{Note: I have made this post “sticky”, due to its level of importance as an announcement, both to my readers, and for family and friends that check up on me here at POM.  In other words, this post will appear first on the “index page” (http://www.practiceofmadness.com), though I will continue publishing new articles.  New articles will appear below this post, in chronological order as usual.  So, if you’ve already read this, scroll down to the next post to read my most recent articles.  Cheers!  scars }

I was sitting on my bathroom floor the other night.  A couple of “friends” had left some syringes in my kitchen “junk drawer” about a month ago, and I had taken them out – not for the purpose of injecting drugs, but for the purpose of self-harm.

I was injecting myself with peroxide and bleach, in very small amounts, and digging through my hands and feet with the needles, tracing my veins with little holes, tiny puncture wounds, until I had created a map, and until my hands had swollen up with balloons.

What the #&^% was I doing?!?

It took a break from reality to figure it out, as it often does for this young (and quickly growing older) woman.  What was I doing, back on the bathroom floor that I spent so many high school days sitting on, breathing in noxious chemicals (“crystal meth”  ) ?  As I was dissecting my own body, I ended up dissecting my life, my psyche, and the map on my hands became a map back to myself.

My visit “back home” for Christmas was devastating. I do not know what was more Hurtful and harmful: A Hate Crime, during which this White Woman With Blonde locks was raped by a first nations man three times her size for two hours, or the revelation – upon her departure ten minutes after my arrival at the family home, and her arrival ten minutes before I was due back at the airport for the sole purpose of screaming at me and making me feel, just as she had last year, like a complete “failure at life”.  I would venture to say the latter, as during the sexual attack, I waited for it to be over, and eventually, it did end.  My sister’s decision to pick a few times out of a 20 year-relationship – the few times that i was at my weakest, and did not show her the pure, unconditional love and generosity that has absolutely characterized my relationship with her since she was born – has threatened to tear my life apart. I wait for her to reevaluate our relationship, and I’ve been waiting for over three years now.  Yes, this is what truly derailed me.

So, for lack of a better way of putting it, I was acting out a bit of an “I am whatever you say I am”, bit.  I was responding to my family’s persistent decision to view me as an out of control drug addict (a quick anecdote: after my best friend in Winnipeg, Sam, who has known me since I was fifteen, drove me to the Emergency Room after my attack, I had to fill a $400 prescription, that I will soon be reimbursed for by the B.C. Government, and thus be able to pay my dad back, who “fronted” the money.  I walked into my dad’s house, apparently without being heard, coming “home” after the grueling and rather gruesome experience of a going through a post-rape examination and rape-kit at the ER, and filling this prescription for anti-HIV medication, to find my dad screaming at his wife in the kitchen about how he wanted to know about what this $400 prescription was that “Sam and I were snorting or smoking, or whatever, at his place”…I walked into the kitchen and slammed the bottle of pills down on the table – I had been trying to save my family the stress of having to know about what I had been through the previous night.  And when I told them, there were no “I’m so happy that you are still alives”, no “you poor things”, not even any “you did the right thing by going to the emergency rooms”.  There was only concern about the pricetag of this prescription, that may well prevent me from getting HIV or another horrible virus from the horrible monster that raped me) …so, back to a few nights ago.  I did purchase some drugs, though they all ended up lost or down the toilet – I had no idea what I was doing with these substances, I find them boring now, I was done with them a long, long time ago, but my family’s insistence that my experimentation with drugs almost a decade ago, makes me wonder if I “am, whatever they say I am”.  The needles, instruments of death, are not me either.  And I was not trying to “get high”, I was trying to make this woman, who my sister seems to think is deserving of great pain, feel that pain, to an extreme.  When my hands grew numb and I realized that I could be doing permanent damage that would prevent me from doing the one thing that I truly love doing, indeed, my very life-blood: writing – I knew that I had to stop.

But I had not yet figured out why I had been doing this, or what was to come next.  Luckily, I caught one of my best friends online as I tried making a few phone calls at 1:00 am, proclaiming that I had lost touch with reality and was hurting my body.  Everyone else was sleeping.  Everyone else “has to go to work” (I think small retail chains can suffer a little when saving one of your so-called best friend’s life is the issue at hand, but I also know that I was let go from a job for trying to save someone, so though firm in my opinion, I understand the employee’s dilemma).  I talked out my immediate circumstances with my dear friend, and only then did I come to the epiphany that I was trying to be the despicable person that my family (very falsely) thinks I am, and that I was trying to make the person that my sister, the sister that I raised after my mom died when she was six, and I thirteen, feel the pain that she deserved.  I was being the person, and playing the roles, assigned to me by the people that are supposed to know me better than anyone else in the world, but do not, are incredibly far from knowing me even close to as well as how well my friends know me, because they have never given me the chance to show them who I really am.  For some reason, the labels they have chosen for me provide them with comfort.

It is for this reason, that I am “cutting the cord” for some time.  After my ICBC settlement cheque arrives, and I settle my recent bills with my father, I am going to do some travelling, and I am going to write a book, and I am going to enroll, not in law school*, but in a one-year journalism program, and perhaps a photography program afterwards, as these are my dreams, and law school is someone else’s dream.

*The reason why I had decided to return to the academy to obtain a degree in law, was that I saw it as the only way that I could compete with my very perfect sister, who has done everything that my dad wanted his children to do (live at home until they had earned medical or law degrees – she’s chosen medicine, so I chose what was left).  I thought that if I did this, maybe, just maybe, the father that I love so dearly would, for once, be as proud of me as he is as my sister – more importantly, that he would show me the respect that he shows my sister.  However, on that fateful night (I believe it was Monday, perhaps Tuesday) I realized that I was, once again, choosing a very demanding career in order to please other people.  We all know how well that went last time!!  (if you are not familiar with the story, I suggest you scroll all the way to the bottom of the “Academia is Nuts” gallery that I created a link to in that last statement, and then click on older posts, once again scrolling to the bottom, to get a clear picture of how I discovered that the “academy” and I just do not mix.  Oil and water.  And I, I am blood.  Dragon’s blood, and salty sea water, with a sprinkling of rue and lavender.

Part two: I have decided that it is time for me to write a book.  In preparation to do so, I need to take a trip, all by myself.  I have been wanting to travel to SouthEast Asia for over a decade, and this is my opportunity.  Thus, I am going to ask you, dear readers, a couple of questions. (And of course, I will continue writing for this website, every day or every other day when time allows.  It is the one thing in the world that I am most proud of, prouder of than my thesis, or any number of theses and academic papers I could ever, ever write):

(polls)