Victoria

They say the only way to heal from anything is to forgive.

When I was around 10 we moved to Victoria. I hated it.

People will tell you children are resilient, they'll adapt to just about anything. I don't believe it.

By the time you're 10 years old, you are a person and while there may have been any number of places on earth where you could have dropped my 10 year-old self and had me thrive, Victoria was not one of them.

We came from the east, a more antithetical mind-set to the pacific northwest - well, I honestly don't think one exists. Coming from within the country there is the expectation that one still belongs somehow. If I had come from another country, I would have expected to be out of my element. As it was, Victoria made me feel as though I had somehow failed to attain the basic status of functioning human being.

I was a Canadian kid, I knew that for certain. There was no logical reason why I should feel so completely alien to that place, yet I did. I was louder than the Victorian kids, my clothes were weirder, much weirder. My taste in music - dear God, there was no common ground there at all. I was used to sculpture parks, open markets, street musicians and the planetarium - none of these things existed in Victoria. In Montreal we would hang around the steps of the porch on hot summer nights watching the thunderstorms and pretending to colour while we listened to our mothers gossip and tell stories about their youth.

We would sneak tubes of lipstick from their dressers and play at being rock stars in the alley behind our attached houses. We built snow forts. We would sneak off to the bedrooms of older siblings and listen to comedians or dance to their 45s on their record players - the kids in

Victoria did none of these things.

The kids in Victoria had easy-bake ovens and they played in playgrounds well away from their parents. They liked to look "sporty." What this meant was the girls wore jeans and little tee-shirts or shorts and little tee-shirts and no make up. They liked to be cute. I liked to be pretty. I still liked to race the boys and I certainly liked to win but I liked to do so while looking like a girl. The little girls I knew in Victoria liked to lose to the boys while looking rather too much like them for my tastes. To say I appeared to be contrary would be a significant understatement.

My parents were divorcing but that wasn't it. The kids, from the first morning I spent at school, made me despair of ever finding a friend. They seemed completely free of emotion. Compared to my Montreal friends they had no idea what was going on in the world and in the entire school there was not one black kid. This struck me as sinister.

These whiter than white children, interested mostly in sports and in the brand names of the things they acquired - they scared me. They never spilled anything, never skinned a knee or lost their tempers, from the outside, they felt cold and superior. I was an alien, an outsider and the more time passed, the more I tried to bury it, the more acutely I felt it.

The landscape is stunning, the ocean mesmerizing, even miraculous; the weather - actually, I am indifferent to Victoria's weather. It is always cool and breezy, always perfect. Summer is a nudge warmer than autumn which is a nudge warmer than spring was, which is only a nudge warmer than winter. It is placid, unmoving, still. It demands nothing. However, it is always windy and so I am always at least mildly annoyed with it.

When I visit, I take hundreds of pictures of the place. I think I am trying to imprint a kind of love of it on my own psyche - it just never sticks.

In Victoria, I developed a taste for solitary exploration. The few children who did become my friends were mostly other migrant kids, other outsiders, the daughters of Army officers or families who came to try their luck on the west coast and eventually left, in high school it was the gay kids, the artist kids, the unpopular kids and looking back, I have to say, I still love every one of those kids in my memory. I still wish them every blessing. I'm sure they are all successful adults now, they all still tug at my heart.

I remember two girls in particular today, one was so tough, it seemed as though nothing could hurt her. Her hair was cut short and the other kids made fun of her for it. She was quiet, nearly silent all the time and while the other kids whispered that her short short hair - really a brush cut, was the result of a particularly stubborn case of lice the truth was much stranger. She just preferred it that way.

The other was tall, overweight and painfully shy. Her clothes, because of her size, were the clothes of a matron, not a middle-school girl and this only made matters worse. I was president of the drama club and as such could produce my own play. I cast the big girl in a leading role and she was spectacular. Just spectacular. Years later I saw her working at the cosmetics counter of a local department store and it made me smile.

I was weird but I was pretty and even then, somewhere inside me I knew I could offer these kids some protection by being their friend. The gawky gay boy who hung around with me had a place that several of the more typically attractive boys envied, the big, awkward girl had an edge that the pretty, popular girls did not - she went on stage and people applauded.

My feelings of being completely wrong for the place meant that I was ready to stand up for the other kids who were left out of popular society and when I did, finally become popular myself in high school, I tried not to forget it - sure, I was a jerk in a hundred other ways but I think I remembered how it felt to be excluded.

In my early 20's I threw myself into a social life, dancing, attending openings, going to restaurants - didn't matter. Nothing could shake the feeling that I was trapped in the wrong place far from the person I was somehow waiting to meet - none of it made any sense then and it doesn't, I suppose, make much more now but this blog entry is an attempt to let it go and to forgive the place for being such a huge vacume in my life. I don't want to regret it.

I suppose this is how it feels to be gender dysphoric - you have every outward reason to accept the definition society places on you and yet there is no denying what you know to be true. You are what you are and only what you know you are is the truth.

Hard to think anything that took up so much time and space in one life could be something to regret but I think it is better to see it, regret it and move into the life I live now, the one I don't regret - without giving that one negative aspect even more of myself.

I wanted to fall in love with Victoria, wanted to fall in love in Victoria and I had two or three relationships in an effort to convince myself it was happening but I owe those people real apologies because honestly, it never was. When I think of the damage done just in trying to attach to the unattachable, trying to pretend to live, it makes me want to cry.

I expect this blog will return to Victoria stories with some regularity and I don't expect that to make sense. We are all such a mass of contradictions. The first person I am letting off the hook for all of that is me now. Then Victoria and as for everyone else - they never needed forgiving. I don't blame a soul for the life they had to live. Everybody's gotta learn sometime.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIVh8Mu1a4Q


At the top of this post (because I don't know how else to put them in) are some pictures from my most recent visit to the city most people would call my home town.