"As cliche as it may sound, university has been the best and worst time of my life. I came in to McGill thinking that I’d be in a very different place than where I am right now. The hardest change I had to adjust to was the fact that I can no longer live my life as I planned ahead; I wanted to become a medical missionary for a very long time and I had these schools that I wanted to go to and this education I wanted to pursue, but I was no longer interested in studying the human body, or even had the vitality to be serving other people. 

I started to hit my lowest near the end of the second semester of my first year. I was crying a lot, was worrying about almost everything and all of the things I used to love doing, especially learning, was not fun anymore. And when that really got to me once in a while, I had to drop everything because not only my physical system would stop, but my mind would only work to create more worry. It started to get worse in my second year. That “once in a while” wasn’t once in a while anymore but turned to almost every day. I couldn’t write my exams or even go to class, I couldn’t keep up with my personal relationships, and I cried. A lot. I was constantly beating myself up for not being able to plan my life ahead or not being able to follow through on my goals. Everything seemed to be my fault whenever people let me down, when they walked out of my life. I despised the fact that so many aspects of life after high school was out of my control. I started to have a lot more bad days than good days. I started to think something was not right with me, that someone’s not supposed to want to hide from people, responsibilities and my own emotions and feelings all the time like I was. 

I went to see someone, and was diagnosed with depression and anxiety. They said I needed to get professional help. So I started psychotherapy. Then later on to meds. Fortunately, I met a very nice and warm therapist. What she told me really changed my perspective. I think it really helped with getting better. She emphasized the importance of being open to exploring. She told me that not being able to follow these steps I set was okay, and that I’m supposed to be living life so I learn about myself in depth through these alterations. She said it was okay for me to take a detour or to try anything that I decide to lay my hands on so I end up with what I truly like. She told me that I have to focus on my people who support and love me even when I’m on my floor bawling at 3 in the morning. So I started to do that. I started to think differently. It was not easy at first, but I got better at it. When I got lower-than-expected marks on exams, I tried not to call myself an idiot or useless. Whenever people let me down, I turned to my boyfriend then, my best friend and my family, who were always there for me. When I felt a change was needed in this grand plan I had for myself, I no longer hesitated. Even before depression and anxiety, I had always been a very, very neurotic person. I had been very susceptible to negative emotions. Being that person, being able to tell myself it’s okay to be not okay or it’s okay to be not perfect was a huge step, but I did it. It took a very long time for me to think healthier, but I ended up doing so, and I’m proud of myself for it.

I still get through my bad days being scared that I might go back to this rock bottom I used to be at. I am still neurotic; I still get very upset over small things. But I no longer hate myself for not being sure. I even enjoy this openness I newly discovered, and I learned to become more aware of my feelings, emotions and lessons I learn from my experiences. I would not want to go back to where I was before and redo everything I’ve gone through, but these struggles and this so called recovery really formed my identity, it helped me build who I am right now. I have a different outlook on life now. I am able to see things in a more broad perspective. If it’s good, then it’s great, if it’s bad, then I learn from it. I also became more interested and concerned with mental health. I am able to relate to people’s struggles. All because I’ve been there. If I digress for a moment, I personally hate it when people say things like "pain is temporary, GPA is forever.” No one knows how much pain one has to go through unless they experience it themselves. GPA may be “forever" on a piece of paper, but this “pain" has left a mark on me that will linger forever and has changed me for good, hopefully for the better. Although I still get scared of regressing back to where I was before and I’ll probably have to live with this for a very long time, if not for the rest of my life, I don’t want to and probably not going to forget anything from the two dreadful years as they are now part of me and they shaped who I am today."

"I get memes about 2016 being a disaster but not because of celebrity deaths or American Nazis (as a white dude, seeing police shootings or white supremacist partisan victories did not affect my body). Instead I’ve spent the year trying to heal from trauma without leaning too much on my friends and partners. Being a dude has complicated this because I’ve been trained to resolve mental health problems through distraction—most guys I know fuck around or get vicious to cover up their broken bones, but broken bones need casts to heal. And stoicism is bizarre to teach guys because it’s based on failure: silence often leads men to kill either themselves or the people around them (look at domestic abuse and murder rates from male to female partners; rates of childhood trauma in prisoners, or the gender divide of mass shootings and suicides).

Imagine if we applied this approach to building airplanes:

“So those are the engines that catch on fire?”

“Yes, sir.”

“We will take all of them.”  

Losing brilliant friends or partners in 2016 prompted me to research the communication behaviours of child abuse survivors. I learned that we’re prone to experience an ‘intimacy dysfunction’ where we are either too needy or too absent in order to avoid abandonment, either through an intrusive over-assurance or in being ‘not all emotionally there’ so that our ‘true selves’ are not rejected in a future breakup. I learned that male abuse survivors should be weary when seeking the support of women, considering the imbalances in our socialized expectations of unpaid gendered labour. I learned that above all we should avoid becoming Liz Kinnamon’s Male Sentimental, who manipulates women to avoid the discomfort required to change shitty behaviours.

So, after this research, I’ve decided to try and accept my imperfect reactions to revisited trauma. This has been complicated because the style of masculinity I was taught associates success with a myth of perfection (achievable by consuming material or stockpiling women). Being a survivor of emotional abuse also complicates things because I take critiques ‘fully,’ reinforcing the violent narratives told to me about me that I survived, bringing me to affirm critiques instead of defending myself. It’s been difficult not to take the critique of a female friend or partner as ‘absolutely true,’ and so I’m trying to consider them a similarly flawed human being with similarly flawed critiques—while not dismissing them entirely, as I’ve been programmed to do.

I’m ending 2016 by cutting toxic people out of my life and working to accept when I’ve been cut. That’s an easy line to write and harder to work through when it aligns with abandonment and the ideal dude as woman-hunter/consumer, but believing that women know what they’re doing when they cut us out is something a lot of guys I know could benefit from. While it makes sense that we act this way (our media romanticizes lines like “I asked your mother out thirty-eight times before she said yes,” suggesting that successful courtships are just a matter of the ‘determination’ of the man–erasing female agency, besides being pathetic), I do believe that we as men can reprogram ourselves. It feels necessary to me if I say that I care about the lives of the people around me now and in 2017."