My story begins before I do, with my beautiful steamship-travelling British mom and dapper Croatian/Yugoslavian (in that geopolitical moment in time) speaking dad in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia.
They met in a nightclub in the late 1960s in Sydney. The men wore neatly tapered suits and the women wore chiffon dresses with small hats on their hairspray-hardened hair and carried smaller purses under their lace-gloved arms.
The nightclub had a thick blue haze of cigarette smoke lingering in the air. Sparsely clothed young ladies with trays of neatly assembled cigarette packs for sale wove, like delicate fish, among a school of sharks, selling cigarettes.
Three years later, with a similar bluish cigarette smoke hanging in the lobby of the maternity ward of the Queens Street Women’s Hospital in Sydney, I was born. That was a time when doctors pointed their ashy cigarette at you and discussed symptoms around your respiratory difficulties.
“It might be as easy as getting more fresh air outside the office, Mr. Smith,” the doctor would say as he took a long drag from his Marlboro.
When I was three, my parents loaded up a trunk of our belongings and immigrated to beautiful Canada. The airplane started in Sydney and stopped over in Hawaii, San Francisco, Chicago, then, finally, Toronto. Air travel was like a frog jumping on lily pads in a really big pond back then.
I was a pretty normal kid, I think. I was captain of my soccer team once or twice and played hockey in the winter. I had a good shot but couldn’t skate so, like most kids, the NHL wasn’t a career option.
I had a warm, safe home with parents, who worked hard to provide for me and my sister. I was a normal kid.
Looking back, in early high school, I started having some problems with my mental health. I began isolating myself and binge drinking because I couldn’t cope with life as a teenager. I dropped out of school in grade 10, left my suburban home and, eventually, after living on the edges of society for a few years, got on a bus and went west.
I tried to work at the expected jobs and have the fun, healthy relationships a young person starting in the world should enjoy. However, I just failed, in both work and relationships, again and again. It’s a cycle that gets under your skin and into your head: the belief that you’re just no good takes root.
Eventually, to cope with the inability to cope, I began abusing substances and seriously isolating myself from the society around me. The place, I felt, I wasn’t good enough to belong.
For a couple decades or so, I was the person you would call an addict: the people we mistrust and look at unfavourably; one of the dishevelled souls who disappear to the outer peripheral of everything, marginalized and barely maintaining. They don’t think they’re worth much so we don’t think they’re worth the bother, and the tragic cycle spirals downward.
Why do I tell my story of mental health issues in a column instead of in Psychology Today? The first ever permanent supportive housing for the homeless and people at risk of being homeless is opening in Powell River and, on social media, especially, there is a lot of hateful knee-jerk negativity happening.
Governmental funded rehabilitation and counselling has been central to my story not ending abruptly in tragedy like so many do these days. Before being judgemental, think, with common sense and empathy, about how everyone has a story and how we all play a part in making them better.
Robert Skender is a Powell River freelance writer and health commentator.
