An older boy pointed at me as I walked down the hall alone one day. “Is that her?” he asked, loudly enough for me to hear him. He was in the school’s rock band. He flashed a handsome smile, and his sandy-blond hair flipped over his shoulder as he turned back to Sylvia and Melanie and his other friends. “You’re right. She’s a total dog. Fugly.”
I had learned long before this that engagement was almost always bad. I walked away that time, the next time and the time after that too. I was a good walker-away-er. But as I walked away, the sandy-haired boy and his friends started following me down the hall, calling me Zenji, which was a hybrid of Benji (a well-known movie dog from the seventies) and the word “zits.”
Zenji: a dog with zits.
That name spread through the school like acne had spread across my face that year. Puberty had not been kind to me. I grew my bangs out and wore my hair down to shield as much of the pimply redness as possible. I came to hate what I saw in the mirror.
“Hey, Zenji!” kids would say when I arrived at my locker. They would bark at me when I walked into the cafeteria, collapsing in laughter at their own cleverness. My few friends stood by me, but quietly, not wanting to become targets themselves.
“See?” I told myself while I was getting ready one morning. “It was just a matter of time before everyone figured it out.” Everything I had feared about high school was rearing its unwelcome head: the loneliness, isolation and mockery. It was consuming me. The Zenji “joke” went on for months, and things soon got worse.
I started drinking—just a little at first, but the habit grew quickly. We had a liquor cabinet at home that nobody touched, its dusty bottles sitting on the shelf for years. No one noticed when the contents began to disappear. I would stash a mickey in my locker at school and take swigs between classes. It was just enough to take the edge off.
But nights alone in my room were the hardest. I watched endless MuchMusic videos and wrote songs with the five or six chords I knew on guitar. I felt empty and hopeless.
My last day at my first high school ended up being one of the hardest of my life. There are pieces of that day I can’t remember—a common occurrence with traumatic events. But here’s what I do recall: I was standing outside alone, watching a handful of other people smoke cigarettes or chat with their friends. Before I knew it, a group of students had filed out of the building and gathered around me. They were the guys from the band, some of their fans, and Melanie and Sylvia. They all looked to be waiting for something. I immediately tensed up.
Melanie, I noticed, had a bottle of hairspray. Sylvia was clutching a box of matches. It took me only a second to understand what they were about to do.
Melanie walked up and started spraying me. It was a repeat of the time they had chased me down the road, laughing and trying to set me on fire. Except this time, they had an audience.
“Want to see Zenji dance? Let’s make her dance!”
Even in the open air, I could smell the alcoholic stench of the hairspray on my thick cotton sweater. I turned away.
“Please stop!” I yelled. “Stop it!”
Adrenaline flooded through me. I knew I had to run, but they were quicker. My back went up in flames.
Anyone nearby would have seen me: a screaming girl with flames shooting up her back, throwing herself onto the grass and rolling around to extinguish them. They would have seen me stand up, covered in dry grass and leaves, my pants stained and sweater charred. They would have seen me looking around at the sea of shocked faces (and a few amused ones) and bursting into tears.
One girl emailed me a few years ago to say she still remembers that awful moment and regrets not stepping in to stop it. To be fair, I don’t think anyone could have. The bullying had been building for years. Had this not been the climax, it would have been something else.
I don’t remember much of the rest of the day, except that my parents were notified and arrived at the school understandably upset. A meeting took place with the principal, then we packed up my things and I never attended that school again. It was no longer safe.
Most of the damage done by bullying is internal. The lasting harm comes not from what the bully says or does at the time, but from how often the victims replay the events in their minds and chastise themselves for not responding differently. It’s how what is said to us festers and morphs into what we say to ourselves. Bullying is like a snakebite: the initial attack stings, but it’s the after-effects that can kill you.
My foundation had new cracks in it. I knew it, but I didn’t know to fix them, and I didn’t try. The damage had been done; the basement was flooding, and I was sitting in it, waiting to drown—hoping to, in fact. Those giving me grief could have walked off the job sooner. No one needed to be cruel to me any longer; I was doing a fine job on my own.
Over the next few months, I continued to self-destruct. Severe anxiety and depression took hold. My drinking escalated, and I found myself unable to stop, despite my best efforts. I told my parents through sobs that I needed help. My mom pulled in every resource she could find, but in 1991, there weren’t many options for a fourteen-year-old. Most facilities didn’t know how to deal with someone my age who was abusing substances. If I’d been even a year or two older, they might have had a place for me.
Finally, after I wound up drunk and high with strange adults on more than one occasion and went missing for days at a time, a treatment facility took my parents’ cries for help seriously. On June 13, 1991, my dad drove me to Alwood, a six-month live-in treatment program for teens and young adults just outside of Ottawa. We both cried as he drove away.
Alwood offered group sessions, individual counselling, art and music therapy, meditation and nature walks. It was situated in a beautiful old brick farmhouse surrounded by fields and forest. The staff and other residents were friendly and upbeat. They ate together, laughed together, sang songs together and supported one another. All I had to do over the next six months was buy in like everyone else had, do what was asked of me and focus on learning new life skills.
I hated it.
I was full of attitude, sullen and angry for the first half of my stay. I didn’t know how to be Amanda anymore. Spending all day, every day, patching up your foundation is heavy work. Growth is never a straight line. I clashed with staff members, played victim in nearly every situation and got called out more times than I can count. I nearly got kicked out twice, and I was told maybe I was too immature to handle the program. I could have left. Because it had a lengthy waiting list of teens and young adults desperate for help, Alwood insisted its residents be willing participants in their recovery. “Don’t take up space someone else would gratefully use,” one social worker told me. “We want you to stay, but what matters is that you want to.”
People came and went. Some stayed a few days, some a few weeks. A handful graduated after the full six months, and a few of them visited to provide hopeful updates on their lives since then. Once out in the world again, some relapsed and found their way back. It was a home in constant transition. The bed beside mine would be in use for a time, then lie vacant until someone else came to fill it.
One day, a staff member pulled me into the office.
“We have a young woman coming in today who’s addicted to heroin,” she explained. “She was supposed to go to a detox centre first to get through the worst of it. But there was a mix-up, so she’s going to do a medically supervised detox here.”
Within hours, a woman nearly a decade older than me became my roommate. For the next three days, I watched her suffer through the agony of the powerful drug leaving her body. She would scream for someone to help her with the pain, sweating and clenching her stomach. I would wake up in the middle of the night to her moans and sit by her bed until a staff member arrived. What she was going through was so much worse than anything I had ever experienced in my life. And as she got better, she began to share her story with me. The earlier parts sounded a lot like mine.
I realized that I not
only wanted to be there but needed to be if I was going to make it to adulthood. I dug in and worked harder.
In December 1991, to the surprise of everyone, I became the youngest person at that time to graduate from the program. I was six months sober and as ready as I could be to rejoin the world. I emerged a more confident and assertive fifteen-year-old, with a smile on my face and plans for my future. I had my life back. I was starting to figure out who I was, and she wasn’t so bad.
I returned to Aylmer and started bumping into some of the people who used to bully me. But one fundamental thing had changed: my attitude. I was completely unwilling to be pushed around. There were rumours about where I had been—some people thought I had gone to juvie for petty crimes or had almost died of an overdose. I laughed them off. The kids who used to hurl insults at me quickly learned it was futile to continue. Instead of giving them the reaction they were looking for, I would just smile, shrug and keep walking. The spell had been broken.
Today we know that some young people who develop a dependency on substances when struggling with acute mental illness can go on to have a healthy relationship with alcohol once the primary issue has been dealt with. But if you were a teen abusing alcohol in 1991, the standard treatment was lifelong sobriety. It was just as well. Sobriety became a tool I used for twenty-five years to shape my life in healthy ways. After that solid chunk of time, and following several conversations with the right professionals, I tried drinking socially again.
If I’m an alcoholic, I’m doing a really bad job at relapsing. I barely touch the stuff. But I wouldn’t take back the years I spent sober, or what it took to get me there. The lessons I learned are worth more than all the Pinot Grigio I missed out on. And because of the path those lessons put me on, I found myself across the table from the one person who would change everything. What we had both experienced in childhood was simply preparing us for a future that would require an abundance of resiliency. Our shaky foundations were about to come together to build something new.
FOUR
gravitation
I MET THE LOVE of my life on May 1, 1993. I was sixteen and had been living on my own for the previous few months. My experiences had changed me. I no longer felt like a child, but I was still leading a child’s life. My relationship with my parents had been strained over the past couple of years, and time away hadn’t repaired it. We argued far too much, and a lot of my negative behaviours were coming back. It just wasn’t working. I left two months after my sixteenth birthday, with fifteen dollars in my pocket, half a pack of smokes and a determined look on my face.
For six months, I slept on couches, in someone’s spare bedroom, at the downtown YMCA-YWCA, in a couple of rooming houses that would take someone my age and even in an apartment stairwell. It was a relatively short but critical part of my life. I was just beginning to find my footing, and the last thing I was looking for was a relationship.
Even at that young age, my romantic track record was already sketchy. When I was fourteen, my virginity had been taken by force by a nineteen-year-old drug dealer on an old basement couch on New Year’s Eve. The few relationships I’d had since then crossed boundaries in other ways, from infidelity to verbal abuse. I was done with boys. No more. I wasn’t sure what the appeal was, anyway.
I briefly thought about dating girls—particularly the one who told me she had a crush on me. The thought was short-lived. I didn’t want to stand out any more than I had for most of my life. Always an outcast, I now just wanted to blend in, to be part of the fabric of society. The easiest way to do that was to find the right guy. But not yet. First, I had some fundamentals to figure out: finding a stable place to live, getting a job, going to school and making sure I had enough to eat. These were my daily priorities. I had no room in my life for dating.
But I did like parties. There was room in my life for those.
A few weeks earlier, I had moved into a nice halfway house on Gloucester Street in downtown Ottawa. The spacious three-storey red-brick home was a breath of fresh air. It was clean and quiet. The organization that ran it provided rooms to adults in recovery or living with mental health issues. At sixteen, I wasn’t an adult, but I was nearly two years sober and had dealt with my fair share of mental illness. Because of this, they made an exception for me. It meant a warm home, three meals a day, my own room on the third floor with a window overlooking the neighbouring church and access to counselling services. I was, and remain, deeply grateful that they took a chance on me.
It was there I met Sandra, a young Indigenous woman full of humour and enthusiasm. One night, Sandra and her boyfriend, Ben, were going to a friend’s birthday party, and I scored a last-minute invitation. I threw on a black off-the-shoulder sweater and made sure my curls had extra bounce. Sandra and Ben were a bit older than me, and I wanted to make a good impression on their friends.
The party was in a nondescript apartment building in the city’s east end. We made our way to a large event room in the basement. It was dark, save for the DJ lights bouncing off balloons and streamers affixed to the ceiling tiles. The music was a mix of eighties new wave and early nineties rock. I grabbed a Coke and sat down with a group of Sandra and Ben’s friends. It was nice to get out and meet people.
After about an hour, I excused myself and went down the hall to find the bathroom and reapply my nineties-era Jennie Garth dark lipstick. When I came back into the room, I saw a very good-looking person sitting at the table.
“This is Ben’s roommate,” Sandra said.
I smiled and held out my hand.
* * *
—
The girl from Peterborough had moved to Ottawa to go to school. At twenty, she presented herself to the world as a young, attractive man. This is not what she wanted, not who she knew herself to be, but life had continued to show her that there were no other avenues to pursue. This was how she had to live. This was what she had to pretend to be.
She was taking a computer science program at Algonquin College while staying in a house with Ben and some other students. A few months earlier, away from her small town and the judgment she would certainly have faced there, she had taken a bold step forward. With a female friend’s permission, she had gone through her wardrobe and borrowed some of her clothes. She wanted to see how they looked, how they felt. She stared into the mirror and, for the first time, saw a glimmer of her true self staring back. She smiled shyly at her reflection.
The girl worked up the courage to wear those clothes around the house and hoped she would be well received by the people she called friends. In this large city, in this place away from everyone she had grown up with, where she finally felt a sense of safety, it was her moment to tell everyone who she really was. She could build a new life.
She took a deep breath and made her way downstairs.
At first, they met her with laughter. They thought she was being funny. A dude dressing up as a lady to make his buddies double over. When they realized that she wasn’t joking—that she was dead serious—their amusement turned to concern and anger.
“You can’t do this here,” they told her.
“But this is who I am,” she explained. “It’s who I’ve always been.”
“No way,” they replied, a mix of pity and disgust on their faces. “You need help. Get some. If you start wearing dresses, you can’t live here anymore, okay? You’ll have to leave.”
It had taken nineteen years to work up the courage to dip a toe into the waters of authenticity. It took just minutes to be shut down. Heartbroken and embarrassed, she went back to her room, took off the dress through hot tears and made a solemn decision: she would never utter another word of this to anyone again. No matter the cost, she was going to live as a man.
* * *
—
Ben’s roommate was a babe—a serious, stone-cold babe. Leather jacket. Sexy hair. Full lips. Guys really didn’t do it for me, but this felt different. I wasn’t able to put it in these words at the time, but there was a disti
nct softness, a gentleness that was positively magnetic.
We quickly got lost in conversation. I sat, transfixed, across the table from Ben’s roommate, who loved new wave music and vegetarian meals, and who seemed as enamoured with me as I could have hoped. A guy unlike any guy I had ever met. A guy who wasn’t a guy at all, but was trying so hard to be.
One month later, we signed a lease and moved into an apartment together. Me and the person I knew as my boyfriend. We lived above some drug dealers and a massive Rottweiler that often made it impossible for us to enter our upstairs flat from the front door in our shared hallway. Instead, we would climb up the rickety back steps, icy in the Ottawa winter, and laugh about our luck. We were starving students—truly hungry a lot of the time—subsisting on noodles made in hand-me-down pots and pans from my parents. I was finishing high school and would proudly tell anyone who listened that my boyfriend was taking computer science in college. We had a rescued kitten that would curl up between us while we watched The X-Files on Sunday nights. We always spent our last pennies of the month at a trendy little coffee shop in the ByWard Market. We would read, sketch, play chess and hang out with our artsy, geeky friends. We were poor, but it was a magical time.
Had we moved too fast? I had leapt with both feet into the relationship and spent hours justifying the decision to my parents and close friends. When I announced I was leaving the halfway house, the director of the program, who barely knew me, had yelled at me in her cubicle in front of other staff members.
Love Lives Here Page 3
