Slow Time

Cabinet Mineral for Soleil Rouge Digital — March, 2020 Alisa Calypso

Life has been hectic lately. I don't know if it's post-separation comedown, or post-mid-pandemic malaise, or post-busy-work-springtime, but I find myself challenged to stay motivated to do anything. Monday mornings, I often take a little crash for anywhere from one to 24 hours: rot on the couch, watch sitcoms, scroll social media, and ignore my duties and responsibilities. It's not ideal for actually getting anything done; it's also not ideal to feel slightly out of control of the crash, as though I can barely drag myself to the resting point before turning my brain entirely off. 

watching sitcoms | watching improv shows | reading romance novels | reading fun magazines | a little snack | a seasonal fruit | a new flavour of sparkling water | reading a how-to book | putting my phone away

The things that sustained me in other hectic, hard-brain times—Drag Race, knitting, cooking, queer romance novels—have lost their lustre. I don't think it's depression, because I'm still joyful and grateful to be alive, but it's like a little void has opened up and I'm not sure what, exactly, to fit it with. I like being busy, but it feels like one of those situations where you've been eating strawberries your whole life, and then suddenly, you mouth is itchy when you eat one. Where did that come from?

doodling | hanging art on the walls | sewing | knitting | blogging | writing a short story | writing a poem | menu planning |

I feel somewhat like my creative tank has been spilled out—and really, it's hard to be creative when we're in survival mode all the time. I feel also like I've been someone with passionate hobbies (those of you with ADHD and autism are shouting "hyperfixations! special interests!" and don't think I can't hear you), but to suddenly find myself with a lack of hobbies, or at least hobbies that are fuelling my creative tank, is weird. Yes, I'm still knitting, but nothing too involved. Yes, I'm still blogging, but my last post was a blob. I'm still doing stuff, but I'm doing the most basic versions of the most basic stuff. Why? 

dancing | going for long walks | lifting weights | yoga | riding my bike | swimming in the lake | throwing a football around | flying a kite | a massage

Realistically, I don't feel energized and I'm not sure why. Is this perimenopause? Is this...sadness? Is this a meme about anime and Harry Potter? Is it burnout? Is this something else? I feel much less anxious in my daily life than I have for many years, but was anxiety the fuel I used to propel myself forward? If so, respectfully, what the fuck? Because this feels boring, and I feel like I'm boring right now, and I hate feeling that way! And maybe I do need to unpack why I feel the need to be interesting and helpful and shiny all the time, but really, I also enjoy doing things and not doing things feels sluggy and weird! So: perimenopause? Burnout? Sadness? WHAT??

talking on the phone | going for coffee with a friend | dinner with my sister | walks with my mom | driving with my dad | going to the splash pad with my kiddo | pal sleepovers | visiting friends out of town | sitting in a busy coffee shop | sitting in a quiet library | therapy | sending a card in the mail | writer's group | volunteering | snuggling

Maybe this is just a season of slow. Summer is often go-go-go, but it actually carries a lot of grief for me. Summer is when people have historically gotten sick, and when affairs have come to light, and when a walk on the beach is likely to contain slow tears or a drunken sob. I do much better in spring and fall, when the heat is soft and the days have structure. And, after all, I am still grieving the collapse of my marriage, and the additional relationship devastations that have piled on since then. I feel punched in the brain, in the heart, and like I'm still trying to get up from that.

tidying up | paying my bills | laundry | sweeping | grocery shopping | cooking something easy | cooking something hard | gardening | 

And maybe this is also a bit of choice paralysis: I could be doing anything, and instead, I'm curled up on the couch because it all feels a bit impenetrable. My creative goals used to be small-scale ("knit a pair of socks!") and then I felt like I could take on more; then I started edging into territory like "refurbish the dining room table" and that might actually be too big for me. Shoot for the moon and you will land among stars? Dude, I can't even figure out how to get off the launchpad. I've thought a lot about how percolation is a key element in my creative process, but where does percolation stop and overwhelm begin? 

a soft shirt | a cozy blanket | a pretty dress | a nice bit of jewellery | showering | good-smelling soap | the right sunglasses

The idea of sitting in the void, even just for now, is stressing me out. It's not my usual way. My usual way is to distract myself with a million things to do, little jobs that keep me busy and moving and going all the time. And I want to get back to that—I do!—but the motivation is so low. I don't really know what my alternatives are. I can't force myself to feel better. I can't bully myself into productivity. I mourn the loss of the easy, spring-up side of myself, and trust that she will return. 

And if she doesn't, who will I be?

Life, Right Now

Lately the vibe of this blog has been single-topic rants/harangues/love letters/musings, which has been great for my writing chops and focus, but I do sort of miss the days of writing a meandering blob of nothing in particular. Working on this little corner of the internet for the past fifteen (!!) years has meant that I have dabbled in a lot of different formats and approaches, and the meandering blob is a perennial favourite, right alongside "the listicle nobody asked for" and "half-baked takes on things that matter to me" and "pop culture responses, I guess??", but I often feel compelled to put a little more oomph into these things, now that I'm only doing one post per month. Still: maybe this month is a little less oomph-y and a little more flowy, as a little treat.

There are things happening behind the scenes that I don't want to broadcast, or at least not yet: domestic shakeups that are not yet fully formed, changes to lifestyle and habitat, and an overall sense that the plans I had made are maybe not the life I will live. But those things are yet to be finalized, and so focusing on a collection of small things while the Big Things thunder on in the background is where I'm at right now. 

And, oh, what small things! In no particular order: 

- Spring is here, and that is very good for morale. The garden is popping off, and the azaleas and rhododendrons are not messing around. Pure beauty. Every year, I have delusions that I will make dandelion wine or pickle magnolias; every year, the moment passes and I don't do it, taking me one step farther from being a self-sufficient forager type and/or cool weird hippie, but likewise, every year I enjoy the spring more and more. I get why retired people get really into their gardens. It's good out there. 

- It's been an utterly fabulous friendship time. I feel wildly blessed that so many good people have collected around me. How? I don't know, but I don't take it for granted. These are people who make me laugh until I cry, who laugh at my jokes (the dream!), who hold me when I cry, who send thoughtful cards, who linger on my front porch, who walk with me, whose kids I love, and whose advice I take. Friendship wounds have crossed my life in many ways and those scars can run deep, but right now, I feel like the small collection of besties I've somehow ended up with are absolutely the right people for me. 

- Likewise! Beyond just ("just") friends, I am having a really nice community moment. The volunteer work I do with the climate group and on the library board is so generative and positive! I feel good about it! The relationships in those spaces there aren't friendships, but they are friendly and rooted in mutually aligned goals and values, which is affirming and feels important. Plus, because my paid work is remote and my colleagues are spread far and wide, having people that I sit at an actual table with feels like a novelty, but a good one. 

- I'm on a Harry Potter fanfic kick, and while it is DEEPLY embarrassing to be known in this way, I have to admit that the reading of the fanfic has been SO FUN. It's so fun. I have many theories on why fanfic is so fun, but it's basically spending even more time with your imaginary friends, and who doesn't want that? This is like discovering several new seasons of your favourite sitcom, or a sequel to your favourite movie, and as an added bonus, it comes with much less of the terrible politics of the author, and a lot of in-jokes and snark. 

- I just broke four years on Duolingo. I spent a year learning Japanese and retained none of it; I've moved on to Spanish and I'm...medium-bad? This is more of a phone game than a language acquisition process, but I know the Spanish word for owl now, and I didn't before. 

- I am struggling with time management right now, and I know it will get worse in the summer. I am not really a morning person, and in order to be effective, I need to get out of the house and do something right away, and then go to work. On the days I have my kiddo, the commute to school is usually enough structure to get me to my desk by 9:30; on the days I don't, I can be a gormless prawn on the couch for several hours before I haul myself to the computer. I need to break this habit, because it doesn't serve me. At the same time, I am really a person who enjoys evening work, and that is hard when I have to simultaneously do a bedtime routine. Advice on this balancing act appreciated, although I suspect it boils down to "be a different person" and that's tough. 

- My creative goals are all over the place right now, but they include (and are not limited to) the following: making friendship bracelets; framing and hanging my art; making new art; creating a kitchen-themed oracle deck; writing more chapters on my weird time-travel novel; figuring out what to do with the three yards of neon-orange mesh fabric I bought last summer; deep cleaning my house (not technically creative, but key to the creative process); refinishing the dining room table; and maybe cooking some new or low-rotation foods. 

- By the same token, one vision I have for the summer is a Weekend of Indulgence, where I just go and eat at all the good restaurants, scarf down pastries, buy some trinkets or fancy books; walk through some natural areas, and wear some great clothes. I know for many people this is also slightly-elevated normal life, but right now it feels like a real reach. Not in a poor-me kind of a way; in a "this will be special" kind of way. Holler if you want to join!

- I realized recently that the fight-or-flight hormones that had been flooding my body for....many years....pretty much constantly....have largely ebbed away. My overall anxiety is way down, along with the intrusive thoughts and generalized panic. I feel like myself for the first time in a long time, and it turns out, I like myself! I can put my foot in my mouth still, or have hard days, or struggle with motivation, but the sheer bad-feeling-ness that had become my "normal" has been a mega relief to slough off. I'm smart and funny, strategic and weird, and I have things, people, and goals in my life that feel like they fit. I like it. I'm happy. 

Image creator unknown

Fashion Vibe

Amanda S. Lanzone

I recently stopped into a new coffee shop. It was cute - the vibe was very GOOP, with refined sugar-free cookies and ashwaghanda hot chocolate - and as I sat there with my goat cheese-stuffed date and ice tea, a parade of new mums came through. It was wild how similar they all were: sleek mid-ponytail, black leggings, white sneakers, gray or black sweatshirt, little gold hoops. It was almost at the level of a dress code, or, frankly, cult member. And it made me wonder: is this stylish? Is this trendy? My baby is eight—should I dress like this?

I think a lot about style and trends. I love fashion and clothing, especially how it functions in as proxies for our social selves. Clothing creates in-groups and sends signals about how we want to be perceived. It helps create our public images. Clothing is a tool by which we create our lives. 

I've been thinking about this again lately, because it had occurred to me that the people in my life that I look up to for being stylish are all wildly different. There is my bestie who dresses like a stoned woodland princess (a lot of velvet and silk and interesting headbands); a pal who dresses like a member of a 1990s girl punk band (Doc Martens, windbreakers, leather pants); a friend who is an unabashed wardrobe maximalist, who routinely wears head-to-toe neon pink and heart-shaped glasses; and a buddy whose wardrobe, despite being mostly beige, seems so luxuriously touchable that I can't help but swoon.

In trying to define what unites these diverse and divergent queens, there are a few common denominators. They all make use of texture—wooly numbers, leather and fur, lacy bits and bobs, squishable fabrics, unexpected choices. They all have great accessories, like weird glasses choices, an excess of rings, or a funny poofed hat. None of them are shrinking violets: these are outfits designed to be seen and admired, not to blend in. And while they're all attractive as hell, most of them downplay the fuckability element. These folks are dressing for the girls and the gays; the straight male gaze is an afterthought, at best.

But more to the point, each of the people has a deeply personal way of dressing that just...matches who they are. It's hard to explain: I could write a thousand words on my friend who dresses like a girl-punk, and how she's brash and sensitive and a former member of the Pillow Fight League and how she will get in your face and defend anyone's honour...but I don't have to, because her frilly socks and t-strap Doc Martens say it better than I ever could.

So: is being stylish just a matter of matching your own vibe?

I think it has to be. I think this is why I still feel like I'm discovering my own style: because my internal vibe has shifted dramatically in the last ten years. That goes along with changes to my body and budget and my willingness to be perceived and get weird. In my 20s, I felt like my style was more like cosplaying who I wanted to be. In my 30s, it was a desperate apology for getting fatter and not being as hot as I once was. Now? Now, I feel like nothing hangs together, and it sort of works anyway.

The internal-vibe thing is so interesting to me, because it answers my question of why "it" works for some people and not others. Some people's maximalism is delicious while others' feels messy. One person's frilliness is perfect, while on another, it feels childish. Some people look like a million bucks in an outfit that could be described as moderately unhoused, while others need a boiled-wool coat and a low-heeled boot. Sometimes I want to tweak someone's personal style—I have a friend I really want to see it more 1980s band tees—and sometimes it's hard to define what's working and what's not. Why does athleisure read as slobby on one person and sleek on another? Why does office wardrobe look polished on her and like a costume on her?

Again: the vibe. The vibe is misaligned, and while it's not wrong or bad, it's just not as gloriously personally perfect as it could be. This is a low-stakes problem to have, and exploring solutions is just the most fun. Does a necklace solve the problem? What about the wrong shoe? Can we bring in a statement piece? Can we make it our signature thing? C'mon people, let's try some solutions! I don't want to be part of the Legging Mom Mafia. That seems dull as hell.

I still don't know what my internal vibe really is—am I a fritzy earth mother? a hard-edged femme? an outsidey community activist? a low-key professional who still cracks jokes in meetings? the third-hottest person at school pick-up? the girl crying in the bathroom at the club?—because the reality is, I could be any one of those people on any given day. Some days, I'm all of them (those are long days). I am weird and strong and soft and shiny, and I mostly dress to reflect that. I dress as a dreamer, too: the people I want to become, trying them on for size. And I dress in order the tell the world: I am still becoming the person I am.

The Small Job

This week, I took ten minutes and did a small job, and I feel good about it.

It goes like this: I thrifted some beautiful mid-century modern teacups, with gorgeous black-and-white graphic flowers. I had spied them in Value Village, where they had been priced at thirty dollars for a set of eight cups and saucers. Thirty dollars! At Value Village! (In this economy!) But I picked them up because they were quite pretty, and the manufacturers' stamp indicated actual vintage rather than HomeSense knock-offs. When I looked them up online, it seemed like they were a pretty popular item (a single pair of cups and saucers was selling on Etsy for sixty bucks), and so I put them into my cart, not wholly sold on the purchase but unwilling to get scooped while I was still in the store. I finally committed to them when I pictured my family sitting around my table on a Christmas brunch, drinking coffee and tea from these little mugs. Even though I don't even know what version of my family I bought them for—it's certainly not my current iteration, in seemingly constant turmoil—it seemed like maybe the mugs would help manifest the family, or at least it couldn't hurt.

Anyway, of course these cups and saucers had been sitting on my kitchen counter for six weeks while I hemmed and hawed about where to actually put them. If I tucked them away on the "good china" shelf, I would never use them; at the same time, I knew they wouldn't be in regular rotation, because they hold about two-thirds of a cup of liquid and are pretty silly as an everyday drinking vessel. 

Related: this week, my mom came and helped me freshen up my back room. Not quite a mudroom, but definitely not a living room, it serves as a storage zone/erstwhile potting shed/place to store bikes/plant hanging facility. My mom took the lead on redoing the flooring (laying laminate over old vinyl) and painting (scuffed white walls to a pinky terracotta). I mostly "helped" by repeatedly making incorrect cuts and, at one point, laying several laminate boards over top of a pencil I had left on the floor. I often consider myself handy, but I was definitely not on my game this week. But the job is 90% done, and it looks great, and I think I can mostly finish it myself. 

It was while this big job was underway that I decided to finally just hang the teacups. I went and got hooks and I got out my cordless drill and I spent ten minutes drilling, and then I hung up my teacups and they looked great. The job was done! The small job was done. The big job, of course, is not done, but we're getting closer.

I don't usually half-ass things. I have four regular clients, I serve on my library's board, I help organize community events, I'm solo parenting half the time, and I have a multitude of hobbies, from daily Worldle to this very blog to knitting to gardening to making jewellery. My creative to-do list currently includes several major projects, like refinishing my dining-room table and learning how to make punch-needle textiles. I like big, bold challenges. I like creative approaches and systems-based solutions. I sound like an insufferable LinkedIn profile, but these are true things about me: I like to do and make. 

But this year, I find myself struggling with the bigger projects. Maybe not even just this year: if I'm honest, the last few years have often been a balancing act where things like "a clean house" or "an interesting meal" goes by the wayside, so the chances of me taking on a big challenging haven't-done-it-before project are pretty slim. Things have been so busy and so different, and since my separation, even more so. I've been pretty in my head about it all, too: a lot of anxiety, a lot of time spent stretched out on the floor, waiting to feel better. 

But maybe I'm taking the wrong approach. Maybe I need to focus less on the big stuff and more on the little stuff. I know the sense of satisfaction that comes from a large project, but I also know that they can be kind of...interminable? Sometimes there's no sense of being done on a large project. There's always a bit more to finish, a few things to polish up. A small job? That has a start and an end. There's a moment where there is nothing else to do, and the brain sort of goes "ahhhh" like a sigh. It's part of the reason I like knitting socks, or hanging framed art, or even doing unloading the dishwasher: at some point, the job is done. While the big project brings a sense of creative stretch and accomplishment, the small jobs delivers staccato bursts of dopamine that, turns out, can be very helpful in actually orienting the brain towards bigger jobs. But the sense of ahhhh is also useful and pleasing in and of itself: not a full meal of completion and satisfaction, but a very delicious little snack. And who doesn't love a little treat?

As a small job, the teacup project was perfect. Aesthetically pleasing, short, and helps my house be less of a disaster? I love checking those boxes!

Maybe my next step is to investigate where my small jobs live, so I can find them more often. They're often little home- or self-improvement tasks, like cleaning out a drawer or doing a skin routine. I don't need to stack them up or do too many of them, but I might keep a little roster of small jobs I can tackle when the motivation strikes and the timing is good. I know small jobs give the illusion that more is happening and that I have control over any of it, but the reality is, I can control a small job.

I need to remember that this is not, actually, a grind: that these little jobs provide me with an outcome I enjoy, that can be done in under 30 minutes, and that make my life just a little bit nicer. In an era of my life when things are often grindy and, frankly, not very nice, I can do a small job and feel kind of good about it. The teacups, hanging and beautiful, feel good.

 

Kith

From peopleiveloved.com

If you had told me in my youth that the grand love affairs of my life would mostly be platonic, I would have been gravely disappointed, and that would have been wrong. I can honestly say that the people I've met in my 20s and 30s and now, in my earliest baby-steps of my 40s, are entirely amazing. 

In 2024, the depth and breadth of my community astounds me. I have friends in their 70s and friends in their 20s. I have besties of many stripes, volunteer-colleagues and work mentors, mom-friends and pen pals. I'm not fooling myself that all these friendships are deep, but they are all meaningful to me. I cherish the warm relationships I have with people, and when we do get to know each other better—the family drama, the hiccupy marriages, the health worries, the rich wormy compost of the soul—I fucking love it. I love it! What a gift, to get to know each other in this way!

And this is post-pandemic, after a period of time when we could only be IRL with people with whom we shared an address. To be able to cultivate a garden of friends during and after such a life-weirding, world-altering, emotion-boggling event feels like a goddamn triumph, you know? I don't know if this is a small-town thing, where we're all just in the soup together and unexpected relationships form out of sheer proximity. I don't know if this is a product of being "on the scene" in several key Stratford spots (hello, Revel, I love you). I know that having weak ties is important; I also know that people like people who seem to like them (especially more than others). But I think we're in a moment where many people, not just me, are hungry for connections. Is it post-pandemic cabin fever? Being in our 30s and 40s? Are we all extroverts with social anxiety? Have we relaxed our definitions of what makes a person cool? (I know I, for one, find the folks with showing-up energy to be pretty sweet these days.) Or is the secret that we're all just kind of great and people like to fall in love with each other, even platonically? I don't know; it doesn't matter. We're here, together, now.

I find this current friendship boom, borne of school community and small-town civic participation, so enriching. By walking my kiddo to and from school every day, I've made some incredibly meaningful friendships. Volunteering has led to some lighter connections, but it's also been great fun to get to know the baby boomers in my life. Not since university have I made this many connections in such a short period of time, and I don't even have to live in a dorm this time. 

That's not to say that there's never been friendship misery. Some of my most tender scar tissue is relational: fallout from two terrible years in middle school of being bullied full-time, of being picked up and then dropped and then ostracized. In my early 30s, two Very Important Friendships went belly-up, and I'm still feeling those reverberations nearly a decade later. I feel like any joyful reflection on friendship has to include these caveats, because I've had these spectacular friendship blow-outs, and it feels dishonest to not acknowledge them. 

And yet! And yet. The opportunity to learn from these friendship implosions has been deep indeed. The fact that those failed friendships in my 30s hurt so very damn much helped point me to the fact that I needed some actual therapy to help with the bullying aftermath, despite it being 25 years later. It woke me up to the fact that I feared those losses so immensely, and I fought against them so hard, and I was fucking awful while I was trying to "save" the friendships, and it was sort of no wonder that those friends bounced. Understanding that my behaviour came from a wound that could be examined with curiosity and tenderness, rather than shame and a frantic need to hide it under the guise of "being chill," has been very healing. (YES I KNOW THIS IS THERAPY-SPEAK, I did the therapy so I get to use the speak, right?!) Understanding this dynamic has changed my life, my relationship with myself. And if nothing else, I know, even if those old friends can't, that I'm not the same mangled human that I was 8-10 years ago. I can gently let myself off the hook for those disconnections.

What I like about this phase of friendship is that no one is trying to be cool anymore. We all like ourselves more than we did in our early adulthood. We all know ourselves a lot better. We're all a lot more relaxed. And most of have been through some shit that has softened our hearts and shown us the stakes of life—we all lose eventually, so why compete so hard? Maybe it's the latent co-operative board member in me, but collaboration is where it's at. I sometimes refer to proto-friendships, the phase where we obviously dig each other but we don't really know each other yet, as the "mutual admiration society," but I try to carry that energy into even the deepest and longest connections I have.

I love and admire the hell out of my friends. And they deserve that love and admiration: they're cool as anything, generous, thoughtful, funny, creative, wise, sweet and salty. Knowing them makes me want to operate on that level. We elevate each other, as all good relationships do. There's some part of me that knows I'm lucky to have so many amazing people in my life; there's another part, sweet and warm, that knows that I'm kind of amazing too. 

The oldest definition of the word kith, as in "kith and kin," used to be one's country, one's land. Our physical locations, the places where we root and grow. Now, it means our friends, who the other side of the coin to our relatives. I like to imagine my kith as somehow both: the people among whom I have planted myself, and where I bloom.

Culture Daze

Chandni Chowk

I spend a lot of time thinking about the ways I'd like city life to be better. I'm not a daydreamer, although I do give the occasional interview in my shower, pretending that I'm running for mayor. However, I am fascinated by the ways we design our spaces and places to reflect our collective priorities, especially when it comes to cultural life.

When we went to Iceland in 2012, I fell in love with the street art in Reykjavik. So many buildings are painted with huge murals of robots fighting or migrant caravans or cartoon suns, and it brought the city a sense of vibrant urbanism. Reykjavik is a small city in a small country—Iceland only has about 370,000 residents, and a third of them live in the capital city—but it was refreshing to see art, especially art associated with urban culture, prioritized in such a brash way. Toronto has graffiti and street art as well, but ours is famously hidden down multiple back alleys. Stratford, where I live now, has very few public art displays: we have one relatively recent mural in the downtown, and, yes, an alley that shared the history of the local music scene. It's big city-style art writ small. 

I think you can tell a lot about a city based on what it prioritizes. Toronto is a place of commerce, of course, and most people live close to a corner store or a shopping corridor. On the other hand, the city's quilt of public parks and playgrounds allows residents access to green space that may not be exactly in their backyard, but is at least within walking distance. Stratford's core is oriented mostly to tourists, so we have a fair number of restaurants and boutiques, but you'd be hard-pressed to pick up a non-artisanal apple in the downtown. And a playground or a place to get lunch with your kids? Forget it.

This is one of the major bummers about living in Stratford. Private homeownership and large-ish property sizes are common, so most of us do have our own backyard. The idea of the commons—places where we can go and gather, for leisure and social time—seems relatively foreign, and the places that do exist are designed for consumption. Visiting the relentlessly hardscaped Market Square, with its plastic picnic tables and sidelined greenery, is my showcase point. It's used and useful as a gathering place, but it's not beautiful for its own sake.

I'm not mad at Stratford for this, but I am frustrated. There are so many ways in which we could design shared spaces in order to maximize pleasure, beauty, and connection. The library desperately needs more square footage, and can't access it. Huge sections of town lack a playground within walking distance. The playgrounds we do have are often outdated and uninspired. The city's affordable housing is on the edge of town and looks much like affordable housing in most North American cities—that is, cheap and embarrassed by itself. Sure, there are gardens and a great-looking City Hall, but gardens are designed to be seen and not played with, and City Hall isn't a social site.

As a town, we've gotten a bit lazy. We've downloaded that beautiful streetscape onto private homeowners, creating an intense sense of keeping up with the Joneses and a singular "right" way to have a garden or a lawn. The culture that attracts tourists often comes from private organizations like Stratford Festival or the Chef's School, and while they are admittedly so much fun to attend, their priorities are driven by butts in seats. I'd love to see more art festivals like the Lights On event: a month-long celebration of light sculptures in our darkest months. We tend to play it really safe, because we don't want to alienate anyone. It's a bit....boring. And it's sort of baffling, given how many current residents and visitors come from bigger cities with diverse cultural landscapes! Semi-weird culture is accessible—and accessed—all over. We don't need to be so staid in our approach.

I think about what I had access to in The Big City and there's a sense of youthfulness, of experimentation. I once saw a light installation in an underpass! There are street festivals and community hubs, art outlets like the AGO and the Harbourfront Centre. Am I being unfair to Stratford, a place that has 1% of Toronto's population? Yeah, probably! But there is a sense of holistic lack, as though the city is only interested in me if I'm shopping at the boutiques or going to the theatre. My child, my need for fresh food, my desire for good housing, my yen for green spaces, are all much less served in Stratford's cultural core.

Some of this can be chalked up to the relative dearth of young people in Stratford. Iceland's average age is a youthful 36; Stratford's is 44, and Toronto is right in the middle at 40. Youth is a time of experimentation, of creation and identity-building, and young people often leave Stratford because there's not much here for them. I did it myself—I waited tables here a few summers in my 20s, but when it came time to start a career in non-profits, Stratford just didn't have the job market I was looking for. It didn't have the space to get weird in a way that felt primally necessary at that age. I wanted to fall in love, ride my bike at midnight, get drunk on a Thursday, walk kilometres gossiping with friends, quit a job six weeks after I started it. I wanted to be a writer, an artist, a designer, a board member, a student. I wanted to kiss my friends on their rooftops and watch as the sun came up over Bloor Street. Toronto in the late 2000s and early 2010s was romantic, dumb, inspiring—a transitional moment between David Miller's utopianism and the embarrassment of Rob Ford, before the vast majority of people in my generation were squeezed out into the hinterlands.

Stratford, on the other hand, is known for having the most secretive city council in the country. Make of that what you will. 

It's been a fascinating return to the city over the last five years, navigating the ways Stratford feeds and stifles its own community. For example: despite being a flat and dense little town, there is precious little cycling scene here—the drivers are too aggressive and the roads are too chewed up. The cycling champions here are rich-dad weekend warriors. There are no regular-gal cyclist scenesters, the kind who would bike to brunch because driving is for suckers. There are two movie theatres in town: one is a twee micro-cinema that usually focuses on private events, and the other is a cinderblock octoplex that never met a blockbuster it didn't want to screen. Live theatre is here, and might even be accessible if you snag tickets on sale, but there's no fringe fest, no comedy scene, and no regular live music venue. 

I'm not trying to dunk on Stratford, and believe me, by the time I left Toronto, I was ready to go. But it's funny to consider how "culture" manifests in different ways, on different scales. It's interesting to see whose perspectives and values get reflected, and how: are events free or paid? Are they family-focused or date-night material? What does "diversity" mean in a town that is mostly white, or where there are twice as many seniors as there are kids? 

Whose voices get heard when we talk about this?

We all want to live in a place that seems to want us back, right?

Things That Happened in 2023

 

January: Oh man, 2023 started off with a bang! I got my G2 driving license and basically spent the next few weeks with the goofiest grin on my face—like, so proud of myself—and THEN I had a fibroid surgery that I'd been sort of on the fence about/dreading for the better part of a year, and it went....totally fine! It was totally fine. Starting the year with two things I'd been dreading and then aced was a huge boost! Noah turned seven and I finished my zine about knitting, so those were also pretty great things! 

February: Former Toronto Mayor and Noted Old Person John Tory resigned in a sex scandal! Responses ranged from Yuck to LOL, which is correct. We started watching Bluey on Disney+ and everyone fell in love with the Heelers. Nothing much happened, really: there was some weather and we went out with friends, but overall, it was February so we were all just trying to survive. 

March: March break, again, which was another trip to Toronto. In 2022, we went to a hotel and it was very Covid-fraught; this time, we went to my in-law's place and bummed around with friend and rock-climbed and it was much more chill. I did March Madness on the theme of theme of Strong Female Leads and it was sort of...meh? Like, there are definitely a lot of movies that I love with strong female characters, but it felt kind of flat to focus on them exclusively. Anyhoo! Noah also joined the garden club at school, so that was pretty cute!

April: Halfway through the month, I woke up with the fastest heartbeat I'd ever had in my entire life. I went and sat on the toilet—still half-asleep—and by the time I sort of realized what was happening, it was probably topping 200 beats a minute. To this day, and I write this in December, I don't know what that was or why it happened. Was it POTS? Menopause? High blood pressure? Allergic reaction? Stress? Anemia? Dehydration? Panic attacks? Sleep apnea? I don't know. I never found out. It kept happening for weeks. It was so stressful. I helped organize an Earth Day party and I went to Trashion Week for the first time ever, and both were just really nice moments of affirming community and my place in it. I've now lived in Stratford for five years and it's been exactly the right place to participate in civic life on a scale that feels meaningful—I sit on boards and volunteer and know my kid's principal and many of my neighbours. It's so nice to be embedded somewhere; technically, I know this feeling is possible anywhere, but it has manifested the most in co-op, in my 20s, and here in Stratford, in my 30s. 

May: I long-term borrowed my parent's very very old Prius and started driving for real this month. We started with a trip to the Beaver Valley in which the car broke down and it was very annoying (but ultimately totally fine). There was also Mother's Day and organizing Mike's 40th birthday party; I spent his actual birthday evening in the hospital because my heart rate would not calm down, and it turns out I was pretty dehydrated! Mostly it was just so nice to welcome the sun back in a meaningful way, to get some independence, and to gear up for the summer.

June: Mike's 40th birthday party, which was a backyard shindig and well-attended by many people who love him. Then: The Smoke. Remember when the air was absolutely disgusting with wildfire smoke from coast to coast? And the kids were encouraged to stay indoors during recess, and New York looked like Blade Runner 2049? It's moments like this when it's like, oh, man, right: we are living on a planet in great crisis, and it's so hard to navigate the grief of feeling like our Earth Mother is dying of a disease we gave her ourselves, and that we could do something about it (only the "we" in that sentence is concentrated to a few dozen members of the human race, and I'm not in that club). On the summer solstice, I walked a labyrinth and meditated on all the ways my body felt connected to the earth. 

July: Summer holidays! Trips to Toronto! Weddings! Landlord troubles! Grandma health concerns! Multi-day internet outages! Neighbour issues! Man, this was a month of high highs and very low lows. For a minute, I was convinced we were going to be evicted because we hadn't mulched our garden beds. It was stressful as hell, y'all. On the plus side, the Barbie movie came out and that was a fantastic moment for feminist memes and the Indigo Girls.

August: We spent two weeks at the cottage and that was really nice. Noah went to the hippie Christian day camp of my own youth; Mike and I went out on a date and ate Mexican food. I continued my months-long stretch of waking up in the middle of the night. When we got back home, Noah and I spent two weeks going to the library every day and helped build a city of recycled materials. August sort of felt like a hangover from the mayhem of July, to be honest. 

September: September is the dividing line in the "before" and "after" of 2023. In September, I got some explosive news about my relationship. And that was the end of it. It was the end of nine years of marriage, of five years of trying since the last explosion, it was the end of wanting to keep trying. I was shocked and appalled and anxious and sick about it. And I was also relieved, because now, finally, I could stop holding on to something that wasn't working. In the first few weeks, I would rage out or cry my eyes out—a remix of "I Wanna Dance With Somebody" had me sobbing for an hour—but my anxiety damped down and my heart stopped racing so much. I started sleeping through the night again. Marriage is hard work, but I think we made it harder than it had to be. I'm being deliberately vague because I don't want to ruin his life, or mine, but I'm not ashamed of what happened here. I hope we both get to move on from this. This was survivable. I am surviving. 

October: Okay, all that being said, Mike didn't move out until nearly the end of November, and the next couple months were not easy. I slept in my office, or he slept in the attic. I took a whirlwind trip to Toronto and told many friends about what had happened. Noah's anxiety started ramping up, as if mine was being transferred to him, and it was absolutely terrible to watch. October was a holding month, a month where I just counted the days until something would be different. My grandma passed away and it felt sad to say goodbye to the last of her generation. She was such a beautiful, complicated, interesting woman—just like my mom, just like me, although we each have totally different versions of beautiful and complicated.

November: Mike finally moved out after nine weeks of post-explosion co-habitation and I was sort of dreading being on my own, but I came to neutrality on it in fairly short order: I watched a lot of old Whose Line Is It Anyways? and ate at weird times, and my heart didn't explode and I even found myself enjoying it sometimes. Then I turned 40! I planned a birthday party, but two days before, I tested positive for Covid (!!), so I had to call it off. What a freaking bummer. Anyway, I had been sort of mildly convincing myself that I would die before my 40th birthday (#darkthoughts) so the fact that I didn't was GREAT.

December: Noah's separation/general anxiety was pretty debilitating and it was a ton of work to get him to school every morning. I got kind of bogged down in work things and will have to get caught up before everybody comes back online in early January. I hosted a Solstice party and I spent my first Christmas away from my kiddo. The intensity of single parenting means I need to find a way to savour our breaks, because I need them—I need them, and I enjoy them—and I also miss my kid when we're apart. I had a 24-hour trip to Toronto to see old co-op friends and fall in love with the city again. I tried some dating apps and quickly found out that that scene is wild—like, are the men okay?—and 2024 will probably bring some romantic mishaps, or maybe total radio silence on that front, or maybe new love?? Who even knows, because the idea of going on a date with someone right now makes me want to barf.

In a nutshell, 2023 had a lot going on! Like, a lot. Friends showed up in a lot of amazing ways, from couches to crash on to weddings and weekend hangs to just letting me cry in their backyards while our kids played together. I loved being in Stratford and the roots that I've been slowing growing here seem real and true. I got to see Toronto friends many times, and that was nice. I read books and magazines, I walked on the beach, I worried about things that didn't happen and things that did. 2023 felt like a watershed year—the end of my marriage, milestone birthday, important deaths, important friendships—but it also felt like a compilation of moments where I felt really proud of myself, or like I was growing in a direction I liked. I have no idea what 2024 will bring. I hope it's good!