This is a speech I gave for the Canadian Mental Commission:  

 I fear a lot of things.

Some of them are obscure and weird. For example, I ate Lobster last night. I fear that one of you might want to shake my hand. Only trace remnants of the lobster remainbut you might be deadly allergic. I think about what it would be like if I killed you. Then I think if I should have mentioned the lobster in this speech. It costs a lot. Maybe the Mental Health Commission will think I just ordered it because they were paying for it.

I fear that right now you aren’t going to pay attention. That you are going to be lost in sexual fantasies about your classmates or you are going to take down a lot of notes you’ll never look at and forget everything I have said.

I’m not here to talk to you about journalism.

This won’t be on a test.

(Apparently this will be on a test)

I figure most of you won’t become journalists. I figure now is my chance to talk to you while you are young and say somethings that people never said to me.

This is in the hopes that you all become adults. One out of five of you will deal with a serious mental illness this year. Two out of three won’t go forward to get help due to the idea that you failed at being a person and getting treatment would be admitting that failure.

I’m here to talk to you about my success at failure.

I’m not going to tell you about how I failed Grade 10 math because I was a puberty explosion and my teacher was hot and I spent my time thinking about things that would get poor Miss Delaney arrested. That’s irrelevant.

My greatest fear is that somehow I won’t become what I was supposed to be.

I’m sure you have felt it to. That somehow you could make your life exactly the way you want it to be. That you just weren’t trying hard enough.

At 25, I worried until I was worried about how much I worried.  I was so scared that I wouldn’t be able to sleep that I couldn’t sleep. I went for months on two hours of sleep a night. I wanted to be normal. Just normal, able to eat, sleep, work and love.  I prayed to lose this thing that was killing me even if it is the same thing that made me a good person. I wanted to be normal even if that mean I’d no longer be special.

I was stuck in a negative cycle where thinking became torture and all I could do was hope for an escape. I know what it is like when the pain was so bad that you forget the world. I understand what people who commit suicide are thinking.  Suicide is the failure of all language to reach you. It’s like selective deafness. Where you can only hear yourself and you don’t have any good things left to say. I never knew the world went away. I was lucky to have people in my life that reminded who I was when I forgot. I got to see the world return and nothing is more beautiful.

No one ever told me about mental illness, not in all my years of school.  I learned about it from watching my friends weep and hold each other in the King’s Chapel, when a brilliant boy named Jason Lionel Walsh didn’t get to grow up. Seeing how much one person could affect hundreds, living with his absence, as my friends used each other as crutches for fear we would become dominoes. I learned about it from Aaron when we did mushrooms in Middle Bay and he added mescaline and had a hallucination where he stuck a gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. I watched him disappear behind pills and powders. And I was lucky enough to be there when he finally got the help needed. One of my best friends got returned to me.  I learned about mental illness from watching my friends commit suicide and become addicted to drugs.

I have to believe there is a better way.

I think a lot of us believe that we aren’t what we should be. That we live each day mourning the fact that we didn’t grow up to become the people we thought we would.  You know that inner child that keeps bothering you. Kick his ass. He is just a kid and he doesn’t know any better plus he’s small. You can’t learn without making mistakes.

On the topic of making mistakes, a week ago I was hanging out with a friend of mine. The mistake wasn’t hanging out with my friend.  We used to go to karaoke together but my rendition of Hulk Hogan’s “I’m real a American” involved tearing off my shirt and has led to us no longer being welcome at said karaoke.

She was telling me about how she read an article about how our memory is changed each time we recall it. To her the horror was the idea that every single moment of your life changes your past, that the twisted little monkey that exists in your brain, fucks with the works and changes Mona Lisa’s into monsters. Part of me, being an optimist, saw something hopeful in this. That the meaning of the past can be rewritten. We are not bound by the past, the past is bound to us. It’s a fiction that suits whatever you believe at the time. And oftentimes it’s full of shit.  It means that you don’t ever truly know what your life is, that your brain is too flawed an instrument to measure your own worth.

I have never understood this as clearly as when I attended Jason’s funeral. He was quiet, eccentric and hilarious. He wasn’t someone most of us really got to know. At the sidelines of our life he made us better. Forcing us to be better rappers, thinkers and humans. He always carried a lighter with him even though he didn’t smoke.  At 20 years old, his death shook our lives to the core. This one life, lost in it’s infancy, changed our school and his hometown forever. No one ever knows the joy they create. Rarely are you put in a situation where you can see it illustrated so obviously, to see what the terror that brought my friends into adulthood, when we become crutches to prevent ourselves from dominoes. We knew what suicide was. You never know how large your life is. What you inspire simply by being alive.

You thinking this ain’t a FYP lecture, cuz?  He’s been smoking that Bob Marley and talking nonsense. Well, why you are here but for micro miracle moments that made your mom and dad get sloppy on top of each other, whether it was booze, loneliness, love, fear, you got made. Whatever led to that moment, led to you. How could a unique silly motherfucker come from that place? How could a bad marriage create a good you? The millions of coincidences and failures that made you exist disappear and the only thing left is a child who needs to make their own story. You are more than the past that birthed you.

I know a girl and she’s beautiful and she dances like a maniac and has a habit of knocking over every drink that gets in her way. She’s got an MBA, she’s going to be a lawyer and she’s got a brilliant brain. And she’s incredibly unhappy. She got the best grades. Her mom asked where you going to Grad School. She went to the best Grad School her mother asked when you are going to get married, when are you going to make more money, when are you going to get promoted. When she finally had a husband, a kid and a Mercedes, she’d be happy. Only she couldn’t be happy until she did those things. Until she did everything her mother ever wanted her to do in her own life instead of being a housewife, could she begin to live her own life. Thing is she has gone to the best schools, gotten the best grades, smiles in pictures and feels lonely wherever she goes.  It doesn’t matter how much she smiles when you a camera is being held up to her face. Life isn’t lived in pictures. She realized a little while ago that she didn’t want to live her life writing the perfect obituary. Terrified, almost in tears, she finally grasped the idea that no one grades your life.  She wanted to live her own life. Like most of us, she has no idea how to do this.

It’s okay to not know what you want to do. It’s okay for what you are doing right now to be not being something you want to do for the rest of your life. Quentin Tarantino worked at a video store. Einstein worked at a patent office.

My friend was working at a call center, drinking more than a human should be able to consume and quietly dying. He was waiting to be promoted from the call center and made a part of the Mother corporation, where he could slide for the rest of his life, without having to worry about his potential. Then he was given the job of making a film for their award show. It was supposed to be a shitty video and it wasn’t. Poorly acted but beautifully filmed, it was the first towards the realization of his own possibilities. I remember the day when I realized how good he could be at this. We were putting together the video for the Come Out campaign and I slowly saw this thing assemble from a million disparate pieces and it was amazing. Somehow out of Youtube clips we created a word I still consider to be my best.  It is weird seeing someone come back to life. Suddenly he put down the booze and picked up a camera. Now he is in film school at the beginning of a long career he is going to love. It is amazing to realize that you can discover what you are supposed to do when you are 25, when you are 30, when you are 35. That who you become is dictated by what happens along the way. That people finding the meaning of their life in places you’d never think to look.

When someone asks you where you are going to be in five years, take pride in the fact that you don’t have a fucking clue. It means you are open to learning about what you want. And you don’t know that yet. Being 20 is about trying on some new world changing revelation each and every week. Believing you know what your life should be, so you can try it on and see if it fits. It doesn’t have to fit yet.

It’s going to be hard. You’re going to struggle, you’re going to worry about rent, your parents won’t be able to give your life to you, neither will your teachers. You have to do it for yourself and that’s how you become an adult. And you are going to do it. We all have. You aren’t going to be any different. You parents got drunk, got fucked up, screwed people they barely knew and took the time to figure themselves out. You learn who you are by making mistakes. Not that you wake up one day and you never fuck up again. Adults don’t stop making mistakes, you don’t reach a point in life where you get to rehearse the lines ahead of time. They just know they can get up again. Remember that when you fall down. Remember it even when you feel like you are going to forget. Nothing is forever, life always comes back if you live long enough to let it.

Failure isn’t something to fear.

Nothing is more amazing to me then our ability to create when failure is certain. One day the Pyramids will rest in the sands. We went to the moon all in the hopes of creating footsteps that couldn’t be erased.

We fall in love even though we know that nothing hurts us more.  We break our hearts for those seconds of closeness. We have the courage not to live our lives to avoid pain but to experience pleasure.

I remember sometimes how bad my taste in the opposite sex has been. How many times I have been willing to pretend that one day talking about the boys she likes will somehow become smiling through blowjobs. I think about how much time I wasted and then I realize I wouldn’t have gotten to experience my first love if I hadn’t stumbled through that series of mistakes. I got to experience those moments you are nostalgic for even when they are happening. To think to yourself that you’d like to experience every single kiss again, every single missaid word, fight and fuck while they are happening. Where you couldn’t imagine that life would fall off your shoulders and feel that the past lead you somewhere. New worlds appeared on my shoulder. But I know why we live. Because moments like that happen. Even if they hurt afterwards. Even if memory is like second hand smoking when you are dying for a cigarette, I prefer to have something to remember. Something to lose.

The more you live the more you lose.

So live.

I want to be sick and dying, to be shitting through a tube, breathing through a hospital apparatus and say I want to do it all over again.  I want to drown in nostalgia and go out screaming for more pain, more agony, more lessons, more of those few moments when it all seemed worthwhile.

You don’t get to keep the past. You don’t get to know the future.

This is all you have.  And it’s the world.

Enjoy it.