Semi-Colon Solidarity

On April 20, 2016, I was fired for the first time in my life.  For many people, this could be seen as the lowest point. Luckily, I had faced this possibility with my fiancé the night before, and I was better prepared than I thought I could be, emotionally.  Within twenty minutes of hearing the news, I had seen the silver lining gratitude of it, and actually felt more relieved than devastated by this new milestone of mine.

I had struggled in that role, and a lot of that struggle involved my mental health.  At first, I could blame SAD, and then, I thought it might be depression, and in the end, a counselor labelled it as social anxiety. I didn’t fit in with the culture of the organization, and they had no way of accepting me into their culture.  It was elementary, junior high, and high school (and first year of university) all over again! I tried to do what I could – I excelled in my role and was praised by my peers – but there was always this unsettling knowledge that I was DIFFERENT from everybody else. That difference was frequently things that I truly LOVE about myself, but not fitting in was always really hard on me.  Once I knew that I didn’t have to struggle with that, I realized that I was really free from the six-month struggle I had endured.

After clearing my things from my desk, I hopped on my bike and headed home, almost an hour later than I had anticipated.  Had I left at my planned time, I likely would have come across a similar scene as I approached the Parliament buildings, but I’m really glad for my timing on that day.

April 20 is 4:20, or the annual day for Marijuana activists to gather around legislative grounds in an effort to have the herb legalized.  Despite my activism, I have never actually been a part of a protest, nor a part of the crowds in the surrounding area. It was inspiring to be around so many passionate, stoned individuals.

Within those crowds, there was still traffic and crosswalk timings to deal with. I had hopped off my bike as I approached the crowds, and walked it alongside the masses making their way through the bottleneck that is the High Level bridge, right beside the Legislative grounds.  As I waited for the final light to change, a young woman’s voice spoke up beside me.

“Is that a semi-colon tattoo?” she asked.

I looked down at my wrist, as if to remind myself, and then looked up at the voice. “Yea, it is.”

“I’m glad you have one,” her tone delivered the deeper message behind the tattoo.

I paused for a moment, taking in what she had said. This was love – unconditional love – from a complete stranger, expressed as gratitude for my existence here, today, rather than the alternative a period would have created. “Thank you.”

“I have one of those, too,” her voice was a splendid mix of pride with just a hint of the humility all humans possess.

I stared back at my handlebars for a moment. The light changed, and my window for a response was closing. “I’m glad you have one, too.” I turned my head back to her and held her gaze long enough for her to feel my love for her, for all of the other people like us, brought together by a simple tattoo and the knowledge its presence revealed.

She smiled curtly, nodded her head, and almost whispered, “thank you.”

A semi-colon is a punctuation mark best used sparingly. It is a moment when the writer could have chosen to end their thought, but decided instead to carry on.  I have a friend who used a period. I really wish she hadn’t. I know the sentence was a struggle for her. I know she had used semi-colons in the past, and it hadn’t made the next part any better. Her life had become a run-on sentence she could no longer run in. I know her sentence is over now; her story continues on my wrist. 

I hope conversations like the one I had on April 20, 2016 help with more people who ever contemplate the proper punctuation.

Get Up Fighting: An Introduction

I don’t remember much from my childhood, but I do remember my maternal grandmother. Sadly, she was the first loved one of mine to pass away, and most of my memories are of her being sick.  As the youngest in my family, many of my memories are supplemented with tales from my other family members, and I’ve been able to piece together a sense of how amazing I was even at a young age.

My middle sister gave me a fabulous memory of our maternal grandmother within a year of our grandmother’s death. If my memory serves me - which by now you should know that it doesn’t – I think this happened in the last week of my grandmother’s life. Every grandchild got one last one-on-one visit with my grandmother, and we respected that alone time patiently watching cartoons in the lobby of her hospital wing.  In my sister’s visit, my grandmother passed on the wisest words my ten-year-old ears had ever heard:

“It’s OK to go down crying as long as you get up fighting.”

That was twenty years ago, and I have heard a lot of great sayings since then. Alas, this one usually gives me the most motivation to keep on trying.

I’m a self-proclaimed activist, but I’ve never been in a protest. I have rode in a Critical Mass, though, and it was the most exhilarating bike ride of my life. I think of it fondly every time I cross the High Level Bridge, remembering how we covered that busy, narrow bridge with bicycles during rush hour on a Friday afternoon. It was a beautiful display of a peaceful demonstration. That’s the type of activism I like to promote.

I’ve been a vegan for six and a half years. Before then, I was an animal rights activist living under a huge cloud of guilt. At fifteen, I read about the seal hunt in the Arctic and was appalled at the slaughter of seal pups for an ingredient used in a cosmetic product (lip balm). While everybody else seemed to brush it off as a “way of life” and an industry we needed to support, I could only feel the sadness of the seal pup’s eyes looking out at me from the pages as I thought about my “way of life” and the animal lives I consumed because of something that we had always done. As a very good girl, I never wanted to question my parents, and so I kept my first attempt to be a vegetarian a secret. Within three days, my father noticed and started to ask questions about what I wasn’t eating. My emotional eating kicked in…and I gave it all up for a microwaved hot dog. I used to feel bad about having such a frail backbone, but I’ve since strengthened it.

At 17, I moved out to go to university (fall babies get all the glamour of appearing more mature). By Thanksgiving, I had become an “anti-factory-farm” vegetarian. Basically, I was a vegetarian unless I was at home, where I still wanted to be the very good girl and supported the livelihood of my family. I feel bad about eating those over-salted chicken breasts from M&M Meat Shops, though… By my second Christmas visiting back home, my body had adapted and I puked up all the turkey I had eaten when I was supposed to be going to Christmas Mass. (Never mind the pound or two of chocolate I had consumed before dinner, I still cling to it being the turkey that made me that sick.) From then on, I was a full-blown vegetarian…and my family slowly adjusted to the idea.

I did a GAP year in England after university and realised that their traditional GAP year happened before uni. Oops! I still learned a lot about different cultures, children, and living abroad. I loved it, but I came home broke. So, I moved to the only province hiring anybody during the global recession, and lived with my two older sisters for a few years. During that time, I finally took the plunge and became a vegan. My family resisted this change much more than my baby stepping into it would otherwise have you believe. As my middle sister told me at the time, “I could tolerate the vegetarianism, and it even made me eat less meat. Veganism, though, makes me want to eat all of the meat that you aren’t.” Oh, sisters…always trying to make us into better versions of ourselves…in some twisted way…

A few years later, a friendship blossomed into a romance and I am now going to be marrying a feminist ally. He’s pretty confident in himself, thoughtful about the causes that I care about, and a lovely cynic of the world. I don’t always agree with him, and that makes our relationship work best. We have a profound respect for one another and the marvelous people we choose to keep as friends. He’s taught me a lot about how to love myself, and I’ve helped him with my own superpowers, too. You’ll read about him as “my love” because he’s less of an exhibitionist than myself.

I love my family, but I know I’m the black sheep. I love where I come from – the Prairies – but the politics here make me face palm more often than Jean Luc Picard. Needless to say, my frustration with being here has led to many tearful collapses into my pillows. But, I keep getting back up…because of what my maternal grandmother told my middle sister on my grandmother’s deathbed.

Fun little fact: I do remember that I was the last of the older grandchildren to get my turn to see Grandma that week. Sadly, by my turn she was so worn out that we put it off until the next day. She died that night. It’s OK. I never liked seeing my grandmother in that hospital bed, with all the tubes hooked up to her. I prefer to remember her as the vigilant caregiver that took me to my first Asian restaurant. When I had a tickle in my throat, she moved us to the non-smoking section of the restaurant “on account of my asthma.” According to my mother’s memory of this story, my grandmother was too sick to drive us to the restaurant in the first place. That makes me love her even more, because she wanted to treat me to a special one-on-one dinner with her, one last time.

This blog is my account of getting back up fighting. I may not be the most vocal activist, nor seem like a very active one, but I am a very passionate one.  I believe in standing up for what I believe in…even if my opinion changes when I have more information. In fact, ESPECIALLY when my opinion changes with more information. So please, read my passion, contribute your own thoughts, and let’s be activists together. I have no tolerance for ignorance, though, so consider yourself warned, trolls and the like.