ME... 20 Years Later - Part I

There are days in each life that are profound.  These are the days on which you stop, breathe more consciously, see more clearly, appreciate more deeply.  For the rest of my life, this will be one of those days for me.

Anniversaries are powerful things. When happy, they are cause for celebration.  When painful, they can be cause for great sadness.  But not always.  Sometimes painful memories can also be cause for celebration.  Celebration of strength and of survival. Celebration of life, with all of its cuts and bruises.

Twenty years ago today -- on February 21st, 1992 -- a hole was blasted through my life.  I was still living with my mom & dad, and had stayed late after school to do some work in the library. Normally at night I would phone home from the subway and let my parents know what time the bus was coming, so they'd know what time to meet me at the stop near our house.  On this particular night however, the bus was already there when I came up the escalator from the subway and I didn't want to miss it.  I didn't stop to phone home, but instead ran straight onto the bus.  It was a beautiful winter night, not yet 8 pm, and as it was a Friday evening there were lots of people out and about.  It was a half hour bus ride then a 10 minute walk home; I figured I would have one nice walk from the bus stop in the soft freshly fallen snow. I'd be home in less than 45 minutes.  Everything would be fine.  

I was wrong.  45 minutes later, a wooded park that I had played in during my elementary school days became the burial ground for my soul.  And I became a statistic -- a rape victim.

There is no need to elaborate on the crime; if you can picture a masked man, a terrified teenaged girl and a large knife, you get the gist of it.  In what was less than 30 minutes but seemed like about a week, the person that I was died.  I stayed dead for six years.

I suffered PTSD and went from being a straight-A student all my life to dropping out of school.  I spent entire days in my room lying in the fetal position, not speaking.  I had a beautiful, kind therapist who was a lifeline but retired suddenly less than a year later.  I learned how to fake being present.  I went back to school and won a songwriting award and scholarship, only to drop out again when a major news story made concentrating and studying completely impossible.  I got a job; that didn't last either.  I could do nothing, nothing at all, but sleep and write music.  I have absolutely no doubt that writing a collection of songs that I named Praylude is what kept me from checking out of this life.  I put my grief into the songs and I began performing. Reconnecting to the process of creating and sharing and finding beauty in that process -- through all of the pain -- kept me alive.

Sharing everything that I've been through since would be far longer than a two-part blog post, it would be a book.  Perhaps someday it will be. (There is so much more... what I refer to as the 'record store incident'... the day I left home with a bag of clothes and ran to a convent, only be told to "try Covenant House" and have the door closed in my face... then finding refuge at a different convent...)  And there is a moment in my story that is so traumatic I doubt I will ever share it. Needless to say, I continued for years to walk through my life in shell mode.  I had jobs, I had friends, I laughed.  When I finally got to the point where I didn't find men terrifying, I went on dates and of course became emotionally entangled with a few who were also deeply troubled.  I had completely forgotten what health was, or perhaps I just couldn't recognize it because I hadn't lived in that space for so very long.

There were also some men who were healthy and who cared, but I scared them away with my unhealed state and they scared me with their soundness of mind.  There was no way I could be in a relationship with a healthy person when I was clearly a mess... there was no way a healthy person could want me.  I believed that subconsciously, but the subconscious mind is the most powerful force existent. You cannot fool it.  It can never be derailed from its own truth.

The beginning of the long way back wasn't until almost a full decade after the rape, in 2001. And it happened because I was fired from my job.  I was working for a box office and feeling more stable when I was told over the Christmas holidays that they were downsizing, and I was one of the people who didn't have a job to come back to in January.  It was a huge blow. I figured that since I had no job, I'd apply to go back to school and this time it would stick. And it did.  I also trained as a Crisis Line Counsellor with the Toronto Rape Crisis Centre.  I was very grateful for the therapist and the creative outlet that I'd had, my music, which had been my go-to place in those darkest of moments.  I kept thinking about the women who didn't have a go-to place, and I wanted to be that for them if I could.

I graduated from school and got a contract for a great job.  I got my own place.  Life started to become normal, even good.  But it was short-lived, and the next few years were exceedingly painful. Short-term jobs followed by long periods of unemployment, the death of a collaborator that I loved in the middle of recording my first album, and a whole lot of loneliness born of fear and a dearth of self-confidence.  On the outset I appeared to have "healed", but I was an exercise in fragility.  My apparent togetherness was a facade, combined with a daily dose of numbness that I would've taken each morning in pill form if I could've.  Then in November of 2005, something happened that would drastically alter my path and fuel a period of healing and self-evolution that I never could have foreseen. 

I auditioned for a role in The Vagina Monologues.  I'd been an usher at the Canadian premiere years before and knew the script really well.  But I'd never auditioned for anything and didn't even have an appointment.  I crashed the audition and got a part.  The closing piece.  I had always loved performing but on the night of the show, in front of that audience, I fell in love with acting.  I went back to school yet again to study theatre.  I auditioned for a production of Ragtime and got that too. When the producers of V-Day stepped down and needed someone to take over the following year, I jokingly said yes and ended up stuck with it when no one else made a similar joke.  I had no interest in producing TVM, but I wanted to direct it and knew that the producer made that call.  In that singular moment, I went from being an acting student to a theatre Producer/Director.  I had zero experience as either. But I'd written all my life, and loved words.  I was a singer-songwriter who understood storytelling.  I was an artist to the core, and I was a fighter.  I knew I could do it.

I had being raped to "thank".

Had I not gone through what I had 14 years earlier, I would have had no knowledge of the level of my own strength.  Directing a play would've seemed crazy, let alone the prospect of taking over the Toronto arm of a worldwide movement.  But a movement whose purpose was to end violence against women -- how could I not?  Within me there was a sense of calm about it all, even when one of the previous producers "strongly encouraged" me to find a "real" director and informed me that if I tried to direct it myself I was going to singlehandedly destroy a legendary play.  I wasn't swayed by it.  Once you've flirted with the possibility of death, strongly-worded emails questioning your leadership capabilities just aren't quite as scary anymore.  I took them as a challenge.  

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Go to PART II.