may 30 2024

I stopped doing ecstasy when I decided I had had enough of artificial happiness.

It’s 2017 and I’m packing up a carry-on size suitcase to go crash on Hanna’s couch. My life is a mess and I could tell it was starting to get really bad. I had run out of money so I gave up my place in Le Plateau and ended up in a ground level garage suite all the way on the other side of the island - in fucking Lachine. The mice came exactly two weeks after I had unpacked and I was having a mental breakdown about it. I call Hanna, crying, and she tells me I can stay with her. Twenty minutes later I get my ass on the bus and make the hour long trek back to the east end. She welcomes me with two kisses on my cheeks.

A few weeks go by. I break up with my sexy, stupid long distance lover. I quit DJing. I quit drinking. I quit smoking weed. I pop pills for the last time. Eventually, September rolls around and I’m holding a one way ticket out of Montreal. I get on a plane with two suitcases - one for my clothes and one for my books. I didn’t even bring my shoes. 

I think happiness should be pure and real and true - generated from within and reproductive, permeating, radial. I hate when it’s constructed or facsimiled. I can’t force it. I hate fake shit. On Hanna’s couch, I realize that this is what I’ve been doing to myself. 

It’s August and still 2017 and she’s cooking, making us dinner. I have my laptop open on the table, playing random Youtube videos. It goes from Ted Talk to Ted Talk until the voice of an insane and serious woman comes through the speakers. We stop in our tracks and stare at the screen. It’s Teal Swan. We don’t know it yet but she changes our lives in a visceral way. We watch her videos back to back to back. We cry cry cry. I feel true, real, non-prescription happiness for the first time in my entire life.

That evening, I mark the date on the calendar on my phone: “august 12 - the day my heart opened.”

me in 2017