Where? Here. When? Now.

Prompted, of course, by the result of the United States’ election, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what it means to make art that is of value. If I’m making politically-motivated art, aren’t I stuck between either preaching to the choir or trying to change the minds of people who will steadfastly refuse to listen to me? If I’m making entertainment, aren’t I contributing to the mass apathy that got us into this mess in the first place? Well, to a certain extent, yes. But there’s another part of me that knows that’s not all of it, that there is a way to find a middle ground, and that it’s worth trying to find.

I’ve been lucky enough to have found myself in a place right now where I feel incredibly safe and accepted, but the world is so much larger than whatever tiny part of it I’m standing on. As wonderful as it is to be here at this point in my life, it also means that if I am too lazy or apathetic or afraid to stand up and fight, I can get away with it. And that is not okay. I’d like to say I haven’t been getting away with it, that I’ve been fighting publicly for the things I believe in, but mostly I’ve been making vague statements about my supposed vales, and feeling totally swamped by all the things I don’t understand or know how to deal with. In the past I’ve often found myself romanticizing the notion of having some kind of clear-cut cause to fight for, as if historical movements weren’t just as full of difficulty and misunderstanding and grey areas as the ones we’re facing today. Everything is way cleaner in retrospect. I can look back on things people have done in the past and say I totally would have been a part of this or that had I been alive then — but that’s the thing, I’m alive now. I’m alive during this time, facing these issues, in this world as it is, and nobody is going to tell me what I’m supposed to do about it.

What I do know is that there is so much more I can be trying to learn, to educate myself about, so I can at least engage on some level with the world outside my front door. It is so so so so so easy to do nothing, to keep myself misinformed, disengaged, to pretend that everything is fine. The trick is to accept that there are no sides. It’s not “us” versus “them” because it’s way more complicated than that, and it doesn’t help anyone to turn your so-called enemies into monsters. They’re human beings just like me and we’re all just trying to figure it out. I have to remember that as difficult as it may be it is not in my best interests to close myself off to the people who will challenge me and my beliefs. It’s hard, but I’m trying.

As for the role of art in all of this, well, I’m still working on that, but I think I’m getting closer. I had the privilege of being able to volunteer with Bread and Puppet Theatre and be a part of their performance of Faust 3 for the past few days, and it was an awesome experience. It was like nothing I’ve ever done before and, things being as they are, it felt exceptionally relevant. Although their theatre is very activist/political, it’s rooted in a place of hope and belief in the redemptive power of art — cheap art, specifically, the kind that is taken off its pedestal and given back to the people.
Of course I don’t know whether or not that’s the answer, and I don’t know if that specifically is the kind of art I want to make, but I know for sure that trying anything is better than sitting here twiddling my thumbs and hoping that everything will turn out alright. I believe in rational faith: the balance between critical thinking and hope. I believe in community and love and trying your best to connect with everyone you come in contact with, even the people who disagree with you. I believe in good friends and good food and not taking everything so seriously all the time, but also knowing that sometimes things are incredibly serious, and that it’s important to make that distinction. I believe that deep down, as shitty as the world may be, people are good.

To quote WH Auden (and you can substitute poetry for whatever art you like):

“For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives / In the valley of its making where executives / Would never want to tamper, flows on south / From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs, / Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives, / A way of happening, a mouth.”

Art can remind us of what we’re fighting against and what we’re fighting for. It can take us out of our isolation, our apathy, and open us up to the people around us. Art doesn’t make things happen, but it brings us to the places where they can. And now as much as ever, we need it.

Six Weeks in Montreal

“He wondered whether home was a thing that happened to a place after a while, or if it was something that you found in the end, if you simply walked and waited and willed it long enough.”
— Neil Gaiman, American Gods

 I moved in on August 27.

Classes started on September 6.

I didn't go home for Thanksgiving weekend — not because I didn't want to see my family, I do! But because I knew it'd throw me off. I'm just now finding my footing here. Things are starting to seem more real, solid.

For a long time when I first got here I couldn't shake the feeling that I was just visiting, that this was some kind of trip I was going on. Finding yourself in a new place takes time, but I think I'm finally starting to grow roots here (or at least heavier shoes). Thinking about it, I think I've officially passed the point where I could go home and have it feel the same way.

It's partly terrific and partly terrifying but I don't really have a place I can definitively say is my home anymore. I switched my saved "Home" location on google maps to my residence here because it makes it easier to navigate, but also in part because this is my home now. Or at least it's where I'm living for the time being.

Home in my head is how I refer to the house I moved out of in August. To the province I was born in. To the city I went to elementary and high school in.

But I know that things have shifted in a solid kind of way because now, when I go home (home back in Ontario) for Christmas, or for summer break once school's over, it'll be a transitory space, impermanent in a way it never was before. My bedroom will be the same as it was when I left, but I'll be different.

This summer, my home in Ontario will be the place I'm staying while I wait to go back to school. When school starts again, home will be whatever house or apartment I end up living in that year. Home is a point of reference — when I say I'm going home after class I mean I'm going back to my dorm room. When I talk about what it was like "back home" I mean the city I grew up in. When I say I miss home, I don't mean I miss a place at all. I miss that time in my life, the people I knew, the person I was.

Soon enough, I won't be able to say that my parent's house is my home anymore at all. I'll have my own place to spend the summers in, and my parent's house will be the place I'm simply visiting, a stop on my way to somewhere else.

I've never really had any desire to settle down and start a family, but the idea of home is something that's just kind of always been a given for me. I know where it is, that single point of reference. Now that I'm starting to realize that it won't exist for me for much longer I find myself trying to redefine what home is. It's not whatever place you're staying, and I don't think it's that Garden State quote about people creating a collective idea around a place together either. I don't think home is a place at all — or at least I don't think it should be. Home should be yourself. If you can become a full person, if you know yourself and are comfortable and proud of who you are, you can be at home within yourself, and you never have to be tied to one place because you are your point of reference. You are your home.

“Where does it all lead? What will become of us? These were our young questions, and young answers were revealed. It leads to each other. We become ourselves.”
— Patti Smith, Just Kids
 

An Open Letter To The Class Of 2016

I graduated from high school on June 26th, and in the weeks since I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about what that means. Mostly this comes in alternating waves of excitement and abject terror; a special kind of butterflies in the stomach that has resulted from the realization that most of the things I once held on to as stable and consistent in my life are no longer in place. The roof, all four walls, and the floor of the safe little house I’ve built for myself here have been removed in one fell swoop. To say I don’t feel ready would be an understatement. But I also know that if I only ever did things I felt ready for I probably wouldn’t get out of bed in the morning.

The scariest part about this whole thing, though, has been my all-pervading worry that I should, by now, be far better at being a person than I currently am. There are so many things I feel like I should have gotten over — my perfectionism, my fear of taking risks, my socially awkward tendency to somehow be simultaneously both overbearing and shy — and as much as I’ve been working on it, it’s hard to tell if I’m making any kind of progress. My growth as a human being isn’t something that can be easily quantified, so as long as I continue to be obsessed with being able to control and understand everything in my life, I won’t be able to shake the feeling that I must somehow be failing.

It’s not that I think I’m supposed to be flawless, but with University right around the corner, I’m terrified that where I am right now isn’t good enough, and even more terrified that I’m never going to change. That there’s some kind of inherent problem with who I am as a person, and regardless of what I try to do I’ll always, deep down, be left with myself.

So, confused and concerned and close to the end of my tether, I did what I always do in this kind of situation: I started to write.

What resulted is kind of my unofficial graduation speech — one last nod to high school before I step out into the “real world”, and a way to reassure myself in attempting to reassure others. I hope it can be of some use to anyone who reads it no matter what stage of your life you’re graduating from, even if it’s just the step between today and tomorrow.

Without further ado:

An open letter to the Class of 2016,

One thing that’s become increasingly apparent to me over the past little while is that high school just kind of… ends. You go to your last few classes, take your exams, get your grades, and waltz out of graduation with a diploma that supposedly signifies some kind of meaningful achievement, and then, well — then it’s the whole rest of your life.

With graduating from high school, as with pretty much every so-called milestone in our lives, we spend so much time thinking about what it’s going to be like that by the time we actually get there it really doesn’t feel as special as we might have hoped. I turned 18 in January, officially making me an adult in the eyes of the Canadian government, but I certainly didn’t wake up that morning feeling any different than I usually do. It was just another day, like every other day, and every other big and little moment in my life that never seem like very much at all while they’re happening to me. The thing is though, all those big and little moments add up to something.

Think about who you were when you started high school compared to who you are now. You’re still the same person, but you’re also someone entirely different. You look a little different — a little older — you like different things, you have different friends, you’re better at some things now (and worse at others). You’re still you. But you’re different.

Growing up doesn’t happen all at once. It doesn’t hit you over the head in some transcendent moment of clarity and change. It happens day by day, moment by moment, ploddingly, painfully, s l o w l y. But it happens. It’s just almost impossible to notice. Simultaneously never-ending and over in the blink of an eye, we are hedged in at all sides by the inexorable passage of time.

This can be sad. You can be nostalgic about all the good moments you’ll never be able to relive. You can worry about the wasted time you won’t get back, the decisions you won’t be able to change, the things you said, did, were.

You can hate yourself for not growing up fast enough, not learning the lessons you feel like you keep on being hit with over and over, you can wish with all of your heart for things to get better right away, for things to stop hurting, for you to finally find the perfect life you know you’re meant to have.

But we all know it doesn’t work like that.

How it does work is the way it always has, and how it has over these past few years. Think back again to who you were when you started high school. In another four years you’ll probably feel the way you feel about yourself back then, about yourself right now. The things you’re scared of won’t seem so bad anymore, the views you hold will feel outdated, you’ll say things like “I was so stupid back then!”, and “what was I thinking!”. You’ll probably be embarrassed. That haircut! Those shoes!

But I want you to give yourself some credit. Everything looks much easier in retrospect. Right now it’s hard. Right now it’s scary. Right now it hurts like hell. But one day, maybe in four years, maybe in fourteen, maybe in forty; one day it won’t anymore. You’ll have new problems then — don’t get me wrong, it never just ends — but these problems, these fears, they’ll be gone.

I’m never going to be able to find all of the answers. I know that. I know I’m never going to be able to completely understand myself. I know there are always going to be parts of me that will never change completely. But I also know that I am who I am because of all the unique ways I’m messed up. Maybe I’ll always be a bit of a perfectionist, but maybe I’ll also always love socks with funky patterns on them, and use quotes in casual conversation, and skip down stairs, and cry at the happy parts of movies. Those things are as much a part of me as anything else is. We can choose what we allow to define ourselves, and there are so many things that I think define me right now that one day I’ll barely remember. And that’s good too.

Who you are right now is only one small point on a path that goes so far away you can’t even imagine what’s on the other end of it. The trick is knowing that the path doesn’t stop. There’s no big end goal, no glowing mountain for you to reach and know that now, finally, you’ve grown up, you’re all better, all done. What there is, is you. Right here, right now. And the will to keep on going anyway.

I would wish you good luck, but you don’t need it.

Things will change, that’s part of being alive. Whether you like it or not, they always do.And I hope that you are always, always, always growing up.

Love,

Ella

In Defense of Late Bloomers

Typography by Sherry Qian

Originally published in Show & Tell Zine

I’ve always been a bit of a late bloomer. I was the flat-chested, stick-thin thirteen year old hoping beyond hope that I’d wake up one morning with boobs; the one who watched from the sidelines as all my friends started dating, the one who didn’t start wearing makeup until the tenth grade, the one who saw a concert for the first time last summer. I have this vivid memory of being about eleven or twelve and crying to my mom that I didn’t have a “best friend” like all the girls in movies did -- someone whose house I’d go over to all the time, or who would call me after school to gossip and chat about our lives. She told me it was just because of the school I was at, that most of my friends lived far away, that their parents were strict about when they could go out. She said that it would be better in High School.

Whether or not that particular conversation had much of an impact on me, I’ve heard the same thing expressed in various ways across various mediums for pretty much my entire life. High School. The big one. “The best four years of your life”. Yes, of course the universe doesn’t start and end with high school. There’s a whole world out there, and the idea that the four years you spend trying to get your shit together stuck in a building with a bunch of other sweaty, stressed-out, frightened teenagers will be the peak of an 80+ year lifespan is more than a little ridiculous. But if all we ever hear is “don’t worry, it’ll be better when you’re older” -- well, that’s the same advice I got when I was twelve: just wait. Just wait. Just wait. It’ll be better in high school, it’ll be better in university, it’ll be better once you graduate, it’ll be better when you’re dead. At what point is it too late?

I’m seventeen -- why haven’t I had my first kiss yet? Why haven’t I gotten drunk, or thrown a house party, or gone on a date, or a road trip, or skipped school, or snuck out of the house at night, or gone on any of the amazing adventures with a band of quirky misfits my 12-year-old self was sure I’d be having? When I was younger all I wanted to do was grow up. Now, with one year left of high school and less than three years left of being a teenager, I feel like I’m running out of time. 

In my darker, self-pitying moments I attribute all of this to some personal fault of mine. Maybe I’m ugly or annoying and everybody hates me, or I’m too scared to take risks and do things that I could get in trouble for. Maybe I’m forever doomed to go through life without ever really doing anything because I’m a Boring Person. I feel like I’m missing out on some integral part of The Teen Experience™ that movies and books and TV shows have been selling me for so long, and as long as my life continues to be unexceptional, I’m plagued by the idea that I must be wasting it. 

The problem with this type of thinking, however, is that it’s all wrapped up in expectation. If you’ve spent your whole life expecting that certain very specific things are going to happen to you at very specific times, it’s hardly surprising that you feel like a failure when they don’t. High school comes with a set of expectations, and so does University, and adulthood, and just about everything you’ll ever do -- and as long as I keep focusing on the things I haven’t done yet, I’ll forget about the things that I have. I may not have gone on a date yet, or been to a real “party”, but I have gone to New York, and ridden a horse, and seen Shakespeare in the park, and read a 1079 page novel, and I have absolutely no idea where life will take me next.

So when I worry about why I haven’t had my first kiss yet, or when I worry about whether or not I should take a gap year after high school, or when I worry that I’ll be missing out on something if I go to theatre school instead of university, or when I worry that if I do go to university it’ll be too late to go to theatre school afterwards, it’s because I expect that things always and only happen in one specific way. I was lucky enough to be accepted to a two-week theatre training program at the beginning of this summer, and the actress I was paired with there as my “artist-mentor” gave a me a really good piece of advice. She said that there’s no A + B = C pathway for being an actor. There’s no set of rules or any guarantee that if you do this or that thing, you’ll end up with one specific outcome. Anything you learn can be useful, whether it’s English lit or particle physics, because it’s all about figuring out who you are and what you want -- and this can apply to anything. Maybe it’s a cheesy notion, but that doesn’t stop it from being true. There’s no such thing as Too Late. 

I suppose I could have had any of the stereotypical teen experiences I expected I would have in high school if I had forced them, but it probably would have felt worse to do things just for the sake of crossing them off of some kind of cosmic to-do list than to wait until things happened on their own. Sure, you shouldn’t just sit back and wait for things to happen to you, and yes it’s more than possible to be lazy, or mess up, or make the “wrong” choice, but dwelling on it isn’t going to change anything. 

In the end, whatever happens happens. There aren’t any rules, there aren’t any guarantees, and I’m not going to force anything just for the sake of having done so. I don’t know what happens next any more than you do, but I can grit my teeth, make choices I believe in, and try my best to figure it out as I go along. 

That’s all any of us can do, really. 

Field Trip 2015

Field Trip is a two day music festival started by Toronto record label Arts & Crafts. It was the first music festival I had ever been to, and if it’s anything to go by, it won’t be my last. According to their website, Field Trip is “Toronto’s downtown community music and arts festival”, and it certainly fit the bill.

The first thing I noticed when my friends and I arrived there just past 1PM on Saturday (we were aiming for earlier, but that’s a long story involving cancelled subways, missed GO buses, streetcar confusion, and an overall inability to navigate downtown public transit) was the vast range of ages of the people there. I was only really expecting to see teenagers and twenty to thirty year-olds, but there were a ton of younger kids and older people as well. One of my favourite moments of the day was seeing this woman who was probably in her 70’s or 80’s getting really into dancing to Pins & Needles -- don’t let anyone tell you you’re too old to go to a music festival.

There was a lot offered for the really young crowd as well. Not only was the whole festival free for anyone under twelve (a 5’2” friend of mine joked that she should have pretended to be someone’s little sister), but they had a whole kids’ section with everything from bouncy castles to face painting, and an afternoon performance by the ever-cheerful Sharon and Bram. I won’t pretend I wasn’t at least a little jealous -- or tempted to run through the giant plume of bubbles that I passed by on my way to the TD Fort York Stage.

There were artists selling handmade pins and hats and and flower crowns, there was some kind of immersive technology game that I didn’t get a chance to check out because the line up was too long, apparently there was a stand up comedy show that I never got around to seeing either, someone was painting a mural, a couple of women were doing some pretty impressive hula-hooping, and that’s not even mentioning the food trucks! I had a portobello burger for lunch, which is essentially a hamburger except instead of meat it’s just one giant mushroom (I know, I couldn’t believe it either). Dinner was mac and cheese with gelato for dessert, and by that point I had to stop buying food or I wasn’t going to be able to afford the bus fare home.

Now, as much as I could spent the whole time talking about everything else, the most important part of any music festival, of course, is the music. I think the main thing I kept thinking about during the whole experience was that there was so much going on I’d never be able to see everything, but I managed to get to a hell of a lot. After seeing a great set by Pins and Needles at 1:30, we walked over to the other side and spent most of the time at the Garrison Stage. We lay down our blankets near the back of the field and ate lunch while listening to The Belle Game, and then moved right up to the front for the next act: From Jamaica to Toronto. We were pretty lucky in that we got to stay pretty close to the stage throughout the whole evening, as the crowd got bigger and bigger through De La Soul, The War on Drugs, Arkells, and finally the headliners for the night, Alabama Shakes. I wasn’t too familiar with most of the bands there, but not knowing all the lyrics didn’t stop the whole experience being pretty spectacular overall. Alabama Shakes were definitely my favourite, so thank you for that, Field Trip, I don’t know if I would have found out about them otherwise. Brittany Howard has a voice like you wouldn’t believe, and the whole thing was a perfect way to cap off a great evening. I think the sense of community in the audience was at its peak by that point, because I could almost feel the buzz in the air around me like something alive. Being shoved in at close quarters with a big crowd may have its downsides, but my god if there isn’t something magical about jumping up and down and cheering to the same beat as a thousand other people.