I've been meaning to write this one for a very long time- close to 6 months at this point. I suppose up until this point I haven't felt like I've been in a time in my life I could say anything about. It was a time to trudge through, get back on my feet and then reconvene when I understood it. Now, I think I finally have a grip of what all of this was and I can finally say something about it.
So I guess the best way to begin is with Scotland.
There is so much I could say about Scotland were this a travel blog, but I'm just not there yet because I haven't found my way through Southeast Asia yet and I've never been to Burning Man. So I want to keep this part brief. Scotland was so much more than I expected and maybe this was because I more or less randomly chose it from West Jet's discount flights about 6 weeks from departure with almost zero prior knowledge of the country, but heck. It was a surprise for sure. Scotland was so much more savage than I anticipated and in the most charming and hilarious of ways.
I ended up seeing a lot more of it than I anticipated- spending the bulk of 10 days in Glasgow as it was my favorite, a couple of days and nights in Edinburgh, and did some Highland tours that stopped in Inverness, Glencoe, like 5 hundred castles, and several lochs (lakes). I got to get a really good sense of the country on foot while also seeing so much more of the barren wasteland parts of it than I expected (or understood to be there).
The scotch was better than I thought, the cities so much...more and less European-seeming than I expected, and the people a lot more viscerally savage and sexy. All of the smaller towns I visited were pretty much as expected- haggus and charming and lots of kilts and bagpipes. The cities, however, while considered "sister cities", were in fact starkly different from each other. Edinburgh certainly had more interesting things to see and do and had a lot more history to learn about, but it also looked a lot more polished and pretty. It has been the city for the rich and scholarly in Scotland for a very long time while Glasgow was something else entirely. Glasgow was still absolutely gorgeous in terms of amazing architecture and greenery but it also had a very distinct style- everything looked a lot older than Edinburgh and older like an elderly great-aunt that you don't humor anymore and absolutely smokes crack but is objectively the coolest bitch around. Glasgow was so fucking trendy while at the same time looking the opposite of every other trendy place I've ever been. Edinburgh and Glasgow apparently have a very famous and long-withstanding rivalry and this is basically how the two sides are presented:
Edinburgh: We have history and royalty and Universities and The Big Castle. You are full of peasants and have rubble rubbish castles around instead.
Glasgow: FUK DA POLIC *is punk and also 9 billion years old*
There is so much more to say but I'll leave it at that, throw in some pictures, and move forward before I open up a discussion on the insanity of all 6 thousand clan rivalries, sports rivalries, city and town and region and castle rivalries, Christianity rivalries, and a weird common love for Irnbru which is the wierdest fucking soft drink that has ever graced my lips.
At first, I thought I'd begin this post on how my trip to Montreal was different than Scotland and how the intense and crippling anxiety I faced prior to my departure compared to the much more manageable anxieties I felt en route to Montreal. I figured that if nothing else, it probably had something to do with how I was "dealing with Jordan". When I went to Montreal I was dealing with his moving to Okotoks for the summer and everything that went along with that and when I went to Scotland I was dealing with our long withstanding unavoidable and obvious drift and my newfound resignation of it.
I tried making sense of the anxiety this way, but my mistake was comparing the locations and their distance from home/ Scotland having no friends living there when I should have been comparing where I was in my life in April of 2016 compared to where I was for Scotland. I went to Montreal to see friends and experience solo travel for the first time and to start the summer off on a good foot even without Jordan there. I went to Scotland with a desperate hope of getting better.
Again, this isn't to say that Scotland wasn't spectacular as it was so much more than a journey through some aspects of my mental health, but the anxiety going in to it was different than Montreal for this reason, not any other.
I can't not talk about Quest, but I'm so tired of digging through it myself and with others that I don't really know where to go with this one. I can't not include it in this masturbatory piece of self discovery and release, but there is a problem where I look at it now as something more or less buried respectfully with only a couple of sad bits reaching out, and yet I know I can't leave it there. I need to fucking put it down in writing that what happened when I was dehumanized and ripped from a community where I was vulnerable that was everything I'd poured myself in to for years was trauma and what I went through in dealing with it was not just picking myself up and finding self confidence again- it was grief. It was grief and I lost some self esteem and some people that I'm never getting back and I will one day stop mourning the loss of (for some, that day has already come and pass) but the world I existed in was absolutely punched in the face and it never grew back the right way. I really don't think it ever will. It was more than an ego blow and a little heartbreak no matter how I tried to frame it for myself. While I was ripped from Outreach several of my superiors and former clients and their support systems fought for me...and while it maybe should have been a sign to me that I was valued, it absolutely made it worse and set back any moving forward with it several months. I felt and knew respect, affection, and real relationships in Outreach and with my clients, 3 of 5 of which I still talk to, and 2 of which I have seen since. Even those who were not individuals I supported daily but rather saw while I worked at the Outreach center are still people I cannot shake the habit of thinking of often. I'll never forgive the corporate level of Quest for what transpired with so little empathy and not just for me but for the individuals who depended on consistency even more than I. It was a big dramatic thing which left the whole Faculty of Education debacle of 2014 in shadows.
And yet, I spent a lot of time thinking on it while I was in Scotland, especially walking around late at night drunk and at times a little lost. It's hard to be bitter, now, considering how much I learned about myself and my practice through my work there. It's hard to be bitter when that place in my heart for the clients I supported and my phenomenal superiors still beats in me. Finally after spending the summer with the Y and going to interviews which reminded me of who I am and what I'm doing here with this life, I can see that Quest was no end to anything. There is more for me and more Megan-shaped holes in this world I hadn't seen yet. I am valued, I have value, and there is no reason for me to leave Quest with any gross resentment. What happened was traumatic and I felt grief. I spent most of this year weighed down with a lot of self doubt and frankly, with alcoholism. But damn if I haven't finally swam to shore this summer. After wading water and gasping for so long that it stopped being desperate and drowning and started being just a body in water, I finally started swimming again and Jesus Christ the shore is finally there.
All of this also happened to coincide with Kyle's health crisis and decline in overall quality of life. It was rough. It was really fucking rough. It was hard to not exude sadness and pity for him, but it wasn't hard to support him when opportunity presented itself-big and small. If I couldn't be there for all of my clients any more and if I really needed something to challenge my new take on liquor consumption, supporting Kyle through this endless dredge of uncertainty and dehumanizing awfulness was opportune. I felt like neither of us had any kind of footing and both felt less real life human being than what we were beforehand. Somehow this allowed me to feel less alone and allowed me to be a better partner when I could, and a miserable lump of overtired crying when I couldn't.
When I was first going to write this about 2 months ago, I wasn't going to talk about any of the weight I carried with Jordan because I didn't have the energy for it. But now, after a conversation with him that I always hoped would be as kind, respectful, and perfect as it was, I'm not going to write about it because I just don't feel that weight any more. It's gone and it seemed to go away all at once like finally breathing again, yet at the same time so gentle...like a kind and gentle breeze. There has been a lot of mercy over this past year for me- as much mercy as there has been devastation. But I am most grateful for the peace and mercy we found here. After that conversation it was like every Christian image of being saved was happening to me. It was like an ohm fucking brought me back to life. I knew that there was weight there that would inevitably be dropped when it came to an end but I worried constantly that it would result in a gross and stressful death. Instead, it honestly felt more like a rebirth. I felt so much love for him in those moments- so much overwhelming gratitude and divine understanding, that everything that had been there rotting in me for years just wasn't there any more. I don't know if it turned to ash or came back to life or turned in to fertile soil or anything. I don't like any of these images. None of them seem right for the situation. Maybe I'll think of one another day. All I know is it was love like nothing I'd ever felt before and it was right like only so much has felt right in all of my adult years.
In conclusion, the title of this piece is also the title of Scottish poet Robert Burns's best known poem. It isn't my favorite by any stretch, but it is relevant to this post in so many more ways than it just being Scottish. I'll let it speak for itself here via youtube video.
I like to think there will always be more opportunities in my life to practice compassion- that this is the one thing that cannot be pulled from beneath my feet. Even if a lot of this year has been a blur of unsteady ground, doubt, and confusion, it is this sentiment that has come through for me. I may have had to travel abroad, retreat to something familiar this summer, and allow for some self doubt and pity, but whatever this was I ended up here and damn, it seems like forever since I've felt like myself again.
I'll raise a cup of kindness here for auld lang syne!
So I guess the best way to begin is with Scotland.
There is so much I could say about Scotland were this a travel blog, but I'm just not there yet because I haven't found my way through Southeast Asia yet and I've never been to Burning Man. So I want to keep this part brief. Scotland was so much more than I expected and maybe this was because I more or less randomly chose it from West Jet's discount flights about 6 weeks from departure with almost zero prior knowledge of the country, but heck. It was a surprise for sure. Scotland was so much more savage than I anticipated and in the most charming and hilarious of ways.
The scotch was better than I thought, the cities so much...more and less European-seeming than I expected, and the people a lot more viscerally savage and sexy. All of the smaller towns I visited were pretty much as expected- haggus and charming and lots of kilts and bagpipes. The cities, however, while considered "sister cities", were in fact starkly different from each other. Edinburgh certainly had more interesting things to see and do and had a lot more history to learn about, but it also looked a lot more polished and pretty. It has been the city for the rich and scholarly in Scotland for a very long time while Glasgow was something else entirely. Glasgow was still absolutely gorgeous in terms of amazing architecture and greenery but it also had a very distinct style- everything looked a lot older than Edinburgh and older like an elderly great-aunt that you don't humor anymore and absolutely smokes crack but is objectively the coolest bitch around. Glasgow was so fucking trendy while at the same time looking the opposite of every other trendy place I've ever been. Edinburgh and Glasgow apparently have a very famous and long-withstanding rivalry and this is basically how the two sides are presented:
Edinburgh: We have history and royalty and Universities and The Big Castle. You are full of peasants and have rubble rubbish castles around instead.
Glasgow: FUK DA POLIC *is punk and also 9 billion years old*
There is so much more to say but I'll leave it at that, throw in some pictures, and move forward before I open up a discussion on the insanity of all 6 thousand clan rivalries, sports rivalries, city and town and region and castle rivalries, Christianity rivalries, and a weird common love for Irnbru which is the wierdest fucking soft drink that has ever graced my lips.At first, I thought I'd begin this post on how my trip to Montreal was different than Scotland and how the intense and crippling anxiety I faced prior to my departure compared to the much more manageable anxieties I felt en route to Montreal. I figured that if nothing else, it probably had something to do with how I was "dealing with Jordan". When I went to Montreal I was dealing with his moving to Okotoks for the summer and everything that went along with that and when I went to Scotland I was dealing with our long withstanding unavoidable and obvious drift and my newfound resignation of it.
Again, this isn't to say that Scotland wasn't spectacular as it was so much more than a journey through some aspects of my mental health, but the anxiety going in to it was different than Montreal for this reason, not any other.
 |
| I took this picture on the last day that my client and I volunteered at the Japenese Gardens. We didn't know it would be the last time ever but, yknow |
And yet, I spent a lot of time thinking on it while I was in Scotland, especially walking around late at night drunk and at times a little lost. It's hard to be bitter, now, considering how much I learned about myself and my practice through my work there. It's hard to be bitter when that place in my heart for the clients I supported and my phenomenal superiors still beats in me. Finally after spending the summer with the Y and going to interviews which reminded me of who I am and what I'm doing here with this life, I can see that Quest was no end to anything. There is more for me and more Megan-shaped holes in this world I hadn't seen yet. I am valued, I have value, and there is no reason for me to leave Quest with any gross resentment. What happened was traumatic and I felt grief. I spent most of this year weighed down with a lot of self doubt and frankly, with alcoholism. But damn if I haven't finally swam to shore this summer. After wading water and gasping for so long that it stopped being desperate and drowning and started being just a body in water, I finally started swimming again and Jesus Christ the shore is finally there. All of this also happened to coincide with Kyle's health crisis and decline in overall quality of life. It was rough. It was really fucking rough. It was hard to not exude sadness and pity for him, but it wasn't hard to support him when opportunity presented itself-big and small. If I couldn't be there for all of my clients any more and if I really needed something to challenge my new take on liquor consumption, supporting Kyle through this endless dredge of uncertainty and dehumanizing awfulness was opportune. I felt like neither of us had any kind of footing and both felt less real life human being than what we were beforehand. Somehow this allowed me to feel less alone and allowed me to be a better partner when I could, and a miserable lump of overtired crying when I couldn't.
 |
| An important image featuring Jordan with some fabulous sunglasses sharing poutine with me on an afternoon this spring |
In conclusion, the title of this piece is also the title of Scottish poet Robert Burns's best known poem. It isn't my favorite by any stretch, but it is relevant to this post in so many more ways than it just being Scottish. I'll let it speak for itself here via youtube video.
I like to think there will always be more opportunities in my life to practice compassion- that this is the one thing that cannot be pulled from beneath my feet. Even if a lot of this year has been a blur of unsteady ground, doubt, and confusion, it is this sentiment that has come through for me. I may have had to travel abroad, retreat to something familiar this summer, and allow for some self doubt and pity, but whatever this was I ended up here and damn, it seems like forever since I've felt like myself again.
I'll raise a cup of kindness here for auld lang syne!
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