Well fuck.
This is part two in the: “I’m moving and processing said move through my writing.”
By which I mean I’m really grappling with some pretty big issues of legacy and the saga of a family. Which isn’t exactly what I expected.
See, I always thought when I moved, I’d write this big goodbye letter in the local newspaper, because I have a reputation as one of the colonial settler families that have been around this small town for over a hundred years and 5-6 generations. It comes with a set of parameters that I’ve grappled with for decades.
It’s everything from small recognitions of who you are, and the prejudice that comes with that. Oh, you knew my dead grandfather or my father? Great! That means I have a paintbrush wash over my identity before I even know who the fuck you are! Because of course, people often ask if you’re related to “so and so” before they even tell you who they are. My enormous family of dozens has dwindled and even the individual nuclear families are mostly fractured and scattered. Our local clan is dead and gone in the eyes of the local populace. I’m merely a relic remaining past his prime, really.
Inversely, when people recognize you around small towns, they often knew you as a child, and Satan forbid I actually remember somebody I met once when I was a wee lad of 4-5 years old!
I’m an entirely different beast these days. I’m openly demisexual, finally understanding what it means to be on the grey-ace spectrum, and I’m realizing it’s why I gravitated to the queer community for so long (despite feeling ostracized from it for a good majority of time as the greater ace community can speak to.) I’m exploring gender identity – leaning towards the nonbinary and actively realizing that gender expression looks different to everybody, even those that present mostly masculine. I’m setting boundaries and new expectations for myself – to do what’s best for me first and foremost in my goals of fixing this busted up world and species.
And… I’m of course falling back into my intellectual and nerdy hobbies like writing as a means of self-expression!
It’s all a far cry from the tiny little logging family redneck kid I’ve been stereotyped as my whole life. People like me are born to die, in a sense. Society wants us as tools – used up for our labor and skills until we burn out, often dying via suicide and suffering from substance abuse and untreated mental health symptoms.
But with this move comes an ending. And I’m still trying to feel that ending out.
This place is not the place I used to know. Hell, it used to be that small-town politics ruled the day. Now instead of an old boys club of rich white men dictating what happened to the town, it’s bourgeoisie white gentrifiers that have turned the old logging town full of Rednecks, First Nations folk, and Punjabi Sikhs into their own personal adventure nest, raising their own children in the lap of luxury.
If I see another Arcteryx jacket on some douchey “huck life” thirty to forty something white boy, I might just vomit.
But that conversation is dead. Those people “won,” and the hicks, natives, rednecks and sikhs lost. I cannot help but cackle at such a petty culture war, as if anybody could truly “win” such a thing.
Ten years ago, it was all about old versus new. People wanted a culture that had already been killed off by the actions of local government and economies of scale.
The irony of trades folk like me pining for “the good old days” in a stolen first nations community isn’t lost on me.
Yet…
I can understand the very feeling of being pushed out of a place you feel was your home. To have that home change slowly until it becomes unrecognizable. The local first nation knows that feeling all too well. Why else do you think they’re asking for their land back?
I could talk to the land in lieu, I guess. It’s the only thing that has struggled to resist all the forced change upon its face.
So to the town, to the features…
Old man mountain. You know who you are. Looming over me in childhood, so close, yet so massive as to be far outside my jurisdiction.
I remember the day you broke your nose in a roar of thunder when I was a little boy. I hope you healed. I remember back in 2014 when again a quarter of your face crumbled away, leaving the iron-red stains of tears. It’s remained for almost a decade, and I’m still not sure if you’re mourning for your people, or for the land itself. Maybe the two are one and the same, depending on who you choose to protect or guide.
To the river, please keep the salmon alive. They represent a way of life that cannot be allowed to be extinguished. Floods, peroxide spills, oil spills all put you at risk several times already. Fucking tragedies. I’m sorry for the damage humanity has caused.
To the last few remaining community members from the town I once knew, both the local nation and the colonial settler population – thank you for doing your best to foster community, to spread knowledge, and in your own variety of backwards-ass ghetto redneck ways, thank you for creating a sense of community and for volunteering your time to help educate, inform, and preserve old knowledge and old ways. I value it more than you know – both the acceptance for weird eccentrics like me and my family, and the wisdom you shared.
I promise not to forget.
In retrospect, I hope I gave back enough to the community that raised me. I tried to help educate and uplift as best I could. To foster kindness, acceptance, and progress for all. I’ve only been back for about a decade, but I know I won’t likely be back again outside of the rare visit, or to crash on my friend’s couch during snowboarding season. The lure of being anonymous in a big metropolitan center is just too appealing. It allows me the freedom to work and be known, but to also be understood by a wider demographic of the public without the judgement of small minds and petty small-town politics and vendettas. Because for every one positive person who believed in me, there were three trying to tear me down for various shitty reasons.
I won’t dwell on the negatives – this article would be ten pages long if I were to cover every slight against me, deserved or otherwise.
Whew!
See?
Saying goodbye is always hard.
Especially when you’re a creature like I am.
I’ve said goodbye a hundred times, flowing as the shapeshifter between various social groups. I got used to becoming a mirror for whatever social group I was in, hiding my true identity and personality because I was often too weird to be accepted as my true self.
Textbook masking, if you ask the Autism and ADHD community.
Every time, every goodbye, there’s this sense of loss, even though the connections built over time were often never truly that deep. I guess it’s because even the most superficial of relationships and connections are still connections, and I have very few in my life who actually know what kind of person I am beneath the surface. I tend not to let people in to see that sort of stuff because nobody ever bothers to ask. Nobody wants to know, I guess.
But in that loss there’s also freedom. Part of me enjoys the fluid nature of my way through the world. It’s lonely, sure and hell – I once even had a friend tell me that I’m going to be lonely and miserable forever if I keep holding myself to this sort of standard. But I also dislike being held down or restrained in my actions, which social circles and social norms tend to do via the reinforcing of behaviours – as if they don’t know that they’re often trying to Pavlovian train somebody’s actual personality into a more palatable one. Constricting somebody’s core self and identity, which I find distasteful if they’re not hurting anybody by being themselves.
I don’t mind being that eccentric loner, honestly. As much as I wish I did have a community that understood me. Maybe that’s why it’s kind of easy to say goodbye again and again, and to leave people. To hunt for new communities in the hopes that they will accept you more openly and truly than the previous ones.
Just like this move.
Uprooting my whole life is scary of course. I’m a creature of habit, and I tend to like nesting – building a home and a comfortable space I can invite friends and groups into for fun events like art nights and board games and cult movie marathons.
But fighting towards a sort of freedom – freedom from legacy, freedom from my past, freedom from the institutionalized, heavily controlling, and often toxic workplace of public education.
That’s definitely worth some temporary discomfort.
I find that certain goodbyes are easier than others, of course.
Coworkers, neighbours? In our disconnected world, it’s easy to say goodbye. Oftentimes we don’t find truly deep connections through work or simple proximity. We have to hunt through thousands of people to find our own “right crowd.”
Romantic goodbyes are harder. Knowing that you’re losing a deeper connection that you thought was real? It’s so damn tough. Especially if it was real.
I’ve only really had long-term relationships. I’ve never dated casually. It’s the Demisexual effect. That means mostly longer-term relationships where I’ve emotionally bonded with someone. And most of those relationships, even the shortest ones, are still a year or more in length.
Disentangling yourself from “your person” is one of the hardest goodbyes you can have. And be it the nuclear truth-telling that causes emotionally abusive exes to explode, or the soft “it’s not going to work out long-term” goodbyes, it always hurts. You’re giving something up, or changing something from what it was.
And of course, depending on the person you’re dating – they can take it differently depending on what the reason is for the goodbye. I’ve had everything from full on rage to quiet tears.
I’m not sure how many more goodbyes I’m going to have in me.
But I feel kind of confused about this one, if that makes sense.
Endings are always hard, but saying goodbye to a place is different.
I can’t count how many times I plotted out this goodbye in my head, with big grandiose gestures that made a splash in my mind’s eye because it was my final opportunity to do so. But now I kind of just want to fade away into legend and myth. Like the rest of my family. To become a name whispered or brought up with hopefully fond memories associated.
Last night before writing this, I burned more of my belongings. Including a good amount of ancient journals, artwork, and schoolwork from my childhood. It felt freeing, like I was burning an effigy of myself and taking power back over who I wish to be. Some people burn things to cleanse themselves. Maybe it was one of those sorts of acts.
Watching pictures, paintings, and old thoughts from a young child burn, maybe I did free myself from my past a little more. I can only hope the trend continues, that the dead, old me can finally find some semblance of peace. To be buried like my first name I have given up to death.
Other people call goodbyes a transformation. They often believe that nothing is ever truly gone, it just changes to become something new.
But I want certain things to die.
And I want them to stay dead.
So maybe that’s what this all represents.
I’m killing the old me, so the phoenix can finally rise.
Not that World Serpents are born from ashes, mind you.
Now?
Let’s get the fuck out of here.
-McRae
