on living with an eating disorder

This is going to be a bit of a diversion from my usual [tiny number of] posts. I’m hoping I don’t sound too self-absorbed…maybe I’m just a big old narcissist. But then again I’m talking about my own experiences so you kind of have to be absorbed in self-reflection when you’re doing that. I’m writing this because it’s cathartic and because I hope it might help people who have had the same/similar experiences, and maybe even inform those who haven't.

    

I’ve wanted to write about struggling with anorexia nervosa for a long time, but always feel held back by worrying that it’s self-indulgent, that it won’t add anything new to the conversation, that my experience has been so much less severe than the hell so many others have been through. But as usual that’s me holding myself to standards and restrictions I would never expect of anyone else.

The few times I have tried to write about this I haven’t really succeeded, whether because it just felt too raw, or I didn’t know where to start, or once I started I couldn’t stop and it was just this flood of words that seemed to have no conceivable end in sight. I started a blog a few years back that I was going to keep anonymous so I could write as frankly as possible. That fizzled out very quickly, but there’s one post on there that I wrote during a rare moment of clarity that shows a tiny bit of what it’s like to live with an eating disorder. I also went into it a little bit for an article on mental health in Concrete, the UEA newspaper.

People have a lot of misconceptions about eating disorders, ranging from the belief it’s just an extreme diet or a desperate desire for attention to the conviction that the sufferer will be alright once they’ve gained some weight, or that all people with eating disorders are thin, or that complimenting them on their thinness will cause them to suddenly realise they don’t need to lose weight. Then there’s the idea that eating disorders are a rich white girl problem, which is utterly false.

I’ve had some bizarre, amusing and unhelpful responses to telling people about anorexia: “Eat some chips” (insensitive mood-lightener), “Oh that’s a clever person’s disease you know” (bizarre compliment), “I wish I had a doctor giving me an excuse to put on weight” (utterly insensitive perverse look-on-the-bright-side bullshit).

Eating disorders are horrendous, life-threatening illnesses. They arise from an intense, grasping desire to wrest control where you feel you have none, to seek completion where you feel broken, to punish a body that is the material manifestation of everything you so deeply loathe about yourself.

That drive to be in control is central, and it is a futile endeavour because when you develop an eating disorder you are no longer in control. The disorder is driving you, but you falsely believe that you are empowered, that every time you abstain from eating or stay on the exercise bike another half hour or feel your bones pressing more tightly through your skin you have gained more ground in achieving the completion you desire. But that ‘completion’ is utterly abstract and unattainable solely through body modification, because the void you seek to fill is emotional and psychological and is not of your flesh.

The less you eat, the more it eats you.     

I was depressed and anxious for a while before anorexia crept in. From about the age of 8 or 9 I would go through long periods of utter obsessive terror about dying, climate change, nuclear war, alien invasions and a whole host of hysteria-inducing cataclysmic events. I would literally break into a sweat and have palpitations any time the thoughts resurfaced, which was often. But I would escape temporarily through reading, drawing and writing. This morbidity smoothed out into a background malaise, a sadness that would clamp onto my body and weigh me down. As I entered puberty the feeling of general, non-specific worthlessness began to cluster around a new target: my expanding, sweaty, spotty, monthly bleeding, glasses-wearing and eternally awkward body.

A few years in I began drinking with my friends, which properly started to kick off at the age of 16, and my bouts of depression grew more severe. I felt like I did not belong unless I was pretending to be someone I was not. I felt disconnected from my family. I loathed myself for my lack of ability to commit to anything, whether it was my previous love of artistic pursuits, music lessons, swimming, any kind of activity that I had chosen outside of the forced, exhausting routine of high school. I went through a short phase of cutting and making myself vomit but couldn’t sustain that either - the only time my lack of motivation and commitment has been a good thing.

So when my clamouring body anxieties grew to a high enough volume in my head, they combined with all these feelings of failure and self-loathing and I finally committed myself to something. I wanted to be perfect. I wanted to be taken seriously. I wanted to shake off my worthlessness, which I perceived as being physically manifested in the flesh I felt was weighing down my body. Its absence would be my armour. The less of me in the world, the better.          

What followed was a very dark period. Strangely I have a lot of memory gaps from that time. I know I spent a lot of time on the sofa. I barely slept. I remember feeling constantly cold, right through to my bones. Mum strictly administering 30g of cereal and making sure I ate it all. My therapist threatening hospitalisation. My doctor’s warnings of early menopause and cancer because my periods stopped for so long.

I remember being curled up sobbing in my mother’s lap because I felt I would never be free of this thing hounding my every moment. Getting myself into college and interacting with people as though everything was normal took up what little energy this ravenous black hole had left over to me.

Calories, calories, calories. Everything viewed through a haze of obsessive thought cycles.

Some of it I’m able to laugh at though. I had a panic attack at a prawn sandwich because there was butter and mayonnaise in it. I almost shouted at my mum once because she didn’t make an egg the way I thought it was meant to be. It’s certainly true that I was acting like a bratty monster. But the warped emotional mind-set behind that behaviour was far more than being some neurotic princess.

You kind of have to laugh at it because in the grand scheme of things it is absurd. How can so much fear and value be assigned to something as basic as food? But this is what an eating disorder does. You flag up certain things in your head as harmful, because you view a body weighed down by any level of fat as dangerous. Excess flesh seems full of crenellations open to grapple hooks. It makes you into an assailable target. If you look alright, maybe you’ll become valuable. If you look alright, maybe they won’t notice your ugly internal flaws.

It becomes so all-consuming, this perverse matrix of self-defense, that little and eventually nothing else matters. I had to postpone university for a year and when I finally did start attending, I only lasted a semester. It was impossible to study and live and fight off this thing and keep pretending everything was cool. I struggled to maintain any academic effort, in large part because a malnourished brain cannot focus properly. I also could not, and today to a lesser extent still cannot, sit down to study for long periods of time without guilt about being sedentary. And then there is the additional guilt that I am concerned by such things in the first place.

So much time and effort wasted. All the potential for learning, changing, all the things that could have been worked towards. I know this is all very negative and my nearest and dearest would tell me not to feel guilty, it's an illness, I can do all those things now I’m “better,” but that does not make how I feel any less real or legitimate.

I am so much better now than I was, but I still struggle with those thoughts every day even though I act against them and work through them. I am managing university and have just about got through a year abroad. I let people into my life now. I have even somehow, out of the blue, found myself in a committed, healthy relationship and it’s fucking wonderful. I’m determined not to waste any more time.

Anyway, despite this tale of woe my life has been very privileged. I want to use that position to enact socio-political change, and am finally getting into a place where I can do this – not just reading and sharing articles/petitions and ranting to people with pretty much the same views as me – but actually getting involved in direct activism. And I never want to stop learning. Specifically I want to read more academia on eating disorders and mental illness in general, from perspectives which look at their social construction. We can’t separate individual experiences like mental illnesses from the fact we live in a consumer-capitalist society.   

Anyway I seem to have begun rambling vaguely. As I said, once I start to talk and write about this stuff I don’t really know where to stop. So, for now, that’s enough. Maybe I’ll write about this again, maybe not. But it feels good to have communicated a little bit of what eating disorders and mental illnesses are like, for those who are interested. Next step: smashing white supremacist patriarchal capitalism. Easy as.     

antics in canada: musical lecture, cabin camping, hard truths

Random shot of a bird in a pretty autumnal tree

So it’s been quite a while! As a result this post will probably be pretty haywire and involve no chronological precision. I’d like to say that’s my modernism course exerting its influence on me but no. It’s just me being lazy and having a shitey memory.

Several weeks ago I went to a musical lecture by Tomson Highway, a Cree novelist, playwrite, composer and general polymath. He immediately made me think of Robin Williams. He has so much bubbling energy, rapid humour and even sounds like him. His lecture was very fluid, mostly anecdotal and interspersed with music he’s composed, played by himself, on a grand piano. He speaks a ridiculous amount of languages and has travelled widely. He went to residential school as a child but he reported positively that he is grateful he learnt music and languages there, contrary to most Native peoples’ experiences in those institutions. Having already been fluent in the Manitoba Cree dialect before he began residential school, his language was not stamped out of him in order to repress Native culture as with so many children at these schools.

He talked a bit about Cree language and culture and compared them to the Anglo/Euro construction of dichotomies and hierarchies. The Cree do not view the world as being arranged with God at the top, Man next, Woman next, then animals, then inanimate objects. Highway described the Cree placement of beings in creation as sitting at the circumference of a flat circle, and when they die they don’t go up or down, they stay on the circle (he demonstrated this by curling his arm round like a horizontal circle, and pointing to parts of it whilst describing people, animals etc.). Animals are not referred to as ‘it’ – they share gender-neutral pronouns with humans, and nouns are instead split into animate and inanimate. The body as a whole is animate, but all separate body parts are inanimate except from the vagina, because this is where life is cultivated. When the body dies, it becomes inanimate. This also applies to plant life, which in the Anglo/Euro tradition isn’t seen as animate or ‘sentient.’ A tree for instance is animate, but when its wood is used to make, say, a table it becomes inanimate.

All this conversation was interspersed with recitals of his compositions, ranging from a beautiful relaxing piece written for a ballet to jaunty staccato tunes to be featured in a musical. I wish all lectures were like this – non-linear, interspersed with anecdotes and using different media. I would love one of my lecturers to analyse US foreign policy accompanied by a honky-tonk.

Camping bus!

A few weekends ago the Student Exchange Club put on their annual Sunshine Coast camping trip. It was pretty awesome. They picked us up from campus in classic yellow school buses, took us to the ferry station at Horseshoe Bay (which looks a bit like a murder mystery would take place there), and we eventually arrived at the YMCA Elfinstone campsite in the evening. They fed us dinner in the communal space which was a big scouts’ lodge from the 1920s and then there was a lot of beer and spirits and peer pong and throwing terrible shapes. The next day we were all given activities to try, so first we went to high rope climbing (ropes strung up in the treetops that you climb.)

Not-so-peaceful kayaking collision snapped by Amelie

After lunch we went kayaking, and while we were hanging out on the jetty waiting for our turn a lot of us thought we might’ve seen a whale surface and blow water in the distance. We got super excited and one of the supervisors told another one over the radio and next thing about 20 people were thundering towards us from the high ropes area. We decided after all it probably wasn’t a whale and felt pretty bad about that. Kayaking itself was amazing because there was only five of us out on the still water between sessions, with the mountains and forests all quiet around us. Seals kept bobbing their heads up to look at us from a distance. After kayaking we went to try archery, which it turns out I’m not terrible at like I was expecting.

Gettin my Robin Hood on

After dinner we were meant to do the ‘Global Village’ activity which was where everyone put on some kind of presentation or performance about their country. A few of us chickened out but didn’t fancy being pressured into doing it, so we ran away to the cabin and then felt bad and spent ages trying to figure out when was a good time to go back in without being awkward. At one point we saw everyone doing the conga and Tamsin suggested we run in and join the end like we were there all along (we didn’t, though that would have been hilarious.) We eventually scuttled back just in time for s’mores around the campfire, which are SO delish. If you don’t know what s’mores are, what you do is toast a marshmallow on a stick, wait until it’s hot through, put chocolate on top and sandwich it between two graham crackers. Then there was more beer, Cards Against Humanity and dancing.

On Sunday after breakfast we tackled the climbing wall, which is super hard work to weaklings like me, and then after lunch went for a trek through the forests around the campsite. Hanging out in the campsite before we headed back to uni, Ellen and I investigated a squeaking noise we kept hearing from our cabin. We ran outside and it was a tiny baby squirrel scurrying up and down and all around the branches of a tree nearby. It was adorable.

     

Week 8 was pretty busy. On Monday I had my first Agapé street outing. Agapé is a club that runs outings to give food and a bit of company to homeless people around Downtown Eastside. We gave out granola bars, protein shakes and socks. There were a lot of takers. We stopped for a long time with one woman who was sat on the roadside with all her stuff around her. She had a rat in a cat-carrier that she’d cobbled money together to buy from a pet shop, so she’d have some company. The week before the City had come by and taken away loads of her stuff, including the grill on top of the cage, so she was worried the rat would get through the cardboard she’d replaced that with. Apparently these sweeps happen all the time but she has a lawyer coming to help her – I think there’s a charity organisation who provide concessionary or free legal aid for poor and homeless folks. She asked me to pet her rat and I was reluctant at first but it was really cute so I stroked it (I didn’t die yet mum). When I told her I’m from England she said she really wants to go there one day, but probably won’t ever be able to afford it since she can’t pay for a house. I told her to keep dreaming and I hope she does (and that my saying that didn’t come across across as patronising or insensitive.)

On Tuesday I had my first meeting with the UBC Refugee Relief group. We’re planning to raise funds to sponsor a Syrian family’s application to immigrate to Canada. There’s an archaeology professor who stayed with them every time she went on an expedition to Syria. She lost contact with them in the chaos of the past few years, but recently located them in Beirut. I’m part of the planning team and we have our first big (hopefully big) meeting this Friday with whoever is interested.

Straight after this I ran to catch a bus with Tamsin to a talk at Simon Frasor Humanities Institute downtown. It was a talk on ‘Settler-Colonialism and Genocide Policies in North America,’ by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, who recently released a book called An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States. It was brilliant. 

Before the talk two Musqueam nation members gave a traditional welcome and honour song in hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓, the language of the Musqueam people. One of them, Audrey Siegl, talked about hope and how she had been wary of it all her life because it seemed a dangerous thing for those facing the injustices that Indigenous people do. She said, though, that she’d heard someone on the radio talking about hope as something you live and enact, and that this had finally shifted her view of it.

The talk itself was really great. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz is a 76-year-old Oklahoma woman of Native descent (she thinks Cherokee - her Native grandmother died when her mother was 4), who laid out some powerful arguments and documentation of Indigenous histories. One striking point was her breakdown of the UN definition of genocide, and her dismissal of the strange argument that Indigenous People in North America did not undergo genocide because there’s “too many of them left.” Besides, 10% of the original population is hardly a large amount of people to be left over. According to the UN, removal of a population/group doesn’t have to be “complete” in order to be considered genocide. She went over some other horrible details such as the forced sterilisation of thousands of Indigenous women during several decades at the end of the 20^th century, and the attempts by the U.S. government to get Indigenous nations to become corporations and make their members shareholders. They called this last one ‘red capitalism’ and are apparently trying it on again. Which is gross. What Indigenous peoples in the Americas have undergone, and one could argue are still undergoing, is genocide.   

   

After the talk there was a question and answer session. During this two elderly First Nations people stood up and addressed the audience (I think they were Musqueam but not certain! I'm also not sure whether they were elders or not.) The one who spoke first began by saying it was good people had come out to the talk. She then dropped the niceties and told us her personal experiences of the issues discussed during the talk. She was visibly furious, and openly demonstrated her pain with tears and raised voice. She’d had 4 abortions by the age of 20, seen most of her family die, watched relatives go off to fight the Canadians’ war (there were First Nations soldiers serving in WWI & II) and the surviving ones return with TB. She’d been run off the road by the RCMP and so was in a mobility scooter – which, her husband said, she’d been pulled off in the street, again by the RCMP. She said she was scared for the fate of her people and of the land, her peoples’ land which has been and is being stolen (B.C. is the last unceded territory in Canada). She said that the fish and birds are dying, the land is dying, that we needed to ‘get off our butts’ and go outside, see what’s happening to the land and her people, and DO something. Then her husband stood up and showed us the beautifully carved talking sticks he’d brought with him, and told us that his grandfather used to carve Totem poles - one of which was given to the queen of England to remind her that British Columbia belongs to the First Nations who have always lived there.

I think the white/settler audience needed all this. I think we were all sat there feeling proud of ourselves for getting educated about Indigenous culture and history. To be confronted with anger and uncomfortable truths from the mouths of the actual people experiencing and resisting these horrors was a much-needed kick up the arse.

I’m not sure what I can do to help while I’m here, but I’ll find something and I’ll do it. Stay tuned to see how that goes…

antics in canada: laci green, street poutine and unwanted physical contact (weeks 3 & 4)

Return to Wreck Beach

Week 3 was relatively uneventful – we were all recuperating from Banff and deadlines/midterms have started to flow in unfortunately.

  

Friday night we went to Richmond night market again. Deep-fried cheesecake is lush for about 3.5 bites but do not overestimate the power of your stomach on this Everest of confectionery items.

On Saturday morning we went to the Etsy Canada market, which I was expecting to be HUGE, like in a warehouse somewhere, but it was fairly small - maybe about 40 stalls in a square where a little ice-skating rink is usually set up. There were some amusing cards with lots of puns and cute pictures which I spent a bit too long standing around laughing at. Who can resist a pun, really?

After this we went to a shopping centre because we’re all a bit short of clothes having packed light, and then thrift store shopping. We went to Lady Madonna’s, which is a tiny dark little thrift store with tonnes of amazing clothes crowded onto the racks. I impulsively bought a couple of ‘60s skirts.

That evening we had ‘Gage Goes Classy’, which was a semi-formal dinner put on by our RAs (the building we live in is called Walter Gage). There was a curious mixture of butter chicken (they ran out of chicken mid-way through), spicy mac’n’cheese and some kind of thick focaccia-like cheeseless pizza – the vegan option, I guess. We may have snuck in a couple of drinks because we are not nor will we ever be ‘classy.’ The entertainment was a pretty great jazz band – the saxophonist was awesome – and a couple of magicians from the UBC Magic Club. The part of this which sticks in my head is one of them appearing to swallow a needle on a string which really grossed me out. I couldn’t see much because a couple came and plonked themselves down in front of me and I hate attention so much that I won’t even stand up at the back of a seated crowd. After that we had a wee little party at our flat which was fun but then someone got really sick and thus did the fun end.

On Sunday night the Astronomy Club hosted an observation of the blood moon eclipse on a hill near the Museum of Anthropology which was really cool. The moon rose up between two huge fir trees and it was really beautiful – huge and a sort of muddy red, though the constant blinding flashes from people’s iPhone cameras were somewhat diverting. We didn’t watch the full thing because we were getting cold (although my Australian friend would have me point out it was the English folks who were complaining of cold first), and wanted hot chocolate.

On Monday we went to the ‘Best Sex Ever’ talk by Laci Green who is brilliant. She’s a public sex educator who runs really great, accessible and hilarious videos on YouTube informing people – particularly young people – about sex. There was more sex education in that evening than in 7 years of Catholic high school, none too surprisingly. I have never seen a picture of a vagina projected onto such a large screen before.

The highlights were a hilarious animation of a penis becoming erect, Laci describing US anti-vaccination sentiment as ‘the dumbest shit of my [her] life,’ and explicitly and extensively detailing consent and the fact that NO ONE EVER EVER ASKS TO BE SEXUALLY ASSAULTED. BECAUSE THEY DON’T SO NEVER EVER VICTIM/SLUT-SHAME/BODY-POLICE ANYONE EVER. It felt a bit like she was preaching to the converted – most people in the audience were feminist-y seeming folks who overwhelmingly clapped and/or cheered every time she said something feminist-y which was an awesome space to be in. I’d love to catch me some misogynists though, if only they were visually detectable, and sit them down in a room with Laci Green videos on loop.       

Apart from sunset at Wreck Beach one evening, the rest of the week was a bit of a blur of lessons and cram-reading and last-minute essay writing.

90s Ellens

On Friday we went to an Irish pub for a 90s night. There was a funny guy called Cody who suddenly appeared and asked if we were ready to ‘twirl’ him and kept reappearing throughout the night throwing some amusing shapes. The DJ was a nice Glaswegian guy who was really good about taking requests (though he turned down Parklife because he said no one there would know it). My highlight was Lady Marmalade. There were also some sleazy guys who kept coming up to each of us saying ‘you’re really pretty, would you like to dance?’ and persisting despite being turned down many a time.

The same lads followed us down the street for an irritatingly long time trying to get us to go somewhere with them. We shook them off and forged ahead to Mean Poutine, which serves amazing poutine and is open 24 hours.

Downtown at about 2am

Someone cut in front of me in the queue so I got all indignant. His mate, who I had never met in my life, grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me saying ‘What’re you gonna do?!”, which initially pissed me off but then I got free poutine from the one who cut in front. When asking the free-poutine-guy to clarify if he’d said he was from Seattle, his mate nudged me all cheeky-like and said ‘Does he LOOK like he’s from around here?’, referring to the guy being Asian. I replied ‘You know white people aren’t from around here right?’ After which we got into a debate about Indigenous rights. 

Despite me telling him current statistics and stories I’d been learning in class and online, his argument was pretty much that the struggle for Indigenous rights ought to be left in the past. Just as he asked me ‘What happened to the Indigenous people of Britain, eh?!’ we had to go catch our bus, and thank fuck for that. I get too tripped up by awkwardness and anger to be any good at coherently demonstrating to people their own ignorance.

Gig toilet graffiti

On Saturday Ellen and I went to the Biltmore Cabaret to see a band I really like, Titus Andronicus. We got extremely lost on the way there and back. The support was Baked and Spider Bags, both of whom are pretty sick. Patrick, the frontman of Titus, started the gig by telling people to show some respect and not be enforcing their physical presence on others. I thought this was really cool, although he was of course jeered at by loads of dudes. As expected, it was pretty rough. Halfway through Patrick reiterated what he’d initially said, telling us he used to be that way and that he hates his younger self. He also pointed out that this behaviour was kind of weird anyway since he was singing a lot about his experiences with manic depression. It’s really annoying that if you want to go anywhere near the band you like, you have to be prepared to get violent or be crushed. I used to love moshing back when I was actively self-destructive.

And then I just got majorly pissed. I was really getting into it but kept feeling the hand of the guy next to me brushing my hips and arse…I figured it was accidental as there was a lot of jostling going on. He then wound his arm round my hips so I moved away and tried to stand behind him. Apparently not getting the message, he then went to stand close behind me again. So Ellen and I went to the other side of the crowd and I felt grossed out and pissed off for the rest of the gig. I really am disgusted by the scene and its offensively overt masculine physicality. Girls to the fucking front, to reference Kathleen Hanna. It brought up a lot of turbulent feelings about things that have happened in the past, to me and to friends, so I spiralled into a bit of a hole.

We actually met Patrick Stickles at the end of the night and I told him a lot of his fans seem to be fuckboys. He apologised, which wasn’t necessary because it isn’t his fault and he’d even tried to talk people down. He then said it’s difficult for weak folks - he’s really small and thin (but with a GREAT BIG bushy beard) – but added drily that we shall inherit the earth. Maybe so, but in the mean time I'm sick and tired of having to guard the borders of my own body.

Getting lost has its benefits

On Sunday evening we went to a Disney Marathon but only stayed for the Lion King because really we were there for the free pizza and had lots of work to do.

Copious amounts of work may well be my new blog theme.

In the meantime, the Conservatives have gotten into 1st position in the polls after cracking down on niqab-wearing and pledging to set up some kind of hotline for reporting 'barbaric cultural practices.' So, that's shit. I suppose I was getting a bit homesick, some Islamaphobia should make me feel like I'm back home. Here's a good article by Sheema Khan about how it feels to be a Muslim woman living in Canada right now.

Peace. 

antics in canada: karaoke, banff and james joyce's fingers (week 2)

Me, cold but chuffed on an actual glacier
(Apologies for the weird vignette, my camera lens is being terrible)

On Monday night we went to karaoke at The Pit on campus which was amusing. At one point there was a load of fratboys who impressed no one by piling onto the stage like So Solid Crew. We ordered poutine to share which was damn tasty, and just before we left a guy who’s also from UEA did an amazing growly rendition of All Along the Watchtower. 

Classes were the usual mixture of awesome and angering and depressing, particularly given that one piece of reading was the Amnesty International report ‘Stolen Sisters’ which is a huge compilation of stats and case studies on abused, murdered and missing Indigenous women in Canada. In a nutshell, the figures are staggering, absolutely horrifying. And Stephen Harper that same week said this issue was ‘not on his priority list.’ I imagine at some point I will write a separate series of posts about current events and politics in Canada, because there is so very much to say.

On the other hand, my modernism teacher continued pootling along in his eccentric way. His first tangent was telling us he hangs around outside cinemas so he can ask people what they thought of the films they watched because no one reads books on buses any more. Then later he suddenly told us how much James Joyce loved his own fingers because he’s always showing them off in photographs. I did a search and he does often put his hands in prominent positions…

On Wednesday Ellen, Andrea and I got up early for FREE PANCAKES and we queued twice and it was great. Sadly when we reached the front of the queue they stopped letting people administer their own syrup, and the most miserly guy took over before monitoring the girl who took over from him.

Not much of note happened the rest of the week until we went to lovely Banff National Park up in Alberta...        

We caught the coach at 6pm, and basically what followed was a pretty hellish experience of trying to sleep for 12 hours and not succeeding. I spent a lot of the night staring at the pitch blackness surrounding the coach and feeling a bit weird, with the occasional headlamps of oncoming cars floating towards us. Ironically I only felt sleepy about fifteen minutes before we reached Banff. I perked up when the rising sun started to illuminate the huge mountains towering along the roadside.

A big ol'train

The bus station and info centre where we got off the coach was right next to an open railroad, and a huge freight train roared past which I can only describe as looking and sounding American. Alberta being further north and inland, the temperatures were a lot colder than Vancouver.

Cheeky squad pic in the middle of the road

We then headed to our hostel, the Samesun, which is definitely for young travellers looking to drink beer together in the hostel bar. And, y’know, hike and such. We stored our luggage and headed to a restaurant next door for bacon and maple syrup pancakes which were glorious but for some reason served next to a pile of fried potatoes.

Thus stuffed we moseyed around town for a bit. The town of Banff itself is very small, with one main shopping street, and is quite touristy. We wandered along Bow River and then found the Buffalo Nations Museum which was pretty tastelessly, in my opinion, designed like an Old West fort. We didn’t go to it in the end because it was $10 and just seemed to be a small hall filled with mannequins of First Nations people sitting outside wigwams.

One of the views from our tiny bean of a mountain

Then we climbed Sleeping Buffalo Mountain (or ‘Tunnel Mountain’ as the settlers named it) which was hard although it’s meant to be the easiest peak in that area. We got a lovely view of the valley and surrounding mountains. Strangely there really wasn’t a lot of wildlife at all. I had been expecting to see a lot more birds but apart from several magpies and a hovering buzzard, no luck.

A cool tree

We went back into town and bought some amazing popcorn before returning to the Samesun for showers, grabbing a margarita in the bar (they have different drinks specials every day of the week) and going to a nice brewery for dinner. We went to bed early as we were all shattered and had to be up early for our tour tomorrow, despite the allure of karaoke and value tequila in the hostel bar.

Some mountain near our hostel

The weather on Sunday was miserable but we still had fun. Our minibus picked us up at 8.15am and we piled on. The tour guide, Nate, gave us some information as we travelled towards the lakes and higher peaks of Banff National Park. He added in a fair few Aboriginal names and histories of places which was good.

The Trans-Canada Highway cuts through lots of natural habitats, through which animals are of course inclined to move, so when the roadkill got too high overpasses and underpasses were built exclusively for the wildlife. We passed Castle Mountain, which is pretty epic-looking and includes Eisenhower Tower, which wasn’t called that for a while because Eisenhower did something I can’t remember to offend Canadians.

Lake Louise

Our first stop was Lake Louise, which is an extremely beautiful tourist hotspot where a massive luxury hotel has been built. The intense blue of the lake is typical of the lakes in this area, a result of mountain particles stripped away by the movement and melting of ice. These particles emit several colours, all of which are absorbed apart from blue, which is reflected. That’s a very brief and probably erroneous explanation because I really don’t have a memory for scientific knowledge or stories about Eisenhower.

We took a load of pictures, mooched around the hotel gift shop, looked at the hotel workers’ funny Swiss-mountaineer-style uniforms, and returned to the bus late because we all needed the loo and coffees at the last minute. Nate told us how the hotel workers wear those uniforms because silly visitors used to get lost in mountain storms and fall down gorges so they enlisted lots of Swiss guides. Probably because they’d pissed off and/or killed off the original inhabitants who might also have helped by this point.  

Peyto Lake

The next stop was Peyto Lake, also stunning blue. The viewing point was high up so we were able to see the point where the silt filters into the lake before appearing blue. On returning to the bus I saw some of the group looking into the trees and shrieking at something small and fluffy [understandably] running away from them. Turns out it was a li’l chipmunk scurrying along with a mushroom in its mouth. If I’d seen that my life would be complete.

The next notable stop was the high point – literally – of the tour: the Althabasca Glacier in the Columbia Icefields. We were piled on coaches for about 5 minutes taking us from the tourist centre to the ice buses, which are very leaky and 60s-looking and had massive tires. Because the majority of people on our bus were Japanese, the tour info was given in Japanese, so we were bewildered by the odd burst of laughter and at one point the alarming sight of all the people in front of us suddenly standing up sounding shocked as if something bad had happened. That went unexplained.

Going up the glacier

The glacier itself was absolutely beautiful. The higher you go, the bluer the ice. We were allowed to get out after the comforting announcement that we were stepping out of the bus ‘at our own risk.’ It was, as you’d expect, freezing. There was an unpleasant sleet battering into us on the icy wind. We filled our bottles from the stream and shuffled around very carefully on the slippery surface. I hate walking on ice back home so it was quite unnerving, but also an incredible experience.

It was strange to be standing on top of this beautiful, solid thing which to my mind looms monolithically as some kind of mythical, far away object, a symbol in the global imaginary of environmental instability and our carelessness of it.

Unsurprisingly, the information we were given in English on the way back down included nothing about glacial recession or climate change in general. That’s not really a selling point for a company selling tickets for massive chugging glacier coaches. Nate gave us some cheery facts back on the bus, such as the prediction that there will probably be no glaciers left in North America by 2100, which is desperately sad in itself but also scary in that 90% of North America’s drinking water comes from glaciers. Not to mention the ol’rising sea levels globally. Looks like we’re all in for a wild ride lads.

Bow Lake

On the way back, altitude fatigue set in as we’d been warned and most of us slept. There was one last stop at Bow Lake, which curves around a huge mountain, before returning to Banff where we were dropped off at the Samesun. We had dinner there and a nice pint of local Beaver Beer before getting back on the bus for 12 more hours of psychological purgatory broken up by breaks in depressing fluorescent-lit overnight gas stations.

I don’t know if I can fully explain how it feels to be surrounded by such staggeringly huge mountains. Their peaks just kept rising higher and higher into the mists. Symbols won’t do it justice. A photo does not convey that crushing and euphoric sensation of smallness you get, and words are terribly inadequate after all. I’m trying very hard, you can probably tell. I don’t want to be too cheesy but I just kept thinking of a line from one of my favourite songs, Holocene by Bon Iver, ‘And at once I knew/I was not magnificent.’ To stand at the bottom of a mountain, at the edge of a vast azure lake or in the shadows of a swathe of massive pines is to be humbled, to fully realise your own transience.

Anyway, enough babbling. My point is I'm fairly keen on mountains. Banff was absolutely worth the 24-hour-plus round trip and it’s a shame we didn’t have more time there. I would highly recommend going if you happen to find yourself in Alberta.         

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If you're interested, this is Holocene. The video's very appropriate: 

                      

antics in canada: squads, colonialism and rug pushers

Wreck Beach on Thursday night

Tuesday was ‘Imagine Day’ starting at 8.30am…I’m in a ‘squad’ (it felt hilarious running around saying ‘where’s my squad’) which is called Dunbar Street for some reason. About half the people were British, which is a fairly solid representation of our presence here on exchange. Lads abound, and rest assured they’re protecting the reputation of the English abroad.

After some awkward get-to-know-you activities (I went red and chose ‘bookworm’ as the adjective to describe myself before I remembered that’s not an adjective) our squad leader gave us a campus tour. He walked at the back of the group most of the time so we didn’t really know where we were going, and didn’t take us to very many places. In the library we were standing around for about 15 minutes without anything going on, and nobody knew why were hovering like eejits. Several times he admitted he wasn’t sure what he was talking about and asked us if we knew the answers.

Then we had to sit through talks which lasted about 3 hours informing us of things we could easily find out online. It was really good that they had a decent section on mental wellbeing though. Then there was free lunch which wasn’t too shabby, then back in for more coma-inducing talks.

Afterwards Ellen and I checked out the club fair. I signed up for many things as per (we’ll see which ones I actually stick with.) The women’s club looks good – they have a safe space in the AMS Nest (Alma Mater Society – like a Student Union building) where you can go for tea and a chat, but they also organise things like self-defense classes and protests. It was ironic that they were two desks down from the pro-lifers with their plastic models of foetuses in wombs.

The Democrats were also there collecting signatures against Bill C-51, which is an ‘anti-terror’ bill recently passed which infringes massively on individual freedoms. There’s a significant body of resistance to Harper’s right-wing government, which makes me happy. I’m hoping to get more involved in and aware of Canadian politics whilst here.

I also want to join the Agape club who go downtown and provide company and food etc. for homeless people. Downtown Eastside has been dubbed ‘Canada’s poorest postal code’, with huge levels of homelessness, drug abuse, and horribly high levels of missing and murdered Aboriginal women. So, they need all the practical, material help that can be offered.

On the other hand I’m going to join the tea society!

Lessons started on Tuesday with Spanish 101 at 9am. I remembered how much I dislike learning languages in a classroom and felt a bit deflated afterwards. It’s all good though because I’ve decided to take Gender and Indigeneity in Canada instead – may as well take interesting topics which are unique to this place.

My next class was Indigenous Literature and I love it. It’s hard-going but our professor is fantastic. I didn’t realise UBC – and all of Vancouver – is built on unceded Musqueam territory. The huge international airport where you’re greeted by a totem pole was plonked right next to the reserve, which is a ridiculously small area of land. UBC campus used to be a huge dense forest, and many of the beaches here used to provide a large part of the diet – shellfish – for the Musqueam people before they were cleared and topped with sand to make them picturesque. The trampling of Indigenous peoples’ rights is ongoing here and the more I learn the more my skin crawls. The Indian Act still exists – an Act on which South African Apartheid was partly modelled. As my teacher said, ‘postcolonialism is not what we are studying here, because this is still very much a colonial society.’ I can tell that my classes are going to be hard-hitting, but I really feel that it’s worth going through the anger so I can learn more about the experiences of people who do not have my social privilege.

After this was my Modernism class. Our professor is great – very enthusiastic. He’s an energetic skinny guy of about 60 who always wears very neat double-breasted suits and writes on the blackboard in a way I can only describe as Mr. Bean-ish. He told us he has hypergraphia to such an extent that he’s known by the Vancouver Police Department, after writing at a traffic light for so long that a tonne of traffic was backed up behind him after the light went green. He encourages us all to write as much and as often as we can, and to not even worry about how good a first draft is – the skill is in the editing, he says. I think that Modernism is also going to be challenging, but not in an emotionally raw way like my other modules – it’s a fourth year literature class so there’ll be lots of high-powered analysis going on, which I’m rather happy to get my teeth stuck into.

My last class on a Wednesday is Intersectional Approaches to Thinking Gender. It’s a three hour class which runs until 9pm which is tricky. I’m excited about it though – our teacher said she wants us to get involved not only through academia but through activism, because academia alone does little to change immediate material circumstances. She encouraged us to follow the news and said we’re at a very interesting, crucial time in history, a time at which the world could move in any of a multitude of directions. She’s going to keep us posted on active ways to live our politics.

That night I felt the need to blow off steam and luckily there were plans to head to the pub. There’s an Irish pub on campus which is really nice. It’s got a bit of a cosy feel and all the English is subtitled in Irish. It’s strange getting table service for ordering drinks though, I think I prefer lounging at the bar as it’s more sociable – though you can obviously do that too. They also serve a schooner here which is smaller than a pint (although I think pint glasses are still available). 

Lo and behold we met a load more English people. I irritated someone when I told them I had no interest in going to a party dressed as a Mexican.

Thursday night we went to Wreck Beach, which is just off campus. We arrived just as the sun had gone down, and all around the bay were mountains which were silhouetted against this fierce orange afterglow thrown upwards by the sun. It was stunning. We climbed the billion steps back up through the forest onto campus, to be greeted by a police officer asking if we’d seen anyone passed out. We said no, he asked more people, and then more police cars and a couple of fire engines pulled up.

We went across the road and ogled for a little bit. A guy in a fedora who seemed to be on shrooms was standing near us with his partner and kid. He filmed the fire engines and was like ‘Here I am with a group of the finest women in Vancouver’ then turned to us and said ‘All that beauty, what ya gonna do?’ After this he handed me a business card and said ‘You ever need a rug, give me a call’ (the card advertised a public relations business). He stood in front of us and said ‘give me your colours, I need your room colours, I’m thinking teal and blue…’ Then the three of them went off in a taxi. I was told later this is standard behaviour in Vancouver.

In the meantime the firefighters were all congregating around the top of the steps as people came up off the beach. Two ambulances pulled up and as we started to think something really horrible might have happened, the results of which we didn’t want to see, we left - and haven’t heard anything since about what happened down there.

Gastown

Friday night we explored Gastown, which is a swanky neighbourhood not unlike Shoreditch. We got an amazing curry there (I swear the curries here are better than in England) then went for a drink at Bambudda, which does Chinese food and amazing cocktails. I had the Corpse Raiser #2 which was delicious and tequila-y. After this we went along to a club which was fun but a bit dead. It was in Downtown Eastside and we saw full-on the shocking levels of homelessness in this city. I hope Agape starts up soon, if not I’m going to volunteer for a local organisation instead.

Football friends

Saturday we went to the homecoming football game. I had absolutely no idea what was going on in terms of the actual game but the hotdogs were tasty and there was a brass band and the atmosphere was fun.

Saturday Night Lights!

On Sunday we went to Richmond Night Market, which is apparently one of the largest Chinese markets in North America. It’s mainly Asian food stalls but they had a few anomalies like a deep-fried Mars Bar van. I always find those kind of places a bit discombobulating with all the fluorescent lights and strange karaoke tunes and loud adverts booming out on loop. We stuffed ourselves pretty well. I had some kind of Indian-Chinese fusion salmon wrap and salt & pepper calamari and we shared some delicious Japanese crispy buns on sticks. Then I bought ten pairs of socks. The madness of life. 

Salmon thing

 Watch this space for more political angst and a trip to Banff...

Richmond Night Market

antics in canada: spillages, suspect hotels and fratboys

After sad goodbyes at Norwich airport my journey was relatively uneventful apart from knocking water onto my crotch, then more water onto my neck pillow, on top of which the woman next to me spilt beer.

Between numerous food-servings and hot wipe deliveries I watched movies, got a bit claustrophobic and panicky for a bit (deep breathing is yer only man), and swung between sadness, excitement and fear. I thought a lot about how strange time is as well, but I won’t pontificate about that.

Vancouver airport is big, quite nice…very recently built. There are totem poles and indigenous sculptures to let you know how “inclusive” Canada is (my first few Indigenous Lit classes have confirmed my suspicion that this is something of a grand claim). After a big sweaty passport queue I got into a bigger sweatier visa queue.

When my taxi pulled up to the ‘family hotel’ I’d booked online my heart sank a bit. It was basically just a house with no sign and the door wide open. I asked the driver to wait and walked in to find a surprised-looking guy in the kitchen. I asked him was I in a hotel and he yelled someone’s name and walked off. A guy who I assume was the owner arrived and helped me with my bags.

As I paid the taxi driver he kept repeating ‘stay safe’, which was none too comforting. The owner showed me my room and after making sure there was a lock on the door I paid with a weird flimsy card-reader attached to his iPhone. Being exhausted and anxiety-prone I figured I’d be put in a pie. No WiFi access was the last straw and I cried for a while, which is silly in hindsight, but at the time I felt bombarded with things to cry about.

In the end I rationalised the situation and decided the owner was sound, just a lad turning his house into a hotel (he was pretty much constantly doing DIY). Having gone to bed at 7pm I woke at 6am and snaffled a load of Hobnobs. Then I hovered around the WiFi box in the kitchen to try and book a taxi. A nice couple from Calgary helped me.

A glimpse of mountains from the taxi

Having moved in I bumped into my friend Ellen (who is also at UEA and by coincidence was on the same flight) who was planning to go to IKEA. We found a couple of English guys who wanted to go as well and we all shared a taxi. I mentioned how I ‘don’t particularly like IKEA’ and the guy with a backwards Obey cap remarked ‘I thought all girls liked IKEA, you know, domestic stuff.’ Since I was wedged next to him in a taxi I said nothing and stared at some mountains.

IKEA was IKEA – a one-way purgatorial experience. At the end I walked away from the self-service having forgotten to pay so an assistant hauled me back to do so. Back on campus we were curious about the toga party but were almost ill with jetlag so we decided not to and practically went straight to bed.

The next day Ellen and I headed to the supermarket and bought so much that we weren’t able to get to the bus stop. We had to call a taxi in the end even though the sign said ‘no student drop-off or pickups - WESBROOK VILLAGE RESIDENTS ONLY’ – which is a bit bizarre seeing as Wesbrook Village is on campus.

(Just a quick note about size – everything here is HUGE. Campus is like a town in itself. Each road takes about half an hour to trek across. You can get like a pint’s worth of ketchup for $3.)  

Blurry beer pong

That evening we headed to a party – ‘we’ being three of my flatmates, Ellen and I. My flatmates are really great. There’s six of us and we’re all from different places – Canada, Australia, New Zealand, China, Turkey and the UK. I hang out a lot with Amelie the Aussie and Tamsin the New Zealander. At the party we played beer pong, danced, ignored sleazy advances, and went to bed in the wee hours (but I still woke up super early because of jetlag).

The view from our kitchen

On Monday I went for a walk around campus with Amelie and Tamsin. This place is so beautiful. All around there are lakes, the sea, distant mountains, gardens and some really great architecture. Also there are black squirrels which is REALLY exciting to me. After this we went back to the flat and started planning a Canada bucket list.

The view from the rose garden on campus

That evening our RAs hosted a BBQ for all of Walter Gage residence (which comprises several 17-floor tower blocks). We met a lovely girl called Cavanagh, who’s Indian and grew up in Ireland before her family moving to the US early on. The queue was about an hour long and we discussed things like crosscultural identity and Ireland and the importance of travel and the idea of education as a right not a privilege. She was quite curious as to why I’d chosen an American Studies degree since I’m clearly not a big fan of America as a country and I said ‘how are you supposed to make the world a better place if you don’t understand how the world has been made a worse place?’ It’s interesting how conversations with strangers will help you realise and solidify things about yourself, because I honestly hadn’t come to that many solid conclusions about why I’m studying about America.

That night we went to a frat party which was fun, hilarious and disturbing in equal measure. I think it was fun because we were in a good group which stuck together whereas usually groups split up because everyone’s there to cop off with a randomer. The frat houses are on their own little area of campus (next to the police station which is very sensible). They’re big, proper houses with big enough rooms and a basement to form a mini-club with a bar and such. We were let in ahead of loads of people because we were a group of women, one of whom flirted with guy on door.

Frat friends

For my part you know you’re older than everyone else when you bring Pocket Tissues because you’re sure the boys won’t have bought enough toilet roll for their guests.

I said ‘fuck off mate’ a lot. I’m also 90% certain a load of white people were line-dancing to King Kunta but my perceptions may or may not have been somewhat skewed by alcohol. They were definitely stamping in unison. The whole shebang included a lot of white people dancing stiffly to rap and hiphop, myself included.

I talked to a guy who went to Harrow for a while, mainly because I really wanted a smoke off him. Then there was some guy telling us something about a sloth that got brought onto the frat area and people were poking it or something and we asked where’s the fun in that and soon he went away. Then we headed back to Gage, got yelled at some more by bros, and tried to decide if this guy sporting a topknot was from Hackney or Brisbane.

Thus concludes my first weekend in Canada.