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It’s the late 2010s and I’m a teenager carefully watching my mom out of my peripheral. She’s paying attention to the TV and the animated man on the screen in a hilarious combination of suit, tie, and yellow beanie. He’s eating ice cream in a diner with a friend: a girl who’s made it very clear she likes him this whole season, only to be met with his awkward body language, stumbled excuses, and quick subject changes.

I’ve seen this one before, but my heart is in my throat when the companion asks Todd Chavez (Aaron Paul) if he’s gay.

Todd responds, “I’m not gay. I mean, I don’t think I am, but I don’t think I’m straight either. I don’t know what I am. I think I might be nothing.”

I click the next episode of BoJack without hesitation.

BoJack Horseman is a Netflix original animated tragicomedy set in a fictionalized version of Hollywood. Our cast includes a mix of humans, anthropomorphized animals, and celebrity cameos. As it aired from 2014 to 2020, BoJack went on to receive consistent critical acclaim and a dedicated audience who loved the balance between the wacky scenarios typical to adult animation and the honest portrayal of serious topics like substance abuse and depression.

When season four graces our screen, I finally hear the word that I’ve held close to my chest for years now spoken aloud: “asexual.” Todd Chavez, our wacky slacker sidekick, initially reacts with an aversion to the label.

But after some uncertainty and self-reflection, Todd embraces his identity in “Hooray! Todd Episode!” During a vulnerable moment, Todd comes out to BoJack: “I’m asexual. Not sexual.”

I share a look with my mother, the woman who’s known me all my life, who still knows me best, and hope that she understands.

*

Todd Chavez was one of only two asexual characters included in GLAAD’s 2017-2018 “Where We Are on TV” report, marking the first year the annual publication included asexuals in its data. While the publication notes that there was some asexual representation on television in previous years, “those characters were often relegated to one-off episodes, which did not allow for nuanced exploration.”

Seeking out asexual representation on TV was an often-disheartening exercise for a young asexual (commonly shortened to “ace”) like me. As a greater number of queer characters stepped into the spotlight, I searched desperately for the aces. When it came down to it, most of our “ace representatives” pre-2017 were only “ace-coded” characters, portraying some common signs of asexuality without ever encountering, exploring, or articulating the term. Asexuals would often recognize these signs or find the experiences of the characters relatable to their own asexual experiences, but we rarely heard our label spoken aloud.

Sometimes, it was enough to be the character left uncoupled by the end of the narrative—like Frozen’s Elsa—to be hailed as an “asexual icon” on internet forums. The ambiguity of the unlabelled asexual meant little repercussion for portraying common ace stereotypes like the logical and emotionless “robot” over and over again. Think The Big Bang Theory’s Sheldon Cooper who says he “find[s] the concept of coitus to be ridiculous and off-putting.” Sheldon is touch-averse and sex-repulsed, but never uses the term “asexual” to describe himself. The lack of articulated labels leaves it up to fans to draw their own conclusions and, in more cases than not, leaves the writers space to retcon any common ace markers to suit their narrative needs. When the word “asexual” was actually uttered, it was met with a “fix it” attitude like House M.D.’s episode “Better Half.” (House spends his 44-minute run-time trying to disprove the claims of a self-identifying asexual couple, unfortunately succeeding when it’s discovered the man has a pituitary tumor that lowered his libido and caused erectile dysfunction, and the woman admits she was faking for her husband.)

Todd Chavez’s ground-breaking journey on BoJack was an important milestone for those of us looking to see our sexuality portrayed with positivity and a complex, comprehensive multi-season storyline on screen. When I showed my mom BoJack, already knowing where Todd’s journey would lead, I was secretly building a foundation for my own coming out moment.

As Todd comes into his own understanding of his identity—an asexual who is interested in romance, but sex-averse—the show demonstrates the variance in ace experiences. A couple from his Asexual Alliance group explain the difference between aromantic asexuals—those not interested in sex or relationships—and aces who enjoy dating. Todd’s childhood friend Emily (Abbi Jacobson) informs us that some asexuals do have and enjoy sex. As Todd’s dating life progresses, we see the struggles that arise from dating while asexual, such as Todd dating Yolanda (Natalie Morales) because they’re both asexual, even though they have nothing else in common.

The thing I dreaded most about my own coming out moment was having to explain to my family what asexuality means. I didn’t want to field questions, discuss the nuances, and be delegitimized because I was just an inexperienced teenager. One of the benefits of representing marginalized identities on screen is that representation bridges gaps in understanding. Pink Triangle Press’s 2024 PTP Pink Paper, a research report on Canadian 2SLGBTQIA+ media representation, explains, “9 in 10 media professionals agree that on-screen representation increases understanding and drives acceptance of 2SLGBTQIA+ people in society at large.”

In its delicate handling of my identity, BoJack provided the crash course on asexuality that I dreamed of. My mom was an apt student who was enticed by the series’ rapid-fire shifts between tense dramatic moments and silly schemes. By the end of the series, she left with something meaningful: some basic knowledge about a type of sexuality she wasn’t previously familiar with. All that was left for me to do was to point at Todd and say, “Mom, that’s me.”

Yes, I came out to my mom using BoJack Horseman. Turns out TV is a useful tool.

*

Since BoJack, I’ve encountered more asexual characters in the media I love, though many of them aren’t as widely visible as the ones found on television. Most of my favourites come from books or indie content on the internet with a limited audience. On TV and popular streaming services, especially in Canada, there’s still a lot of work to be done.

In GLAAD’s most recent “Where We Are on TV” (2023-2024), they reported four asexual characters across streaming and cable: Sex Education’s O, Heartstopper’s Isaac, Heartbreak High’s Cash, and Big Mouth’s Elijah. At four characters, we see double the total from Todd’s ace-debut year—all of them found on Netflix, two carried over from the previous year—and still pitifully in the single-digits. The 2024 PTP Pink Paper report omitted data on asexuals as there was not sufficient ace representation in mainstream Canadian media.

A greater number of characters only have their asexuality confirmed by their creators rather than shown on screen. According to SpongeBob SquarePants creator, Stephen Hillenburg, in a 2005 People Magazine interview, he “never intended [SpongeBob] to be gay. I consider [him] to be almost asexual.” SpongeBob is asexual! Who knew? Many other creator-confirmed aces can be easily-missed by audiences, buried in interviews and old social media posts. The aces are out there—more of us than you’d think—but where are our storylines?

It’s tough work seeking out asexuals on screen. Alongside intersex and Two-Spirit, we’re still one of the most underrepresented queer identities on mainstream TV. Nearly a decade after he said “asexual,” Todd Chavez is still important to me, still my favourite character in western animation. He gave me the courage and the resources to express my pride and come out to my family by bravely embarking on his asexual journey. As the next generation tunes in to their favourite shows, I hope they find their Todd.

Image by Hendra via Adobe Stock

On October 7, 2023, I was just about three months pregnant. As a genocide unfolded before our eyes in the weeks that followed, I reflected a lot on the parallel lives mothers live on both sides of this dystopian world.

Like many others, my social media feed exposed me to countless images of the Israeli military’s atrocities in Palestine. Images of shrapnel seared into the bodies of innocent Gazans are seared into my brain like scars: a woman silently mourning as she tightly hugs a child-sized body bag. A damaged incubator containing shrivelling babies. A girl hanging limp over the window of her destroyed home. Wide-eyed toddlers shaking uncontrollably as they begin to process the trauma that will remain with them for the rest of their lives. Many of these images were censored, black squares politely asking me whether I still wanted to view the photos that they concealed. Apparently their contents were too heinous to set eyes on, and yet not heinous enough to end in reality. There was always the occasional image that slipped by uncensored. In those moments, I wished I had not logged on. I cried often. I was pregnant, but these tears were not hormonal. They were human. I often had to force myself to move away from the screen to limit the horrors I was viscerally absorbing, as if to protect the baby that was living through me.

It was an unusual time to be pregnant, to be growing a new life as I witnessed the lives of others being ended so mercilessly. Over the span of three months of genocide, 20,000 babies were born in Gaza. As I planned for my son’s future, over 16,000 children were killed, futures completely obliterated. Of the nearly 1.1 million children in Gaza, those that survived now faced malnutrition, disease, physical disability, and psychological trauma. As I received excellent care in Toronto through regular prenatal appointments, I read about the horrific and life-threatening conditions that 50,000 expectant mothers in Gaza endured, birthing in unsanitary conditions on rubble-filled floors with limited access to medication. As I felt the pain from the stitches of my C-section for weeks, I remembered the mothers who were forced to have emergency C-sections with no anesthesia. I cannot conceive of their unfathomable pain and the trauma that will forever be bound to the memories of how they welcomed their babies into the world. As one mother from Gaza, Um Raed, told Al Jazeera, “Since the birth, I’ve not known whether I should be focusing on my contractions or on the sound of warplanes overhead. Should I be worrying about my baby, or should I be afraid of whatever attacks are happening at that moment?”

Though my pregnancy felt challenging, my baby boy arrived, healthy and present. When I caressed and gently wrapped his little body in soft swaddles, I kept getting intrusive flashbacks of those babies whose tiny bodies were maimed before their first birthdays, and of those who did not even reach this milestone at all, wrapped in white shrouds. While I had the privilege of enjoying my baby’s first winter through a festive holiday season, I also got chills thinking about the infants in Gaza who have frozen to death.

I often wondered about the purpose of bringing new life into this world full of anger and injustice and pain. But if there is anything I have learned from the Palestinian people, it is their deep-rooted resilience, one that stems from the same faith that I share with them as a Muslim, but has been put to the test in ways I can’t comprehend. They provide us with an important lesson on finding purpose in a world littered with inhumanity: we all have a responsibility to be active agents, building a more just world for all. From the articles and poems we read and write to the dinner table conversations we partake in using the knowledge we choose to seek, from the silent donning of a keffiyeh to the ways in which we raise and speak to our children about the world and its people, we all have, within our own skillsets and capacities, in our respective spheres of life, the ability to partake in this global, growing tide of activism.

Over the course of a year, we contributed what we could. Never has the world been so vocal in its support for a free Palestine. Boycotts have proven successful, careers have been put at stake, and a new media outlet, Zeteo, has emerged, questioning the status quo and bringing challenging conversations to the forefront so that we no longer have to tiptoe carefully around the subject of an ongoing genocide.

Despite the signing of a ceasefire deal 465 days later, we will continue to learn, speak, cry, create, call out, and call it like it is. In doing so, we will watch the tide continue to rise, from the river to the sea, in all ages and stages of life, until injustice is entirely swept away.

Illustration by Matthew Daley

My mother’s house looks like my long-repressed childhood memories. The black floral wallpaper is veiled with dust, cloaking walls yellowed by years of chain- smoked cigarettes. Everything decorative is dangerous: swords hang in place of picture frames, flanked by ominous leather ropes of unknown origin.

My mother’s house feels like a castle, but one where everyone lives in the dungeon. It’s a house made of walls that could be so beautiful, if they weren’t so broken.

When I walk back into my mother’s house nearly two decades after our estrangement—a separation born the day her drinking became too much for me to bear—everything is just as I left it, just as I imagined it after all those years.

Well, almost everything.

In my vivid visions of those dark walls, I never imagined my adult self standing within them, hugging a person who is both a stranger and my mom at the same time. And I definitely couldn’t have envisioned how I would get there in the first place—that it would take psychedelics for my mind to open enough to let me open my mother’s front door.

*

Unlike my mother’s house, my psychedelic guide’s home is a sanctuary. Her porch is enclosed by warm stone and decorated with trinkets and treasures: crystals and incense line the windowsills, spider plants spill from hanging baskets like fountains of forest. Each time we meet, we sit on the floor, a pot of magic-mushroom-steeped tea steaming between us.

My guide is an underground plant medicine ceremonialist and bodyworker who uses psilocybin—the hallucinogenic component of magic mushrooms—to help people tap into their own inner knowing. She works outside of any medical system and doesn’t call herself a therapist. Instead, she holds space for people, using mushrooms to light the way.

I visit this guide because talk therapy always fell flat for me. I could recite the painful story of my childhood mechanically to anyone who asked, but I could never texturize these tales with feeling, because I didn’t seem to have any. My emotions were invisible rocks that I carried, weighing me down so viscerally that it would take a proper excavation to set myself free. Magic mushrooms, I hoped, would help me unearth the hurt.

*

Though psychedelic therapy is slowly becoming mainstream, with the federal government acknowledging promising clinical trial results and a first-of-its-kind in Canada psychedelic- assisted therapy program introduced at Vancouver Island University’s Nanaimo campus last year, it still remains illegal and largely underground thanks to its fractured history in the Western world.

Psychedelic use dates back centuries, with early psilocybin use (called teonanacatl) linked to the Olmec, Zapotec, Maya and Aztec in what is now called Mexico. But it wasn’t until the 1950s that scientists began to study it in North America, with researchers examining whether psychedelics could treat alcoholism and various mental illnesses.

Their investigations showed some of what shamans knew all along—that psychedelics could be used to treat addictions to other drugs, recover buried emotions and process childhood trauma, or even ease the mental distress faced by cancer patients. These results were promising enough to warrant further analysis, but as psychedelics became associated with anti-war counterculture in the 1960s, psychoactive substances became outlawed. For psychedelic research, the Summer of Love became the summer of loss.

As history book authors wrote their chapters on the War on Drugs, psychedelics remained tied to a harmful, hippie stigma. It wasn’t until the 1990s that interest in psychedelic research was gradually renewed, with studies assessing the effectiveness of MDMA, LSD (acid) and psilocybin to treat depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and addictions. With tempered excitement, researchers began conducting the first human trials since the ’70s, instilling a new sense of hope in the field of psychotherapy.

Today, it seems we’re finally reaching the level of societal acceptance needed for a psychedelic therapy renaissance, with Health Canada offering some exemptions for researchers and health care practitioners to study or administer psilocybin and a number of convenient (yet illegal) mushroom dispensaries openly operating storefronts in major Canadian cities, akin to cannabis shops pre-legalization. These shifts are opening a potent path to healing for people like me.

*

At each visit, my guide asks me to begin my journey with an intention. Spilling a brave breath, I tell her I’m here to work through my childhood trauma. I want to dive deep into the cellars of my psyche that I’ve locked away from myself, to go back to the time of court orders and custody battles, child psychologists and threats of foster care—all those things that slashed the already precarious tightrope connection I had with my mother. Through my words, I pour my intention into my mug of mushroom tea.

It’s not long after drinking the psilocybin that my body feels lighter, colours become fractal and I enter that classic psychedelic state of oneness. I feel as though I am floating in bliss, embraced by levity. That is, until I’m not.

Abruptly, the room darkens and my lungs feel compressed beneath bricks. I see my heart trapped in a steel lockbox inside a pressure cooker. It vibrates like water coming to a boil, getting tighter and constricting, as toxic grey smoke billows from my body. Tears flood my face in a relentless stream. Overwhelmed by panic, I can barely grasp an inhale.

Everything that happens next happens so quickly, a lifetime of painful memories flip-booked in a nanosecond. I’m alone with the lightning inside of me and it’s terrifying. Out loud, I scream.

That’s when the lockbox shatters, revealing a white light emanating from my chest. I see my adult hand entwine its fingers with those of my child self. I hear myself telling her it’s okay, that we’re safe and we can let go of the pain now. As I do, my heart seems to release its venom. It leaves behind a void, but I see it as newfound space for the loving joy I’ve yearned for.

*

Thanks to neuroscientific research, the trippy magic of the psychedelic experience can actually be explained. It’s thought that at its root lies the brain’s Default Mode Network (DMN), which is active during states of rest and thought. With psychedelic use, the DMN slows down, creating space for new neural pathways that override the typical mental shortcuts the brain uses to process information quickly in day-to-day life. This can open the door to creativity, new ideas, meditative states and ego dissolution. It can also help us tap into deeper states of consciousness beyond our regular, waking awareness, which is likely why psychedelic users can often access buried emotions.

When these emotions are surfaced in a safe way, led by trained therapists and integrated using other therapeutic and trauma-informed modalities like somatic experiencing and talk therapy, or daily practices like yoga or journaling, people may have a chance to accept, forgive and heal from their past experiences. For many, like myself, this can be life-changing.

My guided journeys get worse before they get better, as I dig into the lingering pain of my abandonment wound. With the support of a counsellor trained in somatic experiencing, I feel like I’m knocking my own house down, deconstructing those survival-mode walls that I built for myself in childhood. I work hard to construct something new, and each day I come home from a journey, I begin to greet a little bit more of the person I want to be.

Slowly and non-linearly, I process my anger and shame, exchanging it for acceptance and compassion. I swing through depressive states and, against my extroverted nature, I isolate myself as I struggle to navigate the world wearing the mask of the old me—a mask that doesn’t seem to fit anymore. But feeling that ungrounded comes with opportunities to foster new outlooks: I’m finally able to replace a desperate longing for the maternal relationship I wish I had with an unconditional acceptance of the human that my mother is, flaws and all.

Out of the blue, I call her.

*

On the phone, my mother’s voice sounds unfamiliar. We talk about nothing, the weather, the news. The rift of almost 20 years is too wide to catch up more meaningfully. Struggling to change the subject with grace, I blurt out that I forgive her.

My mother seems caught off guard. She says thank you and not much else. But it’s the first test of my ability to love her without expectations. I forgive her as part of my own healing, and so I forgive her with no strings attached. The simplicity of the exchange is no match for the radiance of feeling unburdened—the feeling of turning my body into a comfortable home at last.

My sharp edges soften enough to bring me to her doorstep a year later, our first hug bringing me to immediate tears. We look at old baby photos and offer each other small but symbolic tokens: the rose quartz that I carried to every journey for her, and a pair of earrings from my late grandmother for me. We promise to keep in closer touch, which we won’t do, but I’m at peace with the way we are. Because standing there, at my mother’s doorstep, I could finally see that although the walls of my mother’s house may be broken, they’re still beautiful.

Illustration by Janie Hao

“The trust is, of course, that there is no journey. We are arriving and departing all at the same  time.”

—David Bowie

The Parisian night sky is charcoal grey. Fog rises from the Seine like a lonely apparition and is swept away by the glare of Notre-Dame Cathedral’s lights. At Point Zero, the famous symbol that marks the centre of the ancient city, stands a Christmas tree decorated in purple lights. People crowd around taking photos. Somewhere in the distance a siren blares. The air smells of mulled wine, roasted chestnuts, and wet limestone. I breathe in, savouring it all. It’s the last Friday of 2018 and our last night in Paris.

My husband, Mark, and I are standing in line for the cathedral among a motley group of tourists, Christmas revellers, and worshippers. Around my neck I wear a blue velvet ribbon decorated with a hand-blown glass bead, the exact blue of a Paris sky in June. When we arrived in the city I had five beads. Over the past two days, Mark and I have zigzagged across Paris, leaving beads behind a balustrade in the Palais Garnier, in the Fontaine Saint-Michel, from Pont Neuf into the Sein, and in front of an old tree near the stairs leading to Sacré Coeur.

This is the last.

The beads were custom-made for us by a glassmaker, and each contains a speck of Indy dust—this is what I call the cremated remains of my daughter, India. Each bead is about the size of a gumball. They are decorated with musical notes, birds, and stars—symbols that tell India’s story.

The last time we were in Paris, India was still living. She was 11 and in love with the history of the city. She could still walk and do most of the things healthy kids do. The rare neurodegenerative disease spinal muscular atrophy with progressive myoclonic epilepsy (SMA-PME)—to which she would eventually succumb at age 16—was still relatively controlled.

Mark and I decided to leave our last Indy bead at Notre-Dame cathedral, because my husband remembered he and India climbing the 422 steps up to the tower on that visit. India had watched the Disney version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame and was eager to see the famous view. I remember waiting outside, looking up towards the tower and worrying. I was afraid India would fall down the staircase or exhaust herself. Instead, she was invigorated, grinning broadly when she returned, as if she’d climbed a tall tree and swung from one of the highest branches.

Since India’s death in 2013, Mark and I have left beads in the U.S., Japan, England, Canada, and Portugal—places she loved or wanted to visit. It’s our way of staying in communication with India and keeping her in communication with the world.

The word bead comes from the old German word for pray. It’s related to the medieval English custom of praying with rosaries to count bedes. This makes sense to me as when we leave a bead, I feel as though I’m speaking with my daughter. To me, India is as close as it gets to a deity.

Of course, I’m not the first to feel this way about a loved one who has died. According to Charles W. King, the author of The Ancient Roman Afterlife, the Romans believed that after death ordinary people became deified and were called Manes. These God-like dead were worshipped by their families and it was believed they had the power to look out for their living relations. Every February, the Romans celebrated a nine-day festival, devoted to their family’s dead, called Parentalia. Families gathered to remember their dead relatives and brought offerings of garlands, salt, and bread softened with wine. They hung out at their relatives’ tombs and ate meals, to reconnect with those they’d lost.

Joseph R. Lee, a certified Jungian analyst and one of the hosts of the podcast This Jungian Life, believes we’d benefit from more such normalized traditions around connecting with our dead, in modern times. In Episode 217 – Death: A Jungian Perspective, he says:

“Certainly we deprive ourselves of the kind of elegant religious ascetic that many more ancient cultures have been able to cultivate. In part because lacking the technology we have in the modern age, they could not forestall death in the ancient world and therefore developing an attitude of acceptance was essential. But also it seems that death was considered an intrinsic and essential part of life. One of the religious shapings around death, was the certitude that the ancestors continued to be in intimate relationship with their progeny—facilitating, protecting, helping, nurturing.”

I envy the Roman’s their public proclamations of grief. These days, I hide the fact I’m a bereaved mother until I’m sure I can trust people. I nod my head and smile as people talk about their kids, pretending I never had any. Grief has made me a liar.

I found a baby’s epitaph on the Vindolanda Trust blog—Vindolanda is the name of a historical Roman auxiliary fort just south of Hadrian’s Wall in northern England. It serves as a poignant reminder of the universality of parental love. To put this in perspective, in ancient Rome one-third or one-quarter of babies died in their first year of life. Parents may have, as Lee suggests, been more accepting of death as part of life, but they were certainly not immune to the pain of loss.

“My baby Acerva was snatched away to live in Hades before she had her fill of the sweet light of life. She was beautiful and charming, a little darling as if from heaven. Her father weeps for her and, because he is her father, asks that the earth may rest lightly on her forever.”

Mark and I are the last two people allowed into the cathedral. As I slip through the great door, I feel as though I’m leaving one world and entering another. The commotion of modern Paris is suddenly very removed. The inside of the cathedral looks as if it’s been covered by a gauzy lavender-grey shroud; lights and candles flicker throughout the building, but behind every pillar and column there’s darkness.

Only the brilliant gold cross and the priest in his crimson robes are well lit. Bells ring, and voices mumble prayers that sound like spells. We sit for a while and take it all in. I watch people light candles and wonder how many of them are talking to their dead.

I talk to my dead daughter all the time. Sometimes, I just tell her that I miss her; at other times I ask her to help me—like when I’m scared walking the dog alone late at night or driving in a storm. I’m aware there’s a good chance that I’m talking to myself. I don’t care.

Mary-Frances O’Connor, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Arizona and the author of The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science of How We Learn from Love and Loss, explains needs like mine like this, “In humans as well, it is because your loved one existed that certain neurons fire together and certain proteins are folded in your brain in particular ways. It is because your loved one lived, and because you loved each other, that means when the person is no longer in the outer world, they still physically exist—in the wiring of the neurons of your brain.”

When I first read O’Connor’s last line, I read whirring, not wiring. This seemed like a better description of what my grief feels like. It’s as if my brain is filled with the constant hum of grief and worry. Only talking to my daughter quietens it.

I heard about the Wind Phone from a friend. Overlooking the Japanese city of Ōtsuchi, this shrine is composed of an old-fashioned phone booth and a disconnected black rotary phone. But it is no ordinary phone; it allows the bereaved to talk to those who have died—the idea being that the wind carries the mourners’ words to their loved ones.

Created by Itaru Sasaki, to honour a beloved cousin he lost to cancer, the shrine now receives over 30,000 visitors a year. First opened to the public after the devastating tsunami in 201l, the Wind Phone offered relief to people who didn’t get a chance to say goodbye to the loved ones they lost. Today replicas of the shrine have sprung up all around the globe including in Quebec, North Carolina, and Dublin.

If the thought of using a dial-up telephone to talk with your dead seems too old-fashioned, there’s now the Here After app. It works like this: a virtual interviewer offers prompts in order to help the participant share stories about their childhood, relationships, passions, and interests. These are recorded and stored so that loved ones can ask questions and interact with, thanks to the magic of artificial intelligence, the participant’s virtual avatar on their phone or computer—even after the participant has long since died.

It sounds appealing, particularly the opportunity to hear my daughter’s voice again. If I close my eyes, I can still imagine the sound of her calling me or singing one of the showtunes she was so fond of. Nothing makes me happier than when someone tells me a story about India or sends a photo. I’m always appreciative—after all I’m aware that the photos and stories I have are it. There are only so many of these in existence. I can easily imagine I might become addicted to the Here After app. Constantly relying on it to give me an India fix whenever I craved it. But the true work of grief is learning to create this kind of experience for one’s self. That is why leaving the Indy beads in places Indy had loved was so important to Mark and me. At each place, we built a new connection and memory with her.

“Almost a third of Americans say they have communicated with someone who has died, and they collectively spend more than two billion dollars a year for psychic services on platforms old and new,” says Casey Cep, a writer for the New Yorker.

Throughout my daughter’s illness I blogged about our lives, sharing our experiences in and out of the hospital; the possibility of a treatment, when a university research team took an interest in her rare and degenerative condition; and then the shattering reality of her death and learning to live without her. It was all there, hopefully to help other people going through similar ordeals. But I soon learned that seeking solace in their grief was not the only reason some people sought out blogs and social media posts about death and bereavement.

Three months after India died, I received an email from a so-called psychic in England. She told me she’d been contacted by a little girl she believed was India. She said that the girl’s head hurt and that she was crying for her mummy. She wanted my consent to speak to her. Of course, she assured me, she didn’t want money, just to help. The letter filled me with panic. Later when I thought about it logically, I felt angry that someone had attempted to use my grief against me.

People are always recommending psychics to me. I tell them, I don’t need anyone else. I feel India with me and communicate with her in my own way all the time.

I may be alone in this. Many people seem to prefer to employ professionals, to connect with deceased loved ones. Cep says, “Like clairvoyants in centuries past, those of today also fill auditoriums, lecture halls, and retreats.” The first Spiritualist church appeared in the 1840s in upstate New York and by the 1860s, they had followers throughout the world.

The Spiritualists believe in communication with the spirits of dead people through gifted mediums. Cep says, “there are more than a hundred Spiritualist churches in the United States, more than three hundred in the United Kingdom, and hundreds of others in more than thirty countries around the world.” There are spiritualist churches across Canada from Vancouver to Ottawa. Though, I don’t feel the need for a session with a medium, I do find myself wondering what it would be like to sit in one of those churches in the company of others, who like myself wanted nothing more than to talk to their dead.

Mark and I venture into the cathedral’s ambulatory, hoping to find a good resting place for our last Indy bead. As I walk, I think about the history buried beneath the stone slabs we are walking on; the 4th century basilica and 9th century Carolingian cathedral that once stood here. For hundreds and hundreds of years, this piece of land has been the real estate of the bereaved and grief-stricken, all pleading with their dead for a sign.

When India was dying, I remember whispering in her ear, telling her that I loved her over and over. If she had to die, I wanted it to feel like falling into a sleep. I have always imagined death to feel like being pulled under. Like Alice falling through the rabbit hole in Alice in Wonderland but instead of furniture floating around, scenes from one’s life float by.

Further back still, the Notre-Dame Cathedral was once the site of Lutetia, the Roman predecessor of Paris. The Pillar of the Boatman, the oldest piece of sculpture in France, was discovered here. Dedicated to the Roman god Jupiter, it was a gift to the Roman Emperor Tiberius from the Guild of Boatmen of the Seine, a group of Gauls. For me, the name of the piece conjures images of the Seine as a sort of River Styx, separating the living from the dead. I imagine boatloads of deceased Parisians making their way down the grey, cold river.

The sculpture is considered a rare find as it features symbols treasured by the Celtic Gauls as well as Romans. One of the featured Gods is the Celtic Gaul’s horned God, Cernunnos—an imposing being that bears an uncanny resemblance to Tim Curry’s character in the 1985 movie, Legend. Not much is known about this character, but it’s easy to imagine him, calling one to the shadows, begging one to join him on the other side.

Picking the exact spot to place an Indy bead is always difficult. Sometimes it takes a while. We always wander back and forth from place to place, trying to decide, hoping to get it perfect. This feels like an important part of our conversation with India.

Finally, we decide on a hiding place. The marble statue of Joan of Arc by Charles Jean Desvergnes, built to commemorate her beautification in 1909. Other than the Virgin Mary, it may be the only other feminine presence in the building. Regal in her helmet and armour, the Saint wears her sword hanging from her hip. Her hands are clasped in prayer. She has the kind of feminine teenage energy I admire. And like my daughter, she was forced to sacrifice everything.

I tuck the bead under Joan of Arc’s foot. Usually, we hide the bead a little, place it under or behind an object. It’s not that we don’t want it found, we just don’t want it to be found too easily. It’s like we’re testing the person who will discover it—like parents meeting their teenage girl’s boyfriend for the first time. We want to make sure they have the appropriate sense of wonder.

Four months late, in April when the fire breaks out at Notre-Dame, I’m glued to the news, as orange flames engulf the spire and the roof. Great wafts of grey smoke circle the ancient building, while toxic dust and lead spew forth contaminating the surrounding area.

I wonder if the little blue Indy bead is still under St. Joan’s foot. I imagine at the first sign of the fire, St. Joan’s spirit lifting from the statue, and wandering angrily about the cathedral, saying “Not this again. I told you God, I’m done with fire!”

It’s strange to think of a monument this magnificent, vulnerable to something as trivial as, say, faulty old electrical wires or a dropped cigarette. Before succumbing to the fire, the cathedral had survived more than 800 years of plagues, revolutions, and wars.

Part of me hopes the Indy bead was found soon after we left it in the cathedral. A lucky talisman that the discoverer takes everywhere. Maybe, they whisper to it when they are afraid or anxious, roll it in their palm, admiring its beauty. I like that thought. This way India’s story continues independently.

There’s another part of me that likes to think of the Indy bead lost in all the rubble and ash surrounded by all that glorious art and history. I picture the spirits of India and St. Joan wandering through the cathedral and pranking the construction team tasked with the rebuild, moving their tools from place to place. I imagine the two of them talking about boys and giggling over plans to spook the night watchman. Racing up to the highest remaining point of the cathedral so they can watch the living saunter by, and comment on how fearful they seem.

Last December, at a creamatorium in Nottinghamshire, England, a Postbox to Heaven was installed thanks to nine-year-old, Matilda Handy, who wanted to stay in communication with her grandparents who’d both passed on. Matilda told ITV Central, a U.K. regional news network, “It was very nice because I’m very upset and it’s just a very nice way to express my feelings and send a letter to them and to say how much I love them.” Within two months, the box had received a hundred letters. The crematorium, which is part of the Westerleigh Group, is now rolling out postboxes to heaven across the U.K.

When I found out about the Postbox to Heaven, I thought about the first time India went to overnight summer camp. She was nine and very excited, because it was a riding camp. I was worried she’d be lonely so I wrote a letter for every day she was away. I did my best to make the letters special. Each one was written on fancy paper with colourful envelopes decorated with stickers and drawings. I spent a lot of time thinking about what to say and drawing pictures of things she liked. I remember writing her name in big loopy letters on the envelopes and putting a heart over the I instead of a dot. I put all the letters in a little cloth drawstring bag and tied it with a bow.

After a week, India returned home from camp, exhausted and smelling like a horse. She’d had a great time. As I was throwing her clothes into the washing basket, I noticed the drawstring bag was still closed with the bow. I opened it out of curiosity. Not a single letter was open.

“India, why didn’t you open my letters?” I said, a little hurt.

“Oh, I was so busy, Mummy,” she said. “I forgot.”

Later when I was complaining to a friend about India and the letters, she’d laughed and said I should be happy I’d raised such an independent child. Looking back, I now realize the letters were just as much for me as they were for India. I needed to express how much I was thinking of her. That’s still true today. It doesn’t matter whether she actually hears me or not, when I place her beads in special places and talk with her inside my head.

Paris was the last trip we made with Indy beads, before the pandemic put travel on pause. Last September, less than three years after the Notre-Dame Cathedral was devastated by fire—Mark died. He was diagnosed on his 64th birthday with stage 4 Melanoma and died a month before what would have been his 65th.

Before Mark’s illness, I thought I knew what it was to watch someone suffer. For years, I’d watched India tortured by seizure after seizure. This was different. Mark’s cancer struck quickly and consumed him entirely. One moment, we were planning trips in our trailer, the next I was holding him up in the superstore because he couldn’t breathe. In six months, he went from 220 to 150 lbs. At the cancer clinic where he’d taken his immunotherapy treatment, his nurse asked if I was his daughter. I was only eight years younger than Mark.

Since becoming a widow I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the past. It’s a strange feeling to be the lone survivor of the family I created. It’s like we all went to war and I’m the only one who returned. The only one left to tell our story. Still, there are times I struggle to believe they are really both gone, or that I once had a child and a husband. So much loss is hard to grasp.

In her article “Walking in the Dark: Creating a New Virtual Map in Your Brain After Loss,” Mary-Frances O’Connor says:

“When we experience a loss through death, our brain initially cannot comprehend that the dimensions we usually use to locate our loved ones simply do not exist anymore. We may even search for them, feeling like we might be a bit crazy for doing so.

If we feel that we know where they are, even in an abstract place like Heaven, we may feel comforted that our virtual map just needs to be updated to include a place and time that we have never been. Updating also includes changing our prediction algorithm, learning the painful lessons of not filling in the gaps with the sights, sounds, and sensations of our loved ones.”

When Mark was in the hospice dying, he told me if I was going to make it after he died, I’d have to forget him and India—pretend they never existed. He was suggesting I wrap up the conversation and move on. When he said this, he was no longer the Mark I’d always known. The cancer and the drugs had changed him. He’d become unbearably frank, sometimes saying things that hurt my feelings. The way he saw it, I suppose, there was not enough time left for niceties.

At the time, I nodded and smiled. But I never once entertained Mark’s suggestion. We were together for 30 years. I’d lived with him longer than I’d lived without him. As far as I was concerned it was not an option to stop talking with the people I loved most, regardless if they were living or dead, listening or not. It would be like losing my leg in an accident and pretending I’d never loved to dance.

At the moment, Mark’s ashes are in my underwear drawer in a plain cardboard box. Eventually though, I intend to have some beads made with his ashes. I will have some more Indy beads made as well. My plans aren’t definite yet, but I’ve been thinking about placing some of their beads in Rome. Mark lived there as a child. He talked about the city the way one might a lost love. We always meant to go there together but we never did. Still, I know all about the city from the stories he told me. How he played in the Villa Borghese gardens and around the Colosseum. I imagine our conversation will continue once I’m there. I look forward to this with all my heart.

As I open the bag of mycelium, a pleasant creamy smell wafts through the air. I break off a piece and feel the smooth pores between my fingers. It’s like grazing the soft hand of a long-lost grandparent.

Around 1.1 billion years ago, the animal and fungi kingdoms split from plants and continued evolving together. Only later did animals and fungi separate on the genealogical tree of life, making fungi more closely related to humans than plants. Fast forward a few hundred million years to me, sitting in my garden-suite kitchen across from a bucket of oyster mushroom mycelium.

Mycelium is the root-like structure of a mushroom, a white thread-like mass made up of tiny branches called hyphae. It lives underground or on surfaces such as rotting trees, spreading metres or even kilometres to transfer nutrients, break down dead plants, and connect with other fungi. Mushrooms—the fruits of healthy mycelial networks—sprout when the conditions are just right.

After seeing the red and white toadstools in front of my apartment last autumn, I was enthralled. What started out as a fascination with mushrooms, quickly turned into a full-blown obsession with mycelium. When I learned about mycoremediation—the use of mycelium to rehabilitate polluted ecosystems—I was in awe. The more I read about its potential, and the science of biomimicry, the more I was certain that fungi had something to teach me.

I stare at the white stringy mass that is my fungal relative, longing to know it. To understand it. In the same way I longed to understand the culture my parents came from, the city I was born in, and the place my cousins, grandparents, aunts and uncles still live—a sad derivative of a country that no longer exists.

Yugoslavia was a socialist federation of six republics and two autonomous provinces, made up of various ethnic groups that coexisted in a single state from the end of World War II until its breakup in the nineties. My parents are of different ethnic groups, and while that was not uncommon in Yugoslavia, it became undesirable when the country was falling apart. Ethnonationalism made it so that you had to choose sides. In Serbia, the country where a malignant dictator was waging carnage in neighbouring Bosnia and Croatia at the time, it was suffocating for ethnic Croats, Bosniaks, Albanians, and other minority groups in the country. It’s a big part of why we left.

As previous conflicts in the Balkans have prompted mass emigration, so did this one. In the last decade of the 20th century, over 100,000 people from the former Yugoslavia came to Canada, including my family.

Being from the geographic battleground of empires for centuries has taken a toll on the collective psyche of Balkan people. And our quests for self-determination haven’t always been smooth sailing either—the carving up of nation-states in the breakup of Yugoslavia thirty years ago being only our most recent collective catastrophe. Bosnian-American writer Aleksandar Hemon describes the cultural phenomenon of katastrofa or catastrophe, whereby the story of a family is the story of the bad that happened to it. If the epigenetic consequences of trauma are what scientists think they are, Hemon says, “katastrofa is inscribed in our cells.”

Of course, this was the big katastrofa for my family. Or at least what I pieced together from my parents’ stories over the years. Painful ones about the loss and betrayal of longtime friends, some family, and a society they helped build. Getting them to share these stories was like pulling teeth. Silence, fragmented memories, and non-answers were more readily available.

My parents were always adamant that nationalism and deteriorating social conditions were the reasons why we left, carefully making sure not to position themselves as victims. This was also the reason why joining a diaspora community was out of the question. In Canada, each ethnic group formed their own enclaves, based around places of worship usually. Nationalist narratives, especially among immigrant and refugee Serb and Croat groups, were commonplace, and to my parents, virulent.

These often revisionist narratives meant my identity as a first-generation person of mixed Yugoslav background fit nowhere, and was seldom understood.

Lots of people grow up in immigrant families where questions of identity are complicated. But to be from the former Yugoslavia, to be Balkan, is to not have a firm grasp on where to even begin in making sense of who you are. And alienation from the very people that can help you do it. It comes with an inherent fragmentation of identity, with various intersections, complexities, and trauma in the mix.

As I stuff my bucket with a mixture of damp wood chips and mycelium, I imagine it as a sentient being that can hear me: “Have you also inherited the trauma of your ancestors?” I ask. “The trauma of a changing climate? The trauma of fearing being eaten by rodents all the time? What would our common single-cell primogenitor make of our respective destinies?”

I first discovered biomimicry in adrienne maree brown’s writings on mycelium in her book, Emergent Strategy. To become a functional fruiting body, mycelium has to expand and connect with other fungal and root networks. It does this through individual cells called hyphae. brown draws on mycelial hyphae as inspiration for a social-justice framework based on the idea that effecting societal change requires establishing a select few meaningful connections, rather than fostering a critical mass.

I think back to a small gathering a few weeks back, when I met with a group of new friends I’d made, all Balkan diaspora women who were independently working through issues of identity using art, research, and film.

I stop stuffing the bucket for a second. As the mycelium grows, it seeks out compatible hyphae in a process called homing, maintaining nutrient pathways to grow and spread across forests.

It occurs to me that these women and I were forming a kind of human mycelial network. No wonder I had such trouble with working out my own questions of identity—I had been doing it alone. Cultural identity is formed by communities, not by one individual. What if each of us expanding our own understanding, filling in the gaps, and healing wounds, could create something better?

When you grow mushrooms, you have to do it in a sterile environment that mimics the humidity, air flow, and temperature of the ideal outdoor conditions. Some mushrooms like it hot, some like it cold, most like it humid.

To best simulate and control this, DIY mycelium experts recommend drilling holes in a bucket, and stuffing it with mycelium and woodchips. This provides something for the mycelium to eat and makes it easy to harvest the mushrooms once they grow. After I close the lid on the bucket, I shove it into the broom closet, excited at the thought of the pink coral bunches that will soon flourish.

I already had fungi on my mind while sipping homemade brandy on that particularly damp February evening when I met Ljudmila Petrovic and Iva Jankovic at Sara Graorac’s house. We’d all been sitting in her retro living room, flipping through books on traditional woven rug patterns and swapping stories.

Iva is passionate about empowering local communities through co-ops, helping people access economies of scale. She and I share this very specific feeling, a longing to not only connect with the place that shaped us from afar, but also to fix some of its problems.

For a while, she’s been trying to connect her work in Canada with the Balkans, to see if new cooperative models can help change the depressing realities of post-socialist privatization, unemployment, and brain drain in the region. She has also made podcasts, art, and films about Serbian society and diaspora connections. She told me once that she felt the need to piece together the fragments of history. To close the loop.

While Iva enthusiastically tells us about her attempts to connect musically to the Balkans by learning to play the accordion, my gaze falls to the person who introduced all of us in the first place, Ljudmila.

In order for the mycelium to grow, individual hyphae must undergo fusion. Merlin Sheldrake, ecologist and author, defines this process as homing and the connection as “the linking stitch.” It’s the essence of any mycelium. Ljudmila is like our linking stitch. She connected each of us in a homing of her own, inaugurating us into the group chat that now serves as our main site of communion.

I met Ljudmila last fall when I was reporting on nationalism in the Balkans. Her Master’s thesis was a pioneering study on how multigenerational trauma in the Balkan diaspora fragments identity among millennial women and on the power of narrative in healing those wounds. When we first met over beers at a local Vancouver watering hole, I studied her across the table as she spoke with such conviction about things I had, until then, relegated to the realm of internal musings. We bonded over the quirks of our grandparents and how no one got our names right on the first try. And of course, inat, or the Balkan cultural phenomenon loosely translated into English as spite.

Reading her thesis was confronting. It was as though someone was revealing secrets about my life to me. For the first time, I saw data on how trauma affects immigrant parent-child relationships in my cultural context and the role silence plays in fragmenting identity. I then realized that my career motivations as a journalist were prompted by the desire to create better narratives, more honest ones, borne of resilience and with the ultimate goal of something better coming out the other side.

Ljudmila spends her time helping others heal trauma through therapy. It’s easy for me to imagine her as a guide for the wounded: her care is evident and so is her steadfast nature. She has dedicated her life to the mental-health profession despite naysayers in her family and a cultural stigma around the field. That’s inat in action. A similar embodied resilience strengthens mycelium as it battles something that is almost guaranteed as it grows: contamination.

About a week into my DIY mycological adventure, I notice something green forming on the mycelium. I am confronted by the bane of every mushroom cultivator’s existence: mold.

I panic. Google. Inspect the bucket closely. I wrack my brain over what I might have done wrong: was the water not hot enough when I sterilised the wood chips? Was the bucket too damp?

Luckily, after a frantic phone call with the guy who sold me the mycelium, who assured me that oyster mushrooms are resilient and would filter out contaminants, I feel some relief in knowing what has to be done. I scrape off some of the green fuzz and pop the bucket back into the supply closet.

Then I get sick.

I get so sick that I head straight to the urgent-care centre. By then, I feel steel wool in my throat. Tired, feverish, and dead certain I have a fungal throat infection, I wait for the doctor, feeling defeated. I think about how stupid it was to put my face so close to the mold. Wonder why I tolerated contaminated fungi in the first place. Why did I not think to put on a mask? Sitting in the cold examination room wearing nothing but a polyester hospital gown, I wait for a throat swab.

I was already feeling sick before visiting Sara. She had hosted our gathering of minds the previous month, before I embarked on my mycological adventure. As I walked up the front steps of Sara’s house—one of those beautiful old Vancouver houses with wood siding—I was excited.

Some of Sara’s art deals with Balkan plant medicine. As we stood in her kitchen, she showed me small vials filled with the distilled oil of a common Balkan folk remedy, kantarion, or St. John’s Wort. Lining the shelves above us were large Dali-esque glass bottles holding herbs, homemade brandy, and other oils used in traditional healing.

As I sat in her beautifully decorated living room, surrounded by colourful rugs and books on Yugoslav folklore, I expected Sara to tell me, with all the hubris of an artist, about the power of art in reshaping identity.

Instead, I was met with a quiet intimacy. Her practice is very personal and private, she said. It was important for her to rediscover specifically Balkan folk remedies and use them in a process of healing not just herself, but others too.

“I feel called to it,” she’d said simply, when we asked her why.

All of us have experienced this calling in some form. Sometimes it’s a faint whisper, and at other times it’s as clear as day and impossible to ignore. Navigating the complexities of being in the Balkan diaspora can be exhausting. It makes sense that most people would relegate these nuances to the back seat of who they are and simply assimilate into the dominant culture. After all, the road to assimilation for us is shorter than for other immigrants. Most of us are white-skinned, so shedding the Other within us, our peripheral East-meets-West collectivist culture, foreign unpronounceable names, and distinct position in the history of European conquest can seem like a good deal in exchange for privilege. But it isn’t. For the empaths among us, it may seem like the struggles of more marginalized groups should be where we focus our efforts. But the truth is, if we want to help others we must first heal ourselves.

After a few days of rest, and no call from the laboratory, I recover from what was likely the common cold.

But just to be sure, I exile my mycelium to the back yard, not wanting it in the house out of fear that the mold could become airborne and poison me. As the unpredictable Vancouver spring temperatures hover around zero, I worry that the mycelium might die. The thought of that is too gut wrenchingly sad to ignore.

So, I lug the bucket back into the house, grumbling, wrap it in a plastic bag and put it back in the storage closet. It doesn’t even cross my mind that the mycelium might have a fighting chance. That it could still fruit in the right conditions, if given the time.

One friend who hadn’t made it to the dinner was Dora Cepic. Her work intrigued me the most because her motivations seemed similar to my own. Our media were different, so I went to her studio to get a sense of what creating a new narrative through art entailed.

As Dora sat across from me I couldn’t help but notice the tools poking out of the stacked bins behind her. The aesthetic chaos of an art studio seemed to exist in contrast to the artist herself. Dora, refined and stylish, looked at me inquisitively. Her beige silk blouse illuminated the golden streaks in her hair, giving her a divine glow as the afternoon sun spilled in through the window. She told me about her stop-motion film—a “moving collage” of a female figure wrangling a vessel that keeps escaping her.

In constructing these tiny sculptures and doilies, Dora draws on memories, dreams, and stories rooted in her family’s Balkan background. These micro props form delicate mise-en-scenes that depict the protagonist, half-ghost, half-woman, trying to collect the knowledge that floats away in perpetuity.

“I’m very deliberately trying to construct an identity and sense of space in my own diasporic way,” she said.

Dora likened the process of making this film to searching for a sense of self in a country that feels foreign to her even though she grew up in it. The painful irony, Dora said, is that when she’s in the Balkans, she is very much “the Canadian.” This is the uncomfortable in-between; the hyphenated existence that I imagine most immigrants live. The late Bosnian-Norwegian writer Bekim Sejranovic defined the Balkan version of this existence in one of his books, an epic about fleeing a small town in a country that no longer exists in search of a home that never quite fits; from nowhere to nowhere.

It is that intangible nowhere that formed all five of us, and the place we are all trying to make sense of by making art, forming economic partnerships, doing research, and growing mushrooms.

Fungi have survived all five major extinction events on earth. Despite devastating species loss, they are resilient to calamity and some even flourish in it. In the aftermath of Hiroshima, the first thing reported to grow was a matsutake mushroom and edible morels grow in forests scorched by wildfires in the Pacific Northwest. Fungi are incredibly good at sucking up nutrients where there seemingly are none. Mushrooms can even grow on old diapers and cigarette butts, and now, scientists are using mycelium to clean up oil spills in the Amazon. This type of mycoremediation takes biomimicry to another level: utilizing fungi to clean up the world.

I like to believe our Balkan mycelial network is part of this grand experiment—we can look to the fungal world to solve the modern problems created by humans. In our case, we’re forging honest narratives about what it means to be in the diaspora. Confronting the nationalism and xenophobia that got us here. Filtering out centuries of hate and intolerance through connection. Nourishing one another with ideas. Decontaminating.

I come home from work one afternoon, emotionally spent and questioning if any of my crazy mycelial ideas have any real meaning. Lying on the couch, staring into space, I realize I haven’t checked on the mycelium since I dragged it out of the cold almost a week prior. I saunter over to the kitchen, where the black garbage bag sits, and I begin to untie it. I feel bumps on the sides of the bucket.

My eyes well with tears as I pull off the bag. Bright pink clusters of fused hyphae greet me, poking through almost every hole. Despite the mold, the mycelium had healed itself enough to finally begin fruiting.

I’m at a party trying to join in a conversation with some men who are older than me, around their mid-thirties to forties. The conversation topics are bachelor parties, home ownership, and sports. I contribute maybe 10 sentences the whole night.

At the end of the evening, I figure this needs to change. I’m two and a half years into transitioning and it’s one of my first times meeting men I didn’t know pretransition. In order to do better going forward, I pick the easiest of topics to understand—sports. To narrow it down further, I go with hockey as it’s in season at the time, and there’s an NHL team in my city.

In the weeks and months that follow, my new obsession with hockey is puzzling to people who’ve known me for a long time. But by this point in my transition, it has become clear to me that weather conversations can only go so far. When I’m trying to befriend men, I worry about not fitting in and not being able to pass—to be seen as the gender I am. I’m afraid that other men will see me as less than or treat me with suspicion. It might seem like I’m leaning into stereotypes when I make the conscious choice to love hockey, but at the core is also anxiety around my safety in unfamiliar environments as I transition and embark on a new life chapter.

While being into hockey, both the live sport and the underlying stats, begins as a pragmatic thing, it quickly changes my life. I feel the need to learn everything immediately, lest someone test me on my knowledge: player history, team history, league history, and the endless, ever-changing stats any true fan would know. But being very, very into something is sort of my natural state, and I am shocked to see how well hockey fits into my brain, almost like it was always supposed to be there. It isn’t long until I find myself staying up too late editing a Wikipedia page for a player who died before I was born. It dawns on me at that point that I am actually a hockey fan.

Now I have something to chat about with nearly everyone. Co-workers have started getting my goat for how bad the Vancouver Canucks are doing; people on public transportation see my team colours and rib me for how bad the Canucks are doing; my optometrist gently mocks me for… how bad the Canucks are doing. I feel like part of something bigger, and I like it. To some acquaintances I’d previously struggled to connect with, hockey has become that thing they remember about my life. They ask me for updates as a way of continuing a relationship that otherwise would have little footing. And I discover there really is nothing quite like the electricity of a crowd—feeling the same emotions as 18,000 or so of my new closest friends.

One of the most delightful surprises about getting into hockey is it makes me feel like a kid again—the kid I didn’t get to be in my actual childhood. When I was young, every boy I knew played hockey and talked about it non-stop. In my mind, hockey and the gender category of “boy” were one and the same. Getting into hockey now, as I transition, feels like reclaiming the all-Canadian boyhood I never had.

As I immerse myself deeper into the world of hockey, sometimes I fantasize about what it would’ve been like to play the game as a child. I think about growing up a boy on Vancouver Island, going to the Fuller Lake Arena for early morning practices, experiencing the camaraderie of a team.

A big part of being trans can be grappling with the “what ifs.” What if I had been born X? What if I had transitioned earlier? When you’re alone with your thoughts, it can become an all-consuming game, running through simulations where everything was good the whole time, and you didn’t have to suffer this long. But inevitably, when I go down that path, I reach the conclusion it’s not a mental exercise worth doing: it plays into gender stereotypes and disregards my actual personality. When I think harder about it, I realize I would have sucked at hockey. My childhood neighbour used to leave for hockey practice at 5 a.m. and I had never been awake that early in my life. I hate waking up early, I hate long bus rides, and, quite frankly, I have no athletic talent—all things that wouldn’t have been any different had I been a boy my whole life.

Still, I’m glad I get to experience hockey now from a distance, finding camaraderie in viewing rather than participating. Sometimes, my hockey obsession is less about connecting with straight cis men, however, and more about looking at hunky guys. Take that time I’m sitting at a bar with a friend and there’s a Canucks player being interviewed on TV. I find him so handsome I can no longer pay attention to the conversation I’m having. But I digress…

Getting into hockey is not all a smooth path to coming into my own as a trans man. Soon I’m grappling with the toxic masculinity associated with the sport. Sexual assault allegations at both the junior and professional level, acts of racism, and reports of homophobic slurs surround the game. And the sport—in organized leagues and in fandom—supports, sustains, and fosters a culture of homophobia, aggression, and violence against women.

I remember when the Seattle Kraken announced their new mascot, Buoy. Buoy is a troll with long blue hair, bushy eyebrows, and an earring. I had the misfortune of coming across a tweet making fun of Buoy for being… trangender? The long hair (clearly hockey hair) and the earring (clearly an homage to Auston Matthews’s earrings) were being used to make fun of trans people. Personally, I love Buoy. I didn’t tell anyone else about this, I just sat with it and felt bad, nervous to make a retort for fear of being mocked.

Another time, opposing fans are being so obnoxious at a game that we can’t hear what the referee is saying on the ice. They are bragging and taunting while their team is winning the whole time. I can’t imagine why anyone would want to scream in public, like ever. After a game where my team, the Canucks, lose (of course), we all pour out into the concourse to leave. The hall turns into a mosh pit as two fans start yelling and shoving each other. Police officers need to step in to break up the fight. This is a side of masculinity I’ve rarely seen in real life, only on TV or well, on the ice. I wonder that evening if this is the endgame of passing; if this is what it takes—being a terror in public—to show the world you are a man? I also wonder if I even want acceptance by such obnoxious people.
In the months to come, some hockey scandals are unfolding in the media. My roommates and I sit one evening and discuss the latest horrifying updates on Kyle Beach’s allegations of sexual assault at the hands of a coach; of the sexual assault trial of Jake Virtanen; of the Hockey Canada story, which hides so many awful elements including multiple accusations of group-led sexual assault and a secret fund used to pay out sexual-assault survivors. Reading the news, it’s unfathomable to think of how some men can commit violence on that level and get off so lightly, thanks to a system that views their crimes more as an inconvenience than something that needs to be eradicated from hockey culture.

I’m not naive, but it’s frightening to be reminded of how evil some men can be. What men using their power and strength can do. In my quest to be more passable, to make myself more in line with heteronormative ideas of gender for the comfort of others, I’ve been reminded time and time again of the harms of traditional masculinity. Learning to enjoy hockey as an adult means I need to think critically about what I like about the sport and culture and choose only those parts to add to my vision of masculinity.

While my masculinity brings me joy, reckoning with the bad things men get a free pass to do in hockey and in our wider culture actually turns out to be a vital part of transitioning for me. While trying to debate other fans on Reddit on these topics may be a futile task, speaking up on issues that are important to me is something I won’t give up for the sake of passing.

These days, I’m not always having the types of discussions I thought I’d be having around the water cooler with my co-workers when I first got into hockey. But ultimately it feels more fruitful than just trading stats. Transitioning doesn’t mean I need to compromise my long-held values. I love hockey, and I look forward to bringing more people with me into my hockey fandom. The sport will win when everyone is welcome.

At nine years old I was an under-the-covers reader. Even on nights when my parents were distracted by their cassette tapes and homemade wine, I wouldn’t risk turning on my bedside lamp after 8:30 p.m. Maybe my parents knew I was deep into the world of Nancy Drew or Encyclopedia Brown under those blankets, a flashlight illuminating the clues and cliffhangers on the pages.

Now, almost four decades later, I’m once again reading Nancy Drew books at 8:30 p.m. every night, only in my 10- and eight-year-old sons’ room. We join Nancy as she investigates mysterious bungalows or stolen clocks, and my youngest son makes wild guesses about what the criminals are up to. Both boys are often still debating plot possibilities after I turn out the light. I don’t think they read under the covers after I leave, but I wouldn’t mind if they did.

The popular culture of my kids’ generation is phenomenally different from the pop culture I grew up with. There is more of it, for one thing: an abundance of TV channels and streaming services, music apps that let them listen to what they want when they want, and many more book series tailored to their age group. Yet the appeal of a child detective is untouchable.

So much media for children in the tween and teen years features kids doing adult things with little adult interference. Teen-detective stories are appealing at this developmental stage because they provide examples of how a person can remain a child, while accessing the bravery associated with adulthood. Because growing up is scary.

In the most recent Nancy Drew novel I read aloud, Nancy gets knocked out then spends several chapters trapped in the gross basement of a bungalow in the middle of nowhere. For me, this is terrifying. For my kids? Well, they take it in stride. Their faith in Nancy is unshakeable. Nancy is brave, and smart—she can handle anything.

The day after we read this section of the novel, my eldest son is starting at a new summer camp. He is excited, but clearly nervous, bouncing around the kitchen, checking his outfit in the mirror, speculating on every detail of how the day might go. He is in no physical danger, but freaking out about this adventure into something brand new. Watching him go through these emotions gives me some insight into why children around his age are so attracted to stories where they see kids confronting the unknown and emerging triumphant.

And in those older mystery novels, that’s where it ends. The mystery is solved, the teen detective wins. Then everyone goes back to their sock hops—until the next mystery crosses their path. But there’s something missing from those older detective books: how do the characters feel as they go through these intense experiences? Did Encyclopedia Brown ever contemplate whether he could live up to the expectations placed on him by his father? Did Nancy Drew ever ponder her own mortality after being hit on the head repeatedly by the bad guys? Did the Hardy Boys ever wonder if their close sibling relationship would survive into adulthood? We don’t know.

These stories were written in an era where children were not expected to examine their inner lives, even as they navigated the complex emotional path to adulthood. It is something that the books published before the 1960s rarely touched upon, but I’m starting to see it in more contemporary stories. Weirdly, the place I’ve seen this navigation of a child’s inner life chronicled with the most depth and heart recently was in The Bob’s Burgers Movie.

It’s a bit of a left turn, I know, going from the classic Nancy Drew novel to an animated musical comedy about a family running a burger restaurant in a fictional town on the east coast of the U.S. And I certainly wasn’t expecting a tween detective story to shape the narrative of the full-length Bob’s Burgers movie, when I took my own family to the movie theatre for opening night.

For those unfamiliar with the series, Bob’s Burgers chronicles the ups and downs of the Belchers: parents Bob and Linda and their three children, 13-year-old Tina, 11-year-old Gene, and nine-year-old Louise. They scrape by on the profits from their underrated burger restaurant, and each episode draws viewers into their flawed but heartwarming family life.

In the full-length film, Louise is positioned as a central character as she unravels clues related to a murder mystery that many of the characters are attempting to solve. It is Louise who finds the skeleton that prompts the discovery of the murder in the first place, and in the space of a few minutes her character goes from confident and sarcastic to reeling in terror. This, combined with being teased in the school yard for her attachment to a bunny-eared hat she has worn since early childhood, sends Louise into a spiral of self-doubt. Contemplating life without her beloved hat leads her to conclude the only way she can prove that she is brave and not—horror of horrors—“a baby,” will be to solve the murder mystery. The adventures that ensue and the eventual conversations Louise has with her family allow her to gain a stronger sense of self.

This is not a coming-of-age story. Louise doesn’t get through these trials by making a clear transition into adulthood. Rather, it is a story showing the tiny steps children approaching adolescence must take to understand themselves a little better. Louise is working to solve a real, messy, grown-up mystery, while also grappling with the fear of removing her signature childhood hat, after so many years of clinging to it for security and a sense of self. The murder is ultimately solved, but the important story is really Louise’s emotional growth. In a scene near the end of the film, we watch as Louise backflips off of a horizontal bar in the school playground, and her bunny ears fall to the ground. The viewer never sees the character without her hat, but the movie shows her calmly retrieving it and placing it back on her head. The hat has become a choice rather than a desperate emotional crutch.

As the mother of a 10-year-old, I see struggles like these play out every day with my own child. I’m conscious of the trend of encouraging children to acknowledge and name their feelings, a trend that was very much not present when I was growing up in the 1980s. Recently, my son woke up on a school day and immediately declared he was sick. This had been happening a lot since the pandemic, and I was suspecting it was more emotional than physical. When I was a child, there was no such thing as a permissible “mental health day.” If I didn’t want to go to school, too bad. Faking sick was the only way to get out of it, and I could see my own kids using that age-old technique. But all it took was a quick discussion about how it’s okay to be overwhelmed and a little freaked out about whatever lies in store beyond the safety of our family home, to shift the narrative. I’m glad this shift to naming and discussing feelings as a tool for handling life’s challenges is making it into the beloved child-detective genre too, in its modern incarnations.

When my family went to see The Bob’s Burgers movie, it was Louise’s story that stood out for us, providing an unexpectedly emotional and nuanced look at the character. Viewers of the TV show have almost never seen Louise without her hat, and over multiple seasons, the hat has rarely been acknowledged or mentioned. It’s just a part of Louise, a character many viewers have grown to love.

Watching her grapple with a personal change that seems small but is actually huge for a child, all while trying to solve a murder, connects the audience to Louise more than I ever felt connected to the unemotional teen detectives of the past. And last summer, whenever we were driving somewhere for a family trip, my kids would play the movie soundtrack. Listening to them sing Louise’s words in the song “Sunny Side Up Summer” always got me: “Each and every day/ I just think I’m pretty great/ yep that’s right/ no big deal/ I’m not hiding what I feel.”

Louise may not have the clean-cut poise of Nancy Drew or the methodical detachment of Encyclopedia Brown, but in The Bob’s Burgers Movie she’s the messy, modern kid detective we all deserve.

Illustration by Michelle Simpson

I’ve been a high school teacher for 16 years now. That means I’ve spent roughly half my life in high school something I’d never have predicted as a teenager. All I wanted then was to get the hell out. I was a fat teen in the 1990s, when “heroin chic” was a fashion trend and when fat jokes were so common in pop culture that I didn’t even question how messed up that was until years later, rewatching Friends as an adult.

As a student, I learned firsthand school was a place where fat kids got bullied. I was called “Whale” and “Fatty,” and once I overheard a friend of my sister’s tell her she’d kill herself if she ever got as fat as me. I was maybe a size 12 or 14 at the time. As a teacher, I learned that fatphobia, whether institutionalized or personal, is baked into the school experience.

I hear my students in larger bodies make jokes at their own expense. It’s an old tactic: get to the punchline before a bully can. When I was in their shoes, I accepted bullying as just part of being fat—a consequence of sorts. I did it to myself too. I accepted the “wisdom” that I didn’t have enough self-control to lose weight, even though nothing could have been further from the truth: in high school I controlled food and exercise to an unhealthy degree. I remember “rewarding” myself with a single Fig Newton for swallowing a diet concoction my mother’s friend swore by. Let me tell you, the diet did not work, and in no world is a Fig Newton a treat.

I spent my formative years learning to hate my body. Is it any surprise I didn’t date? That I was suspicious of anyone who liked me? That I walked into a room and scanned to see if I was the biggest person there? I wish I could say I set out to change the narrative when I became a teacher, but the best I could muster in my first eight years of teaching was working hard to prove that I was a “good” fat person.

I’d casually mention in class how often I exercised. I ate “right” in the cafeteria: salads, low-carb meals, small portions. When my students wrote papers about the “obesity epidemic,” I cringe to think about how many times I said something like, “Not all people who are fat are unhealthy. I have perfect blood work.” I didn’t stop to question why healthiness should make someone like me more deserving of respect than a human who was not in good health; my internalized fatphobia remained completely unexamined.

I’m fatter than ever these days and things that didn’t affect me when I was what’s known in the fat community as “a small fat” are problematic now. Office chairs pinch my hips, and student classroom chairs are torture. I dread bus trips where I have to share a bench seat, knowing I’ll be hanging off the edge of the bench, half a butt cheek in the aisle. Professional clothing is hard to find, especially if I want to shop in a physical store. I miss the questionable privilege of my high school days, even as I recognize the things making me uncomfortable can and should be fixed.

Accessibility should be a priority in educational settings, though I rarely hear anyone talk about how accessibility includes bodies of all sizes. These discomforts, these small indignities, could be fixed by better design, by thinking about more than the “average” student or faculty member, whoever those people are supposed to be.

About 10 years ago, something shifted for me. I stumbled upon posts some friends had shared on Facebook about body positivity. I was suspicious at first: I should love my body, not hate it? This was the antithesis of everything I had learned.

Then, as my friends started having children, I thought of the things we hear our parents say that we internalize. I remembered my mother saying negative things about her body. I didn’t want these tiny humans to inherit our mess. So I dug deeper. I learned about body neutrality, and thanks to the work of fat activists, most of whom have been Black women, I worked on dismantling my own fatphobia and speaking up for myself and others. Today, I’m a better teacher for it.

I have asked for extended sizing in gym uniforms. I have set boundaries for myself around diet talk, asking colleagues not to talk about how great they feel thanks to intermittent fasting, or walking away when it doesn’t feel safe to speak up. I try to challenge student assumptions about fatness whenever they come up in class. I love to simply state “I am fat” whenever I hear a student make a fat joke. When they try to reassure me I am not, I tell them that I am, that it’s just a descriptor like “tall” or “skinny,” and I leave them to ponder this possibility, just as I once did.

However, fatphobia is institutionalized, and my small acts of resistance are not enough to make the system better in any significant way for all teachers and students. According to the Quebec Education Program, “Adopting a healthy, active lifestyle means seeking a quality of life characterized by an overall well-being and autonomously identifying the many factors that influence health.”

This definition doesn’t acknowledge the many factors that prevent individuals from attaining “overall well-being,” poverty, racism, and transphobia, to name just a few. Yes, I raise questions about how the education system shames fat people, with sympathetic colleagues and with my students, in spaces where I feel safe. But even with all my privilege as an educator, a white cis woman, and a midsize fat, I find myself staying silent more often than I’m proud to admit. Dismantling fatphobia is no small task.

I’ll keep taking up space in classrooms because I love teaching, but I do it knowing my body doesn’t fit. Changing this takes collective efforts. If we want to confront fatphobia in schools, we can start by advocating for policies that embrace a health-at-every-size approach, especially in physical education classes. We can acknowledge the variety of bodies in our classrooms and provide better furniture. We can teach allies to call out fat jokes, so their fat peers, or teachers, don’t have to. School shouldn’t be about learning to hate yourself—or others. It should be a place to grow into the best version of yourself.

Photo by ISTOCK/YNGSA

The thought only seems to come in the mirror. It plays out staccato, like a chess game, tennis match, sword fight.

It’s helping. No, it’s not. It could be. It’s obviously not helping. Look, the spot there, a bit back from the front, to the left—no, the right—it’s barer than before. OK. So maybe it’s not helping—but if I wasn’t doing it, it might be even worse than it is now.

I’m talking about the Rogaine. I’ve been rubbing its foam into my scalp—nominally twice a day, though, like any non-binary writer with ADHD and anxiety, I’m far from perfect at remembering—and have been for about a year now. To address My Problem, which people still call “male pattern baldness.” A box of three tubes—a three-month supply—can run you anywhere from about $100 to $150, but apparently no longer requires a prescription in Quebec, as it did when I first started using it. I still couldn’t tell you if it’s helping or not.

Of course, it’s embarrassing. Rogaine feels like such an awfully cis-het man product to me. It speaks, above all, I believe, to a male desire to be attractive to women. I feel like the gay community is relatively comfortable with sexy bald men, that it’s possible to be a sexy gay guy without the thick head of hair or the flowing locks. But, as I began to seriously confront the fact that my hair was thinning a few years back, the question of how this affected me as a non-binary person arose alongside it.

My first act as a non-binary person, after all, was dyeing my hair pink. I made the decision before I’d even come out; it was a statement choice, and a photo of my new ’do was the exclamation point on the sentence. Along with the cut, the colour cost north of $250, a bracing welcome to the world of femininity via professional hair care. My days of $20 barbershop cuts—in places where the men sometimes seemed like they were fighting to see who could say the most sexist thing—were over.

Though my gender does not line up with the sex I was assigned at birth, my experience with dysphoria has been a bit all over the place. I quite like having a penis, though honestly I don’t especially care for testicles, and I do dream at times of being able to try having a vulva and vagina—just as an option. I don’t mind being tall, but I do wish I was skinnier in a way that I recognize as feminine—because I, too, have internalized the idea that skinniness and feminine sexiness are inextricable from one another. I don’t crave surgery—but I wish I didn’t have facial hair or body hair, and if I ever had the money I’d probably look into laser hair removal. I think typically male modes of dress are largely boring, but it’s a boringness I feel comfortable in, and I have close to zero interest in wearing dresses or skirts. I’m curious about makeup, a little bit, and I wear eyeliner on occasion, and nail polish often, but most of it feels overwhelming. I’ve largely stopped wearing them entirely. I think about going on hormones every now and then, but they don’t call to me the way they do for many trans people.

On some level, then, I understood that hair was the easiest, best, most fun place for me to express my gender. Since the pink, I’ve gone back to get it dyed silver, pink again (though this time a subtler one), and, most recently, turquoise. Watching the colours fade over the first few weeks to a uniform blond, and then watching the blond hold tight while my natural brown sprouts irrepressibly up below it, has been fun. I’m 33 now, but for a long, long time—all through my teens and 20s—my hair was a place of conformity, one that, on some level, I longed to use for exploring, but didn’t know how to bring myself to. Coming out finally allowed me to confront, and satisfy, that desire. It felt, to use a word that comes up a fair amount in gender discussions, affirming.

One of the things I love about transness is its ability to subsume the world, the way it functions as a lens, the way everything can be considered in a trans light, in a trans context—even hair loss. One of the most beautiful things I’ve ever read is a sentence about transness I saw on Twitter. It was something like, “every person assigned male at birth has a potential breast size and they’ll never find out what it is unless they start taking hormones.” The idea that our bodies contain within them the blueprints for gender markers we do not claim as our own is a fascinating and unsounded depth of human thought, a beautiful, glittering pool whose bottom we have not yet attempted to touch.

American trans author Thomas Page McBee has at least done a jackknife dive into those waters. As he writes in his wrenching, gorgeous memoir, Man Alive, “In more anxious moments, washing my hands in single-stall gas station johns, I hoped that being a man would not feel like pretending. I looked in the mirror and tried to imagine myself into being. I could have a deep voice or a reedy one, I could become bald or not, I could be skinny or muscular, hairy or pimply. I was a mystery to myself, and yet my body knew what it needed. My body waited for me.”

I wondered what that might be like, the idea of anticipating a baldness, of awaiting it like one might await a child, that your body failing you was somehow a sign of rightness, of success. It was a hopeful concept, but one I felt outside of. Did any older trans women rejoice to find out they could no longer achieve erections? At least going grey, and then white, is gender neutral.

Still, for what feels like the overwhelming majority of out trans and non-binary people today, the questions of bodily aging remain academic. The one fact about trans ages that I’ve seen cited often—that trans women die on average at the age of 35—has since been debunked in a 2019 article in The Stranger, though the study it stemmed from did shine a spotlight on trans women of colour’s alarming vulnerability to acts of (almost always male) violence. Elsewhere, there simply isn’t a lot of data on the subject yet, given that non-binary people are still fighting to be recognized in the medical literature to begin with. The figures that are available—and Canada made a big step forward on this account when it released data from the 2021 census, which contained a question about non-cis gender identities, in April—suggest that trans and non-binary people, as a cohort, are younger than the general population, seemingly in large part because younger people come out at higher rates than older people: Canadian Gen Zers are about six and a half times more likely to identify as trans or non-binary than those born in 1945 or earlier (0.79 percent of the age cohort versus 0.12 percent, respectively). And with a growing acceptance of transness leading to even young children coming out, it’s plausible that the median age for trans people is actually dropping even as our numbers swell.

At 33, I’m hardly an ancient trans person, but it often feels like I’m over a decade removed from where the action is. Which means, for better or for worse, that the embodied experiences I’m living through are ones that so many trans people haven’t encountered yet, and, in many cases, haven’t even begun to consider. And while many trans people will find themselves aching for a different kind of aging as they hit middle age, as their bodies begin to deteriorate and change in sexed ways that may feel like betrayals, there is simply no playbook for aging in a non-binary body. It’s a kind of freedom, of course, but also a form of aloneness.

When was the last time you saw a sexy bald woman? I don’t mean a woman with her hair shaved close, like Amber Rose or V for Vendetta-era Natalie Portman. I mean a woman with a Mr. Clean-style cue-ball head—or worse, the inescapably “male” look that mixes sheer baldness on top with hair around the back and sides. Mainstream conceptions of female sexiness are so wedded to thick hair flowing from the top of the head that it’s conceptually hard for many people to imagine a beautiful woman without it. So, while the first signifier of beginning to go bald may be that one is moving away from youth, to begin to go bald is also to move inexorably away from femininity, or at least from the possibility of expressing a traditionally feminine beauty.

For someone who was just coming into my appreciation, in a real way, of that potential in my male-presenting body, that was a blow. I was only beginning, it felt like, to become myself, when genes, hormones, the inscrutable hard-coded logics of the body were already robbing me of the fullness of that self. I would never be the me I could have been.

Of course, no one is guaranteed beauty, particularly if your ideas of beauty have been passed down to you by mainstream culture, as they have been for so many of us. We don’t deserve that narrow ideal of beauty, we aren’t promised it. That’s sort of the point—it’s more a measure of what some people have and most others don’t than it is any one set of visual standards. We see that in the way ideals shift. People love to parrot that old saying that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but what’s more interesting about it is that certain time- and place-specific groups of beholders all seem to agree on a specific look, only for it to fall out of favour as soon as you cross a border, whether between countries or between decades.

So, I think about wigs, another hallmark of trans life. They can make any kind of wig these days—they could make a wig that looks like the hair I wish I had—short and masculine in length, unmistakably feminine in colour. Do I have wig money? Do I have wig confidence? Do I have a certain wig je ne sais quoi? Would wearing a wig make me feel more like a sad businessman with a toupée or an over-the-top drag queen? Would wearing a wig feel non-binary to me?

Recently, I’ve seen several meme-ified variations of a phrase on Twitter: non-binary people don’t owe anyone androgyny. But that doesn’t mean some of us don’t feel like we do, don’t feel that we’re not being “queer enough.” Did I recently describe myself to a friend as “diet trans” for feeling like my transness wasn’t, as people say, “embodied” enough? I did. Do I feel guilty whenever I let my nail polish lapse? I do. And when an old friend offered to take me out to get my ears pierced and I took over half a year off before getting back to her? It ate at me. How will I feel when it’s too late for me, when the hole in the ozone layer of my hair grows too big to paper over and I need to embrace being bald?

I lied about the mirror earlier, actually. I also think about My Problem in summer, when I’m caught in an unexpected rain, fat droplets thinning my hair down to what feels like nothing, exposing the weak spots. Like I’m made of something sweet and sticky that dissolves in water. Spun sugar. Of course, no one is guaranteed beauty. I’m still in mourning for the body I wanted, will never be the me I could have been. But I hope the
next wave of non-binary kids gets to make the most out of their hair while they still have it. And with luck, maybe one day I’ll be the older non-binary person a younger version of me sees as a model for aging gracefully.

Illustration by Diana Bolton

Family has always been complicated for me. My father left when I was three, and by the time I was 10 he had disappeared completely. I left home at 16 and struggled to obtain housing, briefly finding stability in a group home. I moved on to various households with my siblings, partners, and friends. In my early 30s I moved to Hamilton, Ontario, where I met my husband, and over the years we came to the decision not to have children. Witnessing my husband’s relationship with his elderly dad taught me another version of family life, where a parent could be kind and self-contained, always happy to see us, and supportive of our decisions. As the youngest offspring of three marriages, my husband has always been very close to his father. While we have never been certain what shape our future will take, we assured my father-in-law that one day he would live with us.

The pandemic quickly accelerated that trajectory, and what it meant to be the primary companions of a senior. That first spring, my then-87-year-old father-in-law and I began a weekly ritual of playing Scrabble. Prior to the pandemic, we had only played a handful of times. But the routine Sunday game grounded us through the first few months of unprecedented chaos. We watched in shared bewilderment as our lives became smaller and more confined. A soldier in the Korean war, my father-in-law had lived through his share of history-defining moments. It was soothing to know that his world had almost ended before, and yet here he was, teaching me new words on the porch. I kept all of our scorecards, creating an index I intended to work into a poetry chapbook about our deepening relationship.

Twice a week that summer, my husband and I visited his father’s nearby apartment, loaded up with laundry detergent, toilet paper, and groceries. By the fall, it had become three times a week, as we realized that in our absence, he was increasingly eating bread and cheese for dinner. We would visit, make dinner, refrigerate the leftovers, and two days later be back again. For that first year, we didn’t see a single friend indoors, but his dad was at the centre of our fiercely protected bubble. By winter, the constant worry about my father-in-law’s health, isolation, and the effort of stocking two apartments culminated in a shared decision: we would move in together.

Many of my friends watched on in bewilderment, pulling their cellphones out of their toddlers’ gooey mouths as I explained what was happening. The gulf between my friends and I felt bigger than ever, as I recounted the mountain of books, file folders, and trinkets my father-in-law owned, and his determination to move them all. I found us a new rental home that had enough storage space for all of his things, cursing him under my breath as I gave away half of my own books in the process. My husband and I developed a series of looks that flashed between us, denoting our surprise, laughter, or frustration as we shepherded his father through his first move in almost 20 years. Upon his arrival in the new house, after an epic snowstorm trapping the moving truck in the street for hours, he declared that he would never move again. This assuredness struck us with both relief and trepidation. We were so exhausted and stressed out from the months leading up to this day that it was rewarding that he was happy and comfortable in our new home. But, at the same time, there was a finality to his statement that caused us to panic: what would our own future look like now?

Adjusting to living with my husband’s father has been challenging at times, in particular due to giving up the privacy of our marriage. Daily tasks like preparing meals are interrupted by his father’s recitations from the daily newspaper. In the middle of cuddling on the couch with my husband, his dad is prone to walk in, armed with a new fact from a recent YouTube search. I have digested more about world history, war, and nature than I have an appetite for, while my own analyses of feminism, social justice, and popular culture have been met with equal reticence. A retired university professor, my father-in-law yearns for a heated debate on the freedom of speech, whereas any kind of raised voice causes me to shut down, panic, or retreat. This dynamic may be typical of the father-daughter archetype, but having grown up without a dad, the struggles characteristic of that bond remain uncomfortable to me. These entangled feelings of anger, amusement, respect, and love are evidence that I am finally, in my late 30s, learning how to have a father.

Perhaps because of the strain it puts on the younger generation, multi-generational living is not very common in Canada, despite its normalcy in other countries around the world. According to Statistics Canada’s “Housing Experiences in Canada: Seniors in 2018” report, only five percent of seniors aged 65 and over lived in multi-generational housing in Canada. In contrast, 15 percent live in senior residences and long-term care facilities. As the pandemic ravaged long-term care homes, the vulnerability and disposability of elders in Canadian culture was exposed. Disregard for the heightened risks of the elderly was regularly vocalized throughout masking and vaccine debates, while a staggering 34,999 people over 60 in Canada died from COVID-19 by April 2022.

Amidst these figures, seniors face daily accessibility issues exacerbated by the pandemic. My father-in-law is very
healthy, but as an 88-year-old, he has required two emergency hospitalizations during the past two years. Neither experience yielded follow-up care from his family doctor; his attempt at a phone appointment left him waiting all day for a call that never came. Despite his media and technology literacy, he could not navigate provincial COVID-19 websites. Instead, I booked my father-in-law for his vaccines, drove him to his appointments, and monitored his symptoms afterwards. My husband ordered him masks he could breathe well in after he experienced problems with other medical masks. The single attempt he made to go out for coffee under the vaccine passport system left him denied entry to a coffee shop, standing outside in the cold, clutching his clinic-issued proof of triple vaccination in confusion; to be admitted to the cafe, he required a QR code, despite not owning a smartphone. I feel acute rage thinking of all of the individuals and families who have struggled in similar, and more pronounced, ways due to barriers in accessibility, exacerbated by other forms of systemic and individual discrimination.

As the world fluctuates in and out of pandemic waves, my father-in-law’s health, safety, and dignity remains paramount in our lives. While no one can predict what their life will look like in the next five years, my husband and I feel particularly uncertain. Every day, out of step with the majority of our generation, we make unseen decisions that revolve around my father-in-law, and shift our larger life goals in line with his aging.

Each morning, my father-in-law encourages me to notice the birds that frequent the feeders in our backyard. Jays, orioles, and cardinals flash primary colors, swiftly taking flight as my dogs barrel toward them. A year ago, I couldn’t distinguish between their calls, but now they ring out separately. “It’s a nice day today,” my father-in-law says, and means it, peering out over the trees. As he holds fast to what autonomy he has left, my husband and I come to terms with our interdependence. Perhaps this is one of the many lessons of belonging in a family, in whatever shape it ultimately takes.