The College Years
After I graduated from high school, I spent a year of my life that I call the “Year of Hell”. I didn’t have my driver’s license, and I didn’t go to college, so I was essentially stuck in Strathmore. I tried to find work at the very little places around town, but a lot of the people who made fun of me in school were also working there, and they’d tell the boss not to hire me. So I spent an entire year alone, in the house, doing nothing. I was taking a correspondance school class for Social Studies 30, as I needed it for college, but aside from that, TV and comic books became my obsession. In fact, I recall an incident where my mother tried to cancel my comic book account at the comic book shop in Calgary that I was going to. That sent me in a panic; I freaked out. I didn’t want to face what my life had become. I didn’t want to accept the truth: that I was severely depressed. My parents would also insist that I had to clean the house since I was home “doing nothing”. I would clean the house, only to have the house dirtied again not even an hour after they got home. So then I started to wonder “what’s the use?” It was a seriously depressing period of my life. I was begging for something new to happen to my life soon, or I might just do the unthinkable.
Then I got accepted into Medicine Hat College. I originally entered for the Bachelor of Fine Arts transfer program, but changed it after a year to the Visual Communications Diploma program, as it was shorter. I always thought to myself if I could just get the Hell out of that town I would be much happier. However, the depression was still affecting me in college. I found myself quite withdrawn from others in the class. Indeed, some people even said I seemed to give off a “stay the Hell away from me” vibe. The courses that I enjoyed the most at this school was my Intro to Drama I and II courses, taught by the same instructor.
In this class, I was instructed to let myself loose. To scream, to yell, to do whatever it took to loosen myself up. These courses never had any production that wound up going on stage, only little projects to showcase to the fellow classmates. This one play I received the best critique I ever got in college. My instructor said, “You were such a bitch up there!” Why would that be good? Because that’s what I attempted to portray. He also said it seemed so unlike me, which also made me smile.
I had another little exercise in which I was playing the role of a king and my scene partner was his son who was trying to convince me to do something (the details of what that something was is currently escaping my memory). I stood on stage, standing tall, with my back straight up and my arms crossed, listening very closely to what he said. Then I delivered my lines. The response I got back from the teacher was that my posture really made him believe I was a King. I was happy about that. He was, without a doubt, the best teacher I have ever had. A very positive, martial arts, “zen” kind of guy.
Through this class, I also learned about character development and how people carry themselves. It really gave me a boost and I would like to encourage everyone to take an intro to drama course, because you learn a lot about yourself and a lot about the human condition.
College did prove to be quite the challenge to me, as I was battling my demons while barely passing some courses. I actually failed my photography course as a result of my depression and had to retake it. That all began to change in the third year. I moved out of the crappy and ever-increasingly expensive partytown dorm townhouses and moved into an apartment with a friend. It was the first real decision I made for myself that I didn’t include my parents on. It was far cheaper to share a 2 bedroom apartment that was just down the street, than it was to live in “party central”.
During this time, I was introduced to a wonderful tarot card deck called Osho Zen Tarot. It is a deck I still use to this day; a very zen and positive approach towards life. It helped me a lot to figure out how to get out of my depression. I also made a very powerful decision that year. My 1997 New Year’s Resolution was to quit eating meat. I struggled with the concept of animal rights throughout my life, and got increasingly more concerned throughout my youth. I found I didn’t like the taste of meat, and was really only eating hamburgers and hot dogs. So, after months of debating the subject with myself, even doing research in the library about it as well, I finally made the decision to stop eating meat altogether. I substituted the hamburgers and hot dogs with their soy counterparts.
This decision didn’t go over too well with my parents, who were traditional meat and potato types of people. They kept asking me who was “influencing me” to do this, as they couldn’t (or wouldn’t) believe that I could come to this decision on my own. This opinion made me very angry, as I wasn’t influenced by anyone but myself. I simply didn’t think it was right for an animal to have to give up it’s life unvoluntarily so humans could eat. That was my opinion, and I wasn’t going to force others to do the same thing, but it was something I needed to do for myself. That decision, plus my decision to move out of the dorm and into an apartment with my friend, led my parents to believe that my friend was the one who was “influencing me”. Needless to say, this year proved to be quite difficult, as my parents and I began fighting.
After the third year, I was informed that because I switched programs midway, the two drama courses that I loved wouldn’t count towards my graduation. So I decided to take a couple of electives at Mount Royal College that would count towards my graduation, Intro to Psychology and Japanese I. I finally graduated from college in June 2000. Then I began my working years.