"Well, I read about this farmer in Canada who killed a bunch of women and fed them to his pigs."
Sandra and I spent today in Labadee, Haiti. We woke up at the crack of dawn to go do yoga on the beach, then ripped down the longest zipline over water. And the thing I found most interesting about that experience was I wasn’t afraid. We did a practice run on a baby line before doing the big one (called Dragon’s Breath), but even when I was up on the platform looking at the rocks and trees and reef and ocean hundreds of feet below, there was nothing terrifying about it. It was more comfortable than anything. I jumped off the platform, let go of the bar above me and just soared down the line. I was expecting it to feel… I don’t know, freeing. Not that it wasn’t nice, but I guess I was expecting for it to feel more exhilarating, like I was breaking out of something. I’m thinking maybe I already broke out.
Anyway. Something else interesting happened on this trip. I kinda settled my beef with Canada.
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It sounds dumb to have beef with an entire country, so allow me to explain the back story as to what this all stems from. When I was growing up I was inundated with the message that Canada was the safest country on earth to live in, that everyone is friendly and is looking out for you, blah, blah, blah. And by comparison to other countries at the time, that very well may have been true. But as I started going through all the horrible crap that I went through in my childhood and teen years, I became increasingly angry that the message I’d been fed all my life was turning out to be a big, fat lie. I didn’t feel safe. I felt betrayed.
I suppose you could point fingers at my parents or whatever, but from my perspective it was pretty much a universally understood thing. I’ve talked to other friends – who have both left and stayed – and they understood, having grown up with the same message. Watch Bowling for Columbine and check out the part where Michael Moore goes up to Canada and opens people’s front doors and just goes walking right into their homes. I suppose there are parts of Canada where that happened at the time, but I’d never encountered it. And a lot of my friends were like, “Those people are insane – I’d never leave my door unlocked.” So getting those repeated messages made it really hard for me to speak out about anything that happened to me, not just because I thought that maybe I was the only one, but also because I thought nobody would believe me.
I always knew I was going to leave, though. I never felt like I fit in there. One of my friends once told me that I was an American stuck in Canada, and I think she was right, to an extent. But even so, I still wanted to have pride in where I came from… and that was really hard for me for a lot of years. Canada held a lot of bad memories. Going back was always hard, so I just avoided it as much as possible. I didn’t really feel like it was worth trying to make new memories there. I figured it was just one of those things I’d leave in my past.
But on this trip I had the pleasure of spending time with two super cool Canadian chicks from Toronto, and we reminisced on things like Candy Mountain and Mr. Dressup and other people, places and things we had in common. And I started to feel nostalgic. I missed all those things and the people I love that still live there. And when they told me that Just Desserts shut down because there was a gun fight there, and that a little girl was killed in broad daylight on Boxing Day because a gunfight broke out on Yonge Street, I wondered if maybe the internal message about Canada being so safe and trustworthy had changed. Not that it had become one of terror and doom, but maybe something a little more realistic – that on the whole Canada is full of good people, but just like anywhere else, you have to keep your wits about you because sometimes there’s not so good people.
Anyway. Before Colleen and Sharolyn start getting excited, I should probably say this in no way means I would ever move back – I love L.A. too much, and if anything I’ll wind up moving further away to Hawaii. But I find myself looking forward to traveling there for some book promo, if it comes up. And I do have some press trip options in that direction. So maybe it’s finally time to make peace with my homeland and create some new experiences and memories. It couldn’t hurt.
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