Tuesday, Dec. 23, 2003 - 5:16 p.m.
Christmas Letting

I am home at my parents’ farm for Christmas. All I’m doing is sleeping and eating: jeepers. Definitely need to hit the gym with gusto when I get home.

It’s just Mom, Dad, and my 85-year-old Grandma and me here right now; my sister Anne and her teenaged kids Travis and Marie arrive tomorrow. Family has come to mean even more after this year from hell.

Mom put off composing her annual Christmas letter until she got a chance to talk to me. She wanted to know whether I was comfortable with her mentioning my assault in the letter. I said it didn’t matter one way or the other to me. She felt it would be a glaring not to mention anything, as it has been a big deal for the family in 2003. So she let me read what she wrote—that I’d been stabbed in my apartment in June, and had made a full recovery—and that was more than okay with me.

Of course Mom has been quite affected by all this. She has a couple close friends that she’s been able to talk with about what it’s like to almost lose a son under these circumstances. I’m glad of that. But she feels a bit awkward about the stupid questions she gets from some other folks, and the hushed silence other people display. We’ve had some good talks about this.

I shudder when I think about that late-night phone call she and Dad received from the hospital social worker when I was first admitted to Emergency, informing them I’d been stabbed multiple times and that the doctors didn’t yet know the extent of my wounds. The hospital didn’t call back for another 20 minutes or so, to say I was going to be just fine. Those were the most anxious minutes my parents have ever endured. Fuck.

The miracle is that I came through all that so well. This past Friday marked the six month anniversary of being attacked, and I remember what I said to my mother when I phoned her from the emergency ward for the first time the next morning: “This is going to change my life, Mom. I’ve survived for a reason. It’s time to really start living.”

Six months after uttering those words, I look back and see that I’ve really needed this time to begin to recover, to catch my breath, and let the enormity of what happened sink in. It’s a special knowledge, really, how fragile life is, how in an instant it can be snatched away. I’m so grateful for the exquisite friendship and support I’ve had, and I also have found that a lot of people are uncomfortable interacting with me, knowing what to say, whether to say anything, how to relate. In some ways, I feel like this horrible experience has isolated me, and that makes me sad.

But I also sense the blood-rushing vitality in those words I spoke to my mother six months ago. There’s an awakening available, should I choose it.

And so as 2003 draws to a close, I’m in a “take-stock” kind of space. I did survive for a reason, and while there’s still stuff I have to recover from and come to terms with, I am feeling increasingly energized and hopeful about the future.

I’ve come to see that, far more than any leftover fear and anxiety from nearly being killed, what holds me back is what’s always held me back. An ancient stranglehold that I’ve written about here a few times, but not in a long while. Shame. That all-encompassing sense of unworthiness, that pre-verbal, contracted state of hiding, of disappearing.

More than anything else, it is shame that imprisons me. I have not done any real work on this life-binding problem for several years now, not since I left Toronto in the summer of 1999.

And it’s time. I know what I need to do, and I intuitively know how to begin doing it. What I’ve lacked up until now is the commitment to myself to begin, to keep going, to lovingly push myself through onto the other side. Whether it’s my stalled calling to write, my current vocational impasse, the neuroses I bring to—and with which I too often sabotage—relationships, the ways in which sex—often one of the brightest, best ways I engage with the world—can spiral me far, far away from authenticity: all of these issues get waylaid by the pervasive sense I have of being flawed and unloveable.

I sense how easy it would be to just keep on disappearing. But today, with hope and with tears in my eyes, I pick a different path.

I am gifted, smart and loving. I’ve been cheating the world, keeping myself so miniscule. In two years I’ll turn forty, and it’s time to face up to that black voice inside that tells me I’m a piece of shit.

I sit here at the little house on the farm, the bungalow I was raised in till we moved into Grandpa and Grandma’s house when I was fourteen. Anne and the kids will stay here too; this is where Anne and I get to smoke. Being alone here the past few days has brought up all kinds of memories, good and bad. But what I’m remembering right now is Mom’s oft-told story about how long it took me to talk. How old are you when you first start talking? Two, something like that? Well if it’s age two when most tots start talking, I was three before I did. Everyone was so worried about me. Grandpa was convinced I must be mentally retarded or something. But sure enough, a year later I began speaking. In perfect sentences, I might add.

I don’t have any memory of that, of course. But I visualize that mute two year old boy, and I see him mired in shame already. Now that I understand what shame is, what it feels like, I know I’ve lived my entire life with it. Confronting it is going to be no easy task; I’ve successfully, albeit haphazardly, chipped away at it over the years but what I’m called to do now is be indefatigable.

Life showed me in 2003 that I’m meant to be here. It’s up to me to maximize the being here, and that is precisely what I intend to do.

So I want to wish you all happy holidays and more than that, I wish for each and every one of you a similar liberation from what holds you back from fabulousness. The wondrous part is that my liberation really does depend on yours, and vice versa. Let’s be sexy and wise and unafraid of tears, okay?

Let’s risk everything.

Let’s not hold back.

When we are good and ready, let’s speak up and make our beautiful selves heard.

It’s time. Let’s.