My life is built on trauma. I remember my first tottering efforts at self-actualization and these came largely as a reaction against my family's abusive treatment of me. Family life for me, growing up in suburban Richmond, was an excruciatingly dull and boring pseudo-reality. My parents were negotiating a prolonged, nasty and bitter divorce. Only recently were the beatings becoming sporadic. Before my older brother started working on fish boats for the summer I was constantly at the mercy of his fists. My mother, completely stressed from living with my alcoholic father, was hitting me when my brother wasn't. There was also sexual abuse.
The absence of the two toxic males in my family from our household brought us a very welcome and unusual sense of peace. Mom no longer had to cope with either Rick or Dad and she became herself calm, gentle and reasonable towards me. She almost never hit me now. We were becoming friends.
The damage had already been done. I was a traumatized child. I wanted to make as clean and complete a severance from my damaged and damaging family as possible. Fortunately we were living then in revolutionary times. It was 1970. I was fourteen. The hippies, the Summer of Love and Woodstock south of the boarder had already happened, as had the race riots and the fires in Detroit and other US cities. We had here in Vancouver our own gentle Canadian version of the hippies on Fourth Avenue and in Gastown and the Georgia Straight was our notorious underground newspaper. And everyone was smoking pot and dropping acid.
I wanted in on the action. I was finishing grade eight and celebrated my last day of school smoking a couple of joints with some older kids I'd just met in the park. I was soon hanging out with these people on a regular basis and the easily available drugs were a draw as was the soaking up of an atmosphere such as never would have been imagined or countenanced in my conservative working class home. It was inebriating, as were the free beer and cheap wine we all drank out of the same bottle.
This was my first summer of exploration. I would wander alone downtown, buying the Georgia Straight on street corners, talking to interesting strangers, sometimes sharing a joint or a sip of wine, looking into and exploring the most fascinating art and curio stores and wandering freely in Stanley Park along forest trails that no fourteen year old boy should be allowed to wander unaccompanied by a responsible adult and feasting on the wild salmonberries. That was the summer that I learned about ducks. The mallard drakes, in June, changed their plumage till they looked almost exactly like the females. The only thing that set them apart from the females was their larger size and their yellow or olive green coloured bills.
Reading the articles in the Georgia Straight, I learned that there were alternatives to what I had already been taught: everything from the articles about ending the war in Vietnam and support for war resisters everywhere, eco-justice, and prison reform and human rights for refugees and respect for our indigenous peoples, and gay rights, and information about sex and reforming the abortion laws and the need to rethink and reconfigure the narrow self-interested kind of capitalism that we were still imbibing with our mothers' milk.
I still remember the first issue of the Georgia Straight that I bought. It was the Revolution edition.
The cover was red and black, featuring a photo of four naked hippies, two men and two women, alternating each other (even the most radical folk were still very heterocentric in those days) holding automatic machine guns in such poses as to hide their naughty bits. I was titillated, of course, and intrigued and became incurably interested in revolution, its causes, its effectiveness and its fallout.
When I began grade nine in September I was suddenly years ahead of my peers in terms of my worldview and knowledge of alternative perspectives and lifestyles. I was an unusually bright and creative kid, diagnosed as gifted. I was also traumatized. None of those forays and explorations, none of those efforts of taking back and claiming my own life did one single thing to make me more functional in the real everyday world. Family trauma had impacted my ability to learn well in the classroom. My mother, for her own lack of imagination and resources, didn't have a clue that there even existed alternative schools that might have been my ticket of rescue. She wouldn't have cared, anyway, simply wanting a kid who would turn out as normal as possible, rather like wishing a monarch butterfly to morph into a clothes moth.
I was not about to become employable nor adaptable to the soulless capitalist system we were living under. I was becoming an enlightened and informed human being. However, especially with the stigma of trauma, there is really no place in our workaday world for persons informed or enlightened.
I was developing my soul, but at the risk of never in my life earning a living wage.
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