8,000 miles from home, I was fast asleep in a dorm room at a travellers’ hostel in London, England. I needed my rest as I was jet-lagged and had been working a great deal prior to my trip. I loved staying in hostels, meeting all kinds of new people, and learning about my destination. Unknowingly, this would be the last time I was able to stay in a hostel dorm.
When I’m tired, it’s like I’m in a coma. Once as a teen, someone stepped on my head while I was asleep at a late-night party and I didn’t wake up. But something had changed since then.
If I was sleeping and the heavy door to the dorm opened, I would go from dead asleep to bolting upright and let out a scream. It was so incredibly embarrassing to do this to people who randomly came in the door and those on vacation and didn’t want to deal with a person experiencing a symptom post-traumatic stress disorder. I am sure a few of them thought that was the whole story and forgave me, but the story had so many more parts to it, and many of them were disturbing.
I lived with a severe and chronic mental illness. Growing up, I showed signs of different things such as autism and obsessive-compulsive disorder. I went through disabling depressions as a child. Later, I would experience manic highs during which I was unstoppable and go for days on half an hour of sleep. I also had severe social anxiety.
Early on I learned alcohol would ease my anxiety. At one point, a friend and I got together and an older friend bought us a bottle of whiskey. Our plan was to get a little drunk and go to a dance across town from my house.
I had no clue as to my limits with drinking — I knew no restraint. On the way to the dance, I drank most of the bottle, passed out in the snow and woke up 16 hours later, naked in my bed at home and I couldn’t feel my toes. It would take eight more years of experiences like that one to convince me I needed to quit.
The most disturbing part was that I knew I had some problems but thought I would grow out of them, or that my depression was something everyone experienced. For me, it was just the beginning of a far more horrifying diagnosis of schizoaffective disorder and anxiety.
It wasn’t long after I started experiencing schizophrenia psychosis symptoms that I was hospitalized. Upon discharge, I was told to take pills, go back to school and do whatever my father asked of me. I wasn’t supposed to drink at all, but I got my hands on some money and went out to a bunch of night clubs and got tanked.
At one of the clubs a young woman I knew from years before and her friend tried to approach me and they seemed to think I was attractive and said some kind things about me. I didn’t know how to respond. I had a huge crush on this person since I first met her, but I walked away. I had a few more drinks and decided to go back to where she was and ask her to dance. But when I did, she was necking with one of my mortal enemies, a jock who had teased me dozens of times about something I once said in class. Soon after witnessing that, I got into a cab, gave my home address and laid down and later almost passed out in the back seat.
A few days later, still reeling from the hospital admission and my weekend binge drinking, I picked a fight in class and was taken to the school office. I didn’t comply with the school administrators. The police were called and I was taken back to the hospital.
I was placed in the ward for people who had behavioral problems along with their symptoms of mental illness, and I saw so many horrifying things. People at their very worst, some who had been through hell or a lifetime of disability and poverty, along with ego-filled nurses who would think nothing of slamming you onto a hard, cold floor and injecting you with vile substances then leaving you to rot in an empty isolation room.
Eventually, I was released and went home. Over the next years I struggled with taking medications and doing things no person with a mental health disability should attempt, like taking out a student loan to attend commercial pilot’s school.
Things only started to settle down when I was placed in a group home with other people who lived with mental illness. One of my greatest regrets at that time was that I didn’t think I would ever be able to travel again. I longed to visit London. I wanted to find out if it was true that Canadians were loved around the world. I had incredibly vivid dreams about going to London again. My dad had taken my brother and I to Denmark when I was ten and we stopped in London both ways and I just fell in love with the place. At one point I even went to the post office to see if I could somehow mail myself there.
There were a few movies that I greatly enjoyed that took place in London, one was “The Wild Geese” with Richard Burton, Roger Moore and Richard Harris. It was a story of mercenaries who were sent to rescue a deposed African leader from prison. They’re double crossed during their mission and have to fight their way out of the country, experiencing great loss of life. Another movie that spoke to my heart, “84 Charing Cross Road” with Anthony Hopkins and Anne Bancroft. It’s a touching true story of a writer in New York who corresponds with a bookstore manager in London over the course of decades.
Movies, books and traditions — I drank in anything about that magical place, London.
It was while I was still living in the group home in my early 40s that I decided the dreams and the wishes were enough. I bought a plane ticket well in advance, researched all I could about London, what to do and see, how to get around. I even got a transit pass called an Oyster Card in the mail before I left.
The trip was good, the people in London are incredibly friendly and welcoming to travellers. I recall sitting down at a McDonald’s and meeting a young woman who had lived in London all her life. I thought about people I knew back home who were in their 20s and had never left Edmonton. For me, life was all about travelling growing up.
Once my dad took my whole family to Southern California in his van. We went for a month, and it was magic. I was surprised to learn later when my dad wrote a foreword for one of my books that it seemed long drives were the only thing that would help me come out of my shell and participate in activities.
I spent 10 days in London on that trip and a great deal of money for a person who is supported only by a disability pension. The miracle was that when I got home, the dreams seemed to stop. I was no longer obsessed with going there. I settled into life at the group home again and worked on marketing and writing my books and daydreaming about my next destination.
There was so much to learn about writing. I found free courses and books on the subject at my local library and a short time later I had an article published in a magazine for people with schizophrenia. A few months after, I was offered a job as an editor of that magazine in addition to a second one about bipolar disorder. The job even gave me the incredible opportunity to fly to Toronto and appear on a radio show during a conference. My sister lives there which gave me a chance to spend time with my niece who was just a toddler then. Unfortunately, the magazines went out of business a short time later, but I had no regrets.
When my books came out, I learned that the best way of promoting a book is to get onto radio, so I approached the local university station, CJSR 88.5, and they were happy to interview me. While I was there I kind of fell in love with the idea of working in a radio station and put my name in to volunteer. I had my own show for a short while called “The Prose and Poetry Show” where I would interview writers and poets.
Though I completed recording and editing four shows, only one episode aired and I decided it was too much. I couldn’t keep up with the stress. Before I left, I interviewed two prominent psychiatrists for a radio documentary. Even then I was a shy person. I didn’t mind making a radio show for broadcast, but I had a hard time going against anyone’s wishes which was the only way to make the documentary interesting or worthwhile. The hospital had bred that shyness into me.
Before moving into the group home, I spent six months in the psychiatric hospital at age 29. During that time I was put in isolation more than 50 times and assaulted by both staff and patients, losing about four of my molars from being punched in the face in the process.
My radio documentary was supposed to be about some of the problems with psychiatric treatment in Alberta and I wanted to make public things such as forced sterilization, experiments performed on patients, lobotomies and lifetime hospitalizations. My boss, Matt, head of the news department, was very kind and supportive and tried to explain what was involved in gathering information like that, but I just couldn’t go down that rabbit hole of mental health care in Alberta again.
As time went by, I began to get over the experiences I had in the hospital and regain my footing. I found out that I was eligible to join the schizophrenia society and they were running a course on recovery. In the class, they had videos narrated by a man named Dr. Chris Summerville who was the CEO of the Schizophrenia Society of Canada. Later, I would meet him in person and present him with one of my books.
I got a lot out of the course, and for the first time in a long time I tried to come to every class like I should have done in high school. When it ended, the person who ran the branch office hired me to teach the next two classes. She told me about an opportunity where I could go to different groups to give speeches about my recovery journey and schizophrenia.
I went through the process of learning about presenting and writing my speech. I was reminded of my first experience with Toastmasters as a teenager. Back then, I blushed beet red, my voice and hands were shaking, and I couldn’t look up from my notes. This was exactly what happened in my first presentation, but at the end, I got applause and a young woman bought my book.
This presentation was the beginning of many speaking opportunities. As I did more, I became very comfortable speaking to audiences and they often bought my books at the end of the presentation. It was a new and amazing chapter in my life. These talks didn’t just help me speak pubically, they gave me confidence in everything I did. I was finally starting to get over the feelings of low self-esteem that had been beaten into me in the hospital, plus I started saving and investing. However, there was no way for me to foresee the terrible things that were about to happen to me.
I was taking my medication, I was working and writing. I even had some more opportunities to do some teaching. One of the places where I taught was the psychiatric hospital. The same one where I had been confined for a big chunk of my adult life, and the pay was good. Then one day my psychiatrist, who I had and still have the utmost respect for, told me he had good news. He said there was a newer antipsychotic medication that would work better, have less side effects and last longer than what I was getting at the time every two weeks by injection.
I was reluctant, but I decided it was worth the risk. He started me on pills, then moved me to a long-acting injectable form of the medication. Slowly, surely, once again, I descended into madness. The new medicine didn’t just open the floodgates of psychosis, it was in my bloodstream, and it would be at least a month for it to work its way out of my system.
I started having serious delusions and hallucinations. I spent Christmas in my apartment bedroom where I had moved my TV and PlayStation, eating canned ham on crackers, with a blanket draped over my head. I was terrified that if I moved or made any noise my next-door neighbour who I believed was a member of the Hells Angels would kill me. I was convinced he was shouting threats at me through the walls and could somehow see me, so I recorded the conversations with my phone. I played them for the woman who managed the building, but the recordings were completely blank. I felt humiliated. Then one night I thought if I went to stay with my elderly father that I would calm down and be able to rest. Instead, I imagined my neighbour had followed me there and was going to kill my dad. I shouted at what I thought was my enemy through the front door of my dad’s apartment, but no one was there. Finally, my dad called an ambulance and the police.
After almost 20 years of stability and being able to maintain my mental health, I was admitted for five more weeks of mental health treatment. The hospital was a nice place, but I was incredibly ill. At first, I thought I had grounds for a lawsuit but didn’t want to hurt my doctor in any way and heard that it is almost impossible to sue for a medical condition in Canada. So, I wrote a book instead.
My new book was a combination of a lot of different aspects of my hospitalization. My dad wrote the foreword, I put in glossaries of terms, poetry and essays. I even put in scans of my clinical notes and scans of poetry I had written while in the hospital along with commentary on what each poem meant. It was an incredibly unique work of nonfiction, which meant that no publisher would touch it since it wasn’t any type of proven formula type book that they could publish and turn a profit on. I also got a scathing review of the book by an anonymous user on the Amazon website which kept anyone from buying it. So, I ended up making the book a free download and tried to move on with my life. I was back to teaching, back to giving presentations, and I was doing a lot better. Then COVID hit and things became surreal.
I will never forget the empty streets and the buses that stopped charging for rides, causing them to be parties on wheels for all kinds of broke people. My teaching job was put on hold. I got my vaccinations and sat down on my couch one day and got up to go out about 10 months later.
A few months after things began to partially go back to normal, a young woman who had seen me speak at her college contacted me. She had bought two of my books and was having a lot of problems at the time. My books inspired her to not give up and she read them repeatedly. She was contacting me because, though it took ten years to get her degree, she was graduating and wanted me to join her at the celebration with her friends and family. It was the most meaningful event I was ever invited to. People had stopped inviting me to parties years ago when I decided to not ever drink again, and it only got worse when I was diagnosed with a mental illness. I will never forget the hug that young woman gave me that night, like she didn’t want to let go. My mom used to do that before she passed.
Not long after, my dad passed as well. All my life I knew my illness was genetic and that it came from my mom, but my dad had Alzheimer’s disease in his family. One day he was found wandering the halls of the senior’s building where he lived, unable to find his apartment. He went into the hospital and for months I visited him every day I could. I took him for walks, hoping he would keep remembering my name and face long enough for me to have time to accept his condition. He was in the hospital for quite a while, just being warehoused, until a suitable nursing home was found. I don’t think he was at the nursing home for much more than three weeks when he got an infection that took his life.
My dad didn’t leave me millions of dollars, but he left me with knowledge and experience to take care of myself. When I received the $10,000.00 or so he left me, I invested it and sold a bunch of stuff to invest more. I was very frugal for a long time, and a friend referred me to a financial advisor who increased what I had. I reached a point where I realized that I could leave this money to my niece. But the truth was, she was in school, having a hard time finding work and needed money now. So, I cashed in part of my investments and sent her what I could. Then I did something very selfish. I booked a flight to London again, bought a map and spent weeks watching videos for tourists. I just got back the other day.
I changed hotel reservations twice and I lucked out on the third one. It was a beautiful and ornate 200-year-old hotel with hand-carved wood and leather sofas. There were beautiful oil paintings and stained-glass windows. They even had incredible artwork painted on many of their ceilings in the common areas. It was perfect for walking tours, being right next to Hyde Park. I saw so many things, and the people at the hotel treated me like royalty. Some of the museums I went to twice, not only because they were vast and incredible, but also because they were free. I saw things I will never forget and took pictures of things like St. Paul’s Cathedral and Westminster Abbey. I also had some of the most amazing fish and chips of my life in a genuine pub.
I still work for the Schizophrenia Society and have a volunteer job working for the most amazing woman I have ever met, who founded an organization to help people with schizophrenia and their families. I’m going to fly down to meet her and some other volunteers and clients this summer, and I really don’t know how I could expect anything more from life.
Commitment is hard. Start with this free short story collection.
