’t my only personality trait.

As everyone says, I’m in the prime of my life and should make the most of my youth — but here I am, spending most of my time preparing for the future. I’m so busy stretching before running the rat race that I can’t find my identity.

And it’s so difficult to make new friends when everyone is occupied with keeping themselves afloat. An extra weight isn’t easy to carry.

Live each day as if it were your last, but work until your bank account balance looks like a phone number. Work

until you no longer need to introduce yourself, and work until you die. Is this living life to the fullest? Millennials are the burnout generation, and that torch might be passed to us, Gen Z. But we don’t want it. We’re afraid of growing up because of the way the world has been shaped around us.

We’re tired of preparing for a future centred around a career. We’re refusing to monetize our every waking moment.

Maybe ‘Zoomers’ is the wrong term for us. The idea of slow living is more appealing than ever in our generation — following a purposeful and balanced lifestyle, people prioritize well-being over work and connect with themselves instead of with the white collars on LinkedIn. There’s no problem if you genuinely like the grind, it’s just about

time we remould the world so that everyone can grow at their own pace.

Gen Z is giving rise to an anti-hustle culture. Don’t be mistaken; we’re not downplaying hard work, nor are we trying to be lazy. Gen Z will hustle — not for some big-name corporation, but for ourselves. We want to redefine what it means to grow up; no more obligatory entries into the rat race, no more expectations to turn into machines. No more “rise and grind,” but instead, “rise and shine.”

Still, this wouldn’t solve all of our problems.

“You have your whole life ahead of you” — yet it feels like there’s never enough time.

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Feature for stasis Yearning

— I’ve never met my grandfather. He lived in China, but that didn’t matter since I always imagined visiting him one day. I’d finally be able to eat his stir-fried pork intestines with black bean garlic sauce — cooked in a massive wok — which my mom always craves; learn kung-fu from the old man who was once the strongest in his village; and tag along his medicinal herb-picking trips. But all of that remained in my imagination because, when I was 12, 24 18

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this seemingly invincible man passed away from esophageal cancer. After hearing the news, I watched my mother bawl like a child.

As a kid, I would cry during baths. My first fear was that my shrivelled, post-bath skin would become permanent, but then it spiralled into darker terrors: losing touch with my friends and possibly my own self, living a life that I wouldn’t want, and — most horrifically — facing the day my mom passes away. It’s one thing to grow old, but

another to watch the person you love most reach closer to death.

Simplicity is something our lives will never have again.

But that’s alright, because we’ve learned to compromise. We’ve grown. Growing up is like waiting for your pumpkin to turn into a carriage — except it never does, because magic isn’t real.

Growing up never stops. It crushes most of our dreams but gives us chances to make the exception come true.

That’s something, right? We

lose a lot while growing up, but that leaves room for new experiences: independence, exploration, and all the little things we wished for as children.

Sometimes there’s too much room, so the past sneaks back into the crevices of our lives. Recently, my mom’s old friend came by to share some herbal medicines. Following her was her youngest son, Johnny, no longer a toddler, and then Jason, who smiled at me like any stranger would.

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The root of it all

Writer & Photographer: Lexey Burns Tears dripped down my face as I bent over for probably the 1,000th time. I stood back up and took another step, instantly stumbling, my steel toe boots hooking onto a stray branch. I hit the ground, the remaining trees falling from the bags dangling from my hips and scattering on the dirt. Pain stabbed through my knee and I never wanted to see another little tree sapling for the rest of my life.

At the end of the day, no one on the bus made eye contact with me. It was almost a daily occurrence at this point in the tree planting season; people knew that I had a bad day based on the streaks in the dirt smeared across my cheeks and little tear runways. I was too stubborn to admit that it was my fault, that my inability to put little trees in a patch of dirt was my own mental block.

I kept going back day after day.

In practice, tree planting is transplanting tree seedlings into areas that logging companies have already cut down.

Lumber and pulp mills specifically are allowed to log certain areas with approval from the government. Logging is considered a renewable resource, as the government has legislated that the felled trees be replaced.

This is where people like me come in. Tree planters on average plant 2,000 trees a day, making anywhere from 11 to 50 cents, depending on the type of land and the province.

As of May 2023, I’ll be going into my third season of tree planting. I was 19 years old when I first pulled into Shay’s camp, one of five of my company’s Ontario camps, in Ignace. Ignace, Ontario is halfway between Thunder Bay and Kenora, Ignace exists without a single town stop light and is most likely the only small town in Ontario to function without a Tim Hortons.

This was where I’d spend two months of my life putting foot-tall tree saplings into the ground in whatever weather Mother Nature could throw at me while simultaneously feeding my body to a variety

of insects.

Anderson Todd has never gone tree planting, but he’s fascinated by the idea of it: a group of young adults living in communities in the woods, sticking tiny Jack Pine saplings into the dirt, mud, and duff of previously logged areas.

Todd is an assistant professor in the teaching stream at U of T who has taught Buddhist psychology and mental health in U of T’s Cognitive Science Department. He is also a private practising psychotherapist.

Todd has discussed tree planting with a variety of people, mainly individuals who had done it for only one year and then decided it wasn’t for them.

To do it multiple years in a row, Todd said, was a feat like no other.

My idea of self During my first season of tree planting, my mind and body were splintering a 1,000 different ways, like wood being split by an axe. I was so torn within myself; I didn’t know who I was.

I was questioning everything from why I went to university,

to the jobs I had thrown myself into for the last six summers, to where I would be in the next year, let alone the next five. I didn’t know what I truly liked or disliked or what my hobbies were. I felt like I hadn’t done anything in my life and that I wasn’t preparing myself to do anything later.

Tree planting was my escape from the places I felt comfortable, the people I grew up with, and the self that I had known for almost two decades.

Veteran tree planters say the first year is the hardest. It’s the biggest commitment someone could make, financially, physically, mentally. I made $45 on my first day by planting just over 400 saplings at 11 cents a tree. Instead of paying rent, everyone pays $25 in “camp costs,” which is a fund that goes toward the food that the camp provides, so really I made $20.

On my second day, I cried to my crew boss — whose name was Pascale and was hired to look after six or seven planters while planting herself — because my knee hurt. Unlike my

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Physical work

best friend, who had dragged me into the bush to join her for her second year and had planted 2,000 trees the first day back, I was not thriving.

Everyone around me told me it would get easier. The people who showed up at the same time as me began soaring across the land, hitting 2,000 trees a day, while I could barely make minimum wage. I found myself getting lost in my thoughts, drowning in them, and every time I ran out of trees, or ‘bagged out,’ I could barely bring myself to go back into my piece of land.

Nothing was getting easier, and I constantly tried to blame it on everything else. It was the land, my shovel, the type and size of the trees, and the weather. I could never admit that it was my own fault.

The idea of the self Many people think of themselves as a soul, but Buddhism challenges that. To Buddhists, we don’t exist as a fixed thing.

The idea of a self is an illusion. A tornado is an object, but it’s not a fixed thing. It is a pattern without stability or permanence. Todd explained that “Buddhism… asks us to try to overcome this illusion that we have about our permanence because it believes that that illusion is what causes most of our suffering.”

So how can you discover yourself when it’s not supposed to exist? I think that this process is easier, because your sense of self is constantly shifting, and so you never can have a true answer. Like the tornado, you are able to see yourself from different perspectives, like from the eye of the storm inside or from the outside. It also shapes and grows with each new experience as you discover new things you enjoy or dislike.

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So if Buddhism prompts you to overcome the illusion of our permanence in our self, then what happens with the journey of self discovery? Does it just stop because one doesn’t believe in it? Todd’s answer is no.

Jungian psychology Carl Jung, a Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, distinguished two different parts of the psyche. There are a lot of parts of the psyche and lots of parts of the mind, Todd explained, but the two parts Jung focused on are the ego and the self.

The ego is our conscious idea of ourselves, whereas the self is our entire being, including the unconscious. We identify with our ego, and it comes in handy, but once we believe that it is “solid,” then it becomes a problem.

“So the distinction that I would make is a journey of self discovery, in the sense, it’s not a bad thing at all.

I actually think it’s a super useful thing.

The thing is that

what you’re discovering is some absolute and final and solid and fixed truth is a problem,” Todd said.

The quest Most people go on a journey of self discovery, or a quest, to get out of a cycle. A cycle begins from something, like a job or a relationship, that used to be the solution, but is now the problem. Like clothes, we constantly outgrow positions or people as they outlive their usefulness to us.

We then get stuck in a cycle.

We do the same thing every day until we’re not happy with it anymore.

This is where the quest comes in.

Todd said that “there isn’t one path up the mountain.” There’s no correct way to find your true self, and so the concept of the quest is only one way.

For Steph Jagger, the author of UNBOUND: A Story of Snow and Self-Discovery, her quest involved a journey at the prompt of a metal sign — read-

ing “Raise Restraining Device — at Whistler Ski Resort in British Columbia. At the time, Jagger was working a six-figure job in marketing. She had achieved everything that anyone had ever asked of her, so why wasn’t she happy? She was stuck in the same cycle that Todd warned about. That day, she told her friends she would set out to ski four million vertical feet in one year, which is the equivalent of going down Mount Everest from summit to sea level approximately 137 times.

After a year, Jagger set a world record for skiing the most vertical feet in a year.

Flow state Where does one find self-discovery in tree planting, though?

What do the bugs and the dirt have that allow us to delve deep down into the back of our minds? Todd explained that it is because of a phenomenon called the ‘flow state.’

Todd highlighted that tree planting is a perfect example of

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flow state, with the exception that it doesn’t get harder to do.

The only way planting can become more difficult is by figuring out the question if a planter can do it faster and more efficiently. It is easy to plant 1,500 trees with great quality, but can one plant 2,000 to the same standard in the same amount of time?

Todd compared tree planting to being in a monastery — not that he’s done either, but both require immense amounts of repetition. Planters are bending over, sticking their shovels into the ground, inserting a tree in the ground, and closing the hole two to three thousand times a day. The repetition is similar to chanting a mantra.

Soon, the repetitive quality has an effect on the mind.

“Once the body starts taking it over, you can just let it do its thing, and then you are disconnected from that, which means that people spend a whole lot of time in their own mind,” Todd explained.

Todd said that the only way for an individual to make the most out of their journey is to have something change. “You could be intensely dissatisfied with your life, decide to embark on a journey of self-discovery,

find out a bunch of shit, and then come back to your life,” he said. “But odds are, something changes, either your perspective on your life changes, you learn the value of what you had, or your attitude towardsit changes outwardly. So you behave differently, or you ask different things of [your life].”

Todd highlighted the struggle planters have if they are not able to be alone with their thoughts. Often, at tree planting, you’re alone for hours at a time.

Tree planting allows people who feel stuck in a cycle to think, breathe, and learn more about themselves outside of an environment that they’re comfortable in. It mentally, physically, and psychologically challenges people who may never have been challenged in those ways before.

A little more than halfway through the season, I had been having a terrible day, as usual it seemed. Why was every day like this? Why couldn’t I just put my head down and do the work?

Why was I making every excuse I could to justify myself? It was then it clicked. I needed to stop making excuses. I had let my sense of self, my ego as Todd put it, grow solid. I had taken

everything that had happened in my life too seriously, I was holding onto the past too tightly. I had been seeing the blood in my hands for too long but never realized it would stop if I only let go.

From that day on, I flew across the land. I gripped my shovel a little tighter and stopped with the excuses that had been holding me back.

On the last shift of the season, I hit a personal best of 3,005 trees.

Returning home I’ve only had two years of hindsight, of seeing versions of myself return home after each planting season. Each time, I was proud of the person who made it through another season, who took all of the rain, snow, heat, sticks, and bugs and came out of the bush a little wiser in my own self-knowledge than when I went in. Each time, I came home fearing the year, fearing the same experiences I had tried to leave.

This switching of worlds allowed me to realize what I loved in my life, and what I wanted to see more of in the future. It showed me what I had been doing wrong and ways that I could fix it. It reminded me to

slow down when city life got too busy, when I was feeling stuck in rush hour traffic.

Forced to stop with somewhere to be, I’ve begun taking time for myself and letting myself get there whenever I do. I cannot change what happens to me, only what I choose to do with it.

When Jagger returned home, she was nervous that she would fall back into her routines, into the life that she had up and left the year before.

Her trip was her inspiration to get out of her cycle. For some, it’s hard to return to the root of the problem, and Jagger couldn’t. She quit her job and moved. I’m not saying everyone has to quit their job, find a new home, and live a brand new life because of a trip they went on, but I’m also not saying it’s easier to remember what you learned about yourself in an environment that constantly reminds you by challenging the comforts of your life.

The self can never stay too still, can never slow to a stop, to solidify and become permanent. Like a planter, the self must continue to move through the land. You can’t plant trees if you’re not constantly moving.

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Lake Superior

When I fall in love, I risk drowning Writer & Illustrator: Alice Boyle

When Lake Superior looks calm, my colleague and I launch our canoe out onto the water. The calm almost never lasts.

Superior is temperamental, and pretty soon after we’re in, our canoe starts helplessly bobbing up and down on this massive stretch of water. All we can do is paddle as hard as we can; a futile effort, as we merely inch toward shore. I am left floating atop an expanse of water that can easily drag me down to my death and all I can think at the time is, “Please don’t hurt me, I won’t know what to do.”

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The case for emotion in a rational world Writer: Sahir Dhalla Illustrator: Makena Mwenda You’re hiking through a forest and come across a bear on the trail. You freeze, your heart rate spiking as adrenaline courses through you. Your breath comes in short bursts as you start sweating, terrified of what might come next.

Somewhere else, in a café, two people are on a date. One of them looks up, and feels a rush of something passing through his heart, feeling a certain warmth along with it. Suddenly, his world seems a little brighter, his heart feels a little faster, and his breath catches.

At an event a few miles away, a speaker is getting ready to deliver a talk they’ve been preparing for weeks. Her heart is pounding, and she feels a rush of nervous energy as she hears the audience clapping for the previous speaker who just finished.

Her palms get sweaty and she tries to slow her breathing down.

All of these situations are incredibly different, and yet they all involve something we’re all very familiar with: emotions.

Barring the cases of those diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder, emotions are probably the most universal human experience. We all feel them to some degree. From the highs of joy and love to the lows of sadness and regret, emotions characterize almost every memory and experience of our lives.

But throughout history, across cultures and traditions, there have been groups who aim to control or quell certain feelings. From the Stoics of ancient Greece to modern mindfulness practices, there have always been those who believe we would be better off without emotions.

But is this really true, and can we even control our emotions?

What are emotions?

For a concept we’re so familiar with, emotions are notoriously hard to define.

While there is no one definition of emotions that is universally accepted, many researchers have attempted to understand emotions in various ways.

One attempt to define emotions is known as the James-Lange feeling theory of emotions. In this conception, emotions are mental states or feelings accompanied by physiological changes that occur as a response to stimuli. The emotion of fear, for example, contains a strong feeling of aversion to the object that is feared, but also includes physiological changes like an elevated heart rate, the tensing of muscles, increased adrenaline release in your bloodstream, and more changes that prepare your body for a fight-or-flight situation.

While this notion of emotions seems quite intuitive, it does have some issues.

When we think of the impacts of emotions, we often attach some motivational aspect to them. Emotions cause us to move in the world; they motivate almost every action of ours, and a simple feeling theory seems to ignore this.

To combat this, a group of motivational theories of emotions has sprung up in the realm of this debate. The Simple Motivational Theory of Emotions claims that emotions consist of flexible action tendencies or states of action readiness that have certain goals behind them, as well as a certain priority upon which these tendencies acted.

The simple Motivational Theory of Emotions is able to combat the main issue faced by the feelings theory, and it also accounts for cultural and social factors that affect how emotions are expressed.

If your environment was incredibly hostile toward an emotion like anger while you were growing up, then you will go your entire life without expressing the emotion, and, eventually, no longer be motivated by it at all.

In fact, this is the case for the Utkukhalingmiut, a small Inuit community whose culture shuns any expression of anger.

When anthropologist Jean Briggs, who lived with the community to study its culture, expressed anger briefly; she was ostracized and not allowed to return.

By using the motivational theory of emotion, we can account for the fact that emotions increase our tendencies to act a certain way, but the theory still leaves room for our ability to combat these inspirations.

However, the motivational theory of emotions has its own limitations, as it does not fully explain why certain emotions are experienced in certain situations and why emotions can persist even after the motivator has been resolved.

The complexity of emotions makes it difficult to define them and understand their role in our lives. However, studying emotions is crucial for understanding human behaviour and can provide valuable insights into how we think, feel, and behave.

Do we really need emotions?

Besides understanding what emotions are, philosophers have devoted much time and effort to exploring the role of emotion in our lives.

While emotions do cause feelings and stir up motivations within us, we need to question the value of these judgments, whether emotions can be valuable motivators.

Some philosophers argue that emotions are distractions — shortcomings of the

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What are emotions

ancient evolutionary brain that we must surpass to truly be an intelligent being. It’s these feelings, the philosophers claim, that make us act in irrational, beastly ways, and we would all be better off without them.

Emotions are also an immense source of pain and annoyance. From the pain of heartbreak to the annoyance of an excessively hot day, emotions and feelings seem to cause immense, useless amounts of pain on a daily basis.

What could ever be good about such a thing?

In today’s world, emotion is often looked upon as a hindrance, an obstacle to get over to make way for rationality. But a short look at the case of a man without these feelings showed us quite the opposite. Doctors gave him the pseudonym of Elliot and fake personal details to protect his identity, but he

showed that emotions are not only useful, but essential to our human lives.

Elliot was a successful man who worked as an executive at an even more successful c o m p a n y.

He had a wonderful family and was well liked by his friends and neighbours.

Unfortunately, he had headaches.

Very regular headaches. Eventually, they got so bad that he went to a doctor, and discovered that he had a brain tumour. To help his condition, physicians

recommended he get a brain surgery done that would remove the tumour, which at this point was the size of a baseball.

He thought it over, considering the risks, and decided to proceed with the surgery.

It was a great success, and Elliot went on to make a full recovery. Well, mostly. For some reason, his performance at work and his relationships began to suffer. Tasks that had seemed easy now required immense amounts of energy and focus. He missed countless meetings and his kids’ sports games. He made innumerable errors at work and never fixed them. He watched television constantly and spoke a lot less.

The doctors were perplexed.

His brain scans returned normal results, and he still had incredibly high IQ results. He was entirely logically capable,

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and should have been able to do his tasks and work just as well as before the surgery.

It wasn’t until he spoke to famous neuroscientist Antonio Damasio that they uncovered the issue.

You see, when he’d undergone the surgery, his logic and bodily functions were all preserved. But the surgery, which removed part of the prefrontal cortex, which controls emotions, among other things, got rid of the majority of his emotional processing capacity.

Without this part of the brain, Elliot was unable to feel any sort of motivation or remorse for his actions.

He was unable to prioritize anything, so he went to buy a stapler instead of going to an executive meeting.

He seemed to have no motivation at all. And I’m not just talking about the lack of motivation you have when you can’t study or do chores around the house. This was something much worse.

Without emotions, Elliot became no one at all.

As logical as we may be, at the end of the day, it’s our emotions that seem to be in control of our actions, that dictate what we like and dislike, what we want to do.

These emotions seem to be a necessary and natural part of the human experience, and so they are inherently neither good nor bad. They just are.

useless, but they are harmful, and it is only by controlling them that we can be successful in any manner and achieve a state of peace and tranquility.

To the Stoics, controlling your emotions meant that you would not let your emotions control you. It’s not that the Stoics believed that we should completely suppress or eradicate our emotions, but rather that we should regulate them so that they don’t become

Controlling the flow of emotion Even as emotions are a natural part of life, there have been many philosophical and religious traditions that have attempted to quiet or control them.

One school of thought in particular that has become synonymous with a need to control emotions has been Stoicism, an ancient Greek and Roman school of philosophy arising around 300 BCE that argues that the judgements we make from emotions are deeply mistaken and irrational. According to the Stoics, some emotions are not simply

destructive. In this sense, the Stoic philosophy advocated for emotional regulation rather than emotional repression.

But is it really possible to control our emotions?

There is some evidence to suggest that certain cognitive-behavioral techniques can help individuals gain greater control over their emotions. For example, techniques like mindfulness meditation and cognitive restructuring can help individuals develop a greater awareness of their emotions and how they’re triggered.

It’s important to remember, however,

that emotions are not simply cognitive constructs that we can easily regulate with a simple technique. Emotions are complex, multidimensional experiences that are intertwined with our thoughts, beliefs, and behaviours. Controlling an emotion isn’t like controlling a random thought, but rather controlling something that impacts every aspect of your being.

The ultimate goal of the Stoic philosophy was not to achieve complete control over one’s emotions, but rather to achieve a state of tranquility in the face of life’s challenges.

This means learning to respond to emotions in a way that is not destructive and that does not lead to further suffering. In this sense, the goal of emotional regulation is not to eliminate emotions, but rather to develop a healthier relationship with them.

An important concept from Stoicism that I’ ve found easily applicable to my life is the notion that you can simply feel an emotion instead of being the emotion. When going through a tough procrastination phase, for example, I can remind myself that, as much as I don’t want to do this right now, I can feel those emotions and validate them while still not following what they suggest and leading my life based on them.

What this discussion on emotion shows us is that, as annoying as emotions may seem to us, they are essential to motivating our actions and going about our lives. But even as we embrace these emotions, we can’t entirely give in to them and must exercise our own control over them — we can come to somewhat of a mutual understanding with them.

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o w s

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Sh

I try to catch a glimpse of my friend’s face from the corner of my eye to see if they are thinking what I am thinking, to see if they feel the same unease.

The smell of patchouli intensifies as a white man in his 50s, who unofficially elected himself the substitute for the Indigenous speaker who couldn’t make it to the event, makes another victory lap with his incense stick.

My friend, Jacob Lefkowitz Brooks — affectionately called “Lefko,” who I met a few months prior, and who, at this point, I both live and work with — catches my eye.

We share a look.

It’s a bright Sunday in November 2021. We’re in a park in the west end of Toronto — 32

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or “Tkaronto” in Mohawk. The two of us stand in a circle with 20 or so strangers waiting for a land acknowledgement before the portage, the carrying of canoes.

This portage comes as the final leg of the Davenportage, an annual 12 to 16 hour run-paddle-portage across Canada’s unofficial cultural capital. As ambitious nearly20-year-olds who worked as seasonal guides, Lefko and I were initially attracted to the Davenportage by pain, glory, and learning. We committed to the final leg of the race, since we weren’t runners and had only a yokepad between us.

The others, already in the circle, were ragged from the first two legs of the event: a 3:30 am, 15 kilometre ravine run through the Don Valley and a 7:00 am, 10 kilometre paddle along the windy harbourfront. We heard about the Davenportage from a promo-

w a r um

ls Wa van

ey eav h competition, we gra oto were also never told h &P r it wasn’t one, so we both e it Wr agreed on what we thought was a natural leap in judgement. The boats, snacks, and tion by Universi- other necessities were proty of Toronto Outing vided for us, and although Club (UTOC), which high- Bumby asked us to bring food lighted the event’s pathway to donate, the Davenportage over a historical Indigenous is not a charity event.

So the Davenportage was trade route through downtown. After we signed onto not a competition or a charity. the mailing list, the lead event I turned this over in my mind organizer, Michael Bumby, en- as the group disbanded folcouraged us to bring canned lowing an announcement goods to donate to a fire to sprinkle tobacco into the station along the way — the Humber River. I was at a loss.

What was there to gain from heavier the better.

It took a little convincing on pain without a sense of alour part, but we were excit- truism or the guarantee of a ed to sweat ourselves into our medal? socks in a respectful, socialI decided to find out. That ly-aware way. Or, somewhat day, Lefko and I carried three socially aware — naturally, or four canoes shared by more we were surprised to be met than 10 people; we swapped with incense before a land out constantly, chatted, and acknowledgement, since in- met new people between porcense is a non-Indigenous taging shifts. There were lawpractice, which, we thought, yers, teenagers, engineers, he might have confused with sports managers — and U of sage smudging.

T students like us. Some conThe opening ceremony, fided that they barely touched however, was confusing to the boats at all, while others me. When we went to register sped ahead and worked themfor the race and pick up our selves through breathing exboat only 30 minutes prior, ercises to manage the pain. an organizer told us that the The day was cast in an unDavenportage is not a com- usually bright autumn light petition. Lefko and I were that died over a bonfire on a dumbfounded. hill by the Evergreen BrickThough we were never works. The event culminated told the Davenportage was a in frank speeches by the older S er:

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generations about friendship, feminism in the outdoors, and what it means to be empathetic and included free food and drinks. Even before our first sips of complimentary beer from Red Tape — a local Indigenous brewery — Lefko and I enthusiastically agreed to return the following year.

The commitment was the easiest I’ve ever made. It almost felt like a relief to make it. At the time, I believed I knew why people did the Davenportage. By grinding out kilometre after kilometre, I felt connected to my body schema in a way that evoked confidence and serenity and expanded my understanding of Toronto’s layout and history. Part of

the advertised nuance of the Davenportage is that you are an ‘athlete-historian,’ and you travel through your environment in a way that othes have for thousands of years. This ostensibly deepens a somatic link to the past, not only for understanding humanity in all its discomfort through your own personal strain, but by facing the landscape as a fact.

As we passed through the mall complex and highway-riddled hell of northern Toronto, Lefko turned to me and remarked it was a shame we put land to use like this, gesturing to the tonnes of concrete, gravel, and cement. It was a reminder of how, after every indignity of

settler-colonialism, the layout of Toronto implicitly asserts that a mall complex is better than old growth.

I thought about what Lefko said, and I stared out into the flat traffic. It was so poignant it hurt.

I thought that’s all the Davenportage was for — an event to work out and make you think, “There should be trees here,” without the precondition of being an athletic person with disposable income. After all, Bumby, a key organizer, said that in talking to Joe Katt — a member of the Temagami First Nation and a participant of the Davenportage — they’d concluded that participants learned a lot about the land they crossed:

“It’s hurting. You don’t learn about the land that you’ve crossed by driving a car, you learn about the land by walking.”

Despite my conviction and entirely real observations about the meaning of the Davenportage, I came up short. I would not grasp the true natures of the Davenportage for another year.

— It’s 2022, and Lefko is on exchange in the Netherlands, so I am going solo. At midnight, the day of the Davenportage, I am on the phone with a friend. He’s studying for a psychology exam, and I’m rifling through gear while desperately trying to explain to him what I am about to do.

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I’m extra stressed.

This year, I’m not just doing the portage — I’m paddling too, and I have to be up by 5:30 am.

When I googled the event in fall of 2021, there were a few sparse pieces written about it — in 2015 and 2018, respectively — and only one of them was written by someone who participated. Neither of them told me much more than the emails from the organizer did.

My friend cannot find much else on the internet to help him supplement my frantic elevator pitch, either. Much like myself the year prior, he can’t seem to grasp why anyone would do the Davenportage if it wasn’t a race; after all, why do something so difficult if you can’t even say you pushed yourself to the brink while doing it? Why do it two years in a row if you’re not tracking improvement? Why stop for lentil soup and a group photo halfway through?

He isn’t the outdoorsy type, which doesn’t help his understanding either.

Exhausted as we both are, he winds down and wishes me luck — and then he says something that I make him repeat. He tells me he hopes that with all the people and the few canoes, there are no social loafers and only social facilitators.

I ask him what he means, and he explains a very simple concept that any member of society is likely

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already familiar with. When you enter a group, you have two options: become lazier or get more involved.

I was familiar with social loafing from political science, under other names: the free rider dilemma and the tragedy of the commons.

The free rider dilemma describes the issue of people who take from the community without giving anything in return — for example, not paying for the streetcar. The tragedy of the commons applies that principle in the context of public lands and goods and explains that exploitation for individual gain is inevitable. I reflect that, if social loafing describes the tragedy of the commons, there must be a socio-ecological term that corresponds to social facilitation, since it’s a clear enough behaviour for psychologists to put a name to. Perhaps political scientists would call it a miracle of the commons.

I realize this is part of what makes the Davenportage so baffling. Its existence implies that people would still do things communally, respectfully, and in the outdoors without the pressure of money nor the expectation to root out social loafers.

I thank him, and I hang up.

The next day, I take the bus to the Evergreen Brickworks with my backpack and lifejacket in hand. On the bus, people gawk as much as their morning grogginess allows. I am accustomed to the looks — they affirm what I am about to do

is subversive.

In the parking lot, a family member of one of the organizers picks me up in her car and drives me down to the Don River, where a large white van full of gear, boxes of Tim Hortons coffee, and discarded jackets is parked. The dawn light over the clearing is a timid Habsberg yellow, and illuminates 13 people milling around partially clad in PFDs, hauling boats down to the bank, and partnering up for the paddle. Evidently, some of them were morning runners, as they debrief the highs and lows of the morning’s run.

I greet some familiar faces, but my favourite is Bumby’s.

He cracks a big smile, and he’s understanding when I tell him Lefko couldn’t make it this year. Bumby and I decide to partner up for the paddle, and by 7:30 am, everyone is in boats with tobacco to place in the Don to give thanks to the river.

I sit in stern, and Bumby sits in bow with his back to me, his baseball cap fastened to his head. The flow of the Don is mild, so we don’t have much to help us forward, but we still manage to outpace some of the other boats. The river is dark grey and full of sticks. Looking at it and looking out from it are two disparate experiences. From the river, I see ducks, beaver lodges, and people living under the bridge.

As we descend to the mouth of the river we enter Keating Channel and pass underneath a gigantesque abandoned expressway and loose machinery. The

shadow the structure throws is staggering. Bumby tells me this is a failed attempt at The Gardiner Expressway, a project that died after it was too difficult to maintain. Its carcass looms over our flotilla of multi-coloured canoes; its death shows no sign of ever ending.

The feeling of looking out onto it is something akin to awe, but it still inspires the same brewing frustration as the anti-climactic parking lots in northwest Toronto. The cut of land the abandoned project stands on is disused, and I wonder how much money would have been saved by leaving it alone instead of pursuing ‘innovation.’

To fill the silence and assuage a tide of smallness, Bumby and I talk. He’s a cheery retired man, and while we paddle, he tells me about a stroke that he had. We don’t only talk about his stroke, though — we talk about sports and learning to live in one’s own head, because in many ways, the physical degradation and loss of control from a stroke is very similar to the loss of control experienced by athletes with high expectations of themselves.

“When you can’t move your body and it’s just your brain sitting there with your eyeballs moving around and your ears are working, it’s all only self-talk,” he says.

Bumby tells me he never tried to resign himself to a narrative where he’s just a victim of his stroke. The son of British immigrants and unathletic parents, he grew to be a record-breaking high jumper in his high school years and an

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exceptional athlete all around.

In his early teenage years, he decided to break away from his previous compulsion to react with anger — a habit taught to him by his father. “It’s not as much fun when somebody is getting frustrated.” Despite his high achievement, Bumby doesn’t seem to subscribe to the self-serious idea of ‘the grind’: “If you’ve ever been golfing with somebody where they throw their clubs — if they got a bad shot. Instead of laughing about it, they get angry… It doesn’t help, right?

It doesn’t make your next shot better.”

Bumby adds: “We’re in one of the richest countries in the world playing golf and you had a bad shot? And you’re angry?

People lose perspective.”

Bumby’s speech is marked by a characteric exasperated, sassy intonation on the word “golf” and a quizzical lilt on statements he’s poking fun at.

Bumby tells me that the Davenportage participants are different — they relish their failure and still return the following year. A formidable athlete in his own right, he doesn’t subscribe to the cutthroat nature of high-performance athleticism. The Davenportage has meaning for him because of its humanism and humour; it’s his baby, and it’s a space to break generations of taught frustration.

We cross the Toronto waterfront, where Bumby snaps a photo of the CN Tower, and then we are in the Humber River. The Humber is a mucky and brutalist symphony of sunken concrete blocks. There’s a lonely chair perched on the river’s edge, and a wicked shallow flow — multiple times, I am jarred by the strike of my paddle against the riverbed.

Once we’re up the Humber, we shore up our boats and circle up for a land acknowledgement before the portage.

This is where Lefko and I joined

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last year. We divide up the canoes, and I take a shift with someone I recognize from a previous year.

He has a scraggly ponytail and a ruddy beard, and I remember that he was infamous for carrying a very heavy bag of rice to donate.

Last year, people chirped him for being hardcore, and we all took turns carrying his pack for minutes at a time while he bore it for hours in addition to the weight of the canoes. He seems like the perfect person to ask about what the Davenportage means to him, and from underneath the canoe, he answers. Though quick, his response winds out a larger story of suffering.

“It seems contrived, carrying these canoes… but the bigger the feelings, the conversations, the interactions with people — and yes — the suffering, [the more] the joy is real,” he says. “And they feel exceptionally real for me on that stage.”

While in conversation, our path turns into a switchback 36

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up a forested hill into an oak stand, and he repeatedly bangs into the trees as he turns, releasing a hissed “ah, fuck,” each time.

In the midst of his weighty maneuvering, he continues, “This is my happiest day of the year. This is paradise. I almost didn’t come this year, because I was feeling just not good, out of shape, haven’t done anything all year. Kind of had been toying with the idea of just giving up altogether.”

He continues, “In the last few days, that thought flashed through my mind; which is that if you’re going to suffer anyway… if you’re gonna have all this saltwater, you’re gonna have all this pain, you may as well be having a pain during the Davenportage. And it just struck me as being very true.”

At the top, we switch out.

While he helps me get the canoe onto my shoulders I think about his chosen weight in pack and what he said about the proper way to suffer. I feel empowered placing this bulky instrument of transportation and pain on my shoulders, but I wonder if it holds the same

depth for me as it does for him. It’s impossible to reconcile. It seems the Davenportage creates more questions than it does answers.

I think of social facilitation in the Davenportage again. To a political scientist designing a system, it only makes sense to expect people to take, especially since “to give” means to painfully carry a canoe that you won’t need in the future.

But to people like my portaging companion, this pain is critical to the process. People talking to me about the Davenportage say that their gain comes from what they can give.

I carry the canoe until I am with a new group of people.

We alternate until 3:00 pm, when we reach the Tollkeeper’s Cottage, a community-run museum on Davenport Road. The museum archives the lives of a group of people who used to collect tolls from travellers on roads they maintained — at that time, road maintenance was not a service provided by the city.

We eat lentil soup made by people in bonnets and hoop skirts before we debark once

more.

Travelling through Toronto on foot makes me appreciate the gradients between the socio-economic classes of neighbourhoods — the malls turn into neatly organized townhouses of the Annex before bleeding into the highrises of Yorkville. As we drop off the food at the Yorkville fire station and continue our quest east back toward the Evergreen Brickworks, I overhear someone complaining about having only slept for three hours.

As it turns out, this person is a U of T student. Vartkes Davidian is an Armenian master’s student and first-time Davenportageur. He’s lived in Canada for two years, but prior to the Davenportage, he had never paddled before. Coincidentally, he also heard about the event from the UTOC. Davidian is unfamiliar with how “crazy” Canadians are for the outdoors: “I played basketball, but this is another level,” he tells me. He believes that is “because everybody’s

suffering so it’s hard to keep the mental strength up. I think mental strength plays a huge part here because your body’s giving up, my legs are giving up, something is keeping me on my feet or something… if I was alone, I wouldn’t be doing it.

But people around here… you see people going around and pushing forward, [so] you also push forward.”

Next year, he says he will get enough sleep to wake up for the run.

Perhaps empathy and pain are a critical part of it all. For some people, the same pain that would deter a social loafer may be exactly why they become social facilitators; for others, it’s the act of redirecting a physical burden from their friend or partner that cements their unwillingness to free ride.

The openness of the event allows for all types to participate, whether they are here

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to learn or simply be with a group, whether they want to run or paddle or portage or all three. The radical acceptance is what defines the Davenportage as different from any other sporting event. Many Davenportage participants cannot give a single reason that can explain why they participate, and often their explanation lies deep in their life story.

After the sun sets and our bonfire glows again, I begin to circulate throughout the group to find people commuting home in my direction. Someone says they will be going my way, and as I look at him, he reminds me of patchouli. He is the one who burned incense the previous year. Now, I am catching a cab home with him, his kid, and someone

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else.

Despite my first impression of him, I can find no part of myself to resent this patchouli-burning person who initially made the Davenportage so disorienting. The non-Indigeneity of the event is undeniable, but settler colonialism is undeniable in Toronto itself. The Davenportage is not made to erase that but rather put it into perspective by “pay[ing] some sort of respect to the land that’s been here for millennia.”

“Our event is really just about what you felt tonight — that’s what we’re trying to capture,” Bumby says.

“That is more than enough for me to say it was successful. Because… I think you probably said, ‘What the heck? That was kind of

interesting.’ ” And he was right. I did find it interesting. That’s why I came back.

If you want to participate in the Davenportage just to learn, or simply to be with a group — whether you want to run or paddle or portage or all three — you will feel something. I can’t tell you what that will be, because that’s up to you. We could run the same amount, paddle the same amount, and portage the same amount but have entirely different perspectives on the land, on our pain, and on each other. Our experiences will be different, because at the end of the day we’re different people. And we’re all only self-talk.

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Visuals: Caroline Bellamy

Tattoo art by Sarah Bera at The Fang and Flower

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Dissecting death

Writer & Illustrator: Cheryl Nong Content warning: This article describes death and mentions cadavers and murder.

When I was 15 years old, I went to a local science festival and held a human brain in my hands for the first time.

The specimen reeked of formaldehyde. In my small palms, it felt heavier than I expected. My father — a doctor by training and a neuroscientist by trade, both clearly evident in the way he raised me — proudly snapped a photo to commemorate the occasion.

I didn’t consider the magnitude of the situation until I got home and sent the picture to a friend. He mostly shared my father’s enthusiasm, but he had a few more reservations.

“I’m not grossed out, it’s just a little weird,” he wrote back.

“You know, that it used to be in someone’s head.”

Truthfully, I hadn’t given it much thought. But my friend’s comment set the gears turning in my head.

They were still revolving five years and most of a neuroscience degree later, when I found myself standing with a brain in my hands once again.

My neuroanatomy lab was nothing like a science fair, and not just because of the overwhelming atmosphere of premed despair. Each week, the specimens still felt heavy in my amateur hands, but I could project more detachment from the donors this time: I was there as a stu40

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dent, and they had volunteered their bodies so that my classmates and I could further our education.

That fact helped ease the strange feeling of dissonance I got when I thought of the brain inside my skull, working overtime to coordinate the fine movements of my specimen dissections. In preparation for my lab exam, I traced the surfaces with gloved fingertips, identifying crests and troughs. I whiled away my hours in the Medical Sciences Building knowing someone’s life had once been lived along those lines.

— Long before I was struggling to locate the Circle of Willis — a group of arteries at the base of the brain that supply blood to the brain — previous generations of students did the same. All told, the use of human remains in medical education has a long and complicated history. Even before we were systematically dissecting corpses, we were still taking them apart in some capacity.

Take mummification, for instance. Most famously practiced by ancient Egyptians, it is a method used to preserve a body after death.

While the process chiefly involves removing moisture from the body — also achievable by natural means, like extremely dry or cold conditions — skilled practitioners would also separately remove and store the soft internal organs. As far as we know, the Chinchorro people in

Dissecting death modern-day Peru and Chile produced the oldest known example of these intentional dissective mummies around 7,000 years ago.

Between 1500 and 600 BCE in India, dissections were also commonly performed on the bodies of people who had passed while whole and healthy. Religious guidelines at the time forbade cutting into the body, so educators prepared cadavers before dissection so that tools other than knives could be used.

Students were expected to stringently prepare for the procedures by memorizing anatomy and practicing their techniques on gourds. With these rigorous practices in place, physicians were even knowledgeable enough about the body to surgically remove cataracts.

Aside from their practical, spiritual, and medical value, these techniques were culturally important, which is enough reason for recognition. That said, most medical historians identify the ancestors of modern-day cadaveric dissections as emerging much later.

Our story thus relocates to third century Alexandria and the Greek medical tradition.

Here, local authorities’ desire to build the city’s reputation on scientific progress helped overcome existing unease about the idea of human dissection, which was viewed as a violation of moral, religious, and aesthetic ideals. Additionally, the royal provision of corpses of executed criminals

provided enough material for the dissection practice to find its legs.

However, changing perspectives on medical teaching as well as the burning of Alexandria put a halt to human dissection. As Europe entered the Middle Ages, the spread of Christianity positioned the church as the voice of authority on most medical matters. With religious leaders promoting repetition of historical science and dissuading new advancements — particularly those learned by working with human remains, which was considered blasphemous — the practice of human dissections stalled for over 1,000 years.

Opinions didn’t begin to shift until around the thirteenth century. As medical education gravitated back toward favoring human specimens for teaching anatomy, restrictions gradually loosened. 1315 marked the year when the first officially sanctioned, systematic dissection of a human body since Alexandria’s downfall was conducted in Italy. Public opinion grudgingly warmed across the fourteenth century as religious leaders offered more straightforward authorization as well as clearer boundaries around dissection, allowing the practice to spread further across Europe.

Up to this point, dissections had primarily been performed on the bodies of executed criminals. This source alone proved inadequate as more medical schools embraced

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the practice. To keep up with demand, medical students were encouraged to attend and even pay for local funerals to promote body donation as an option to families in the community.

The situation only worsened during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries with the advent of the Renaissance.

Artists, scholars, and members of the general public became keenly interested in anatomy and the natural world, sparking a greater interest in dissection. Some of the most famous artists of the period, including Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo Buonarroti, and Baccio Bandinelli even performed their own examinations of the human body to better portray its form.

As a result, the growing disparity between the supply and demand of dissectable bodies reached a critical

point. In England, the increasing pressure on legal bodies eventually resulted in the pragmatically named Murder Act in 1752.

Perhaps optimistically, the new law aimed to neatly solve two problems at once: in addition to providing medical schools with a greater supply of cadavers, it also attempted to discourage people from committing homicides. The Act seized on the general public distaste for posthumous dissection by treating it as an extra form of punishment. Not only would murderers be executed for their crimes, their bodies would then be handed off for clueless medical students to deface, rather than receiving an honorable burial.

This drastic course of action was still not enough to

match the rapidly expanding field of medical training. At long last, the study of anatomy was now widely accepted as part of a standard education for doctors and surgeons, which meant that the need for cadavers was greater than ever. In London alone, there were over 200 medical students in 1793; by 1823, that number had jumped up to over 1,000. Yet the total pool of cadavers legally available to both students and practicing surgeons amounted to less than 100 per year.

What was a troubled medical instructor to do?

With an inadequate supply through “official” channels, a period-typical inability to preserve human bodies in the long term, and lingering

public disdain for the practice, many medical schools turned to alternate means of procuring fresh bodies for the dissection table.

Grave robbing was an unpleasant but straightforward solution. Reports of desperate anatomists stealing human remains date back to the fourteenth century, when dissection first made its legal breakthrough in Europe, but the practice didn’t become more commonplace until after the sixteenth century.

Initially, the act was performed almost exclusively by amateurs. Medical students, employees at medical schools, and even professors would stumble into graveyards and nab freshly buried bodies for their own instructional use.

By the nineteenth century, however, a rising class of professionals had burst

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onto the scene: self-titled “resurrectionists,” whose full-time jobs were to sneak into burial grounds, remove the recently deceased from their would-be final resting place, and then replace the grave exactly as it had been left. Upon successfully delivering the corpse to their medical school patrons, they would receive a hefty sum for their troubles.

The best resurrectionists had the process down to a science. As body snatching grew more widespread, families sometimes employed traps or protections to ward off cadaver thieves, so some gangs designated a spy to investigate local funerals and keep an eye out for potential pitfalls. After night fell and the informant had scoped out the location, a small team uncovered the head of the grave, fished out the body, replaced the burial shroud, 42

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and then delicately replaced the soil. The whole process took less than 15 minutes from start to finish and could yield around two pounds per body — more than $300 CAD today.

Not all methods of obtaining bodies were so artful.

Plenty of other reports detail medical students trying to steal corpses even before they were buried, or, at worst, assaulting funeral processions. And yes, if you’re wondering: there is ample evidence that some chose to ‘make’ their own cadavers for study. Most famously, between 1828 and 1829, William Burke and William Hare killed at least 16 people in Edinburgh for famous anatomy teacher Robert Knox in the name of anatomical dissection. Ironically, after they were caught and convicted in 1828, Burke’s body was used in a public dissection.

As generally unscrupulous as these “solutions” to the cadaver shortages were, some groups certainly suffered more from their implementation. Bodies were disproportionately stolen from low-income families, who could not afford the extra expenses of fortified coffins, safer burial grounds, or loyal security guards that could not be paid off by wily resurrectionists. With medical institutions willingly turning a blind eye to the sources of their human teaching materials, the thriving cadaver trade rapidly revealed itself as another face of class conflict.

Fury at the continued exploitation at the hands of uncaring doctors and surgeons culminated in a series of riots targeting medical schools and staff. In New York City, the Anatomy Riot of 1788 brought a mob of 5,000 to a medical building on the

campus of modern-day Columbia University; the aftermath involved an estimated 20 casualties. There were at least 17 other comparable “anatomy riots” in the United States alone in the years leading up to the American Civil War. The violent backlash shook the medical world, and in 1832 — just a few years after the high-profile anatomy murders by Burke and Hare — the British government became the first to pass The Warburton Anatomy Act, more colloquially the “bone bill,” which attempted to diffuse tensions by providing another legitimate source of cadavers: this time, by allowing medical schools access to any “unclaimed” bodies that remained in workhouses and charitable hospitals 48 hours after death. Countries throughout the British Commonwealth followed suit

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with their own bone bills, and the practice of grave robbing gradually fell out of favor as cadavers became more readily available.

If dissection had been a thinly veiled issue of class before, there was nothing veiled about it anymore. In his 2015 review on the history of human cadaveric dissection, anatomy professor Sanjib Kumar Ghosh writes that the Warburton Anatomy Act “effectively made poverty the sole criterion for dissection in England.”

Unsurprisingly, this bodily degradation didn’t discriminate on the basis of class alone, though categories often overlapped. The spirit of bone bills adapted with the times throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. Aside from the poor, who could not always be reached by loved

ones within the 48-hour claim period, other common posthumous victims of dissection included people of color, immigrants, political prisoners, and occupants of psychiatric asylums.

Fortunately, the rise of body donation initiatives in the late twentieth century dramatically changed the landscape of human cadaveric dissection. Today, the majority of cadavers used in Europe and North America are sourced from these donation programs. That’s not to say that dubious practices don’t still persist — researchers still report reliance on unclaimed, imported, or executed bodies in some countries.

The International Federal of Associations of Anatomists recommended body donations as the new “gold standard” source for cadavers used in

dissection over 10 years ago in 2012 to reduce the prevalence of these potentially unethical practices. However, cultural, religious, and historical reasons still make this goal difficult to achieve.

In particular, it’s hard to solicit donations from communities historically wronged by medical institutions. After doing the research for this article, I find it hard to blame them.

— Comical at times and horrific at others, the grisly story of human cadaver dissection is a testament to how far some are willing to go in the pursuit of knowledge. Like most parables about medical history, it’s a cautionary tale; it reminds us students in the life sciences that even our most commonplace practices can easily worsen existing societal inequalities. The people who

suffer the most in pushing the bounds of science are rarely recruited as voluntary participants.

Tales like these aren’t uncommon. In fact, it’s usually the opposite; look far enough into some other medical practice or phenomenon, and you’ll often uncover a history like this. Ultimately, they reaffirm our social responsibility as scientists to “do the right thing” — to choose the ethical solution over the easy one, to invent new options in a forced-choice paradigm — when we seek out truth. If our goal as researchers is to assist all of humanity, how can we get there by continually exploiting those with the least power to escape exploitation?

It’s hard, after all, to find a body that can put up less of a fight than a corpse.

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Houses in the snow

Houses in the snow Writer: Savannah Lollo Illustrator: Biew Biew Sakulwannadee In the snow, I cannot see much.

I know that there are houses in the distance — I can distinguish their outlines. Yet, everything else is obscured. The wind is violent and the downfall is unrelenting. I don’t know the colour of their porches nor the count of their shingles. I can make out just enough to avoid walking right into the structures, but nothing more.

This is the closest I can come to describing what it feels like to lose my memory.

— Two months after I turned 13, I woke up on the floor with my friend standing over me.

“Are you okay?” they asked. I thought, of course I was, why wouldn’t I be?

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A week later, my parents took me to the doctor; they thought I was “acting weird.”

When I pressed them for answers, my mother replied, “You just are.”

Enclosed between the robin’s egg-coloured walls of the office, the physician asked me how I was feeling and if something was off or uncomfortable. I stared at the watercolour painting beside my doctor’s desk — her husband had painted it — and answered, “No.” I felt physically strong and had written an essay in that same week that received a grade of 100 per cent. All I was feeling was proud.

That reality quickly dissolved when I was unable to walk in a straight line.

My diagnosis was a mild concussion — the badge of professional athletes and sur-

vivors of car accidents — I had received when I was in gym class. The physician told me that it would be fine. As long as I went to the physiotherapy appointments, completed the exercises, and did absolutely nothing that required brain power for months, it would all go away, and I would never have to worry about it again.

But around the time that I was preparing to graduate high school, further tests revealed a much more serious condition: post-trauma vision syndrome, a concussion-induced complication that impacted my vision rather severely. Yet, there was still a creeping feeling in the back of my mind. Despite doctors’ assurance that there would be no other injury-related symptoms, I felt that my memory was degrading.

It is usually fruitless to explain this. When you say the words “memory loss,” most imagine a dramatic bout of amnesia, as is commonly depicted in blockbusters and potentially overused in romance and crime. Someone wakes up in a hospital bed with no memory of their lover or the identity of the killer — sometimes it’s both. People, places, events, days, months, or years are missing from their minds, and the audience sees blankness, a completely empty space in place of a life.

The type of memory loss I’m afflicted with is entirely different. It is the loss of autobiographical memory, a type of recollection that can be described as memories that an individual can recall about their life and the experiences they have had. I have no is-

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sue telling you what game I tended to play during recess — four square — but I cannot describe to you any specific round I’ve ever played.

With no usual symptoms of memory loss, however, I did not know how to explain what I was experiencing.

There was no check box on my medical forms for ‘kind of’ remembering your life.

My confusion was not unwarranted but neither was my doctor’s assured dismissal.

Research into traumatic brain injury-induced memory loss is skewed. It rarely studies the effects on memory beyond acute stages of injury. Only more recently, in research such as the 2017 issue of Brain and Cognition, has post-concussion autobiographical memory impairment been explored.

When recalling, I experience an eerie sensation of confusion. How do you remember something you don’t

know you’ve forgotten? Losing my memory has been syrupy, an unhurried process, a thick layer of snow obscuring any valuable fragment, that continues to spread across my landscape.

I’ve confirmed the existence of autobiographical memory loss in accordance with traumatic brain injury — yippee — so I’m not imagining things. Factual past events are a “yes,” but detail and depth are a “no” — so what? Despite the fact that my brain feels like it is being sucked up by a straw, there is not much in the way of a greater picture. What does it really mean to live through a perpetual whiteout?

An article published in the Journal of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology postulates that autobiographical memory “ensures a continuous knowing of the self.” I find this both logical and quietly terrifying. In

1890, American philosopher William James wrote that he believed that if an individual’s personal memories went missing, they would be like a different person. Identity is an active process, with autobiographical memory as the foundation of this construction.

Information to make informed personal choices and constructions of the self is hard to go without. To make decisions about the future, most people refer to their past. But what does one do when that repository is unreliable?

Concussions have a sneaky effect on autobiographical memory. There are no ‘black-out’ weeks, just years of murkiness and a constant sense of déjà vu. So many memories are on the tip of my tongue — where they will stay for the rest of my life.

To what extent am I a different person because of what

I can’t remember? I haven’t forgotten that I used to play piano or that I once wanted to be a race car driver, but don’t ask me to describe any day I spent with my grandparents or any of my birthday parties.

Lacking a vision of my past leaves me unmoored, without a buffer — a safety net of detailed experiences to draw from. In the snow storm, I cannot make out the details of what surrounds me.

But I do have a view of my immediacy. I can see where my feet stand and I can watch my hands reach out into the freezing white of the wind.

Just as the distance is unclear, the present is the opposite. There is a solidity in my everyday, lively greed during my best experiences and assurance in my worst ones. One day, they will be forgotten.

I appreciate moments as they happen. I know it may be the last time I think of them.

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Mother

Mother

Writer: Fred Degen Illustrator: Evelyn Van Andel I am in the studio that Natalka Husar visits every day to make sure everything is in order.

Husar, a painter and my close family friend, is looking at a prepared canvas with Ukrainian embroidery on it. The canvas material is a faded brown, but Husar promises that I’ll be able to see the colours better the next time she shows it to me.

She tells me that she hung the canvas in preparation for my visit.

“This is good Ukrainian linen,” Husar tells me, referring to the stitching. “I could have done the whole piece with the stitching, but the paint is too good.”

The piece is named Rehab.

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chine that used to belong to her mother, who is the first person she talks about when she mentions her art.

Rehab started out as a painting of six women drawn around a kitchen. Then, Husar taped motion cards entailing winking on the women’s heads. She painted appliances on top of the women’s heads along with drawn dolls on a mass of wires plugged into a small outlet.

My mother once told me that Husar can’t predict the outcome of her work while painting; when I mention this to Husar, she tells me, “I don’t know what the painting might show me.”

Husar developed a close bond with her mother when she was my age, and I ask her about how this happened. Though our relationships with our mothers are different, I think the eventu-

al course of Husar’s friendship with my own mother can tell me about my own history with the woman who raised me. “That’s for the personal part of the interview,” she answers slyly.

— When I turned 20 and started university I decided that my mother would be my best friend.

We had always been exceptionally close, so I made an attempt to see more of her.

Sometimes, I think that we’re so close because I look like her but I’ve always had an instinct that our bond was more than that. She’s the person who I have come to love more than anyone and she’s put chestnuts in my coats since I was little.

I still feel that I need her love with me.

When my mother told me that she was getting married and

that I could not attend her wedding, we had our first real fight. I did not understand what motivated her decision, and though we made up like usual, our amends felt insincere.

The first time that I met Husar was when my mother began planning for the wedding. We visited Husar’s home for dinner. I tagged along because I wanted to feel involved in my mother’s ceremony. I tried to be friendly, but it was difficult because my feelings toward my mother were bubbling to the surface.

— I wanted to get a good record of Husar’s work, so I had my friend Evelyn take photographs on her new phone. Before we met Husar, I had told Evelyn that she is a friend of my mother’s.

“She sounds cool,” she said. I

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was surprised, and must have made this clear. She said that she likes most of her mother’s friends, and we did more talking about our mothers than we had ever done before.

Husar wore an angora sweater under a black smock and jeans when we met her — it was her studio day. She hung our coats and then greeted me with a hug. She and I touched arms for some time and then drew apart again. I had never been so intimate with someone in front of Evelyn, but Husar brings that affection out of people. Evelyn wouldn’t think it, but Husar is more like my mother than anyone I know. Husar has the same curt energy with new people that my friends have found odd; something that I always thought was part of her charm.

The earliest mention that Husar made of her mother that day is when she spoke about a box that her mother had emigrated with when she came to North America from a displaced persons camp in Germany. “Everything important to her was in there, and I still have it,” she beamed.

— There was a photograph in Husar’s house that I was drawn to. In it was a naked Slavic man with a buzzcut standing beside his wife while holding a briefcase. His arms were clasped in hers and she looked past the camera in an afternoon dress

and heels. Husar did not know the origin of the photo; she had bought it from a street vendor in Paris for $300.

Evelyn giggled when Husar spoke about the image, and later photographed it. We did not speak of it afterward.

A few days after the interview, Evelyn and I were in Robarts Library working on an assignment. I apologized if it was rude to ask her to take a photograph of a nude man. “You wanted to see it,” she replied. I thought about how struck I was by how calm Evelyn was with a person so like the person who raised me. I told her I’d introduce her to my mother.

I’ve had many friends who I’ve done schoolwork with like this, but they all seem to lose interest in me after they meet my mother. In her presence, they would boast a guarded look. Afterward, they would tell me that they knew where I got my personality from. Evelyn felt like the first person who could let their guard down around my mother, even though they have never met.

Our conversation trails off, and we spend most of our time laughing. When Evelyn laughs, her hair bounces. I show her a pen that she finds funny, and she tells me about when she FaceTimed her cat. In her presence, I feel like I’ve made a real friend.

— In Husar’s office, there is a

bust of her mother made

by Ukrainian sculptor Mykhailo Chereshnovsky. When I speak with Husar, I am facing her as she faces her mother’s bust.

I ask about Husar’s mother and she says that she remembers her in a number of ways.

Sometimes, she has unsettling thoughts surrounding her mother’s late life, but she still laughs about living with her. She remembers the bikini that her mother bought for her 100th birthday, and the time that her mother allowed her to paint her headboard with the Beatles’ faces as a teenager so she could “sleep with them.”

I have my first real apprehension of what I would do if I lost my mother during the interview. I think of her life and what I would salvage from my childhood. It’s something that I willed myself not to see

earlier, and I still don’t know what I would do about it. I think that what I’d heard was another story, but when I hear Husar speak Ukrainian, it becomes something that I feel I need to tell my mother about. European languages are the languages of my childhood, and the ones that I love hearing the best — the ones that she spoke to me. I cry and say that I know what she is talking about, even though I don’t speak Ukrainian.

Back in her kitchen, Evelyn and I eat biscotti and drink mint tea with Husar. Husar asks how we’re getting home; we’ll take the bus, and I’ll be pleased to be back. But part of me wants to stay here, to maintain a connection with the histories of the miscellaneous items that she cares about most.

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Broken records

Broken Record: A disability retrospective Writer: Catherine Dumé Photographer: Averyn Ngan Over and over I feel broken, Broken Never once perfect Perfect.

But broken, Broken Over and over I’ve ‘poken Spoken You never once liztened Listened, ‘Cause I am broken, Broken.

A new record by the window display Its harmonious, glorious Long wait time at the store Yet when I speak I’m ‘cratchy, delayed I’m tucked in the back I’m a bore How much do I have to pay For an experience that izn’t mine?

Can’t you just treat me right?

The world is a quiet place, When you feel like the only case, Who is discarded, displaced.

You know?

Over and over,

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I feel broken, Broken.

Never once perfect Perfect.

But broken, Broken.

Over and over, I’ve ‘poken Spoken.

You never once liztened Listened, ‘Cause I am broken, Broken.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

I may be scratched, But I can still play.

For there will be a time I won’t hide, I won’t delay.

Why should I pay For an experience that isn’t mine?

Why should I be fixed when I’m just fine?

I was made this way Never was a bad mistake Even when my record break, I know.

The world is a lively commotion, Both perfect and broken, Filled with pretty emotion.

You know?

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2020 — the year when the world broke apart. That year, my emotions were going haywire.

My family is always my support system, and my faith keeps me anchored so I won’t be swept away. But as the numbers rose higher and higher to the point of insanity, a cloud of pessimism dampened my rays of sunshine.

I lost my sense of feeling. I was neither sad nor happy — just numb.

It was not until I started writing poems that the gray walls around my heart cracked and crumbled into dust. For the first time, I was able to put into words how I truly felt inside.

All that frustration. All of that sadness. The irate anger that seemed to boil just underneath the surface.

The first poem I wrote that year was “Broken Records.”

Within the Medical Framework presents disability in a negative contrast to the “healthy able-body” that medicine promotes. It perpetuates the idea that since disability is a bad thing, that people with disabilities are sick, they need a cure, they need to be fixed. By saying “why should I pay for an experience that isn’t mine, why should I be fixed when I’m just fine” the poem actively critiques this framework, the concept of eugenics —hiding disability away and curing disability — and promotes a message of

self-acceptance and disability joy.

Having high frequency hearing loss, I struggled in hearing letters of the alphabet, with “S” being the worst, especially at the end of words. Because I was born deaf, I grew up with a lisp, which made it difficult to communicate with others. So asking to repeat one’s self was a constant annoyance. While I ended up getting speech therapy to correct my speech, my lisp is habitual.

Hence the motif of the “broken record.” We hate it when the record gets scratched and gets stuck on a note, and sounds terrible to listen to; so much so we discard it. We only want to listen to and pay attention to those who are “perfectly healthy,” or beautiful to listen to.

While those who are disabled, imperfect, their words fall on deaf ears.

I have high frequency loss, which means I can still hear without aids, I just cannot hear certain sounds, like whistles, keys on a piano, fire alarms and most importantly certain letters of the alphabet: S, SH, CH, R,TH,W. This has led to me constantly asking others to repeat themselves. Additionally, because I was born with hearing loss, I grew up learning how to speak English without hearing a part of the alphabet, thus I have a lisp, which forc-

es me to repeat myself when others do not understand my speech; hence the motif of the Broken Record. When we play a record — or CD — we often hate it when the record gets scratched and gets stuck on a note, that it reverbs and sounds terrible to listen to.

Once it’s scratched beyond repair it’s discarded. This explains why I removed certain “S” from words and replaced them with “Z” as I often did as a child.

It had been years since I wrote about how it felt to be disabled. The first time was when I was 14, in middle school. There was a Hearing Impaired Magazine run by the local school board, and they asked all the students with hearing loss to submit a piece. I wrote a short story called “To Wish Upon a Star,” about a girl with hearing loss overcoming bullying and learning self worth. Maybe it is because my inner spirit knew I needed it, but I ended the story with the girl learning to love herself and actually experiencing character growth, instead of getting a “magic cure.”

When I say my entire outlook on life switched after that moment, it was like a snap of a finger. I still have moments where my frustration catches up to me, and I wonder, would I prefer to be normal

like everyone else? Someone who doesn’t have to ask people to repeat constantly?

Someone who doesn’t have to fear if I am gonna have a seizure whenever my fingers curl up and tingles? Someone who doesn’t have to send her brain through so many mental gymnastics just to understand what is taught to her?

How much would I pay just for an experience that isn’t mine?

The truth is, we all have struggles in life. Sure, my struggles may be worse in some aspects. But at least I have parents who love me. I have siblings who will support me, tease me, and annoy me.

I have friends who are always there whenever I want to hang out or if I need a helping hand.

I have resources to get accommodations and support in order to succeed in life.

The fact that I am even at U of T of all places and am still here after four years proves the number of blessings I have been given, and I am grateful.

So, yeah, I know I am a “broken record.” I’m not going to be someone’s first choice at the record store. That I am discarded by society as an afterthought. That my epilepsy and lazy eye might scare some people or that my hearing loss and lisp will annoy the rest.

But I know my worth. It’s about time society recognizes it as well.

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Being transgender

Misery meat

Writer & Illustrator: Jeremy Mytkowski

Content warning: This article contains mentions of gender dysmorphia.

I’ve spent quite a lot of time thinking about how I wanted to begin this article. There was a lot of contemplation on whether I begin it with a story or a metaphor, but in the end, I’ve decided that I should write it as it is: being transgender is hard.

Despite being proud of my identity, I often feel discouraged by the knowledge that my life would be so much easier if I could just be who I was born as: a woman. I yearn for the simplistic girlhood I once lived in, oblivious to puberty and how awful it would treat me. I want to play on the swings and run in the dirt, not caring about how the clothes I wear make me look. I want to draw and write and create, not having to worry about which parts of my body have more fat than others.

Transgender people are often painted in a bad light, but we are not dangerous. We are people trying to get by.

We want to feel comfortable in our own bodies. We want those around us to support us and not care if we’re present differently because we’re still the same people we were before.

Although my experience is not synonymous with that of other members of the community, I think we can all share the sentiment of just wanting to be treated with respect.

By reflecting on my experiences and interviewing other transgender U of T

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students, I want to show you that transgender people don’t have to have complex feelings about our identity and our bodies; sometimes, we can simply exist and be happy with what we notice about ourselves.

Gender dysmorphia Gender dysmorphia is, technically, a sense of unease that someone feels because of a mismatch between their biological sex and their gender identity. But it’s hard to describe what it feels like to experience gender dysphoria to those who’ve never known it.

I say I want to go through medical changes, and people tell me to not hate my body. I don’t hate my body. I don’t care that I’m a little chubby or that I’m shorter than my brother and male cousins. I care that I am all those things, while living in a female body.

I think of genetics as a lottery — if I ended up with this body while going through male puberty, I wouldn’t mind. But instead, I’m left with bits and pieces that I can’t stand. Extra meat where there should be none, and none where there

should be more. And when I go to shower, staring at my exposed body in the mirror, I see a stranger looking back at me.

Before I came out to my parents, I’d pretend in my head that they were calling me by my chosen name to get things done without feeling discouraged. Even now, when they’re using the right name, all it takes is for someone to use the wrong pronouns for the world to pause for me.

I become forced to focus on the ringing of the “her…“her… her” that bounces between my ears. I know I can never be seen as a man to others the same way as a cisgender man is, but that reality is a lot easier to face when it’s just in my head, and not in every interaction I have.

Sometime last spring, I was asleep in my bed, as I am every other night, and I was dreaming of being with my boyfriend at the beach. In this dream, I had gone through top surgery and was shirtless while in my swim trunks and with sunscreen over the scar tissue.

We were running in the water and splashing around with the summer sun shin-

ing warmly on us. And then I woke up. And there was a heavy weight on my chest. I don’t think I had ever truly felt the weight of my breasts until that moment. All I could do was sit up in the darkness of night and cry.

Dysphoria is that feeling.

That subconscious weight anytime I’m at home and not binding. The discomfort when I hear my voice played back to me — not because it’s weird, but because it’s not me. I feel like I’m an outsider, looking through someone else’s eyes.

When I am fully clothed, I can confidently look at myself and say “Yes, that’s me,” but the moment my shield is off and I’m left with myself, I’m not so sure anymore.

Surgery Although some cisgender people may not think of gender-affirming surgeries as necessary, they can be life-saving for transgender people. In Ontario, we’re lucky enough to have the Ontario Health Insurance Plan (OHIP) which covers gender affirming surgeries, some

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hormone therapies, and counselling to approved patients.

However, waitlists for these procedures and resources can last up to two years.

This lack of insurance can cause other kinds of distress for transgender people all over the world. Worrying about the costs of medical procedures, not getting support quickly enough, or the refusal or lack of accessibility to them can be difficult to navigate.

If it wasn’t already obvious, I have not gone through any process of medically transitioning.

For me, like other transgender people, the goal is to end up going through certain medical procedures to help us feel more comfortable in our own bodies. I have my ideal medical procedures in mind, but as of right now, I’m held back by other factors. This varies from person to person, whether in terms of procedures and reasons for wanting them or not. I wanted to express that through the participation of other U of T students.

Jeremy Mytkowski: Why did you decide on medically transitioning? How do you feel after doing so, compared to before?

Student one: [From] the moment I came out, I knew for sure I wanted to be on hormones and blockers. Even still, it took 11 months of therapy and two doctors’ notes to access it.

As for how I feel, I would say that it’s not so much about ‘before’ and ‘after’ — medical transition is something that will always be part of my life in some way or another, physiologically and psychologically. All I know is that for most of my life, I felt like my body and mind were both adrift, floating in opposite directions. Now, I’ve finally been able to begin closing the gap.

JM: Do you plan on medically transitioning in the future? Why or why not?

Student two: I am probably just going to do top surgery since it’s less awkward for family members to be like “Hey, your boobs seem smaller” than me suddenly getting a bulge. I also do want to remove my ovaries because I do not plan to have children.

JM: In a perfect world, one where you could hand pick how you’d look, sound, etcetera, what would that look like for you?

SO: I feel [like] the impulse is rooted in cisnormativity, but I know that if it were possible I would make my body align with a cisgender woman. I know there are plenty of trans people out there who are totally comfortable with certain physical traits of their birth sex and that is 100 per cent valid, but personally, my dysphoria is such that a cis female body would make me the happiest.

ST: I really like that gruff man feeling, and I would want a beard [or] stubble. To be fair, I’d just like to not be me, though how I would want to look aside from that is uncertain.

like about their bodies: “My top surgery scars. They show how far I’ve come, especially after a very difficult recovery.”

“I have scoliosis, meaning one side of my body looks curvy and the other flat — great for being non-binary.”

“Really weird but my feet, thanks to their size! And also my waist!”

Personally, I really like my hair and my face. Though they’re not perfect, I’m able to easily work with them through styling — if needed — to make me feel comfortable in my daily life.

If you’re reading this and are transgender, I’m proud of you.

I hope you can find some comfort in my words, and that you know you are heard. You don’t owe anyone explanations for your identity.

If you’re cisgender and are reading this, know that we appreciate your support. I hope that my being open

about my experiences can help you understand our lives a little better, and motivate you to keep advocating for equality.

Embracing the parts Although living as a transgender person can be miserable, we are not just our pain and suffering. We do not hate ourselves; we can find joy in that which we have and that which we are able to achieve. So, as some final words, here are some statements from transgender U of T students about what they

Winter 2023

51

Living with cancer

Being on the right foot with someone who’s missing one

Writer & Illustrator: Fabienne de Cartier

During an early morning summertime run by the waterfront, a woman stopped me to tell me that I reminded her of a “young man named Terry Fox.” Of course, it’s an honour to be compared to someone who is widely considered one of our nation’s heroes: a man who attempted to run across Canada following his cancer diagnosis in 1977 to raise awareness and funds for cancer research, which total $800 million to date. But it was pretty funny that, when asked, she didn’t want to admit why she saw a resemblance. Must have been our hair, I guess.

In truth, I do share certain commonalities with Fox. As a teenager, I was diagnosed with the same type of bone cancer, osteosarcoma, and had no choice but to amputate my leg above the ankle. And, like Fox, I too feel like a famous person.

At times, it seems a flock of paparazzi is staring; children get scared, strangers point and do double takes, all of them with their mouths agape. What a spectacle I am!

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And I get it. Maybe these people have simply never seen an amputee before. I spark incessant curiosities, burning questions my devoted audience just has to ask. Some are well meaning: “What happened?”

Some are interrogative: “Why didn’t you pray more?” Others are intrusive: “So how do you have sex?” I understand their interest in the unknown, wanting to understand how our lives differ from theirs, but what is a rare occurrence for them is an everyday reality for me.

What’s ironic is that, despite their keen and ardent questioning, strangers usually don’t like the answers I have for them.

Well intentioned inquiries into the origin of my disability generally don’t end on the uplifting note strangers seem to be hoping for. I’m still looking for a way to sugarcoat my childhood cancer into an easily digestible answer, but I have to say, despite my efforts, the topic is quite the conversation killer. These initially friendly interactions usually end in debilitating awkwardness, with strangers often concerned, apologizing, visibly upset, or pitying my condition.

While empathy is a natural

response — and an essential part of what makes us human — these reactions mean I end up spending time and energy comforting strangers about my disability. I downplay its impacts even though they are in no way trivial. I reassure strangers about something that won’t tangibly affect them beyond the confines of our conversation. I might cherish these moments if the comforting was reciprocal, or a kind of shared healing.

If these were occasional occurrences, I wouldn’t mind playing the consoling role. But I processed the news of my amputation years ago, and the frequency of these interactions means that they are more tiring than helpful. Ultimately, the unbridled sympathies of strangers mean that people with disabilities bear the burden of emotional labour that they shouldn’t have to.

By contrast, the comments I receive are sometimes more condescending than they are concerned. I don’t think this is intentional — the repeated “Way to go, buddy” and “Look at you go!” seem like genuine attempts at encouragement. But the lack of malicious intent behind these

remarks doesn’t change the fact that strangers often speak to me as if I were a young child, using high-pitched tones and dumbed-down diction.

I’ve noticed this tendency toward condescension through my lived experience. We must recognize that disability does not imply immaturity. Accommodations can be made while still affording people with disabilities the same dignity and respect as our able-bodied peers.

Conversely, condescending statements may sometimes arise from an assumption of inferiority more so than immaturity. A phrase I frequently hear is: “If [a person with a disability] can do it, so can I!” This message isn’t inherently problematic. Online, it promotes positivity within an internet culture that often does the opposite.

And personally, seeing people with a similar amputation to my own perform various activities can both be encouraging and show me new ways to approach challenges.

However, this kind of message can become condescending when it inadvertently implies inferiority. Don’t get me wrong; disabilities don’t just necessi-

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tate doing tasks differently but make everyday activities undoubtedly harder to complete. However, one shouldn’t assume they will automatically be able to perform an activity simply because a person with a disability can.

Able-bodied individuals aren’t inherently better at tasks simply because it is easier for them to learn and complete them.

Antithetical disability stereotypes somehow exist simultaneously, representing people with disabilities not only as near children but also as heroes. On a slow evening jog, strangers will declare my bravery from the opposite end of the street, praise me for how much I’ve bled, and unceremoniously knight me with pats on the head. Needless to say, people with disabilities are too often made objects of inspiration. We are perceived as courageous for merely existing.

But my disability is just a fact of my existence, a part of who I am. Simply living my ordinary life shouldn’t be inspiring. Our bodies don’t make us heroes.

While some comments and questions may be uncomfortable, others are genuinely compassionate and heartfelt.

And I understand why people offer them. There’s something really beautiful about kindness shared between strangers. But the sheer volume of comments I receive as a result of my disability means that even the most

caring of words contribute to an uncomfortable excess of attention.

Facing alienation, I crave anonymity.

It’s worth noting that, as a belowthe-knee amputee, I am only visibly disabled when my prosthetic is in view. In large part, I am able to avoid being visibly disabled, especially in winter when I can easily conceal my prosthetic with pants. Of course, a lack of visibility comes with its own set of challenges, mainly that at times, I have to advocate for accommodations more emphatically because some have a tendency to doubt the presence of disability when they can’t immediately see it. Naturally, there are some situations in which it is impossible to hide my amputation, such as when I wear a running prosthesis, which has a bulky shape that cannot be concealed by pants. However, having any kind of option to hide or show my disability is a privilege many people with disabilities don’t have.

It’s also worth acknowledging that I don’t speak for all people with disabilities. Disabilities are diverse, and I can only speak from my own experience.

My aim is not to silence what is

already a stigmatized conversation, as talking to and learning from each other is the only way forward. I am personally always happy to discuss disability in friendships, where reciprocity in emotional labour is implied.

However, the subject can be tiring. We shouldn’t assume people with disabilities have the time and energy to talk about it, especially with strangers.

Instead, we can strive to educate ourselves and engage in conversations where people with disabilities have already opened a dialogue. Learning how to talk about disability is just the first step, but a step in the right direction nonetheless.

It’s one that will surely help us get off on the right foot — even if I’m missing one.

Winter 2023

53

Death cafes

On death cafés and how to live Writer: Gladys Lou Photographer: Vurjeet Madan Death is a concept that’s always felt intangible to me.

Shrouded in mystery, I’ve noticed it is represented in the cultural consciousness in different ways; the word is feminine in Slavic mythology and in Mexico, but it’s masculine in Germany. It appears in the media in the form of the grim reaper, and again in the four horsemen of the apocalypse.

Recently, I’ve discovered death manifesting itself in another way — in a café. More specifically, in a ‘death café’, which is a pop-up open forum about dying and grief.

To learn more about death cafés and what happens during their meetings, I interviewed Linda Hochstetler, the organizer of the Toronto West Death Café events.

A l t h o u g h H o c h st et l e r came up with the idea for the event in the middle of a career change in 2014, her experience with death unfor-

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tunately began much sooner — when Hochstetler was 23, her then-boyfriend died in a bicycle accident.

“We kissed each other goodbye,” Hochstetler recalled. “We’d been dating for a month. We just spent one night together. We were just starting out. I waved goodbye to him and he left, and I never saw him again.”

About a decade after her boyfriend’s passing — while she was completing her training as a social worker — Hochstetler became inspired to get involved in crisis counselling. “I was slightly different from other people… people liked my support, and [death] didn’t tire me out like it tired everybody else out,” Hochstetler explained.

After this realization, Hochstetler would become a grief counsellor for 20 years, a job that involved visiting companies to provide grievance counselling for their leaders and workers after workplace fatalities. During t h e

visits, Hochstetler noticed a recurring pattern: “[people had] been talking about death too late.” She realized that it was important “to talk about death in other situations, and earlier, rather than waiting until someone died suddenly.”

These instincts are what led Hochstetler to conduct a Google search that eventually led her to death cafés.

Intrigued, she visited two cafés in her area — and immediately decided to set up and run her own.

Thirty people attended Hochstetler’s first meeting.

“We had such good, deep, profound conversations,” Hochstetler recalled. “Everybody [asked]: When’s our next one?”

Since then, she has run three to four cafés per year.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the death cafés went online, but since October 2022, they’ve returned to in person service.

One of Hochstetler’s favourite elements of the cafés is that they appeal to various demographics; they’re communities which include people of different genders, races, and ages. Usually, half the group is new and half are repeat visitors.

Part of the appeal of the cafés, Hochstetler figures, is that they have no agenda.

Instead, participants gather in groups of four to five, and each group is assigned a different conversation. “It’s very much about telling stories,” explained Hochstetler. Sometimes, she noted, participants critique subjects that weren’t explored during a café, but participants are invited to talk about whatever is on their mind.

Hochstetler wrote that she enjoys listening to stories about the paranormal experiences that happen at the end of life, such as seeing symbols or having dreams of loved ones. The reason for these

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premonitions, she believes, is that death opens a portal in which time and space can be distorted, causing humans to access knowledge that they couldn’t have otherwise. “ When you talk about these things, it feels kind of freaky. You feel like you’re kind of losing your mind, and you wonder why you know it’s happening,” Hochstetler explained. “Being able to share these stories with each other and normalize death and dying, it makes people feel much better.”

Julie McIntyre is a semi-retired family doctor and a re-

curring visitor of death cafés.

She first learned about death cafés through Hochstetler, whom she attended a mindfulness program with when she was making care plans for her former patients.

For McIntyre, death cafés are a way of learning as much as she can about general concerns surrounding the end of one’s life.

McIntyre believes there is a significant death phobia in Canadian culture, which is why she enjoys discussing advanced care plans with her patients.

“Planning is not [so] that you can necessarily make

huge decisions in advance,” McIntyre noted. “But if you start getting more comfortable in thinking about it, talking about it, and planning for it, it’s going to be easier than it would be if you just ignore it until the moment happens.”

McIntyre also emphasized that everybody’s grief is unique, and that death cafés offer participants a supportive environment to express their feelings without being judged. “There [are] some people [who] don’t cry, they just get busy, and they clean… that’s their way of grieving. Other people are on

the floor, crying all the time.

Everybody’s got their own way,” McIntyre explained.

When asked about the emotional challenges that come alongside a loved one navigating death, McIntyre stressed that we should not just focus on “what [we] can achieve,” instead on how we can provide support to that person.

“You cannot cure everybody, but you can travel with them along that journey,” McIntyre noted. “That support is so needed, and [the person you’re supporting is] so grateful for it.”

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I’m cracked

I’m cracked Writer: Jevan Konyar Photographer: Nicholas Tam

Recently, I decided that I wanted to drink 12 raw eggs every day for two weeks. I wanted to know what would happen — I’m sure I had a better motive at some point, but whatever it was, I’ve forgotten it now.

I’d pondered and postulated for some time because of the

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natural masculine urge to consume inordinate amounts of a single food, obviously. When The Varsity announced that it needed articles for its winter magazine, I was handed the perfect opportunity to legitimize my experiment on a silver — not golden, it could’ve been better — platter.

The magazine editors, buzzkills that they are, wouldn’t let me chug a masterfully blended 12-egg mocktail because of “safety concern[s]” and “salmonella,” but they did give me the go-ahead to eat those eggs cooked instead.

That was fine, I guess. I don’t think this is something other people should try because, while I’d be perfectly fine guzzling a dozen eggs every day due to my great will and mighty form, others probably wouldn’t, for the average egg contains 10 times more cholesterol than a Big Mac, and even half an

egg a day increases the risk of death from heart disease and cancer.

I started on November 4.

Approaching this experiment, I shook with anticipation of egg farts, bloating, protein shits, egg farts again, constipation, and more egg farts. None of these fear-inducing anticipations actually came to pass.

I’m not sure if my body simply wasn’t processing the dozen eggs that I was scarfing down each day, but there were no physical consequences for my actions — a rarity in the grand scheme of my life. That being said, there were unforeseen social consequences — not a rarity in the grand scheme of my life.

Probably the most cutting of these consequences was that my family refused to be in my vicinity during my 6:30 pm ritual. Initially, I chose not to expound my mission to them.

I didn’t think that it was necessary, but after a while, they demanded an explanation.

After opening the fridge to find an inordinate quantity of organic, all-natural, free-run jumbo eggs valued at just over 100 CAD — I only had to suffer through three or four weird glances at Loblaws — my father was the first to catch on.

He expressed abject horror at

the yellow concoction taking shape on the stove.

My father said that he “worried” about me and called my experiment “stupid.” This was — and excuse me if I’m being too personal — one of the most painful things that man has ever said to me, second only to maybe the time he told me my dream of being a great comedian was foolish because “[I’m] not funny.” Hark, dear reader, this cruel deluge of venom pierced me to my very core!

Anyway, my family left the room whenever I sat down with my plate of golden yellow. This isn’t a joke; they indeed refused to be in the vicinity of my research project because they didn’t support my actions. A product of my experiment that I couldn’t have anticipated was the immense loneliness of this whole ordeal; my family gone, I had only Larry David and his misadventures to keep me company.

I’ve brought up the yellowness of my eggs a few times now, and I think I should explain. For context, my eggs were totally plain, save for the butter that I used to grease the pan. I think that the humility of my recipe began with laziness — from my refusal to chop the onions and spinach required

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to turn the mountain of amber mash into something vaguely palatable. After an attempt at spicing things up, however, I realized there was no way to adequately flavour my omelet. The powdered paprika I sprinkled on to the mass on my plate was not nearly enough.

I couldn’t just multiply a recipe. The trial and error it would take to make these recipes not nauseatingly repetitive would demand a commitment to research more thorough than

anything even my most distinguished professors have undertaken. Plus, I didn’t need to make the meal any more filling than it already was — 900 calories of fat, protein, and an excessive amount of high-density lipoprotein cholesterol.

Beyond the discomfort that I started to associate with my kitchen, my day to day venture changed: I became interesting to people for a minute or two. If my experiment came up in conversation, others would enquire and I would divulge, which sometimes acted as life support for a dying interaction. Sometimes, it

even led to a genuine tête à tête. Whatever the case, I got a little kick out of seeing how people reacted, and they, hopefully, had a more interesting day as a result of it.

The question remains: how do I feel? Fine. I didn’t have a heart attack, and I didn’t come out of

this looking like Brad Pitt in Fight Club. Moving forward, I’ve decided to keep going with consuming nine eggs daily since they’re a nice, easy source of protein, and I don’t want to think when I cook.

Overall, my experience was a five out of 12. I would only recommend this diet if you’ve already sufficiently disappointed your friends and family to the point of them not caring.

In some ways, this felt like a religious endeavor, as if I were a devout hermit and the eggs were my prayer and self flagellation. Every evening, my soon-to-be-consumed eggs lined the carton just as the 12 apostles sat along the table in the Last Supper.

As Judas was the first to crack under the bribe, so too did my first egg into the pan, which led to my eventual ascent. In the sublime horror of this faux gluttony, I found the sea of yolk washed away the banal sins of my life. I feel reborn.

Winter 2023

57

Parking lots

Going nowhere to get somewhere

Writer: Khadija Alam Photographer: Caroline Bellamy

Four years ago, during my senior year of high school, I decided I would attend the University of Toronto for my postsecondary education. I could tell you that my decision stemmed from the university’s prestigious reputation, but the truth is that I just wanted to be in the city after having lived in the suburbs my entire life.

Since then, I’ve met many people who also grew up in the suburbs. And despite having lived in different places, there were a few universal experiences that we all shared. One that tends to come up the most is the act of hanging out in parking lots.

I spoke to Grace McHugh — a firstyear humanities student — and Tara Costello — a 2021 U of T graduate — about the formative experiences they’ve had in suburban parking lots.

The Varsity: Where did you grow up?

Tara Costello: I grew up in Whitby, Ontario, which is a suburb about an hour east of Toronto. I lived

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pretty close to the only major apartment buildings we had in Whitby, in the sense that they were very tall after they were built. Apparently, the town was like, “No more big apartment buildings!” I lived on a boulevard. It was essentially a huge block with courts going down into a centre, and in the centre, there was a park.

Grace McHugh: I grew up in Metro Detroit, about 30 minutes from Detroit. It’s pretty unexciting, but still nostalgic. In high school, if someone had a party, that was the biggest thing ever. So, that’s what it was like. There were tight-knit friend groups that you go through elementary, middle, and high school with.

A lot of them go to college together too, but I did not.

TV: Take me into one of those formative experiences you’ve had in a suburban parking lot.

TC: It’s so funny — when I saw what you were doing the story on, I was like, “That’s so specific but so true!”

Almost every time I go home, me and my sisters — at like 11:00 pm — will go for a late-night McDonald’s run. And on the way there, we’re just singing the most specific of songs. One of my sisters learned the harmonies for “Wouldn’t Change a Thing” from Camp Rock 2, so she does Joe and we do Demi. And then we’ll get there, and we’ll go through the drive through. It used to be kind of a gamble when I came home from undergrad because sometimes someone from my high school would be working at McDonald’s. And we were just like, “How many hashbrowns do you have right now?” That would be a little awkward, but not so much anymore. I haven’t seen someone who works at McDonald’s who I knew from high school in recent times.

Everyone who eats in their car would park in the back of the parking lot.

Sometimes we’ll be the only ones eating in our car. But other times, it’ll just be a row of people, and the people next to you are also eating in their car. We’ll just hang out and it’s really fun. That would be the core parking lot experience I have. I have had really in-depth, great conversations with my sisters just sitting in parking lots.

GM: The one experience that is the most memorable for me was after this football game. It was a Friday night.

It’s the biggest night for any suburban high school.

My friends and I were bored, so we went to IHOP at one in the morning. We were driving on what I consider the highway — it’s just a big road, but it’s not a highway. This car of boys was driving right beside us and they were waving us down to pull over. And we’re like, “Great, this is what parents tell us not to do.” And we did pull over, because there’s nothing else to do

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at 1:30 in the morning in Metro Detroit.

So we pulled over at this Taco Bell with this random group of boys, and we stayed in our cars, both parties, and had a conversation with the windows down. It’s what you would see in a movie of some suburban fantasy, like that’s what girls growing up in a suburban area would hope for. We were conversing with them, probably just about life. That was in our senior year, so we were feeling free. That’s why we even decided to do that.

TV: How and why have these memories stuck with you?

GM: I grew up really rigid and my parents were strict. Stopping to talk to strangers was one of the things I was told never to do. And when I did it, I didn’t feel bad.

My friend had her foot on the reverse pedal just in case anything happened. It probably has stuck in my mind because it reminds me to take a little chance every now and then. To not be so uptight.

Here, I’ve definitely had a lot more spontaneous experiences. In a suburban area, it’s not like you have access to go to a concert. You’d have to plan who’s going to drive the 30 minutes, and it would probably be two hours with traffic. Here, down the street is the Phoenix Concert Theatre and other theatres.

You can spontaneously buy a ticket one night and go.

TC: My parking lot era began after I went away to university and moved to Toronto. I think the reason it sticks with me is because, as I’ve gotten older and

moved away from home, I’ve thought a lot about what “home” is and how to make something constant in my life.

When I go home, I look forward to the night that we message our friend who lives across the highway to go to the parking lot to listen to music, chat, eat fries, and laugh. That routine is “home” in a way. It’s nice to have those experiences that you can count on when you do go home.

TV: Why do you think so many young people in the suburbs hang out in parking lots?

TC: Honestly, no offence to the suburbs, but there’s not much to do there. Lots of restaurants and other places to do activities close early. So there are just limited options for activities in the suburbs, especially in the evening, because everything closes except for the 24-hour fast food places. So if someone has a car, just drive to a fast food restaurant, get something from it, and just sit in the parking lot.

GM: When there’s nowhere to go, all you can do is sit there. I grew up thinking, “I wished I lived in a city.” So, you get envious of city kids who’ve been able to just walk the streets alone. That’s not a thing in the suburbs; they’re not walkable.

Parking lots are good places to just play music loud. Sometimes I would even go alone and I would just sit in

them. And sometimes me and my sisters would just sit, listen to music, and talk.

TV: What is it about parking lots that seem conducive to such memorable and transformative experiences?

GM: If you have difficult parents or something going on at home, or if you’re having a hard time at school, it’s the one place you can go. It’s just a different atmosphere when you’re in a parking lot. Nobody knows you and anything could happen.

Parking lots can have different vibes.

If it’s daytime and sunny, they’re gross.

But at nighttime, they’re very ominous and spooky. To spice up the life of suburban kids, that’s just where they go.

You feel like you’re going somewhere else and it feels comfortable to sit in a spot that’s your safety box.

TC: I don’t know what it is about parking lots that make them like this other world. For my master’s, I took a course on transcendence. We talked about liminal spaces and how they’re essentially that transition point between one known place and another new place — they’re that ‘in between.’ You never live in a parking lot; it’s always a pit stop. They’re never meant to be places that you stay.

So, I guess they can make way for transformative spaces because everything is temporary in a parking lot. There’s no pressure.

These interviews have been edited for length and clarity.

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Purple hyacinths

Purple hyacinths Writer & Illustrator: Jessica Lam

Although I don’t tune in to every sports game like my older brother, I couldn’t give up the opportunity to miss a day of school to watch a local hockey game. I was in the seventh grade, and I was excited about my day off, of course. The night before the field trip, my heart sparkled at the thoughts of chatting with my friends instead of going to math class, and buying overpriced snacks using my $20 allowance after promising my mom that I would buy an actual meal for lunch. This hockey game was my first middle school field trip — I knew I could never forget it.

I began my morning routine like any other, but it soon became apparent that something was different. The grumbling water in the kettle, the whirring stove top fan, and the bustling sounds of my father preparing lunch in the kitchen downstairs were absent. The whooshing from my mom’s hair dryer next 60

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door that normally acted like my second alarm clock was gone. My accelerating heartbeat replaced the morning sounds that I was so accustomed to.

I started to worry, but I wasn’t sure what I had to be nervous about. In the midst of a frantic search for my parents, the phone rang, revealing my answer: “Your grandfather passed away.”

The best time to plant hyacinths is from October to December so that they can flower in the spring.

The school trip was on November 24.

My mom always visited 公公 (gung1 gung1) every Tuesday and Thursday evening after work, homemade Chinese food in tow.

She was afraid that 公公 wouldn’t eat the dishes that were served at his nursing home. And, every Tuesday and Thursday, my mother would ask me the same question: “Do you want to visit 公公?”

My response was always the same: “No.” Visiting 公公 at the nursing home meant that I had to work on Kumon worksheets or watch the news — 公公 didn’t talk much, which made visiting even harder to bear. Besides, my family would always pick him up every Friday evening so that he could spend the weekend with us — what was the point of visiting one day earlier anyways?

Just before the winter, outside, I planted a white hyacinth spore to remember. 公公 didn’t have many friends in Canada. While the nursing home held many activities for its residents like ballroom dancing and trivia, he was never interested in these unfamiliar forms of entertainment. So, while many enjoyed the company of others during bingo night, 公公 was isolated in his room trying to understand the news anchor on the television.

While others would chat with their neighbor during breakfast, 公公 wondered why he had to eat oatmeal instead of congee.

At night when I tried to close my eyes, I tried to grapple with the idea of his passing. Millions of questions flooded my brain.

Did the nurses treat him well, or was he just another name on their list of patients? Was he treated worse because he didn’t speak English fluently? What was his day like when my family didn’t visit? I always looked forward to going to school to talk to friends everyday — did he look forward to anything?

Each of my days was exciting, but 公公 probably grew accustomed to every day as if the only thing that interrupted the repetition was when we visited. Even when I started to drift to sleep, the countless memories I had of 公公 replayed in my head like a movie with a broken stop button.

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With a small splash of sunshine, but mostly rain water, the flower bloomed and grew taller.

Whenever I did visit , he boasted the blank expression that prevented me from approaching him. As a child, I believed that a smiling person is someone good, and an emotionless one caused me to be on edge. So when I saw the bright look and wide smile on his face as he watched me randomly dance during a visit to the hospital, my world changed.

I’d always thought he didn’t care whether or not I came to visit, because he never showed interest in my presence. I thought that I was nothing more than a kid he saw from time to time.

As 公公 aged, my mom often asked him to name each person in the room to help with his memory. He always answered with a head shake. But when she pointed to me, 公公 would always shout, “Jessica”. Even if he didn’t know who I was at the moment, I was proud that I could change that blank expression. Now I understand that just being in the same room as a loved one could mean the world to them — regardless of whether you spoke to each other.

Why didn’t I try harder?

On the flower’s blank canvas, I painted figs, plums, and grapes.

Besides my name, I’ve only heard 公公 say a few words. Most of the time he answered questions with a shake or nod of the head. The only time I remember him forming a full sentence was when he,

alongside my brother and me, waited in the van while my parents shopped at a lighting store.

I was playing Mario Kart on my Nintendo 3DS when my brother began distracting me, causing me to finish second place in the race. Rage filled my body, and I snapped back at him, fuelling an argument.

Our fight spread like a wildfire until 公公 exploded: “Don’t mess with your sister!” My brother and I immediately stopped, shocked by his intense tone. Perhaps it was because our fight prevented him from sleeping, but I realized that day that, although it seemed like he wasn’t mentally with us, he wasn’t someone I should dismiss.

Letting the flower grow so tall was a mistake.

As I grew older, I stopped dwelling on most of these thoughts and feelings. I could take a step forward in my journey to acceptance, but every time I saw 公公 smiling in his photo next to his urn, I took a million steps back.

After a while, visits to the columbarium became sparse, and the reminders disappeared.

In response, I protected myself by subconsciously erasing everything that had to do with 公公 from my memory. I could finally sleep at night without a single thought in my mind. I could finally be at peace with myself. I had finally accepted his death.

Its blossoms slowly droop and fall. The perennial plant is now so small, waiting for the next

season to call.

Eventually, the visits resumed, and when I saw his photo again, I had a completely different response than previous encounters. Tears no longer fell, and my brain didn’t play guilt-filled memories. My mind was overwhelmed to the point that I mistook it for being empty. I traded the memories I had of 公公, both good and bad, to protect myself. I regretted not writing them down, even the most mundane ones. My cycle of sleepless nights returned.

The purple hyacinth bloomed again.

All these thoughts and feelings of guilt were too much for a mere 12-year-old to handle. Instead of wishing for the latest tech gadgets as I blew out my birthday candles, I began to wish for my family’s health and happiness. Instead of pondering what I should do at recess the next day, I thought of all the things I should have done with 公公. It got to a point where, as a middle schooler, my brain was preoccupied with trying to understand the afterlife. What were 公公’s last few moments like? Did he feel pain when he left?

Realizing an important person in my life can suddenly disappear without warning, I developed the habit of taking photos and videos of the time spent with family and friends — even if it’s just a simple dinner. I love collecting miscellaneous but sentimental trinkets like dinner receipts and

movie tickets. Those little pieces of paper hold great value to me, even if my mom says I’m a hoarder.

Coming to Canada from Hong Kong at the age of 60, 公公 knew very little English, or so I thought.

My mom said that 公公 actually knew a lot of English, since he used to own a small factory, manufacturing and selling watch straps primarily to companies in Africa. As a businessman, he often hosted events for people from all over the world. It was only after he experienced a stroke that his demeanor changed.

When my mom told me stories like these, I realized that 公公 wasn’t just a family member that I had to visit from time to time. He lived an interesting life, and my existence was only a small part of it — maybe the best part. Though I have countless, unanswerable questions about his life as a small watch strap factory owner in Hong Kong, my memories of him as my grandfather hold more weight. The time I had with 公公 was much more important than the time I should have had with him.

Although the flower’s vibrant colour faded the next year, and although the plant still stings with a single touch, the blue jacket’s fragrance is so sweet and much more fragrant now that it sits on my bedside table, lulling me to sleep.

To 公公 and my 12-year-old self.

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Favorite food

The flavour of favourites

Writer: Angad Deol Illustrator: Makena Mwenda I could write for days about my favourite foods. There are so many dishes I love that listing them all is a Herculean task for my heart.

For me, the foods that evoke the most memories are my mother’s butter chicken and my father’s karahi chicken.

Perhaps it’s the gravy’s richness, how well she seasons the chicken, or that she always puts extra garlic in for me, or maybe it’s the memories of cooking it with her in the kitchen — but I always love it when I hear that my mom is cooking butter chicken.

Watching my father’s methodical cooking process for karahi chicken — which includes precise measurements and cooking times and has led to the la-

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belling of everything in our spice cabinet — always inspires me to carry that same approach in everything I take on.

It’s these small memories around the meals that make them taste better. Many aspects of cooking make it magical, and it’s this magic that brings me back to the same foods.

I’ve been trying to figure out why we have favourite foods for a while now. Of course, maybe I already answered it, but my experience isn’t universal, and it would be lame to only write 200 words about food. You’ve never truly worked at The Varsity until you realize that being

brief is equivalent to being boring. Some of us love salty foods, while others have a sweet tooth. The great olive theory from How I Met Your Mother posits that couples will be successful if one loves olives and the other hates them. The great pineapple-on-pizza debate divides us all too. Overall, we all have unique preferences for the dishes we love.

To get to the heart of this issue, I spoke with Professor Shyon Baumann, an associate professor in U of T’s Department of Sociology, and Professor Irina Mihalache, an associate professor in the Faculty of Information, who are both experts in the field of nutritional studies.

According to Mihalache, the strongest reason we have favourite foods relates to the memories and experiences around them. To illustrate this, Mihalache used an example of immigrant families and how we tend to have memories of “cooking in crammed kitchens” with family members, and how these memories impact our perception of food. For Baumann, people may have favourite foods for a variety of reasons: “To become a favourite food, the food usually will also have a highly valued association with a social setting, an event, or a relationship that a person has.”

Sometimes, we eat food that elicits childhood memories. Instant noodles always bring me back to coming home from elementary school and having a pack of Maggi before doing my dreaded math homework. It’s incredible how food can so vividly take us back to a specific period of our lives. Meals like this are often referred to as “comfort foods” because of the joy we get from them.

Baumann says that we turn to comfort foods since they make us feel “cared for and happy and satisfied,” often turning them into our favourite meals. Similarly, Mihalache pointed out that the frequency

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of cuisines or specific ingredients we encounter during childhood can impact our adulthood culinary preferences in adulthood. Importantly, Mihalache noted that not all of us come from backgrounds of food abundance, so we shouldn’t romanticize our childhoods since our experiences are not inherently universal.

People often love foods that some consider odd.

For instance, people are shocked when they discover that I like dipping French fries into milkshakes — and if you, reader, are shocked too, I challenge you to try it out. The sweet and salty mix is truly incredible, and you’re missing out if you immediately write off such a combo. This love for specific foods that others may skip comes from early life experiences — perhaps your parents liked it, or it’s a common dish in your culture. I can think of many family members who love Karela, a bitter melon dish; but for my entire life, I could not even fathom taking a bite of the dish.

We can even learn to like ingredients we once hated after trying them in other beloved dishes. I was never a big fan of okra as a child.

I thought the sticky texture was off putting and hated eating it. Later, I discovered canned gumbo from the grocery store, of which okra is a major ingredient. Over time, I started to love okra.

My adamant defence of fries and shakes should be a reminder to you to not immediately judge the beloved food of your peers as, according to Mihalache, “What is odd and weird [is] culturally specific and culturally constructed — so it’s important to remember this when we think about people’s preferences.” Baumann and Mihalache also noted that what you may find weird is not weird in the other’s

eyes; this can be because of cultural differences, so these culturally specific cuisines should be celebrated rather than ostracized. I wholeheartedly agree with this sentiment; many of my South Asian peers can recall people in school audibly recoiling at the

fragrant smells of some of our favourite foods. Thus, what is beloved to us should be treated with respect.

Ultimately, I’m realizing that our preferences in food are not entirely an internal decision based on taste. If anything, it seems that external factors are incredibly potent in shaping every-

thing we love. Mihalache said that our preferences in food are a mix of various factors, contexts, emotions, and experiences. She also mentioned that economic capital plays an important role, and not everyone has a choice in what they get to eat due to global inequities in food distribution.

“Even in the most dire of economic and social conditions — see the war in Ukraine and how the world came together to provide access to homecooked foods — food is powerful, creative, and can be tasty and an outcome of historical and cultural legacies,” explained Mihalache.

So, why do we have favourite foods? Personally, it may be because our memories and experiences with food are powerful. Even beyond eating meals, I can think of the impact food has had on my life. From watching my family cook to gathering around the TV to watch cooking programs, as well as the weekly tradition of watching Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown, these are moments I’ll never forget — and moments I hope to replicate with a family of my own one day.

For Mihalache, it’s hard to pinpoint a favourite food, but she has favourite moments: “Cooking dim sum with my sister, including steaming bok choy; my American brother-in-law cooking cozonac — which is a Romanian yeast-based sweet bread — better tha[n] a Romanian.” She concluded that “it’s the experiences, the moments, the memories.”

Food is the great equalizer and brings us all together; so even if you love anchovies on pizza or prefer sour to sweet, I’d love to have you at my table and learn why you love those foods.

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CAPD

Lending an ear Writer: Caitlin Adams Illustrator: Makena Mwenda A click: the “power-on” D-major arpeggio, the soft hum of brown noise, a little squeak, a warm bath of sound. Every time I put my hearing aids on at the beginning of the day, I am reminded of my ability not just to hear but to communicate with the world — something that I, after years of trying, have accomplished through a twin set of microphones and bionic mini chips.

After spending years on the sidelines of conversations in boisterous rooms, my relationship with communication is a cornerstone of my identity. Communication is as much a piecewise physiological reaction to quantized packets of energy as it is a gut feeling; it is friends calling my name or a soft indie album in my ear on a winter’s day; it is the rhythm of new and worn Doc Martens squeaking across tile floors or endearing fragments of American Sign Language (ASL) that people use to reach out.

I am constantly reminded of the fragility of the centimetres-small network that houses our eardrums, a microscopic complex of cartilage loops, a little seashell-looking bone, conductive membrane channels, the eighth cranial nerve, and the auditory cortex. Without realizing it, this 64

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pathway determines how we learn, work, laugh, tell stories, negotiate, banter, say quick hellos, and dream about the future.

Since communication can break so many barriers, the fact that these abilities are not universally accessible frightens me. One condition, Central Auditory Processing Disorder (CAPD), describes an inability to process spoken language against competing background noise. It is often accompanied by hypersensitivity to certain sounds and sensory overloads.

An estimated 400 million people worldwide match the description for a CAPD diagnosis. Contrary to popular belief, it is not a type of hearing loss; people with CAPD often pass a baseline test battery but perform poorly on tasks related to listening comprehension.

I was diagnosed with CAPD in early 2019 after falling severely ill the year prior. Until the COVID-19 pandemic hit, I was sometimes able to compensate for my inability to understand spoken language through lip reading and facial expression. But on September 8, 2020, my acquired uncanny talent for what I’d nicknamed ‘silent English’ became useless.

September 8 was the first rung on the treacherous lad-

der to university application season.

It was also the first day back in person after a term of online school. Students shouted to greet each other a respectful six feet apart. The sides of my head buzzed from their echoes and clamour. Greetings sounded phonetically English, but not quite.

Somewhere in the chaos, I found myself pushing past about 100 people and receiving questioning looks, as I was the only one walking in the opposite direction. Eventually, someone explained to me that, due to public safety protocol, my school had created a traffic flow plan for the hallways — information which was covered in depth in the safety seminar I’d just attended.

Many days during my Grade 11 year were equally over whelming reiterations of this.

Every evening, I would pull on my pair of baby blue noise-cancelling headphones — they’re so well loved that the leather finish is now shredding — and try to recollect the precious fragments of conversation I’d caught that day. Then, I’d sprint home to annotate case

studies in preparation for in-class discussions I knew I could not fully participate in. Once my studying was finished, I would overthink the verbal cues and facial expressions I probably misread that day, knowing that the smile-and-nod response was, while my only fallback, often socially unacceptable.

By mid-September, I set aside time every evening to brainstorm ideas for accommodations, which ranged from FM microphones to Google text-to-speech to transparent COVID-19 masks.

None of them worked: the amplification systems were not compatible with other technology at my school and the only affordable sets of clear masks suited a

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specific face shape. I investigated whether I could use cued speech, a combination of ASL and spoken word, as an accessible and stress-free alternative to conversations, but few of my classmates and teachers understood it. So, I began to experience burnout.

After months of frustration, confusion, and panic, I visited my audiologist, who happens to be the only expert on CAPD in my region. Not only do audiologists test for hearing and speech-language disorders, but they also recommend ways to bridge the communication divide between their patients and other people. In this sense, the best hearing-related healthcare professionals think like designers; when I asked

my audiologist for a pair of traditional hearing aids for hearing loss, she refused to give them to me. Instead, she ordered a model that includes tinnitus alleviation, hyperacusis therapy, and spatial audio recognition that automatically adjusts to the vo l u m e of the room — not one that amplifies all sound.

I remember the euphoria and relief I felt when I tried my new hearing aids for the first time.

For the first few seconds, I wasn’t sure about them: they squeaked and emitted a menacing little rumble that was brown noise onto my eardrums. But then, my audiologist asked me how they felt, and that simple question was the clearest set of words I had heard in a long time.

Following that appointment, my classmates and I played a game where they whispered things across the room and I would try to decode what they were saying using my hearing aids alone.

During a weekend walk, I listened to a podcast about The Quiet Revolution in 1970s Québec, featuring interviews with bomb diffusers,

a family whose tranquillity was stolen, clips of secret messages between gang offices, and narrators whose eloquent voices convinced me that they knew their place in the study of Canadian history.

Every facial expression made a little more sense and every direction fit with others. I could finally listen to two sources of acoustic input without experiencing an auditory overload. I didn’t see this one coming, but I could even switch on a waterfall noise to soothe my ears and mind after intense periods of listening.

A few weeks after I was introduced to hearing aids, I reread the journal I kept during the period where I

felt sheer anger and disappointment toward what little accommodations I previously had. So many of the 80 million other people who have CAPD are still struggling to keep up in school and their careers, stay financially afloat, connect with their communities, and advocate for their own needs. Of these 80 million, most do not have access to audiologists who are equipped to help patients with CAPD. This is not only frustrating for the patient but also detrimental to their communication abilities. Wrongful use of therapeutic technology, hearing aids, or other accommodations, especially in children, can both damage the

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CAPD

entire auditory pathway and cause long-term stress. This conundrum in health care absolutely justifies why entire communities — not just people with CAPD and their health care team — should invest in generalist accommodations that both remove communication barriers and are affordable for everyone.

Enter a truly sacred accommodation: the clear mask.

— “Good design depends on the harmony established between the form of an object and its use / Good design need not be costly.” Max Bill, designer and curator of “Die gute Form”, Switzerland I stumbled upon this quote on the wall of a special exhibition about the evolution of furniture design at the Museum of Modern Art five years ago. The exhibition captivated my friends and me by using simple wallpaper and soft beams of light accentuating vintage prints on retired couches and chairs. Every period piece’s plaque detailed why it was a significant contributor to helping generations of carpenters promote either straight-backed, polite posture or social relaxation.

So, as we snaked through rows and rows of visual biographies, one small thing was changed per decade, be it arms, the concavity of the back of the chair, or material 66

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that I might take for granted when furniture shopping for my first apartment. It illustrated that, much like accessibility technology, well-designed furniture was simply an improvement or reinterpretation of a previous model.

to the way people with auditory disorders interact with their environment. If my use of furniture as a metaphor for communication accessibility still seems too farfetched, consider this: we all need to be able to communicate as much as

My Museum of Modern Art visit occurred only a few months before I was diagnosed with CAPD, and I was already aware that accommodations for the diagnosis were hard to access. However, following my journey through Grade 11, the quote has come to symbolize everything related

we need furniture in our houses.

By January 2021, despite having readjusted to life at school, I was still disappointed by the lack of accessible clear medical masks available for professional use — this was the root of my challenges as well. I spent that winter break sketching crazy clear mask design ideas that I had. Each one had a

unique strap, window, and nose piece. Some were very plain and others looked like animations from a science fiction movie. Having never taken a high school art class, I cold emailed my school’s design teacher, and from my first week back, we worked to bring my ideas to fruition.

I continued this project through my senior year and am still finding ways to continue this project at U of T. I found hope and joy in creating my own prototypes, especially knowing that clear masks are a generalist solution for many kinds of communication barriers.

I’ve already explained that my saving grace, lip-reading, was suddenly taken away in exchange for an effective workaround to a horrible public health emergency. Yet, in situations like these, we should strive not to exchange one solution for another but to promote both where possible, especialvery when essential aspects of life, such as human connection, are hindered.

My dream for the future is a world that accommodates all communication methods and technologies — including accessible, specialized hearing aids, ASL, and other modern technology. One where no person has to question whether they can continue their education because of how they hear or process sound.

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On the inside

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On the inside

Writer & Photographer: Vurjeet Madan Most people remember their university days by how drunk they were getting every weekend. The kids at The Varsity will remember it by the weekends they spent at 21 Sussex Avenue, publishing their school’s weekly newspaper. For these workaholics, the ‘office’ — as they refer to it — is a second home.

The office is a memory by itself. Walls are adorned with posters previous editors put up years ago. Narrow corridors are narrowed even further by the stacks of past volumes of The Varsity on either side. Props from decades-old photoshoots have a thin layer of dust sitting on top of them, like treasures from a grandmother’s old attic.

Yet it is not completely outdated. While editors may sit on old chairs, they work on clean 68

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iMacs. They come into the office with trendy, fun clothes.

They play whatever music is ‘in’ that year.

The office has heard many things. Subtle comments about the articles its occupants are editing — this piece is weak, this piece is strong. It has heard personal details of the masthead’s lives, spilled over Chinese takeout. It has heard sleepy muffled snores as someone takes a nap in the dark on a Saturday production night.

The old walls have witnessed flirty jokes that marked romantic beginnings, and probably a good number of could’ve beens. Undoubtedly, the office is full of laughs from every new yearly group’s inside jokes, which seem to only strengthen as each weekly issue is produced.

Somehow, working at The Varsity balances professionalism with the less-professional

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experiences so innate to college life. As editors send formal, beautifully crafted emails to the Toronto International Film Festival, the Canadian Olympic teams, or perhaps the Government of Canada, they make jokes next to each other soaked in Gen-Z lingo that would have anyone over the age of 25 utterly confused. As much as The Varsity is a

long-lasting institution, it is an institution built by and consisting of university students.

Within its messy interior, the students at The Varsity find community around their craft — to write, to capture, to storytell, and ultimately, to come together to create something that builds onto a legacy that began over a century ago.

Winter 2023

69

Magazine Editor-in-Chief: Alexa DiFrancesco Creative Director: Makena Mwenda Varsity Editor-in-Chief: Jadine Ngan Managing Online Editor: Angad Deol Managing Editor, External: Nawa Tahir Managing Editor, Internal: Sarah Kronenfeld Senior Copy Editor: Talha Anwar Chaudhry Deputy Senior Copy Editor: Safiya Patel Design Editors: Caroline Bellamy and Andrea Zhao Illustration Editor: Jessica Lam Photo Editor: Vurjeet Madan Magazine Assistants: Alice Boyle, Maeve Ellis, Cherry Zhang Associate Senior Copy Editors: Kyla Cassandra Cortez, Lina Tupak-Karim, Ajeetha Vithiyananthan Design Assistant: Johanna Zhang Cover Art: Caroline Bellamy Endpaper Art: Caroline Bellamy and Vurjeet Madan Copy Editors: Andrea Avila, Medha Barath, Kamilla Bekbossynova, Manreet Brar, Nichelle Budhrani, Linda Chen, Anushka Dhir, Ireland Fidale, Selin Ginik, Ikjot Grewal, Denisse Rocher Isaias, Jevan Konyar, Cheryl Nong, Momena Sheikh, Camille Simkin, Kiri Stockwood, Noshin Talukdar, Kyleeanne Wood, Elizabeth Xu, Grace Xu, Valerie Yao Additional editing by: Caroline Bellamy, Sarah Kronenfeld, Jadine Ngan Special thanks to: Jadine, Artie, Makena, Talha, Safiya, Caroline and Andrea for their patience and kindness towards Alexa while putting this project through; and Caroline for being Makena’s human sked.

The Varsity Magazine has a circulation of 3,000 published by Varsity Publications Inc. It is printed by Master Web Inc. on recycled newsprint stock. Content © 2023 by The Varsity.

All rights reserved. Any editorial inquiries and/ or letters should be directed to the magazine editor-in-chief. The Varsity Magazine reserves the right to edit all submissions.

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Fall 2023

17