Everything changed when I began attending high school in Kingston. There I embarked on a journey of self-discovery in an intensive dramatic arts–focused program called Theatre Complete. This was a time of healing for me; I felt safe to exist around people in the program. We were all similar because we were unique in our own ways, and some of us were more obvious outcasts, due to our visible differences, than others. Some members of our group harnessed their truth, owned who they were, and expressed themselves in wildly beautiful ways. The teachers of this program, Al and Susie, created a space for people to be free, to be ourselves — an element unfortunately missing from the mandate of many high school educators, or at least the ones I have encountered. My new school was still a dangerous space, with its own set of bullies who would taunt me while my friends and I smoked in front of the school.
In Theatre Complete I met a person named Eve, who would enter a room and set it ablaze with her intense, focused energy. Everyone was captivated by Eve’s honest expression. She was connected to a higher frequency. I had never met anyone like her before. Her expressive fashion sense and free spirit were a salve for me. Eve’s infectious spirit brought light and joyful vitality into my life. There were others in that program whose loving energy also acted as medicine. Jana, who shared the healing of music and curiosity of thought with me, and the kind and gentle dancer Beth, who rekindled feelings of freedom through dance that I had repressed from childhood.
I toured around Ontario with Theatre Complete. We performed a play that included a monologue that I wrote about my experiences being bullied as an openly gay teenager. I had the opportunity to stand proud and tall in front of thousands of students in schools across the province to tell my story of resilience. I started to feel strength returning to my body and to my spirit while I was in Theatre Complete. I was still lost inside the pain and confusion, but there was an emerging horizon of hope beyond the illusory protective shields that I had built up around myself for years.
I found my way back to myself by returning to the beginning. I became an alchemist by harnessing all the trauma of dehumanization and hate into a power that I could control. After my studies at Theatre Complete finished, I decided to face my fear and go back to Napanee to complete my last year of high school. I was terrified to go back. Strength had returned to my spirit after Theatre Complete, and the abuse I had faced during the three years I bounced between high schools to avoid death threats and to appease institutions had given me some very thick armour. But was I truly ready to face the same bullies who had treated me so inhumanely? How would I confront these demons? At age seventeen, I was expressing my gender in an explicitly feminine way, wearing makeup and adorning my body with unique pieces of what most would consider feminine jewellery. I wasn’t going to change myself. The classmates and friends who had been a part of my life during elementary school and in grade nine were now in their senior year. Would they welcome me, or continue to abandon the friendships we had developed during our years in elementary school?
During these years, 2001 and 2002, I kept a record of my thoughts in a journal given to me by my mom. I wrote a list at the beginning that highlights a return to myself. The list, entitled “5 Things I Like About Moi!” included “my creativity, my values, my individuality, my fashion sense, and my loving personality.” This journal, in which I wrote nearly every night to process my thoughts, is one of the only artifacts I have from my adolescence that begins to make up for the many memories that are lost to me. Returning to Napanee was an important moment in my life, and I wrote at length about the decision to return to a school that still scared me. I was focused on myself again at the age of eighteen, but in a way that I had never been before.
I want to take you through the roller coaster of emotions that I was experiencing in early 2001. This is when I decided to take action, to transform the suffering from the years prior, and to channel it into this new stage of my life — the journey into adulthood. On January 28, I wrote, “From now on follow the rules Josh. No more fuck-ups. Be strong.” Two days later, “Today I looked at you in the mirror and you were so beautiful. Your eyes were glistening and full of life. It’s inside of you. You just need the KEY.” I cried when I recently read this journal entry. I loved myself at that age, despite all the anger, disgust, and hatred directed at me by others.
On February 2, I started to become aware of the defences that I would require to properly protect myself upon my return to high school in Napanee. “Some shields protect, but are shields that necessary? To be open is to be strong. But I might leave myself in too vulnerable a situation. Do what you think will benefit you in the most positive, balanced and forgiving way. Think positively of the journey ahead. You are a strong spirit.”
On February 5, I wrote, “You made it through your first day. Wasn’t so tough, now was it? On with life, on with the march. On with the parade. I am so proud of you, Josh. You have been through so much over the past few years. You have made so many positive, responsible, and mature changes that were very important for your growth cycle. Be strong, Josh. I am the Master of my own life!” On February 8, I noted that “it’s been 3 days and not one single negative remark yet. The school has matured and I think it is a visualized reflection on how society is evolving.”
My optimistic feelings aside, there were many people who didn’t want me back at that school, and I’m sure they were surprised to see me. I arrived back in Napanee unexpectedly, and the administration seemed to be on high alert. My final year of high school demanded a collaborative effort. It was still an unsafe place for me, a dangerous place where I was being taunted and bullied. But I gathered my friends. They were, indeed, powerful people, mostly women, popular in the school, who protected me and cared for me. Their friendship enabled me to complete my final year and helped me to handle the daily bullying. My Amazons were Chantel, Amanda, Becky, and Jenna.
My idea of an Amazon is related to the experiences of many women and non-binary people around me, and is based on a concept specifically learned from Greek myth and popularized by the phenomenon of Wonder Woman. An Amazon, for me, can be a woman (both cis and trans) or non-binary person who does what it takes to survive, who knows what it means to come together with others who might be “others,” and who is powerful in their expression. The defining factor is an ability to take a stand and to fight for what is just against misogynistic and oppressive measures. Chantel, Amanda, Becky, and Jenna were strong, fierce, and beautiful young women who carved out their own spaces of respect where only the strongest survived unscathed. I made it through those final months by carefully avoiding the bullying when I could, and dealing with it head on when I was presented with no other options. And I survived with the support of these Amazons.
On February 14, I wrote, “Allies. Powerful allies and powerful contacts.” I also noted that I was “back to being the true me. No more being false. Just being true.” About a week later, my experience at school made me feel thankful. I listed thanks for life, love, understanding, compassion, strength, friends, enemies, family, for all growing, evolving, and metamorphosing.
I was in a very powerful place in the winter of 2000 at the age of eighteen, facing down the hatred that had forced me to change high schools four times, make new friends, and acquaint myself with new teachers, spaces, and classrooms. On March 1, I wrote of closure on old experiences, starting over, and acceptance of the new parts of my life: “March is definitely a positive-direction month. A time for new beginnings — new beginnings in friendship, work, love partners, change, evolution, appearance, and family. All aspects of my life. Everything evolving. Goodbye to being unhappy. Hello to you. Hello Joshua. Beautiful Josh. I love you.” A sketch of a heart ends the passage.
I completed my high school education with many wounds — from my elementary school friends who turned away from me when I came out at fourteen, from the administration and the teachers who shamefully stood in silence and escaped responsibility, and from the bullies who feared so much for their own identities that they tormented me to make their own sick salve. Fear is the root of the poisoned tree that grows within us. Left unchecked, the tree grows and eventually the poison can overtake us. I have empathy for the people who verbally and physically assaulted me during my high school years. I can remember most of them, especially those from Napanee who took out their innermost insecurities and fears on me. I have always been an easy target. To revise a Japanese proverb (“The nail that sticks out gets hammered down”), I am the alchemist, the nail that sticks out and will never be hammered down. I have never remained in the position of victimhood. The journal entries from these years show that I never gave up on myself. Every trial and injury that I experienced during high school added another layer to my chrysalis, winding me up tight within myself to protect and empower the core of my soul until the time came to emerge.
In the thirty-fifth year of my life, in 2017, two decades after these experiences, I decided finally to face the trauma of my childhood. With Florian at my side, I visited my old home in Napanee, my first high school, and the school I attended in Kingston. I knew the pain would still be there. But I wanted to process it through the lens of my truth. I knew that I needed to return to my feelings, not just my memories. And I knew that this would never be possible without returning to the physical space where the trauma occurred.
We decided to visit the scene of my attack on the night before we were set to return to Napanee. Approaching from Kingston, I saw the familiar Tim Hortons coffee shop that had offered me shelter more than a decade before. As we approached the train tracks, beyond which lay the ditch where my car was stuck that night, the red lights started to blink and the crossing gates came down. A commercial train roared past us. I would have to sit powerless, very near to the place that brought back so many memories of pain and fear. I sat with my feelings, watching the train cars blur before my eyes. The red lights brought with them conflicting signs. They made me wonder if I should have come here in the first place. Was I doing the right thing, making the healthy psychological decision, in returning to this traumatic site? I didn’t have a choice. I came to the realization that sitting with the trauma like this was part of the process, a preparation. For a short while I was being given distance, while being the closest I had come in a long time to facing my fears. It seemed to take an hour for the train to pass, but finally we were let through. We drove slowly past the ditch, but I didn’t feel the need to stop or get out. Driving by was enough to excavate the sharp feelings of trauma within me.
The next morning, we travelled to Kingston. To my surprise, when we arrived at the location of the Kingston high school where I was enrolled in Theatre Complete, there was nothing left. They had completely demolished the school. A crew of construction workers and landscapers were redeveloping the land.
I got out of the car and walked across the street to get as close as possible to where the building had once stood. This high school had provided me with a relatively safe space, among other “different” people, to work through the trauma of being bullied. My time there in Theatre Complete had empowered me to return to Napanee, to face my fears, and complete my high school education. Now standing there, looking at a flattened property, the place I knew in my memories was no longer real. The empty space was a sign to surrender to an important realization: the pain I had experienced when I was seventeen and eighteen would always be a part of me but was no longer real in my present. This was an awakening of sorts that reinvigorated my spirit and prepared me for the next part of our journey, to Napanee.
• • •
Our first stop there was the old high school. The parking lot reminded me of having to walk to the school bus every day to travel home. I hated those buses. I dreaded the walk from the school, where I was being bullied, to this yellow-orange, old, and smelly bus where I was then forced to endure more abuse — being tripped while walking down the aisle, people’s bodily fluids and their chewed gum thrown in my hair.
I took a deep breath and glanced over at Florian, who had his camera ready to document my return. I felt scared and a bit sick. I walked along the pathway in front of the school with Florian following close behind. I came up to an empty and familiar bench. When I had attended this school in grade nine, and then again four years later, this specific bench was always occupied; the space around it was alive. But the spaces that I inhabited alone in grade nine, and then with friends and champions when I returned later, were no longer alive during my visit. There was an emptiness there, like the one I had faced in Kingston. No one was occupying this space any more.
I approached the door and, though classes were in session, it was locked. The school had clearly stepped up the protection and security of its students since I had attended. Just as I started to wonder if it would be right for me to go inside, a student suddenly opened the door for me. I viewed the kind gesture as a spiritual welcome back into the space, a sign to venture deeper into my memories and my feelings. I hadn’t been planning on going inside, but this was an opportunity to delve deeper. I looked down the hallway and felt relieved to find people sitting there. They appeared to be finding comfort with each other. The feeling was familiar. At least the space inside hadn’t changed much. It was still alive. That made me feel good. But why was I still feeling a sense of fear like I had in grade nine and in my final year of high school?
I pressed on and visited the library, close to where I had spent time with the other “outcasts” at the school in my last year. I now had a Ph.D., and I felt a sense of pride stepping into a high school library that held my memories of academic struggle, when I was unable to focus on anything but surviving the bullying and harassment. I took notice of the graduating-class photos decorating the walls. Excited at the prospect of seeing my own face from back then, and the faces of my classmates, I found the graduating class of 2002. Then a voice from behind me shook me out of my reflection.
“Excuse me, what are you doing here?”
I turned around and came face to face with one of the librarians. I felt the sting of nerves and fear. Was I in trouble for visiting my old high school? What were they going to do?
I calmly explained the reason for my visit. “I’m a graduate. I’m just visiting Napanee and decided to see the school again.” I didn’t blame the librarian. The school probably had a strict policy for visitors, but I didn’t want to announce my presence.
“Oh. You were taking pictures,” the librarian countered.
“Just for personal reasons,” I explained.
Though cautious and uncertain, the librarian left me alone. I’m sure they still kept a close eye on me while I took a few minutes to soak up the memories. The library reminded me of how small all of this had become in my present, and how big I had become since then. Did I still belong in the small town where I’d grown up?
Our next stop was Springside Park in the middle of the town — a metaphorical stop on our way to my old home. The park has a beautiful little waterfall that my brothers and I frequented with my dad. It’s a popular spot for locals and tourists venturing through the area. The sun was at a perfect height to bounce light off the water, warming my heart as I looked up to the sky. I took a deep breath and sat down to write this poem, a reflection on where I came from, and who I had become:
I am the stuff of roaring rapids
White wisps of running water here then gone
Roaring with presence
Taking shape, creating
Keeping safe, searching
I am running, moving, fluid
Made from an element that is neither
Something else, possible, open, free
Limitless power, the stillest peace
Within me, in everything
A short drive from the park took us to my old family home. Standing before it, my feelings were undeniable. This was my home, and yet not my home. I felt a growing sense of paranoia mixed with exhilaration as I looked out at the backyard, the field beyond, and the rock on the hill that I used to sit on top of in my own little retreat. The trees we had planted in our yard were massive, almost unrecognizable. To think that I had once played with my Marvel action figures on its branches, and now they were too high to even reach. I had dreamed about this house countless times since we’d left it in 2001, but now my dreams felt less like reality than I had expected. I knelt down to touch the earth — the earth that had once surrounded the walls of my basement bedroom. I took a little rock from the roadside; I wanted a piece of this place to take with me. I put the tiny rock into a bracelet locket. Why did I feel the need to keep something material from that space? I trapped its energy within a cage; the rock was mine to hold in that moment, taken, and then carried away.
A few weeks later, the rock mysteriously fell out of its little metal cage on my bracelet. To me, that signified that the pain I had experienced in Napanee was no longer a reality. The school in Kingston was no longer there. The bench in Napanee was no longer alive. The elementary school just ten minutes from my home was condemned. It was time to heal by shaping my trauma from within. I don’t believe we ever let go of trauma; rather, we work to transform it. We harness it to do better as human beings. We become alchemists.
This is what my short trip to these places was telling me, often in clear and unmistaken ways. Letting go, at least for me, is impossible. But letting go is less about the pain and suffering vanishing, and more about all of these feelings changing their shape to suit who I am now. It woke me up. I was there, all along, deep within a shelter built from the ruins of my pain and the hatred that was directed at me.
It might sound strange, but I am thankful for the night I was attacked. I would never wish that terror upon anyone else, nor would I want to experience something similar ever again, but my spirit emerged victorious. I saved myself from a human being with the face of a violent monster. I didn’t have the help of others. I was alone, and I escaped.
I think we all have this power if we need it. It’s hidden deep, but I had been doing the work of nurturing it for years, unaware of what was to come. My heart still holds the pain, yet it’s not a weakness. It took another decade after my attack to come to terms with myself, to reclaim who I am, but I am here now in these words, and with you in these pages, transformed by my trauma into a loving and empathic human being.