When I was seventeen, I moved to England with my parents because of my dad's job. It was a terrible time for me to move. I was one year away from graduation; I was super tight with a big group of friends; I was starting to have girlfriends, and I was on track to become a Really Successful Guy.
I was getting A grades and med school was on the horizon. Life was good. Then within six months of finding out, I said bye to my friends, packed up my shit, flew across the Atlantic and found myself in a rainy, old, stone, castle-on-a-hill town in buttfuck nowhere North England where I knew absolutely no one except my mom and dad.
I was the new kid at school. I had to drop back a year cause the exams were so different. It was an all-boys school with a uniform and teachers you had to call sir. Shit was fucked and every day my alarm would go off and I wished it hadn't.
There was a ball of snakes in my stomach and I felt scared and sick all the time. I slowly retreated away from the world. At first, it was into movies. I downloaded dozens, hundreds of movies and watched them back to back, often three or four a day.
I'd start one in the morning while getting ready for school and it'd be playing within five minutes of getting home and tearing off my stupid shirt and tie. I didn't care what I watched – anything worked, anything to take my mind of the fact that I was fucked and I fuckin hated my life.
A dark cloud followed me around. I didn't make friends. I failed my exams. I started skipping classes, going home and watching movies instead. My parents could tell I was fucked. They tried cheering me up but who wants to hang out with their parents when they're 17, 18 years old? I found weed and got high and drunk in the basement and continued my downward spiral.
To get into med school in Vancouver (my plan), I had to get a B in English. After getting a U (unclassifiable or some shit), I had to go see a tutor. So once every week for a year I traipsed down the hill to this old guy's house who lived with his dog and played clarinet and read poems for fun and listened to jazz and didn't care about money but ideas and knowledge and above all creativity.
I hated it, resenting him and his stupid dog and poor lowly house full of books and paintings and musical instruments. Thinking back on it, he was patient as fuck, gently, slowly, calmly leading me by the hand across the fields and into the woods.
He believed in literature's strength and ability to pull this wayward youth, this angry, confused, depressed young man through the brambles and thickets of life to the everlasting glory beyond. We read Hamlet over and over. Ever read it? It sucks. At first. But read it again and again until you actually understand what's going on, until you've translated the old-school language to where you can appreciate Shakespeare's uncanny ability, and things begin to change.
I pounded my head against the round table in Ian Wilson's little dining room while Ralph the hound licked my hand. And with the help of my very own Virgil, I passed through hell and purgatory to my very own version of heaven.
Slowly, unstoppingly, the words began to take hold. I recognized the anger, confusion, and depression racing through Prince Hamlet's veins. Then I recognized it wasn't Hamlet I empathized with but Bill Shakespeare, a young dude living a few hundred years ago just south of me.
Bonds of steel, written in ink, were forged slowly across the centuries. Ian Wilson laughed in glee. I pouted, unwilling to acknowledge the cracks in my shell. But now each night as I sat there depressed, drunk and stoned at two in the morning, I no longer pulled my laptop toward me but a pad and a pen.
There were these things, these black sticky things in my hands, heart, and head that had to get out. The only way to assuage the burning sensation was to scrawl my feelings all over the page.
It was self-conscious and bad, poetry at first that ripped off singer-songwriter's lyrics then prose that mirrored whoever I was reading at the time. But the process of sitting down and writing for an hour or two made me feel better so I kept doing it.
Through self-preservation, my body recognized that the pain and sadness lifted a little if I wrote down my thoughts so I returned to the page again and again. I didn't flip a switch and start loving life. I was still cynical, bitter and twisted, no longer recognizable as that popular, happy Canadian kid. But I didn't want to kill myself anymore and I've never wanted to since.
If you're feeling like shit and don't see the point in anything and think the whole world is fucked and everyone in it, especially you, then pick up a pen and tell me how you feel.
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