Tag: Calgary

Identified Patient

I am in Calgary today learning how to diagnose autism. The training is in the same hospital building where I was detained for a month and ultimately diagnosed with OCD when I was eleven. A month of one-way mirrors and cheese whiz toast and CBT worksheets. My current therapist sends me a message before I leave that says “I hope this trip is somehow good for you rather than jarring,” which I think was supposed to be reassuring but ends up coming off ominous.

At the Vancouver airport I text my partner and tell them I cannot stop thinking that I’ve forgotten something important and something terrible is going to happen. There must be a ritual I can do to prevent it, they joke. Ha ha ha. It turns out the feeling that I have forgotten something is correct, although the scale of the catastrophe is a little off. When I arrive at the Calgary airport and try to pick up my rental car, my driver’s license has expired two days earlier, and I have to get a cab. I had planned to maybe check out trendy restaurants that have popped up here since I left in 2004, but quickly I realize I’m going to be basically confined to the strip mall around my Best Western and the children’s hospital where my
course is being held. Wings clipped, I feel like I’m waiting for my sixteenth birthday so I can go through Peter’s drive-in for milkshakes or drive to the airport just to look at it, so I can start to imagine forward movement as a real possibility.

The view out the cab window is vast and empty and slow, and I realize I had forgotten how this place seemed to be a mismatch for the pace I wanted to go. Wheels spinning on ice, futility and pent up energy; knowing there was a whole big world out there where I wouldn’t be such an anomaly. In the parlance of CBT: the feeling didn’t necessarily tell me the truth. There was a whole big world out there, and I wouldn’t necessarily feel like less of an anomaly once I found it. But the idea of it was enough to give me traction, to propel me out of this place that always reminds me of how no one can hear you scream in space because there’s nothing for the sound waves to even bounce off of.

Did you know that it’s more common to be afraid of wide open spaces than it is to be claustrophobic? I am sure that I do not belong here. They gave me diagnostic powers by mistake, it is an administrative error. A Freaky Friday type mishap where I have woken up with unearned power and freedom. I spiral and sweat through the afternoon lecture, imagining all of the catastrophic sequelae of this mistake. My heart races. On the break I get an ice cream from the vending machine where my mom would get me ice cream before family therapy, like trying to coax a feral animal. Only she’s dead now, so I’m trying to coax myself back to productivity or achievement, to my hard-earned place on the other side of the glass this time. I am conscious that adult professionals probably don’t eat ice cream for lunch when surrounded by colleagues. At any second they may realize I’m an impostor, and send me back downstairs for toast, a PRN, a worksheet and a nap.

I go for a walk to try to feel better, and end up feeling sad and slow and lonely, a specific sensation that feels like dull prairie winter in my chest. Vancouver moves fast – my favourite restaurants and memories disappearing before I can make new ones. Calgary moves slow, the pancake restaurant I used to go to with my mom before skiing preserved like a bug trapped in amber. The steakhouse we’d go to after church. The dead mall, standing there like the husk of a giant insect, where I had my first job selling novelty swords to nerds with poor impulse control, and which I recognized recently when it was used as a set in The Last of Us. Everyone I could call from my previous life here has moved or died.

It is dense with memory and devoid of connection. When I was nineteen I saw another psychiatrist who told me he thought I had Asperger’s, which was a thing then. Likely because I looked at the floor while I talked to him, and told him that I believed that the problem was not depression or even OCD, but that “I suffered from a pervasive remoteness.”

These days I have mostly abandoned the CBT I learned when I was eleven at the Children’s hospital psych unit. I still eat cheese whiz on toast, because it feels like a hug. But in light of everything that’s happened, it feels unhelpful to say “that’s a catastrophic thought.” It’s trite, but the only thing that slows down my heart rate and lengthens my breath is gratitude. When I was thirteen I found queer youth group, and when I was fifteen I started volunteering to run it. When I was sixteen they started paying me, and I’ve been lucky to build that into a career as a therapist. The early parts of that were nurtured by old (to me) lesbians who wanted to see me be happy and succeed; who understood that I was doing my best in a hostile environment and wanted to believe in the idea that someone like me could be okay. You couldn’t take a kid under your wing like that now; it would be called grooming. But no one was ever creepy, and I wouldn’t be where I am now without them.

When I moved to Vancouver, queer people felt unfriendly and suspicious of difference. There were a lot of invisible divisions I struggled to intuit – the mirror is never just a mirror. No one was jumping to take me under their wing. I still had the embarrassing tells of someone from a town that hosted the national high school rodeo, whose social and cultural centre was a grain elevator, and where you could ride your horse to school and hitch it there. I used to think it was too easy here, that there wasn’t the kind of exposure to hostility that makes us tender with each other’s earnestness.

When I started writing this, what I didn’t want to happen was for it to turn into a kind of city-over-country supremacy that I think it’s easy for anyone, but maybe especially for queer people, to slip into without noticing. When we do that, what we’re actually trying to signify is the cruelty and stress of the places we grew up, but we tend to do so without examining our own capacity for cruelty that we pack up in our backpacks and Rubbermaid totes and bring with us across mountain ranges on Greyhound buses. I’d even hazard to guess that as much as we learn what to tolerate in relationships from our families of origin, we learn how to be in community in places that hurt us. From where I stand now, I know that under a lot of the cool disaffectedness that I used to be so intimidated by, there is often deep vulnerability.

What I brought with me was a pane of one-way glass, the pain of being observed and described, the specific pain of the identified patient. I roll the words around in my mouth. Nothing goes away until it teaches us what we need to know. I repeat it to myself over and over again like a mantra until my mouth is dry, and it seems to help. My heart slows down to match the pace of this place, the thing I couldn’t do when I was growing into myself