Since the Aurora shooting I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the culture we North Americans are immersed in. What I put forth is my own opinion, and my own story and I don’t intend to offend (and I sincerely hope I don’t) but neither will I apologise. All I ask is that if you listen—agree or disagree—and take part in a conversation with myself, with someone else, with anyone else then maybe some of that culture can be changed for the better. None of us have all the answers, but sadly no one seems interested in listening—instead only waiting for their turn to talk. I’m as guilty of that as anyone.
(Apologies for the length, and any faux pas herein--it's been a long time since I diaried at DK)
My story: I’m a Canadian, living in Canada. I’m the father of an amazing 9-year-old who seems in many ways wiser than her years—and sometimes wiser than her old man. I share custody with her mother (my ex-wife). I’m ex-military (with the Canadian Forces) and have lived with bi-polar disorder my entire life.
Being half-east Indian, and of darker skin than my peers, I face a lot of racial prejudice growing up in rural Canada. If you add to that the manic-depressive episodes that began when I was 8, I guess you could say I didn’t fit in well. That’s not to say I didn’t try—and in many ways I found fighting won me some respect. Looking back, that rush of adrenalin I got when I threw(or more often took) a punch was just as addicting as your first hit of crack—my brain chemistry loved those endorphins.
After high-school I joined the reserves while I was going to university. I’d been in Air Cadets (not sure what the American equivalent would be, but it’s like Boy Scouts only more military in ranks and drill; and financed by the Department of National Defense) and I loved the structure of the military. I also like the rough and tumble nature of being in the ranks—and there was no little adrenalin rushing when doing training and exercises. I learned how to push myself to achieve things that were important to me, and I gained a new confidence in myself. For once I was part of something—and something bigger than I was, something that meant something.
I also learned to drink with the best of them. Oh, and when I had a few under my belt, I was more than happy to trade a few punches.
After injuring my knee, I got a discharge and since things in my life seem to be sliding downhill, I bailed on my degree, and began looking for other options. Eventually I went west to Alberta—big sky country filled with oil and promises of riches for this Maritime boy.
Once out west I took another stab at school—this time two years of college, but rather than stay I jumped at the chance to take my code writing skills into industry (for what was a pittance then, but was great money compared to what I was used to making). Things had changed! I was living the sweet life now.
Only things hadn’t changed much. I spent most of my weekends hanging out at bars with friends, drinking more than I should have and taking the opportunities to scrap as they came—and for a fellow who always felt he needed to defend his loud-mouthed compatriots, that worked out just fine.
Looking back, I don’t think I had a drinking problem—no, I think I had a violence problem.
I was the fellow who would go to the action flick and savor that rush you got when the hero put a bullet through the villain’s forehead. I would get a few drinks into me, and ask my buddies to punch me in the head as heard as they could—and laugh when I was still conscious enough for another triple rye-and-coke.
I was the guy who walked through the bad part of town at night, alert for danger, and partly hoping it found me. I could take it—I was twenty-something and indestructible. I was ex-military. I was ready to be a hero. Then, suddenly my life was altered in a split second. In the fall of 2000 I was in a serious car accident—within inches of being killed, but I was lucky and limped away with a damaged Achilles tendon, two blown disks and a moderate brain injury.
It took several months to recover—although I’ve ended up with long term back damage and have lost most of my childhood memories—and during this time my then-girlfriend stuck with me while I healed and weathered the worst bout of depression I ever experienced.
And I learned to hate. Well, I’m pretty sure I had already learned that, but while recovering, realizing I was never going to be the same person with the same capabilities, I savored that hate and anger. It has always been there I guess—this little ball of rage that began with the bullying I endured and had kept me warm though so many cold and lonely nights.
Years ago, before I ever heard of the tale of two wolves, I said to a friend that (due to being bipolar) I felt like I had this ongoing struggle inside between the civilized man and the savage wolf (I’ve had recurring dreams my whole life of a white wolf with blue eyes). Oh the man was polite and kind and all those outward civilizing things (all sincere) but the wolf reveled in bloody violence—watching or fighting—and he fed on my rage and anger and hate. He grew strong.
Ironically, fearing the wolf and what he might do, when it came to my relationships with women I locked him away. His anger grew.
I married my girlfriend. It was tumultuous, but I felt that a husband needed to be calm and rational—without the wolf, the man became weak. Slowly I became a doormat my wife couldn’t respect. I continued drinking and partying, but I fought less as the wolf began feeding on me—my violence turned inward as he grew angrier—I would purposely injure myself to savor the pain and adrenalin, and it only fed the rage. Slowly I felt the need to re-masculate myself—although gun ownership in Canada has its hurdles I began considering joining a shooting club. I spoke with friends about how I wanted to curb-stomp G8 protesters.
My daughter was born in 2003. It was a tough delivers, and her lungs were wet. For twenty minutes it was dicey if she would breath properly—or if she would even live. I stood beside her in the neo-natal ICU while she held my finger and struggled to for breath. I whispered to her not a promise to never let anything bad happen to here—I’d already failed in that—but to always be beside her with whatever struggles she faced. Slowly she gained strength—and has since grown into a highly intelligent girl with dreams of being a vet.
When she was 10 months old, my wife left me for someone else. I was 30, suddenly single and struggling to raise my daughter alone. In leaving my ex-wife tried to break me, tried to crush what little will and confidence I had left—hoping to leave me so broken she wouldn’t need to fight me for our daughter—she would simply take her.
That night, as I lay emotionally broken and bleeding on my kitchen floor, I could no longer chain the wolf. Sidelined and abused, he yet survived—his anger and rage and hatred fueling my determination to win my fair share of custody; to rebuild my life.
But there was a cost. Desperate to keep control of him I stopped drinking, but I was back to smoking two packs a day, and when I didn’t have my daughter I was out with friends, reveling in violent movies, or picking a fight wherever it could be found. I abused myself in every other way save in drink. The wolf was free, and he was taking no shit.
The divorce took a year and a half. I had my 50%, but I had racked up a staggering amount of debt. I went back to drinking, and when my daughter was with her mother, I spent each night with a different woman.
One day I woke up and had a coughing fit that lasted five minutes and drew blood. I could feel my heartbeat in my nose. I blew up at one of my subordinates at the office that morning and threw my phone across my office. My boss sent me home, and the man I saw in the mirror wasn’t the man I remembered being. I was overweight and pale save for the bags under my eyes.
As a stress relief I began to meditate. I had always been interested in Buddhism, especially Zen, and over time I found living in a mindful way, with meditation instead of prayer, drew me back to my Catholic faith as well. I’d given upon God some time back—but he’d not given up on me.
Over time I learned to live with the wolf. I learned that alone he was no stronger than the man, but instead needed to be tempered to avoid injuring himself. I grew as a civilized person—I began to give back to the community in a way I’d not considered before.
You see, I’d been in the army, and had in fact lost friends in service. I wasn’t one to crow about my won service, but I always felt that society owed me—maybe not as much as it owed my fallen comrades, but hell weren’t we all heroes? That what society told us on the 6:00 news damnit.
I found that my Zen practice, in taming the wolf gathered his anger and hate and funneled it into something better. I released it slowly, over time in the pursuit of competitive scale modeling (I now have a model ship on display in the Charlottetown Naval Reserve facility). When I feel the anger now, I step back and reflect on why. I try to understand my addiction and why I still love the flavour of rage and violence.
Although I was medicated for some time, I eventually was able to take control of my bipolar condition through a change in diet and meditation—Zen helped me eat, live and love better.
Yet for all that, my old self is still there. As much as I long for a cigarette when I’m under stress, I long to taste that rage and hate again. Every time a Canadian was killed in Afghanistan, I wanted to be there—to kill and to die for my country. None of us really change, not deep down anyway—we simply learn how to live better, happier lives (hopefully).
The realization that following my wolf to the exclusion of all else left me as hollow and miserable as locking him away. I realized that the only way to be happy, or at least not be miserable, was to understand both sides of me, and love them equally, and live them equally—at the same time.
Now the man who writes this is energized by the wolf. Where once I would of howled for bloody vengeance for the Aurora victims, I’m now tempered by the man’s rational desire for justice and not blood.
I’m a product of our culture. Every hot-button topic being discussed around Aurora has touched my life in some way—as it has for most people I expect. Being bullied gave my wolf his first taste of blood, fed by the glorified violence of film and TV. The military taught the wolf to kill and to die, and my mental illness (undiagnosed, untreated and misunderstood) laid the groundwork for the war between man and wolf.
Our society glorifies soldiers as heroes—leaving me to seek out the heroism of violence, not because that’s what the military teaches or trains you to do, but because the culture expected me to be that way as an ex-soldier. Heroics and heroism, and the twisting of what they mean by our culture is as much a part of the problem as gun rights.
If I’d been an American, and I had owned a gun, I know I would have used it at some point on someone—most likely myself, but in honesty when the wolf was free I had no control as to who his hate would turn on. Thank God I didn’t have the opportunity then.
Like many North Americans I had been made a ticking time bomb, by a love of violence and pain, by a narrative of the heroic soldier/vigilante, by a cultural failing to deal with mental health issues and ultimately by a disconnect from spirituality to help temper the other problems.
No longer am I a rage-filled hair trigger temper on legs. I see the world as need of opportunity for change—a place to be made better for my daughter and her generation. In my new found spirituality, I understand the needs for the warrior to protect those who can’t fight, but I also understand the warrior’s soul cannot be fed on violence alone.
Real heroes aren’t people who face danger as part of their daily lives—we all do in one form or another. They are the men and women who give this bodies and lives for the betterment of others—the Aurora victims who became human shields to save the lives of others; Ghandi and Mandela; the old man who spends every day of his retirement working through arthritic hands to sort food at the food bank. These are the heroes our culture should praise—but not worship.
As a species, we humans have an addiction to violence—let’s be honest, everyone has deep down that occasional desire to smash their fist into their opponent’s mouth, even if only metaphorically. That doesn’t mean we should revel in the violence and hate continually produced by our entertainment—and more troublingly in our news and politics.
We need to better handle and understand mental illness and how to keep it from harming people.
We need to remove guns from the equation. I don’t know how, but I know that any tool designed solely to kill (and kill lots very quickly) needs strict controls to avoid massacres like Aurora.
We each need to take a moment and look at ourselves—look at what we hate, and why. Look at what angers us, and why. Look at our lives and ask, am I miserable? Can I be less miserable by making some simple changes? Maybe some difficult changes? Change is possible, but you have to want to—really want to.
I look at my daughter, and in her blue eyes I see the reflection of the wolf in my dream, and I realize that he’d been there all along, not as a destroyer, or a killer, but as a symbol of what strength really is. It’s an understanding and acceptance of who you are, and of who you can be—not of who you can hurt or kill (physically or emotionally or metaphorically).
Society needs to change—and we all are part of that change. It is struggle we will undertake daily for the rest of our lives.
Find the strength in you to undertake that change. Be, as Ghandi said, the change you want to see in the world.
Sean
Postscript: a hat tip to G2Geek whose response to my comment from a couple of days ago got me thinking about what I had to say.