Split Personality

Life can be absolutely hilarious in its irony.

I began this summer staring hopelessly at the big, scary expanse of time in front of me, completely bewildered - four months in Toronto, no job, certainly no traveling, and no friends who didn't completely remind me of high school.

I felt like I was slowly being pulled backwards in time, to a period where I was so sure I had moved from. But one funny thing about life is that in order to prepare yourself for the future, you have to reconcile your past. And Past Jessica was the one person I had spent three years desperately running from. Past Jessica is that ugly, misshapen, mothbitten sweater flattened in the bottom of a closet, beneath years' worth of less embarrassing, probably more expensive other garments. But, of course, what happens when the shiny new clothes have been taken to the cleaners or moved into a new home in another province?

I had left my baggage in Montreal. Before leaving, I had emotionally detached myself from some of my closest friends, lost interest in a new romantic prospect and had stopped looking. The weeks before leaving, I spent my nights sweating and shaking alone in my empty apartment, battling an existential crisis into the early hours of the day, squeezing my eyes shut and helplessly unable to keep my mind from asking questions darker than the last about life, and death, and what comes after.

I thought a lot about death those days - wondering how it would feel, when it would come, what would go on after, accepting that it was going to happen eventually, and just as quickly as my university career had swiftly passed before me, so would the rest of my life. I worried about the future, crammed my early adult life with enough plans as to not waste these fleeting years - if I was lucky enough to make them through alive. Lying in fetal position, I would mutter between gasps, "Please get me through these few nights. Please get me at least enough to get back home to my family. Please don't let me rot here in this bed, ignoring calls until they finally find me when my lease is through and they need to break down the door to forcibly evict me."

When the sun rose the next day and I woke from my blurred half-sleep, I would literally let out a sigh of relief and say a quick prayer to get me through the day.

I was ready to go home. There was very little left for me in Montreal. And then, inevitably, time folded and sighed and I was back in Toronto.

Between May and July, I slept irregularly, often going to bed at 5 AM and waking up at 11, still entertaining my dark thoughts. But some time in those months, a strange intruder slowly crept into my mind. She blew the dust out of some of the forgotten corners of my brain and wafted through the vents and awoke some old familiar habits. I had rudely set myself up in her domain, so she made her presence known to me. It was Past Jessica, back to haunt me.

She re-opened the floodgates of all my insecurities, my awkwardness with men, my vanity, my selfishness, my jealousy and my temper - all parts of me that I shrunk and slowly grew out of. She floated into my speech, made gossip more biting, lit the short fuse, spurned my parents and my friends, and I was helpless against her. She argued with me into the night, mocked me relentlessly, cut me down when I felt high. But slowly, like a babysitter dealing with an impetuous child, I got tired of her antics and ignored her when she lashed out. I got busy. It was a gradual shift, I was just so sick of worrying and battling. So I threw myself into project after project. I did the Fringe festival, I tutored English. and she, the jaded teenager, slowly slunk back into her space and blasted her angry music. And in those situations, the only thing you can do is let it rest and then wake up wthe next morning and talk it out. It was time to stop running away and finally face her.

Between Montreal and Toronto, I had left everything behind - my friends, relationships, school drama, and had violently intruded her space with this air of self-importance, bringing back with me nothing but tension and negative energy. And the more I willed myself against her presence, the more she acted up.

I sat her down in a quiet edge of my brain and asked her, finally, what it was that she wanted. She replied matter-of-factly: I want a room. She wanted to be able to settle back in with me. What else was to be done? I let her back in. I unlocked my door, found her a space with a bed and blank walls for her to hang her punk rock posters on, poured some tea for me and got a bottle of Coke for her, and suddenly, she just lived there.

I talk to her sometimes now. She's got her room in an attic in my brain, and constantly offers her two cents. When I get into an argument with my parents and shrink away silently, boxing myself up in my own isolation, a discipline that I have practised over the years for these situations, she with her biting honesty will sarcastically snarl, "So, what, you think you're, like, better than this now? Who the hell do you think you are?" When I am faced with moments of heartbreak and in typical Jessica fashion, turn my back and check out, the over-emotional teenager will rip off her headphones, leap out of the bed in her attic, land in that unignorable little crook that connects to my eyes and my eardrums and scream, "FEEL SOMETHING!!!!!!!" so violently it reverberates through my body.

Okay. I tell her, calmly, shaking, and finally allow myself to feel something.

I'm back in Montreal now, after the four months, and I've taken her with me, the little brat with her angry music and her cold shrugs, but also with her moments of youthful wisdom. Together, we slid the key into the lock, stepped in and looked around at the apartment that I spent three years away from her to cultivate. Being there after all that time was eerie. It was suddenly not my home now; it was haunted by a different presence. Standing in my kitchen felt like I was meeting a stranger who somehow suddenly knew every detail about me - my interests, my friends, my history. This strange presence, I gathered, must be Future Jessica, waiting for me to catch up, beckoning Past Jessica and Current Jessica to sit down at the couch and chat over tea - and, of course, a bottle of Coke.

I wonder what we'll find out about her.

In Transit.

I have always wanted an espresso machine.

Okay, let me be more precise - I have always wanted really shiny, pretty, professional espresso machine, with not only a milk steamer attachment but the ability to steam milk at the exact temperature of 185 degrees in 45 seconds. I don't want the stove-top percolator, a Steam machine, or a low-grade Krups home machine that can steam milk and pull a shot with a cheap plastic turning knob. And really, I don't want to pull a shot, I want to extract one. I want this machine to last 20 years, with proper maintenance and yearly calibration. I want a matching grinder, too - a large burr mill with specific settings to be able to grind extra fine, fine, medium, coarse, and very coarse. One that properly grinds the beans together as to not give off too much heat to taint the flavour, without the spinning blade that so violently bruises the beans.

This being said, it may be surprising to note that the biggest problem preventing me from purchasing such beautiful machinery is not the money. Don't get me wrong- the money is still a problem, as I don't regularly keep two thousand dollars lying around waiting to be spent (unless my couch knows something I don't). However, even if I did so conveniently have that amount cavalierly lounging and sighing restlessly in my wallet, the larger issue would be: "Where the hell am I going to keep this thing?" (I regret to tell you that the idea of giving this exorbitant amount to charity to help the needy ranks a few notches lower, and I do hope you forgive my disgusting human materialistic complexion).

I have often repeated in earlier posts that I wanted my 20th year on this earth to be one of self-discovery and world-discovery, and while I have dipped a small, shakey toe into that pool, I have begun to realize that this transition period will very likely last me at least the next ten years (and, really, hopefully longer). This transition period will hopefully take me through more places I have never travelled before, present challenges and obstacles never tackled before, allow me to run my tongue and teeth across plates and plates of new, exciting foods. And unfortunately for my caffeine addiction, these years will have no room for large, bulky, expensive new gadgets.

I have been in Toronto for four months. I often think about my apartment in Montreal. I think about my very small but inviting bed, the wooden shelves lined with my favourite novels and writers and movies, my coffee table weighed down heavily with reams of paper and notes and my laptop and scented candles, next to a couch upon which mountains of clothes and winter apparel sit comfortably. And don't forget my kitchen - a foot of counter space yet roomy enough for a pristine white hand-mixer, submersion blender, and various sizes and styles of whisks and spatulas. My iPod is palm-sized but it is full to the brim of music I have collected over the years.

I have been away from all of this (well, not the iPod) for four months, and I have survived quite comfortably without it.

I've spent years trying to make this space an extension of me, from the teal/black/white colour scheme to everything in between. I have manifested my personality and identity into a collection of objects, songs, and colours. And this all culminates to what end - when I leave this apartment behind at the end of my studies? What was all of this for?

It has dawned on me that I've done this all a little too prematurely. It's too early to splash "Jessica" all over a bachelor apartment and call the space my own - particularly if I'm merely renting it. And this is why I'm not ready for that sleek new espresso machine.

Maybe when I'm in my thirties or forties, I will have a house and husband (although a large part of me shudders at the thought), and room in my kitchen. But right now I have to remind myself that when one is in transition, the only space they can call their own is themselves, and it's important to take inventory of the small but important aspects of themselves as surely as do with their possessions. I'm not about to go all-out Francis of Assisi and sell all my worldly possessions and live a life of peace and solitary confinement, but I'd like to know that if I did, I would be able to stand on my own.

But for now, I will return to my apartment, bask in itself as myself for one year, and afterwards, leave it in quiet peace, escaping with only two suitcases and the hope that in the end I, too, will be repainted and refurnished.

"This will all feel like shit to you, I can assure you that. Right now, you're doing draft after draft, getting the information and all the facts straight, and you're revved up on confidence and people are telling you how great they think your work is. You feed off of the attention like a butterfly outstretched towards the warmth of the sun, or some similar colourful, textured, and poignant metaphor that you have littered all over your pages. But in about three or four weeks, when your piece is all but a distant whisp of a memory, you'll find the pages, red-marked with comments in the margins, folded into a textbook or shoved in your laptop bag. You'll pick it up, smooth it out, read it with fresh eyes, and... you'll hate it. It's the worst thing ever. You'll ask yourself why you spent the hours slaving over it, what people saw in it, and in you, and why you had to keep this shit around instead of throwing it in the trash where it belongs. But it's not shit- let me assure you this. And I know, because I've read shit. I've written shit, and I knew it was shit as I was writing it, too. And your harsh and jaded eyes will seldom allow you to appreciate your creation, but remember that you kept at it, that you were flying when those fingers hit those keys, pumped for every edited copy. You weren't just salvaging, you were polishing. So keep this now, keep the excitement, and keep going, because when all of this is done, all you can rely on is the memory of finally tackling something you were once proud of."

One step forward, two steps back.

My youth and inexperience makes me (to say the least) ill-equipped to bring on those retrospective drops of wisdom about life; I am, at the very most, in the beginning phases of the learning process. But things I do know from my twenty-one years here: just when you think you're the most sure of yourself, everything seems to fall apart.

One year ago, I was exactly the kind of person that I wanted to be. I had a year of living alone under my belt, a basic grasp of French, was in a town surrounded by fascinating new people, full of buzzing anticipation knowing that the next step would take me to the rest of the world.

I was never as happy or as independant as I was when I was hopping train-to-tram in Berlin, wandering around St-Stephensplatz in Vienna, or making plans with international strangers in London. Even at my lowest points, when I was sleep-deprived, homesick, lost, lonely and alienated, starving and broke, I always had the option of taking that magic little trainpass and going back to somewhere comforting.

When I returned to Canada, people noticed a difference in me - a surge of strength they couldn't quite place, or a freshness and maturity that they had never been able to recognize in me before. I was happy for several months, high on the memories and feasting on possibilities (maybe giving myself a little too much credit) - having seen a part of the world that was completely new to me, I felt like there was nowhere I couldn't go.

Now, it's one year later. I've been back in Toronto for three weeks, desperately handing out resumes, and feeling more hopeless than I've ever been. I've never once not been grateful for the experiences and the opportunities I've had in my life, and I know everyone has their lows. But what happened to post-Europe, independant, mature Jess? When I hand a potential employer my resume and see their smiles slowly wilt, I'm instantly reverted back to high school Jess, who still lives at home off her parents money, underqualified and hopelessly unprepared for her real life. Worries keep sneaking into my mind - what if I don't get a job this summer? What if my lack of experience will prevent me from finding a job in the school year? What if I don't save enough money to travel, and I don't end up doing what I really want to do with my life? Now that I've seen the person that I'm happy with being, will I ever be able to find her here?

I'm afraid I'll never be able to answer these questions. Three months. I just need to worry about these three months, until September, and constantly remind myself to keep holding on, and trust that this, too, will teach me something.

One of those moments you would carefully fold it into a small square and pat it down in your left breast-pocket as you walked home,
And the streetlights would beckon you forward, every single time,
And St-Laurent smelled exactly like lavender, you swear it.

I hate just being human. It's just never enough.

Half of this wasn't me (it was Tom Waits)

nighthawks at the diner
of Emma's 49er, there's a rendezvous
of strangers around the coffee urn tonight
all the gypsy hacks, the insomniacs
now the paper's been read
now the waitress said

eggs and sausage and a side of toast
coffee and a roll, hash browns over easy
chile in a bowl with burgers and fries
what kind of pie?





A bottle of nail polish remover next to
an ashtray, four butts smoked down to the filter behind
a crumpled brown styrofoam cup, perforated by plastic spoon.
This whole city is dying of second-hand smoke,
and the rest of us are just dying.

The Take-Off.

I mentioned earlier this year that I wanted this to be my airport year, to bravely march into the unknown world, stop being perpetually stuck in plain contentedness and stop settling for normalcy. So this year, I bought a plane ticket, traveled on my own and realized my own abilities to adapt, made wonderful friends from all corners of the world, threw myself into completely new environments (from the rural French township of Jonquiere to the bright lights of Paris), found a clearer idea of who I want to be and what I want to be doing in ten years, and dipped a hesitant toe into the icy cold waters of journalism. In this time, I've lost some important people in my life, learned from some unlikely people, and realized who my real friends are.
And so, without further ado,

What I've Learned About Myself (and really, life) This Year
- I'm terrible at keeping a balance in my life. Unless all aspects of my life are going well, than nothing is, and this is often due to a skewed mindset. I will go long stretches of time getting 12 hours of sleep and napping all the time, and then I'll quickly snap into a rigorous routine where I'm out the door at 7 AM and come back home at 10:00. It's very inconsistent and something I need to work.
- Sometimes, at the most unlikely moments, there simply isn't any room to be afraid or worry and it's important to just keep moving.
- Often, it takes one very drastic (but calculated) risk or action before the rest of the details line up. You can go on telling yourself you'll do something, or wait around for people to catch up, but it doesn't amount to anything until you finally push yourself off.
- It's remarkably easy for me to immediate put up a cold, "I'm better than you" front when threatened or insecure. This is alienated me from a lot of people, or it has set me up to be a completely different person than I am, which pigeonholes me into a character that will inevitably disappoint.
- I drink way, way, way too much coffee. Five cups a day should not be a consistent norm, and it has been in the past four months for me. I also don't drink enough water or milk.
- I bypass many of the larger problems in my life and instead target a lot of petty inconsequential things like appearance and weight.
- I need to give myself more credit for a lot of things. I'm a more genuine person than I think I am, and the self-delusional "Oh I can't do this, I'm a terrible person, I hate everything" is easily turned into an excuse to not go for what I want. At the same time, I also need to trust myself to know to stop when I should.
- I am terrified of a whitebread suburban lifestyle. It obviously works for a lot of people, but not for me. Hell comes in the form of a mini-van and a white picket fence.

So that's the sum-up. And this year?

2010 Resolutions:
- Quit soul-sucking job, attempt to find job where I will engage with real human beings who have no chance to hang up on me.
- Do not spend more than $350 a month.
- NO MORE BEER.
- Drastic, but calculated decisions.
- Only go to bars once a week (Karaoke, Tuesday nights, Peel Pub)
- Use time that would have been spent at soul-sucking time cooking dinner for self
- Blog once every two weeks.
- Find a balance. And an internship.

Manageable?

Hopefully. Have a good year, everyone.