When It All Started to Go To Shit

 This is a long one. I know I haven't posted in a long time, I hope to start up writing again about my journey. This is just some stuff I felt like I needed to get off my chest. The following is a story I've never really told anyone, especially not in such detail. I've still left some stuff out, and probably included too much, but fuck it. It helps to put it out there.  

In the spring of 2009 I had a complete mental breakdown. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t the beginning of my mental illness, but it was definitely the beginning of my struggle with it.

I was a bike courier at the time, and had been running a monthly performance/DJ night in my city that showed bike videos, both pro and local indie vids, a merch/swap meet and info table, as well as an open mic and live performance section. It was a lot of work to put together and despite my constant asking for help promoting from my DJs and all those involved, I was shouldering a good 95% of the organization and promotions.

I would work delivering packages the day of, ride home, shit/shower/shave and head directly to the bar, usually arriving at about 7pm and setting up, and I wouldn’t get home till about 3am. I would be at my day job fielding calls all day long from sponsors, the bar, DJs and people wanting to know what time it started or what cover was, even though I’d designed and printed flyers out of pocket that had all that info. Once, a DJ called me to tell me that he saw a blurb about our night in the local alt-weekly, I’m pretty sure he thought he was doing me a favour by informing me, and didn’t consider it was my work that got our night’s info in the paper in the first place. Once, a local bike advocate walked in to the bar as I was setting up, plunked some flyers in front of me and told me, “you can set them up,” as if I wasn’t already swamped with set up work. Thanks, bud.

Getting $5 cover at the door was like pulling teeth and the DJs would show up, spin for an hour and a half then take their pay and leave. I begged them to take the flyers I designed and paid for and get their friends to come out but they wouldn’t. The largest turn out we ever got was the day before a long weekend and of 120 in attendance, I knew all but 5 people.

Performers would skip sound check and show up wobbly drunk, talking about how I don’t have to worry because they’re gonna kill it, which – surprise surprise – they wouldn’t.

It was all very stressful but I thought I was doing something positive for my local community. I figured that all we needed to do was keep throwing the parties and promoting for the summer and numbers would steadily go up and make it all worth it.

I was also scheduled to take a trip to Japan a few months down the road and had no idea how I was going to be able to survive and on what money for the two weeks I was to be there. It was the trip of a lifetime – the Cycle Messenger World Championships – and in Tokyo. Anyone who knows me knows that I am in love with all things Edo Japan. I was taking Japanese lessons so I wouldn’t be assed-out when I got there. I was excited beyond belief to see the city, the ancient architecture, the lights, the culture, the people. It was the trip of my dreams and a friend had convinced Crumpler Bags to sponsor my flight as long as I was their brand ambassador. It was a dream come true.

At the same time as all of this, I was also recording an album that I could barely afford with a producer who really didn’t care about the final product and I’m pretty sure resented me for being broke. We worked out a deal that I would pay him in weed, or with whatever money I could afford, to a set price per track. In 2008 I’d linked him up with a documentary TV show I was asked to be in, and they ended up paying for all my recording costs as well as paying us for licensing the music. It was a stroke of luck for me, as I wouldn’t have been able to afford to get the work done in as short a time without them. The crazy part was that, in the end, they used a piece of a certain song of mine but with ad-libbed lyrics in the show, and so skirted around paying me for the licensing. In the end, the producer was paid more than me even though I was one of the main characters in the show. Some time later, he tried to tell me I still owed him money. I don’t make music anymore.

The day before I cracked, was the last day of the spring bike show weekend. It occurred to me just that night that the show would be a perfect opportunity to promote my Velosocial bike dance night and was wound up so I couldn’t sleep. Of course, no one from my “team” was available to help flyer or poster the show, so as with all other work for the night, that fell on me alone.

I had a bunch of posters already printed, and went down to tape them up at the Direct Energy Centre at the CNE where the bike show was going on. Security told me that I wasn’t allowed to poster, but somehow through my smooth talking and charm (or some divine intervention) I promised the guard that if she let me poster the outside windows, I would go around and take down every last one of them when the show was done. In the end they’d only stay up for a few hours and by the time the sun set, no one would know they were ever there. Somehow the guard went with it and off to work I went.

I was so jazzed and proud of myself for pulling off the job, as well as the excitement that a bigger and more diverse bike-loving crowd would bring, that I couldn’t sleep for another night.

The next day, Monday, I can’t quite remember but I think I took the morning/day off to film a short unpaid appearance and performance at a cable access show that my producer had hooked me up with. It went fairly well, but during sound check (that wasn’t filmed) I swore, but didn’t realize there were kids in the room. There were maybe 5 of them with two adults, and they were sitting in an upper balcony that was blocked from my view by the stage lighting. I was embarrassed, apologized and tried to make light of my gaffe, but I’m not sure how well I played it off. The host was friendly and nice, but I was definitely manic and acting weird. After that, I think I rode my bike up to my courier office 1hr each way (I can’t quite remember the order of events) and actually spoke to my boss while in a manic state. I barely remember what I was rambling on about to him. I guess I’m lucky I wasn’t fired on the spot. That’s legal in the courier industry.

That night though, it happened. I didn’t sleep again and my grasp on reality loosened to the point that I went on a full-on schizophrenic odyssey around my city. I had a huge change jar I’d been saving up, it must have had $400+ in it, and gave it all to a cab driver who dropped me off in a neighbourhood I never asked to go to. I was dropped off somewhere in North York – Lepus Starway or something – when I told the cabbie I wanted to be dropped off at Keele and Steeles. I ditched my courier bag in an apartment stairwell and ran into a couple teenagers out for kicks. I was exhausted plus some, but only resting for 20mins at a time here and there because didn’t know how to calm myself enough to sleep.

At some point in all this, I visited an artist friend of mine with a couple books in my bag about the hidden history of mankind and tried to explain to him all the insanity in my head. He let me leave his house.

I ended up taking the subway to a friend’s house because he knew about computers, and in my coo-coo bananas brain, computers were the key to me saving the world and making sure the eye in the sky couldn’t track me. He wasn’t really equipped to help, so he gave me coffee, and jackhammers were ripping down a building next door. I started hearing morse-code like beeping in my head and was convinced it was aliens or something beaming messages at me. I ended up fleeing, thinking “they” found me.

I snuck into an insurance office that was left open while reception was in the bathroom, and stole papers off the boss’ desk. I ducked into a school and hid in the boiler room for a bit. I ran into a barber shop and stole and ate a banana out of someone’s lunch after asking them if I could use the washroom. On my way out, I tried to steal a car (with no keys or any clue how to hot wire it) and by then the cops were called. They thought I was on crack. Though I’ve never tried crack I imagine I was experiencing what it might feel like. My head was a jumbled mess of insomnia, manic deciphering of perceived hidden messages, and paranoia. It was dizzying.

I remember being in the cop car and him asking what drugs I’d taken. I kept saying the blue pill, the blue pill, the blue pill. I couldn’t remember it’s name, then finally I remembered, I took Advil allergy medication at some point before I left my house.

I remember being in the ambulance. I bit my tongue a few millimetres from the tip and sawed my teeth back and forth till the piece came off. I remember hearing the tearing sounds from inside my head. I spat the piece of my tongue at the poor EMS worker.

I vaguely remember being admitted to hospital. I think they put me in a straight jacket.

The next thing I remember, I woke up on a ward at Toronto Eastern Hospital but it was days later. My friend that gave me coffee said he visited me and I said some stuff, but I have no memory of it. I was pretty drugged up.

I ran into a couple people I knew on the ward. It was surreal. I think I was in there for a week, but it may have even been two.

When my mother called, she almost immediately began yelling at me. All I remember was, “Oh Sunny. What did you do,” before she went in.

I interrupted her and said, ”look. I’m already going through enough right now and I don’t need your bullshit. I’m on a fucking mental ward. You can calm down and stop yelling or I’ll hang up.” Her tone softened. Before she hung up she promised to give me $1000 for my trip to Japan. The week preceding my trip, the amount was halved and when I got angry that she lied to me while I was in the hospital, the amount dropped further to $250 because I was being ungrateful. I should have seen it coming. Such is emotional blackmail, my mother’s specialty. The worst part was that I had to take her money, I wouldn’t have been able to scrape by without it. I’m pretty sure she knew that.

A girl whom I was close friends with in grade 11 (the second time) was also on the ward. I used to go to her house across from our school in Scarborough for lunch all the time. Once when we opened a package of Kraft Dinner and plunked it into the boiling water, little ant-like bugs called weevils floated up. I’d met the girl’s mother, who taught me that tobacco was sacred in her culture, and that the ancestors would be pissed that we abuse it as cigarette smokers, like I was at the time. That stuck with me. We lost touch after that but I ran into her after we’d graduated. She seemed strange and disconnected. She smudged with sage in a sea shell with pearl coating on the inside. I can’t remember if she’d had her child at that time, or if that was later. She was a sweetheart, and gentle. When we were on the ward together, she was a total space cadet. I think she was on lithium. I was on lorazepam and God only knows what else though, so I was a total space cadet too.

There was also a guy on the ward whose I met through a courier friend downtown. I had a crush on him. We exchanged numbers when I left. I called him once and he didn’t really have much to say that was any type of interesting. He told me he had a pet pigeon on his balcony that said, “coo coo.” I never called him again.

I remember the first day when I walked into the TV room on the ward. There was a story on the news about a helicopter dropping out of the sky. In my brain that was a message for me to decipher, that the end of the world was nigh and I had been sent to save it. It took a couple days for me to stop seeing encoded messages somehow directed to me.

I saw a doctor twice while I was on the ward. Or, I think it was twice. The appointments were only ever about 10mins long. All he did was ask me a few questions so he could decide what drugs to put me on. Very cold, clinical questions. He had no desire to know what put me in there, he had no desire to fix the problem, he just wanted to medicate the symptoms. I’d been in and out of one-on-one counseling since I was 13 – at that point it would have been 19 years – so I expected some kind of council from the doctor. I got no long-term assistance or benefit from it at all.

My courier friends – the ones I really wasn’t great friends with but who had a strong sense of social responsibility – came to visit me. One brought their kid. Though it was flattering and very sweet of them, I just felt like a circus animal or side show. Come look at my friend the crazy lady. None of the people I considered my good friends showed up.

When I got out, I was just happy to be home. I looked at the situation as an excuse to be out of work and rest for a bit. It was essential to my denial and sense of self at the time, that I convince myself that this anxiety/panic attack turned mental breakdown turned schizophrenic breach was just a freak one-off. I couldn’t accept that I had underlying mental issues because if I did then everyone would be right and I was just a crazy bitch. In the Neverending Story, Ingywook said that the Magic Mirror gate was the hardest and he was right. Facing who and what you really are is fucking hard!

Since I was charged with assault, (I bit the car owner’s hand when he rightfully tried to get me out), I had to downplay my mental issues to get the charges dropped. I got legal aid and got a bunch of paperwork done and convinced the courts that this kind of thing would never happen again.

My boss wouldn’t let me come back to work without a medical note clearing me, so I got that too.

See boss? See judge? I’m fine. Everything’s fine. Nothing to worry about. Then I swept it all under the rug and went back to work, and back to the bar.