Not much to say here, other than I try to describe the difference between suicide, physician assisted suicide, euthanasia, and medical assistance in dying.
Okay, so I’m going to talk to the best of my abilities about what the differences between Suicide, Physician Assisted Suicide, Euthanasia, and Medical Assistance in Dying are. There really are no clear definitions used universally and some terms are used solely to stigmatize medical assistance in dying.
Suicide is an act of desperation. Suicide is the act of a mind that is so overwhelmed with emotions that it cannot think straight. If you’ve never suffered from major depression you’ll never know how tempting suicide is. Suicide is one of those things that no one ever talks about. As a society, we’re very hush-hush about this to the point that we like to pretend that it doesn’t exist. And if society does acknowledge the existence of suicide society often talks about how crazy the person was that committed suicide and how selfish they were and how much pain and suffering they selfishly inflicted upon others.
Suicide is often not planned for and as such family members, relatives, friends and co-workers can often be left devastated. Family members are often left wondering why their loved one committed suicide and if there were any signs they missed and if there was something they could have done. Suicide often has impacts on others as well such as the landlord or property owner that finds the body. The first responders and bystanders who may have witnessed the suicide will be affected.
How many suicides are there every year? This table is from the BC Coroner’s service.
6,102 people successfully committed suicide in the ten year period starting in 2008. I don’t remember hearing a single news story about these people, do you? Society again thinks that by not talking about suicide that suicide will just simply disappear.
What are the common methods of suicide?
When was the last time you heard of a suicide on the Skytrain? Next time, pay attention to the “Medical Emergency” announcement. Yet between 2008 and 2018 there were 32 successful suicides on the Skytrain. The most prevalent method of suicide is the rather barbaric method of hanging. Let’s be honest, self hanging is NOT the same as hanging used as execution. There is very little chance that the person using hanging as a method will know how to do the proper calculations to ensure a quick death.
And it should go without saying, but committing suicide by Skytrain or railway is not a guaranteed way to go. More often than not you will survive with horrific injuries that will haunt you for the rest of your life.
What is often not discussed is the number of suicide attempts per year. The only stats I can find say that in Canada on any given day 275 people attempt suicide. That’s over 100,000 people per year.
I am not a neurologist, but it’s safe to say that the human brain is fragile and can easily be damaged and not just by physical trauma. The human brain can easily be damaged by traumatic experiences. Because the human brain relies on chemicals to transmit and receive signals any disruptions to these chemicals can cause long term effects. The longer a person suffers from untreated major depression and severe anxiety the more profound the damage becomes.
No amount of telling a depressed person to not be sad or instead to think happy thoughts will fix brain damage caused by trauma. And in the end, no amount of medication of therapy will reverse the psychological damage caused by trauma.
However, the events leading up to suicide tend to be very short term problems that could possibly be dealt with if the person committing suicide believed that they had someone to listen to them.
Physician Assisted Suicide.
Physician assisted suicide is a term that fell out of favour just as quickly as it entered the national vocabulary. When a person with an incurable medical condition wishes to end their life so as not to prolong their needless suffering, they are not committing suicide. And as such, the physician supplying the medication is not assisting in a suicide.
Euthanasia.
Euthanasia is a term for when a person, typically a doctor, uses medications to end the life of a patient typically without the consent of the patient. Euthanasia is pretty well illegal just about everywhere in the world. The only place that anything close to Euthanasia is practiced in on death row when prisoners are executed.
As much as I am in favour of any mentally competent adult, and children in very strictly controlled circumstances, ending their life for any medical or psychological issue, I don’t think that physicians should be able to decide on their own, or the next of kin for that matter, should be allowed to end the life of another person without very careful consideration from the courts.
Medical Assistance in Dying.
M.A.i.D. is the term for when a person applies to use medications prescribed for the sole purpose of dying. As I’ve said before, M.A.i.D. is something that has to be applied for, and it has to be planned for. When I apply for M.A.i.D. I can promise you that there will be a battery of tests that I will have to go through. It will not be as simple as me just going to my doctor and asking for a note.
Unlike suicide, almost every detail of M.A.i.D. is planned out from start to finish.
And unlike suicide, the medications used will ensure a proper death and not just an attempt.
If the proper drugs are used in the proper dosages the person undergoing the procedure will not feel pain and will not even be aware of their death.
And because M.A.i.D. is always undertaken with a sound, rational, and lucid mind, the person undergoing the procedure can stop the procedure at any time right up until the loss of consciousness. For obvious reasons you can’t withdraw your consent once the Propofol hits your brain.
And yes, during the entire M.A.i.D. process from application to the final day, the person electing to undergo the procedure will be frequently asked if they wish to continue forth or if they want to abandon the procedure.
The where, when, and how will be scheduled like clockwork. There will be no corpse for an unsuspecting landlord or relative to discover. Arrangements are typically made for the disposal of the body after the procedure. There will be no curious absence from work. People who need to be informed will be informed. And the answers as to why will be available to anyone who asks.
Why? Why do you want to kill yourself.
I prefer the term “going to sleep”. Kill implies violence. I’m just going to sleep. A sleep like the 18,250 sleeps that I’ve gone through in my life. Just that this is a sleep that I will never rouse from.
For 42 years now I’ve had to deal with the fallout from CFB Namao. What happened on that base is not something that one can simply get over and forget about. Then there’s the after effects of being swept up in the desire of the Department of National Defence and the Canadian Armed Forces to keep the actions of P.S. and Captain McRae under wraps least the Canadian public discover what happened.
The Canadian Forces determined that my mental health and my mental wellbeing were sacrificial to the greater cause. Whether or not you like to admit it, the Canadian Forces chain of command sentenced me to death in 1980.
For 42 years I lived with and internalized major depression, severe anxiety, gender and orientation confusion, the inability to form friendships, the inability to form intimate relationships, the inability to enjoy life.
I’m 50 years old now. Seriously, I’m now fifty as I type this out. I honestly never thought that I would live to see this milestone.
I am very tired. I’ve fought the depression and the anxiety for as long as I could. I’ve hidden the depression and anxiety with every fibre in my body. I’ve tried my hardest to appear normal. But I am damaged. To say that I am not damaged is to minimize what occurred on Canadian Forces Base Namao when I was 7 to 8-1/2. To say that I am not damaged is to minimize my mistreatment at the hands of Captain Terry Totzke from age 9 to 11-1/2. To say that I am not damaged is to overlook the fact that I was supposed to have been institutionalized due to how bad my mental health had deteriorated by the time I was 11 years old.
I am damaged due to the wilful neglect of others. I am damaged due to the fact that others kept me from receiving timely counselling, therapy, and medication.
The damage was allowed to fester untreated and unmanaged for almost 42 years now.
There is no fixing this damage.
Just because I no longer cry myself to sleep at night doesn’t mean that this damage doesn’t affect me anymore. It just means that I’ve run out of tears to cry and I am almost completely dead on the inside.
The time for “fixing” me was in 1980. Not 2021.
My entire life was wasted because DND and the CF had a secret to hide.
I am actually at peace with myself now.
The more I think about how close I am to the end and how peaceful the transition from living to dead will be I become filled with a feeling of serenity. It’s actually a beautiful peaceful feeling.
I have a lot of unwanted people living in my skull, and they won’t voluntarily leave. They need to be forcefully evicted. P.S.; Captain Father Angus McRae; The man in the sauna; Captain Terry Totzke; My father, Mcpl Richard Wayne Gill; The other victims of P.S. that I keep seeing him abuse over and over; Earl Ray Stevens; And many others.
When I go to sleep they’ll never bother me again.
When I go to sleep my major depression and my severe anxiety will never trouble me again.
When I go to sleep I will never wake up in the middle of the night due to horrific dreams.
When I go to sleep I will never again grind my teeth down to nothing.
When I go to sleep I will never be crushed under the weight of a severe anxiety attack.
When I go to sleep my gender and orientation issues will never bother me again.
When I go to sleep all I will ever know is silence.
And after the life that I’ve been through never ending silence is fine by me.
In this post I will briefly touch on some of the issues that I’m facing and why I am pursuing some of the paths that I am pursuing.
I wasn’t quite sure where I wanted this blog to go when I started it.
I envisioned this blog ( beeshive.ca ) as being separate from ( cfbnamao.ca ). And it will be.
My other blog, cfbnamao.ca , is more about the trauma and abuse I went through as a child living on a Canadian Armed Forces base that was gripped by the Captain Father Angus McRae child sexual abuse scandal that the Canadian Armed Forces buried out of fear of the public humiliation that would have resulted had the Canadian public found out that an officer of the regular force had sexually abused children on a secure defence establishment for just short of two years.
The other blog, cfbnamao.ca , is also where I go through the flaws in the National Defence Act which allow DND to hide and bury pre-1998 incidents of child sexual abuse.
This blog is intended to deal with the day to day or week to week goings on in my life.
I wasn’t sure what I wanted to post in this blog or how personal I wanted to get.
There are things I will talk about on this blog, and there are things I won’t talk about on this blog. The ones I won’t talk about are more to do with how boring they actually are.
I’ve been told by one of my counsellors before that I should write a book about my life. The problem is that I’m not a writer. I can type, and I can write blogs. So I figured that I would at least get my story out. It will be in blog form, and it will probably jump around from topic to topic a lot. Sure, I won’t make any money from this, but at least it gets my story out and allows me to tell my side of things.
Some of the issues that I write about will make a lot of people very uncomfortable. And that’s fine. It’s been a really weird life, and I’ve got a lot of issues and a lot of demons.
For a brief refresher, I was a military dependent as a child. My father served in the Canadian Armed Forces. I lived on military bases in military housing from birth until age 16. My father was an alcoholic with anger issues, he had depression and he also suffered no doubt from PTSD due to a naval incident that happened in 1969. He self medicated with alcohol and was quick to anger. Everyone minded their own business in the military housing on base and lots of people, including the military police would just turn a blind eye. My mother left when I was 5. She couldn’t take my father’s drinking or physical abuse. My father brought his own mother, a survivor of the Indian Residential Schools, into the house to raise my brother and I as my father was frequently absent. It is because of my grandmother’s heavy drinking that my younger brother and I ended up being sexually abused by the base chaplain and his 14 year old altar boy for just over 1-1/2 years. In the fallout of the CFB Namao scandal, I spent 2-1/2 years in the care of the military social worker receiving conversion therapy. A couple of years later, I would end up being sexually abused by a retired member of the Canadian Armed Forces who was working as a commissionaire at the armouries where I was in cadets. There’s a lot more dysfunction in my life, but that’s a basic run down.
In 2011 I obtained my foster care records, which I never knew existed. Turns out that in the aftermath of the CFB Namao matter, I was so depressed, so anxious, and so emotionally disturbed that I was supposed to have been institutionalized. That never happened though because the Canadian Forces needed to keep the Captain McRae matter under the rug and out of the public eye. In fact, my father was posted out of the jurisdiction of Alberta in order to ensure that I was taken out of the jurisdiction of Alberta Social Services so that my apprehension would never occur.
So, I suffered with diagnosed but untreated mental illness for 42 years.
Mental illness that various doctors were noting was getting more and more out of hand.
And for the most part I think I got everything “under control” and “hidden”. You learn quickly in life how to hide mental illness and depression and anxiety.
Things have popped up in the past, but you can only keep the lid on a boiling pot for so long before the roiling bubbles lift the lid.
I’ve had an interesting career trajectory.
Most employers that I’ve work for hired me because they could see that I was very technically skilled and that I had a very obvious ability to deal with technical issues. But, the one thing that most employers had remarked is that I lacked the personal skills required for advancement.
In 2011, after the Canadian Forces military police let slip to me that my babysitter had been involved with the base chaplain and that the base chaplain had been kicked out of the military for molesting children, I started to see a counsellor.
I started going over my history with this counsellor. I started discussing all of the paperwork I had uncovered. All of my personal records that I had found. The lawsuit between my babysitter and the Minister of National Defence in 2001. The out of court settlement in November of 2008.
My counsellor said to me that I reminded him of a character in a series of books that he had read, and he wanted to know if I had ever heard about “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”. I had actually. I had already read the books and had already seen the films. My counsellor said that the parallels between my life and the life of Lisbeth Salander were remarkable. We were both very damaged people, but we were both very smart, very tech savvy, and able to put the puzzle pieces together.
And yeah, that’s pretty true. I have no interpersonal skills. I can relate with people on technical issues and in technical discussions, but outside of that I’m lost. I don’t make small talk. I’m not interested in discussing family life. Wanna talk about work, sure, I’m your man. Wanna talk about your sister’s wedding, or what happened in the sportsball game last night? Nope, not interested in the least.
Due to the “conversion therapy” I received from the military social worker I have no honest idea of what my gender is or what my orientation is. And sex is kinda a moot point anyways as (a) I really don’t like being touched, (b) I really don’t like being touched in a sexual manner, (c) I find sex to be repulsive, (d) I honestly don’t know if I’m GLBTQ. And it probably doesn’t help that my years of untreated and unmanaged depression and anxiety mean that I don’t like getting personal with people. I have honestly had very few partners of either gender in my life.
So, for the record I am the Chief Engineer at St. Paul’s Hospital in Vancouver, BC. This is a position that I’ve held since May of 2020. Prior to that I was the Acting Chief Engineer while we reclassified the power plant. Prior to being Acting Chief Engineer I was the Assistant Chief Engineer since about 2017. Prior to that I was a maintenance power engineer for about 11 years.
Power engineering was recommended to me back in 2002. It was a pathway to a decent paying job for a person who didn’t have the funds or the support to take a trade course.
St. Paul’s Hospital is being relocated to the False Creek Flats. Construction of the new hospital should be completed in about 7 years. I’ve had involvement with the planning and design of the new hospital. The old St. Paul’s Hospital will probably continue to operate for at least one or two years after the new hospital is open in order to ensure that all of the programs and clinics transfer from one site to the other without any disruption.
St. Paul’s hospital on Burrard will more than likely be my final place of employment. The hospital and I have been taking care of each other for the last 17 years. And we’ll take care of each other for the next few years.
Now, I will unequivocally state that the future of St. Paul’s Hospital has absolutely nothing to do with my decision to explore the possibility of Medical Assistance in Dying.
I am not looking at M.A.i.D. out of fear for my future. Even though the new St. Paul’s will have either a 2nd class power plant or a 3rd class power plant, which means that I cannot be the chief at the new hospital, there would still be ample positions for me in the power plant none the less.
I have absolutely no doubt in my mind that because of what I’ve done over my tenure at St. Paul’s that Senior Leadership would create a position for me if they had to.
I bring this up because I forgot that one of the Senior Leaders from Providence Health Care follows my twitter feed and saw my postings about M.A.i.D.
I am actually very proud of the work that I’ve done at St. Paul’s and the innovations that I’ve brought to the Physical Plant. I have a good team under me and I have good leaders above. The other trades and I get along very well.
In a way, being at St. Paul’s has probably allowed me to deal with my mental health issues as I could take off sick days on the days where I was completely incapable of getting out of bed in the morning.
Being at St. Paul’s has also allowed me to be as odd and weird as I want because so long as you’re doing the work required of you both HR and the union don’t care, and if they don’t care then the personal opinions of others don’t matter.
COVID last year was an absolute disaster and extremely disruptive to the physical plant. But COVID was far from the sole reason for my breakdown this past spring.
I’ve run as far and as hard as I can.
For 42 years I’ve been hauling around baggage that no person should ever have to carry.
For 42 years I’ve been denied treatment, help, and acknowledgement for issues that were far beyond my control.
The years of childhood neglect, the physical, mental and sexual abuse, the years of self loathing, self hatred, the feelings of emptiness and worthlessness, and the realization that I had been sacrificed by the Canadian Armed Forces to keep their secrets hidden finally came home to roost.
All of it is finally catching up.
I’m tired.
I want to go to sleep.
I don’t want any memories of the past.
I don’t want to remember being caught in P.S.’s bedroom.
I don’t want to remember the sexual abuse on CFB Namao. And let’s be very clear, P.S. could be very aggressive and depraved. This was not, as Alberta Crown prosecutor Jon Werbicki opined in October 2011, “childhood curiosity and experimentation “. P.S. would vent his own anger and hatred on the kids he was abusing, so let’s not mince any words here. There was no fun enjoyed by his victims.
I don’t want to remember watching P.S. sexually abuse my younger brother.
I don’t want to remember P.S. sexually abusing the other kids.
I don’t want to remember the five distinct visits to the chapel on CFB Namao to see Captain McRae in his living quarters. Visits that always ended with a sickly sweet grape juice. One of these visits hurts the most and will always stand out in my mind. I was with my father over at the storage unit he rented for his motorcycle. My father wasn’t around a lot. He’d bugger off for weeks or months on end and leave us in the care of his mother who was living on base with us. I really wasn’t helping him work on his motorcycle, but I just wanted to be near him. P.S. came walking by and asked my father if he wanted P.S. to look after me. I looked at my father hoping that he would say no. My father told me to go with P.S. and stay with him. P.S. took me right to the chapel.
After Mcpl Christian Cyr let slip to me in May of 2011 that the base padre Captain McRae had been arrested for molesting children on the base in 1980, I broke down and told him about the five visits to the rectory and the sickly sweet grape juice. And not having any memories after the grape juice. The CFNIS spent the entire rest of the investigation trying their best to gaslight me. When I finally received the court martial transcripts and the 1980 CFSIU investigation paperwork it killed me to find out that the CFSIU in 1980 knew that Captain McRae was luring children into the chapel and would give them alcohol before sexually assaulting them. The CFNIS had these documents in their possession through the entire 2011 CFNIS investigation.
I don’t want to remember my father threatening to kill me for fucking with his military career. When my father received his compassionate posting from CFB Summerside to CFB Namao in 1978 he ended up being attached to 447 squadron. 447 was the home of the tandem rotor heavy lift and troop transport helicopters. He arrived at that squadron when it was brand new. 447 Sqn wasn’t officially stood up until January 1979. I never knew what position my father had at 447. He would always go off on training exercises sometimes for 6 to 8 weeks at a time. The Chinooks were his escape from the responsibilities of his family. He could run off with his military buddies and leave me and my brother at home with his alcoholic mother who would hire P.S. to be our babysitter. In 2019 I learnt about my father’s death in 2017. I filed an ATI request with Library and Archives Canada for his service records. LAC complied and released a partial amount. But it was more than enough for me to understand that I really wasn’t exaggerating when I say that Richard despised me for “fucking with his military career”. Just after our arrival on CFB Namao in the summer of 1978, the Canadian Forces sent my father to Boeing-VERTOL for Maintenance Management training on the Chinook. Here he was, a kid from Fort McMurray, a kid with bugger all for formal education, and he was going to be a key player in the hierarchy of 447 Sqn. My abuse at the hands of P.S. caused us to be relocated off CFB Namao and sent down to CFB Griesbach. And then when Alberta Social Services divulged their plan to remove me from the home, the Canadian Forces arranged for my father to be posted to CFB Downsview in Ontario. Yeah, it looks as if he was right when he would often rage out that I had “fucked with his military career”. Sure, as a 50 year old man I fully understand that none of this was my fault. However when you’re 11 years old, you don’t understand this. When your father tells you that you fucked with his military career, that’s it, you fucked with his military career. You can’t undo the yelling, the screaming, the backhands, the belts. I lived through his rage, and there is no removing it from my brain.
I don’t want to remember the times my father would beat me and then beat me again for crying. Nothing would get Richard more enraged than crying. And what’s a sexually abused child with major depression and severe anxiety going to do? They tend to cry.
I don’t want to remember trying to hide under my captain’s bed to keep my father from getting hold of me. Richard could lose his temper. I learnt quickly that I could hide from Richard under my captain’s bed. Once he figured out where I was hiding he took all of the panels off the bed. I lost my safe space.
I don’t want to remember hoping and wishing all the time on CFB Griesbach that I would die in my sleep and never wake up again.
I don’t want to remember my grandmother’s alcoholism or my father’s alcoholism.
I don’t want to remember how Earl Stevens used his position of authority at the Dennison Armouries in Toronto to entrap me into providing sexual favours to him. Somehow Earl knew that I was a military dependent and that my father was in the Canadian Armed Forces and that I lived on a military base. Earl was retired from the Canadian Armed Forces and I have absolutely no doubt in my mind that he preyed upon children living on the bases that he was stationed at. He knew that if he touched me that blackmailing me would be very simple as male on male sexual assault is something that no one ever talked about on base. In fact you knew that if you got sexually abused on base the last people you ever wanted to find out were the military police or your own family.
I don’t want to remember the times my father would get angry at my school teachers for wanting to help me or to encourage me to take my hobbies seriously. This one I can’t really speak to or understand. Most parents would have died to have their child put extra effort into school. Not Richard. Just go to fucking school, stare at the fucking blackboard, and stop showing off.
I don’t want t remember being mugged in 1995 by a guy and his girlfriend only to have a Vancouver Police Officer tell me that he wasn’t going to investigate my mugging because he was certain that I was a homosexual prostitute. Even when I found a video tape that had the two suspects on it and showed the proximity to me in a line-up, this police constable refused to look at the matter.
I don’t want to remember all of the people in positions of authority who took advantage of my technical skills to make themselves look better while at the same time limiting my potential due to my lack of education.
I don’t want P.S., Captain Father Angus McRae, Captain Terry Totzke, Earl Ray Stevens, my father, or my grandmother living in my head. They all need to go.
I don’t want to remember all of the kids who beat the shit out of me as I left P.S.’s house the day I had been caught in his bedroom.
I don’t want to remember the kids at the various schools who used to beat the shit out of me for being different and not normal. Sure, I might have been odd and a bit of an asshole, but the Canadian Armed Forces decided that their secrets were worth more than my psychological well-being.
I don’t want to deal with the crushing major depressions or the severe anxiety anymore. I don’t want to wake up with night terrors, or have to have teeth removed because Ive cracked them due to excessive grinding. The anxiety is not fun. The major depression is a literal killer.
Sure, the Lexapro has brought the anxiety under control and seems to have tamed the anxiety monster, but they’re still there. I can feel their presence. I know they’re just waiting for my body to build up a tolerance to the serotonin and then they’ll come roaring back with a vengeance.
I’ve had the suicide monster lurking in my brain ever since the days of living on Canadian Forces Base Griesbach. The suicide monster is kinda easy to keep under control. But it’s there none the less. If I didn’t have a suicide monster living in my head after all that I’ve gone through then that would truly indicate that something was wrong.
So yeah.
There’s a lot of baggage in my skull. There’s a lot of trauma. There’s a lot of damage.
I’m tired, and I don’t want any of this anymore.
Knowing that the end is possibly within reach actually fills me with hope.
Okay, so I’ll talk a little bit about the procedure itself.
If I am approved, I hope to undergo the injection method as opposed to the oral method. Yes, both methods are supposed to result in a painless death, but I favour the injection method due to the swiftness.
Which ever method I’m allowed to undertake, I have to initiate it. Whether it’s drinking the glass of barbiturates or pressing the trigger button for the dosing pumps, it’s the patient undergoing the procedure that has to initiate the procedure.
With the oral method you consume a large amount of barbiturates in liquid form. This is supposed to induce unconsciousness and eventually cardiac arrest. Time to death varies from person to person. This is not the way I want to go. I can’t even stand most over-the-counter or prescription pain killers. And the idea of dying from a drug overdose doesn’t appeal to me.
The injection method is almost clinical in its efficiency and swiftness. There are three or four drugs used depending on the drugs selected.
The first drug to be introduced would be Midazolam. Midazolam is a sedative. This is not used to render the person unconscious. This is really just to make the person feel comfortable. Face it, no matter how intense the desire to die, when you’re lying down on your literal death bed with the cannula in your vein, anxiety can become your enemy.
The next drug to be introduced would be Propofol. Propofol is typically used prior to the administration of anesthesia in surgical procedures. For surgical procedures Propofol is usually administered at a rate of 2 mg/kg. In my case, if I was going for surgery I would get a dosage of about 180 mg. However, in the case of M.A.i.D. I would be receiving a doseof 1,000 mg. At this dosing level I will be put into a very deep coma and would lose consciousness and all sensation.
The third drug to be introduced would be Rocuronium. Rocuronium is a neuromuscular blocking agent that targets striated muscles. The Rocuronium would act upon my diaphragm and cease my breathing.
The final drug to be introduced would be Bupivacaine. Bupivacaine would cause cardiac arrest and stop my heart.
So basically the Midazolam is to calm me down prior to the Propofol. The Propofol is to shut my brain down so that I am unaware of the resulting asphyxiation and subsequent cardiac arrest. With the advent of cardiac arrest, arterial blood pressure in my brain would drop to nothing which means that even if the Propofol were to somehow wear off, I would never regain consciousness.
I’m not exactly sure how long after my heart stops before I will be pronounced clinically dead, but it wouldn’t be too long.
The interesting thing is, it won’t just be me dying. It will be P.S., Captain McRae, the man in the sauna, Captain Totzke, my father. There will be no more depression. There will be no more anxiety. There will be no more night terrors. There will be no more grinding my teether. There will be nothing.
I am an atheist.
I don’t believe in magical special friends or an invisible father figure peering down on me from the clouds.
I may be an atheist, but I’ve never had issues with my morals unlike men of the cloth like Captain Father Angus McRae or Brigadier General Roger Bazin.
Being an atheist means that I don’t believe the the great beyond, or the magical city in the sky. Conversely I don’t believe in the fire and brimstone pits of hell.
When I die, I will simply cease to exist.
Will I miss anything after I am dead? No, I’ll be dead.
Will I be sad when I die and will I be full of regret? No, I’ll be dead.
Life is not a competition to see who can live the longest.
You live the life you have.
You do the best with it that you can.
Life is not a miracle. There are over 7 billion people on the planet.
Society is weird in the sense that if I’m out riding my bicycle and I get hit by a car, “oh well, life goes on”. If I go snowboarding down a mountain and crash into a tree “Oh well, he died doing what he liked to do”. If I had developed a drug habit and died of a heroin overdose, everyone would be talking about how rough of a life I had and how it wasn’t fair that I died. Yet if someone undergoes severe psychological trauma society gets all sanctimonious if the topic of suicide or M.A.i.D. comes up. I can go scuba diving with the sharks or skydiving out of a perfectly functional airplane and society is fine with that. Struggle with the fallout from being sexually abused as a child on a military base, gotta keep on struggling. Apparently it builds character.
If this had been 40 years ago, just after the abuse but prior to Captain Totzke getting his hooks into my brain, yeah, maybe counselling or drug therapy could have worked.
I’m fifty years old in a few short days. I’ve had the events from CFB Namao playing back in my head non-stop since 1980. And I think the effect was made even worse by the fact that Captain Totzke and my father both blamed me for what happened and they both blamed me for allowing the babysitter to go after my younger brother.
So it’s not just the untreated trauma from sexual abuse that I’m dealing with, I’m dealing with the fucked up counselling from the military social worker that I receive back then and the scapegoating. Yes, the release of records by DND did vindicate me. But that doesn’t undo the damage done. In fact in some ways knowing that DND and the Canadian Forces knew the truth all along makes the pain even worse.
So, when do I intend to go to sleep?
Well, March 2023 would be the soonest.
But realistically it will probably be closer to 2025 or 2026.
I don’t know what the criteria will be or how many tests I would have to undergo. I would imagine that there would be more than a two question multiple choice questionnaire .
I don’t know if my current physician would be willing to prescribe me the medications or even cannulate me and connect the IV lines and the pumps. Even though I would have to push the button to initiate the process, my doctor would be the one who would have to insert the cannulas and be ready to do manual injections if something went wrong with the pumps. This might cause some physicians to not be willing to participate.
I would like to stick around a while to see what happens with my class action lawsuit. But I do fear that DND and the Department of Justice will try to drag this matter out for as long as possible in the courts. I have no intention of waiting 10 years.
Place of death? More than likely at home in my own bed. Lay down for one final sleep and never wake up again.
What happens after?
Hopefully I get to go to medical school or a body farm.
If I seem cavalier about death, it’s probably just that I refuse to be afraid of death.
The fact is everyone dies. Death is a normal part of life. There is no escaping death no matter how much you want to wish it away.
I don’t want my body pumped full of chemicals and stuck in the ground.
Send me to medical school and let the students learn.
Cut my brain apart and try to figure out why I never ended up on the streets with addiction problems.
Put me on a body farm and let the forensics investigators learn their techniques.
Okay, so I’m going to delve a little bit into the topic of M.A.i.D. and why I am hoping to be able to avail myself to this procedure.
Let’s face it. I’ve been through quite a lot in this life. And what I’ve been through has left me with some very significant long term psychological issues.
Major depression and severe anxiety would be the most significant issues that I struggle with. Yes, the medications that I am on now have calmed the storm, but the storm is still there. And the storm always will be.
Depression and anxiety have genetic roots. And if I had to say who I inherited what from I’d say that my depression came from my father’s genes and my anxiety came from my mother’s genes.
I went through 1-1/2 years of very depraved and graphic sexual abuse. I went through about 2-1/2 years of “counselling” with Canadian Armed Forces officer Captain Terry Totzke, who was anything but concerned with my mental well-being and was more concerned with keeping the secrets of CFB Namao under wraps, even it that meant depriving me of the psychiatric care that I needed at the time.
My childhood was spent living in the household of a rage fuelled alcoholic with his own inner demons that he could barely deal with.
Because of the meddling of Captain Totzke, I have issues with gender identity and sexual orientation.
I have a lot of people living in my head, and none of them are pleasant. They keep coming back in unwanted flashbacks. If somebody touches me unexpectedly I react. I don’t like being touched. Period. And it’s very hard to be intimate with someone when you don’t like touching.
P.S., Captain McRae, the man from the sauna, Captain Totzke, Earl Ray Stevens, they’re all up there. My father, Richard Gill is up there screaming and yelling about how I fucked with his military career.
I don’t like sex. I guess the lessons that I learnt from 9 to 11 was that sex was disgusting and wrong, just as I was disgusting and wrong for having done what I did on CFB Namao when I was 7 to 8.
Even though I now understand that the mess on CFB Namao was far larger than me apparently enjoying what the 15 year old babysitter was doing to me and in turn allowing the 15 year old babysitter to molest my younger brother, I can’t rewire my brain. Nobody can. There is no erasure procedure that will remove all of this crap.
I don’t want to learn how to deal with it or cope with it. I didn’t ask for it, I didn’t want it, and it’s not up to me to live with it.
Death isn’t something that I’ve just begun to long for recently. It’s been with me since the days of CFB Namao.
The problem though is that no matter how much I really wanted to die, working up the will to follow through is something else.
I have come close in the past. You can’t go through what I did and not want to die. I know of two men who took their own lives due to the events on CFB Namao. How many others took their own lives we’ll never know. There is no way on Earth that the Canadian Armed Forces will go overturning the stones of history.
The closest I came was back in 1994. What stopped me was the image of P.S. and my father holding hands and laughing their heads off like they were buddies.
In the days and years after CFB Namao I must would frequently fantasize my own death and that after my death the police would investigate my father and off to jail he would go.
The more I learnt about suicide over the years, the less inclined I became to commit it. Most suicides are not successful, and if you think you’ve got problems prior to suicide, depending an how bad you botch things up, you’re going to have significantly more problems after.
Suicide is messy. And it’s often not quick. And it’s really not fair to those who discover you and who have to clean up the mess. And it often leaves those who knew you with all sorts of unanswered questions.
In the early aughts I started hearing of medically assisted suicide in places like Scandinavia and I was fascinated. Most if not all of the countries that offered medically assisted suicide didn’t often include depression. It wasn’t until the late aughts early ’10s that I started hearing about medically assisted suicide for depression.
But the reality always was that even if European and Scandinavian countries were allowing people to die who only had mental issues such as depression, there was no way I was going to be able to afford a flight over there.
So my hopes and desires kinda took a back seat.
And besides, I was just about to start discovering the whole rancid truth about CFB Namao and about who knew what back then. The more I learnt about CFB Namao, the more I decided that I needed to stay alive to at least clear my name and see this mess through to a conclusion.
In 2019, something in the Canadian media caught my eye. Due to a court decision in Quebec, the Government of Canada was expected to amend the Criminal Code of Canada to allow medical assistance in dying (M.A.i.D.) in circumstances in which the person requesting M.A.i.D. was experiencing pain, but was not near the expected terminal end of their life. Prior to this, M.A.i.D. could only be given if a person requested it and that person was expected to die naturally in the imminent future.
Parliament passed the amendments to the Criminal Code of Canada in March of 2021 to allow M.A.i.D. in cases where death was not imminent. However, what caught my attention was that the Senate, in reviewing the bill, had determined that to not allow a person suffering solely from psychiatric issues to request M.A.i.D. could be seen as a Charter issue.
Parliament has until March 17th, 2023 to pass the required legislation to allow M.A.i.D. for psychiatric issues such as depression.
Well, it’s now 2021. I’ve somewhat cleared my name. I know that the Canadian Forces knew full well what happened back in 1979 to 1980. I also know why it was buried.
I have a class action lawsuit that is heading before a justice in the spring of 2022. The class action came about due to the release of Captain McRae’s court martial transcripts and the Canadian Forces Special Investigations Unit investigation, both of with indicted that the military police in 1980 were full well aware of what P.S. was doing with younger children on the base and that it was Captain McRae that had taught P.S. and encouraged P.S. to behave in the manner that he did.
I don’t know what the rules will be in March of 2023. I can’t imagine it being something as simple as just walking into your doctor’s office and saying “Doc, I’m depressed, I want to die”. There will more than likely be a barrage of psychiatric tests and evaluations. I will probably have to convince the majority of a panel of at least 3 medical professionals that I am sane, competent, and that I am suffering.
If I succeed, then there will be all of the arrangements. I still don’t know what all of the details will be.
or college, or even university. But even if I had done well in school I don’t think those options would have really ever been open to me.
School was an interesting place for me as a kid.
Prior to CFB Namao, school had always been an interesting and fun place.
School however became a place of torment for me in the days after the CFB Namao affair.
CFB Griesbach was no better. Even my teacher noted in one of her reports that the other kids had made me their scapegoat and that I had been ostracized by them.
In November of 1981 Alberta Social Services was in called in by our teachers and principal to deal with me and my brother as Captain Terry Totzke didn’t seem to be making any progress.
When I became involved with Alberta Social Services I had been deemed to be far too emotionally disturbed and that I should be institutionalized in a psychiatric facility. For whatever reason both my father and Totzke never seemed to make much off an effort. I am still of the opinion that the Canadian Forces were doing everything in their power to keep a lid on the Captan McRae child sexual abuse scandal and the fear of Totzke was that if I went into civilian care of any kind that I would start talking about what happened on CFB Namao and that this would cause problems for the Canadian Forces.
In the spring of 1982 my father agreed to place me into the Westfield Program in Edmonton. This required me taking a bus from on the base over to the public school that hosted the program. And what was even better is that this was the proverbial “short bus”. What more could a kid living on a military base ask for than to take the “short bus” to school. I guess social services thought that having the bus pick me up over by the motor pool building instead of from right in front of my PMQ would shield me from embarrassment . But considering that the parking lot by the motor pool was visible to half the PMQs on the lower half of the base, everyone knew who it was that was taking the “short bus”. At least I didn’t have to wear a helmet. And no, I didn’t lick the windows either.
But riding the “short bus” was pretty well the end of any type of friendship that I had on the base as no one wanted to associate with the “weirdo” and the “retard”.
Even my stepmother had referred to me as a “retard” one day and said that it was my fault for going to a school for “retards”. I would have to say that my family’s involvement with Alberta Social Services and Canadian Armed Forces social worker Captain Terry Totzke was causing a lot of stress for both my father who knew what had happened on CFB Namao, and Sue, my stepmother, who probably has never been told about the events of CFB Namao.
As I would learn in 2011, the Westfield program wasn’t for boys who were attracted to other boys as I had been told by both Totzke and my father. Nope, it was for emotionally disturbed children. Children who couldn’t attend regular school because they were emotionally and behaviourally challenged.
To attend this program, the parents of the children had to agree to sign foster care paperwork. I honestly don’t think that Richard realized what he signed as evidenced by what he told Captain Terry Totzke on January 28th, 1983. I now understand that a lot of Richard’s life was spent flying from one catastrophe to another with no real idea of what was going on and no idea of how to take control, always expecting someone else to solve his problems.
Looking back at this time in my life I would have to say that my having developed major depression and severe anxiety isolated me from the other kids.
Throw into that mix that I really didn’t like being touched. Being touched from behind would send me into a panic. Which when you’re dealing with a bunch of 11 year old kids is just guaranteed to bring more touching. But just the feeling of anyone touching my body anywhere would freak me out.
It was noted in one of my psychiatric evaluations that I would often twist and contort my body to avoid being touched.
Also, around this time I had started to develop a very bad habit of wetting the bed. And it was determined in my household that if I didn’t shower before going to school that the embarrassment would make me stop wetting the bed.
Yeah, there were a lot of stupid people with a lot of stupid ideas back then.
At the time I really liked to be left alone to read books. This might explain why even to this day have no issues with reading manuals for equipment
When my father got his posting to Toronto in January of 1983, one of the promises that he made was that I would be placed at the Sick Kids hospital in Toronto for psychiatric care. Well, this didn’t happen.
I was dumped into good old fashioned public school. CFB Downsview, unlike other bases I had lived on, didn’t have schools on base for military children. We all went to public school at local schools off base.
One of the first things the school board had to do was to separate my brother and I and send us to different public schools due to intense sibling rivalry. Near the end of my involvement with Alberta Social Services it was noted that Richard and Sue refused to talk to each other and instead Richard and Sue would talk to each other using my brother and I as the intermediaries. I guess that had really set my brother and I against each other.
Then the school board came to the conclusion that I was having great difficulties making friends and relating to my peers. I soon found myself moved into a class for “special” children. This was Mrs. Bowen’s class. The nice thing about this class is Mrs. Bowen had a small Scottish Terrier named Misty that she brought to school everyday.
Another problem that I had at home with Richard was that he was absolutely useless for help with homework. Asking Richard for help with homework was akin to pulling the pin on a hand grenade and then holding on to it.
Asking Richard for help with homework would often induce one of his “rage out” sessions where fists or back hands would go flying, and then 30 minutes later he wouldn’t “remember” ever having hit you. But then the next day Richard would be all apologetic for maybe getting a little too carried away.
Junior high school was a completely different experience from grade school that I was totally unprepared for. Boys were supposed to have girlfriends. Boys were also supposed to hang out with other boys and talk about cars, and sports, and girls, and women.
For grade 7 I went to Elia Junior High on Sentinel Road. This was about a 40 minute walk to and from school. I could have easily gotten a student bus pass and taken the bus, but Richard wasn’t going to pay for a bus pass.
Again, I was placed into a homeroom for “trouble kids”. Pretty sure this teacher was Marv Schneider.
I had zero interest in cars, I had even less interest in sports. And anything sex related caused me great anxiety as I was fresh out of Captain Totzke’s care. Anything sex related just brought me right back to the sessions with Captain Totzke. And I still couldn’t form friends.
Kids who like to be left alone in junior high school tend to get beat up a lot. Especially if you’re severely depressed and suffer from anxiety.
My grade 7 music teacher, Mrs. Donskov, considered me to be an underprivileged kid from an underprivileged family. She had arranged for me to borrow a bass guitar and an amplifier that she was willing to drop off at my home every Friday night and pick up every Monday morning. My father blew up at her. So, Mrs. Donskov then decided that if my father didn’t want me playing music in the house that maybe he’d sign me up for drumming instruction with a local drum school. Again, more yelling on the phone when she called him to propose her idea.
When I asked my father why he wouldn’t let me play the bass guitar in the PMQ he blathered on about “military housing rules” and how we weren’t allowed to have amplified noises like that. This of course was complete bullshit. I knew of at least four other base brats living in the same PMQ patch that played electric guitar in their house and one who had a drum set in the basement.
Richard was like that though. He would always blame his rash decisions on something else that was out of his control. See, he wouldn’t mind me playing bass guitar in the house, but the military wouldn’t allow it. This to him sounds much better than him admitting that his untreated depression led him to being easily annoyed by noises or anything else that disturbed his thoughts.
At the end of the grade 7 school year I requested a transfer to Pierre Laporte Junior High as it would only be a ten minute walk from the base to the school.
Pierre Laporte was no better than Elia, but at least I wasn’t in a special ed program. And I didn’t need a bus pass, walking to school was simple.
Same thing though, no interest in cars, no interest in sports, no interest in girls or women means that you got a lot of beatings for being a fag or a queer.
I got beat up so many times at Pierre Laporte. And it was almost always the same clique of kids. G.P., S., R.K., R.A., and a few others that hung around with these four.
Mr. Richard Ford was the music teacher at this school. He realized that I had a knack for rhythm and tempo and that I picked up working with MIDI based synthesizers and Apple Mac MIDI software. I also seemed to have a fairly decent ear for mixing, so I became the official mixer for most of the school performances.
Mr. Ford knew the owner of a PA rental shop on Wilson Ave. and he managed to get me a part time job working there after school rewinding voice coils on speakers and fixing equipment.
My father blew up at Mr. Ford on more than one occasion. Once was when Mr. Ford called my father to suggest that my father buy me a keyboard. The second time was when my Mr. Ford called my father to suggest that my father buy me an Apple Mac or and Apple IIc so that I could get into MIDI sequencing. The third time my father blew up at Mr. Ford was when one of Mr. Ford’s other students had to give a recital at the North York Board of Education auditorium. She was going to play the piano in real time and I programmed the accompaniment tracks to accompany her on the piano. My father at the time was working out of an office in the Federal Government building at 4900 Yonge Street. This was literally 2 blocks away from where the recital was going on. Mr. Ford suggested that I call my father and see if my father wanted to come and attend the recital. I told Mr. Ford that I was afraid to. Mr. Ford asked me for my father’s work number. Mr. Ford then called my father. My father blew up at him for disturbing him at work and for taking me off school property without checking with him first.
I put together a 5mw Helium Neon laser for science class. My science teacher, Mr. Jonathan Bowles of course was very impressed. Not only with the laser itself, but with the description of how a laser works, and the fact that I had interfaced the laser with a video game call VECTREX and could use the laser to play X-Y graphics on any large surface. Mr. Bowles was certain this could get me into the National Science Fair in Ottawa. He called my father. My father blew up.
When I got home from school that day I got a lecture from Richard about how he was sick and goddamned tired of my school teachers calling him up and harassing him with stupid bullshit. He told me that I was to stop showing off in school, that I was to go to school, shut my damn mouth, stare at the chalk board, and only speak if I am spoken to.
The only high grades I had that year were of course music and science. All of my other grades were just barely a pass.
That summer my father asked me what my plans were for the new school year. Was I going to go to grade 9 or was I going to go get a job. If I didn’t go back to school in September, I had to get a job and I was also going to start paying him $200.00 a month for the rent of my bedroom in the basement.
Richard had joined the Royal Canadian Navy with a grade 8 / grade 9 education in 1963 that he obtained in a single room school house in Fort McMurray, AB. So I guess that his way of thinking was that I could simply leave school and luck into employment that would look after me for life, just like the Canadian Forces had looked after him. But this was the summer of 1987, not 1963. Grade 8 wasn’t going to get you anywhere.
Richard made an offer. He said that if I did go back to school in September that he would sign me up for driver training with Young Drivers of Canada on my birthday in September when I turned 16. That turned out to be another of Richard’s many lies.
I did return to school that September.
On the day of my birthday in September after school I went to the DMV and picked up the paperwork for my learner’s permit. I then went to the Young Driver’s office on Wilson Ave and picked up the enrolment paperwork. I then went home and waited for Richard to come home. I gave Richard the paperwork. He looked at it and asked me what this was for. I said that you had promised that you’d let me get my learner’s permit and the Young Driver’s course. He said that I misunderstood him, that he said that he’d check with his insurance company first to see if my driver’s licence would affect his rates. He said that he wanted to let me get my learner’s permit, but that his insurance company said that his rates would go up if he did that. And this was supposedly true even if I didn’t drive his car. Again, another “Richard Lie(tm)”.
I left school not too long after this. I started working full time. And by early 1988 I moved out.
I lived on my own until the summer of 1989 when I bumped into Mr. Bowles. He implored me to go back to school and finish school. He said that my brain was too big to waste on menial labour. He suggested that I could attend A.I.S.P. over at Avondale and that it would be perfect for someone like me who didn’t fit into regular school too well and didn’t have much in the way of support at home.
I got word from Mr. Bowles that he along with Mr. Ford and Mr. Aitken had written letters on my behalf to the administrators of A.I.S.P.. A couple of weeks later I received word that I had been accepted into the program. I went over an met the staff at A.I.S.P. and we formulated a plan. I would take grade 9 and grade 10 in the first year, and then I would take grade 11 and grade 12 in the second year.
A.I.S.P. stood for “The Alternative and Independent Study Program”. It occupied the second floor of an elementary school. It also had an enrolment of close to 300 students. You couldn’t get 300 students on the second floor of this school if you tried. You’d basically go to this school and receive your assignments. Then you were expected to hand your assignments in by the dead line. There really weren’t classrooms to speak of, but you were more than welcome to sit in on lessons. You could also drop into local high schools and attend classes there if you wanted to. The school didn’t have a library. If you needed books you either went to the North York Public Library or you dropped into a local high school and borrowed books from there.
The only problem with Avondale is that I wouldn’t be able to work while going there. And any part-time job I got wouldn’t cover the rent of where I was living. So I went back home and talked to Richard. Richard agreed to let me move back in. I could sleep on the couch in the basement as my former bedroom in the basement had been converted to a new TV room. Richard would also arrange to drive me to his office in the morning and I could walk the remainder of the distance to school. When I got off school I could go wait in the lobby of 4900 Yonge street for a drive back home, but if I missed the drive I’d have to walk home as he was not going to waste his time waiting. Young and Sheppard to Keele and Sheppard isn’s a small distance.
Everything was going fine for the first few months. That was until Richard found me and a group of other kids from A.I.S.P. walking on Yonge towards the North York Public library. As he would always do in his Mustang, he jumped on the brakes, spun the steering wheel, hit the accelerator and dumped the clutch and did a piss poor burnout / half donut across Yonge Street to where I was standing dumbfounded with my classmates. He jumped out of the car and started yelling about not putting up with my bullshit and lies, that he was sick and tired of me not attending school. One of the other kids chimed in that we were in school, that we were going to the library to grab some books. Richard ranted that the fucking school had fucking books and what type of fucking school didn’t have goddamn books.
Richard obviously didn’t comprehend the meaning of “Independent Study” too well.
When I got home that evening after walking from Avondale back to the base it was as pleasant as you could imagine it to be. “You get your fucking ass into a regular school tomorrow or you get the fuck out of my house!”. Again I tried to explain to him what A.I.S.P. was and that I was taking four years of school in two school years and that’s why I couldn’t do this at a regular school. “I don’t fucking understand what the fuck is wrong with you? Why can’t you just be fucking normal? Just take some fucking basket weaving courses and pass the grade, that’s all you have to do”. I quit school again for the last time. I happened into a decent job that was a sixth month contract that had me travelling through the Maritimes. So I satisfied Richard’s demand of moving out of his house.
I got flown home halfway through the job for a two week vacation. I stayed at a local hotel until it was time to fly back. At the end of the contract I had close to $25k in the bank.
I was starting to look for apartments down around the Queen and Spadina area of Toronto. I was kinda hoping to get a job with Active Surplus, or one of the other electronics shops down on Queen.
Somehow I let slip to Richard how much money I had in the bank. He started reminding me how expensive it was for him to raise my brother and I and that I should pay him back for the concert ticket that he had bought for my birthday.
I got a phone call from him one day around the middle of June. He was getting his final posting back to Alberta. He wanted me to move with him so that “we could try to be a family again”. Was I ever stupid. We had never been a family to begin with, so there was no family to “be again”. And no, things didn’t work out any better this time around. If I was a gambling man, I would wager that Richard had told my stepmother that I was going to be going back to school. And no, there was no plan for me to go back to school. Being 19 in grade 9 isn’t a good thing.
In the end I did end up obtaining my grade 12 G.E.D. which is ironic considering that the G.E.D. was created after WWII to allow returning soldiers to finish their education that may have been interrupted when they enlisted to fight in the war.
I knew nothing of the G.E.D. program until I met my mother in 1990. In the summer of 1991 she discovered that I only had my formal grade 8. She found out where to pick up the G.E.D. application and the study materials. So one day after work I went down and picked them up. The next writing session was in about a month. The intake worker said that I could wait for the next session in 6 months. I applied for the session in a month.
Studying wasn’t hard. After all, I didn’t leave school because I found school to be hard. I left school because home life was an absolute unmitigated nightmare.
When you write the G.E.D. you are given a randomized assortment of questions that grade 12 students are required to pass to obtain their final marks. I forget how many question were on the G.E.D.. If I remember correctly is was about 50 questions per subject. The subjects were “Writing Skills”; “Social Studies”; “Science”; “Interpreting Literature and the Arts”; and “Mathematics”.
This is how I did:
An “A”, three “B’s”, and one “C”. Not too shabby for someone like me with only one month to study. So yeah, school obviously wasn’t the problem. It was my home life that was the problem.
The calculation method for the G.E.D. has changed over the years, but back in 1991 it was known as 40 – 45
40 is the lowest possible score you could have in any of the five sections or an average score of 45 on all five subjects. Some questions are worth a point, some questions are worth half-a-point, and some questions are worth more points.
You are being graded against all grade 12 students in the jurisdiction that you take the G.E.D. and your scores are supposed to reflect upon how many graduating students had similar marks to your marks.
Is a G.E.D. the same as a high school diploma? Nope. But in the real world almost all employers, colleges, technical schools will accept a G.E.D. at face value. Some technical schools will require that you undertake a test prior to enrolling in their program that shows that you understand the mathematics at the proper level. I had to do this when I took my power engineering courses. Most universities will also accept the G.E.D. but like technical school, will require some form of additional testing to show that you are competent in the basic areas required for the program.
As far as I know, Richard never completed his grade 12. Yes, he did take some math upgrading courses in Toronto, but I don’t think he ever finished grade 12 or even challenged the G.E.D.
And that folks is my academic experience.
I used to beat myself up a lot when I was younger for not having gone to trade school, or college, or even university. But even if I had done well in school I don’t think those options would have really ever been open to me.
Richard had parlayed his grade 8 education into a 30 year career with the Royal Canadian Navy and the Canadian Armed Forces which saw him travel around the world and visit many ports of call. He flew all over the place with the airforce as was evidenced by his being in Iceland on the day I was admitted to hospital after a bicycle accident in Summerside.
To him, school was nothing more that what he had attended back in the ’50s in Fort McMurray, Alberta. A single room school house. Definitely no computers. Definitely no music programs. Definitely no computer labs. His school was obviously just paying attention to what was written on the blackboard and nothing more.
Why would I need trade school, or college, or university?
The Canadian Armed Forces had taught him mechanical skills, electrical skills, avionics, and had even sent him to Boeing/VERTOL to be trained in the Maintenance Management for the CH-147 Chinook. If the Canadian Forces did this for him, surely they would do the same for me, right.
By the late ’80s grade 8 was no longer sufficient to get into the Canadian Forces. Grade 8 wasn’t sufficient to get into anything really. And by the late ’80s employers were no longer training employees. Employees were expected to show up for the first day of work with degrees and diplomas and 50 years of on the job experience.
Sure was a bitter pill to swallow. But at least I know that I played the cards that were dealt to me to the best of my ability.
After returning back to work I found that the benefits of 10 mg were wearing off around noon. Yes, work is stressful and demanding, so that was probably what started to nullify the effect of the 10 mg.
Being on Escitalopram is different. I’ve honestly never felt like this before in my life.
Don’t get me wrong. It’s not like I’ve been given a 2nd chance at life, or have been allowed to start my life over from some arbitrary starting line.
The Escitalopram hasn’t fixed anything. It hasn’t made me “happy”. What it has done is raised the floor to which my depression would drag me down to. I do get somewhat depressed still, but it’s nowhere near as deep as my depressions used to go. I’ve had this untreated depression for far too long. There are also far too many factors that contributed to this depression. I now believe that I was predisposed to depression from my father’s side of the family. Depression can run in families.
The anxiety, which has been a constant companion of mine since the late ’70s had been toned down substantially. I haven’t woken up grinding my teeth once in the last couple of months.
I find that I can concentrate better now and when something disturbs me while I’m in the middle of a thought, it doesn’t completely derail my train of thought.
The dark thoughts are still there, and they always will be. You can’t go through what I’ve gone through and not carry those demons around.
Captain McRae, Captain Totzke, Mcpl Gill, P.S., Earl Ray Stevens. They’re all still up there too. But at least now I can more or less ignore them for the time being.
Even though the Escitalopram has calmed the waves of my emotions the war still rages on behind my eyes. The time for fixing these issues was back in the early ’80s. Not 40+ years later.
But, we’ll have to see how things work out. I’m 50 now. The average life expectancy for a male in Canada now sits at 80 years, so that’s about 30. Most of the men in my family have dropped dead early though, so I’d say that I might have a life expectancy of 70 years. But there are still other factors at play. So let’s just agree that I’m not getting a second chance. I’m just getting a bit of a respite in the final 1/4 of my life.
I grew up dabbling in car, computers, and electronics. I sure wasted a lot of my life doing that.
Richard wasn’t the type of father to do things with his kids. I don’t ever remember going to any type of event with him as a kid.
That’s one thing that social services mentioned in their paperwork when they became involved with my family in November of 1981. “There’s not one single activity these people seem to have in common”.
Never went to a hockey game with him.
Never went to a football game with him.
Never went to a baseball game with him.
He never came to a school performance or recital.
Never came to a cadet night.
Never went to the Ontario Science Centre with us.
Never went to the CN Tower with us.
No matter how many times he dropped us off at Canada’s Wonderland, he’d never come in with us. And no, my brother and I had no choice with Canada’s Wonderland. As my brother said, Canada’s Wonderland was Richard’s “discount babysitting service”. Seasons passes were $29.95 for the ’83 – ’84 season. He’d give us ten bucks each and drop us off at 9 a.m. and pick us up at 10 p.m..
Never went shopping with him at Active Surplus or College Electronics or any of the other electronics shops that we both used to buy supplies from.
I actually went to more football games with my grandmother when she’d score Edmonton Elks tickets (formerly the Edmonton Eskimos) for underprivileged families from the Bissell centre.
And it wasn’t just outside activities that Richard wouldn’t partake in.
Acknowledgement of birthdays was pretty well non-existent. I had one birthday that he acknowledged that I can remember. That was my 14th birthday in Sept of 1985. As I would discover later in life, the only reason for this acknowledgement is my family was under supervision of the Children’s Aid Society of Toronto and Richard was obviously buttering me up just in case the Toronto Police Service notified Children’s Aid about the massive domestic fight between my father and step mother in the summer on 1985.
Christmas, as my brother refers to it as, was “socks and underwear day”.
Richard didn’t like Father’s Day cards made at school, Richard didn’t mark his birthday. I didn’t actually learn Richard’s birthday until 2005 when I had to get my birth certificate replaced.
I tried to pick up electronics as a kid. I guess that my way of thinking was that if Richard and I had something in common that he’d love me or something. Didn’t work.
The same thing with computers. I never really had an interest in computers.
Electronics was something that I picked up, especially digital electronics and digital logic. But I had absolutely no interest in it. And I learnt quickly not to ask Richard for help with math related to electronics as this would cause him to blow his lid. Again, I would learn much later in life that his formal education was grade 8 with an upgrade to grade 9 to get into the Royal Canadian Navy. When we moved to Toronto he started taking mathematics upgrading courses at York University and Seneca College. These upgrades were more in keeping with the more “administerial” roles he was taking in the Canadian Forces.
Almost all of the electronics that I learnt as a kid came from magazines like “Popular Electronics”, “Radio Electronics “, “Elektor Electronics”. Even before I started servicing video games, I always had after school or weekend employment.
Computers were much the same thing. Richard would spend literal hours programming his computers. I could pick up programming from the magazines that I’d buy at the magazine store, but not once ever did Richard ever sit down with me and teach me how to program.
Richard had a knack of buying stuff that was on sale or had been discontinued. I could participate in computer lab at school, but the machine I had used a version of BASIC that was just modified enough that it wouldn’t work flawlessly with the lessons in computer lab. Almost all of the kids in computer club at school had Apple IIe or Commodore 64 computers. I had a TRS-80 Color Computer. And no, the other kids didn’t come from rich or affluent families. Elia Junior High and even Pierre Laporte Jr. High were in very working class neighbourhoods. These were families that really didn’t have the money to waste on novelties.
Most parents as I’ve learnt in my life put their kids above anything else. Not Richard. Richard is all that mattered in Richard’s life. My brother and I were Marie’s problem. He kept us because it was cheaper than giving us to our mother. One of Richard’s Air Force buddies once asked Richard why Richard did’t give my brother and I back to our mother if we were causing Richard so much trouble. Richard’s response was that as long and my brother and I lived with Richard, Richard could control the costs but that if Richard gave us back to our mother that he’d have to sign his paycheque over to “that bitch”, and that was not going to happen.
Around the time when I was 14, I started repairing arcade video games. Even though I didn’t have a passion for electronics, none the less I could do it. And I was good at it. I repaired CPU boards that guys with technical diplomas from DeVry couldn’t service. Having employment meant that I had money. And having money meant that I didn’t have to live on the non-existent allowance that Richard never offered.
Around the summer of 1986 I bought a 1978 Volkswagen Rabbit for $175. The car was a rust bucket piece of crap. The floor pans were rotted out. The rocker panels and the rear wheel arches were rotted out. This car would have never passed a safety inspection. But that was fine. I just wanted a car so that I could get a membership at the base auto hobby club. My thinking was that I could get Richard to teach me how to work on cars and we could spend time together. That didn’t work out quite the way I planned for it to. I learnt how to work on cars from Bill Parker, Bob Wrightson, Bob, Stephan, and a couple of the other service members at the club.
It’s obvious now looking back that Richard was far too damaged to be a functional parent.
Was it the fact that his father left him as a young kid?
Was it the fact that his mother was emotionally damaged from Residential School?
Grandma had a fierce temper and she was not above using physical force. Did she beat on Richard when Richard was a kid?
Did Richard’s misogynistic views of women come from his dependence/defiance relationship with his mother?
I barely play around with electronics anymore. I never really had an interest in it.
I stepped away from electronics around 1989 when I asked one of the employers I was servicing video games for if I could have a pay raise. His response was that as good as I was at electronics, and sure I could fix equipment that others had given up on, I didn’t have a degree or a certificate from any college or institution and therefore he couldn’t pay me more than what I was making. It was this that prompted me to quit working and to try going back to school.
The last time I programmed a computer was back in 1989 when I was enrolled in the Alternative and Independent Study Program in North York trying to finish off my grade 9 and 10 in the first year and grade 11 and 12 in the second. I took Fortran, Cobol, and Autocad 10.
I haven’t touched BASIC, Fortran, Cobol or any other computer language since.
Cars? The last time I owned a car was 1998. I don’t mention to anyone that as a kid I used to do brake jobs, clutch jobs, and electrical troubleshooting as I really don’t like cars. I can barely be bothered to do my own oil on my motorcycle.
I just don’t have the interest electronics, computers, or cars.
In 2006 I took up figure skating. That was a blast. Now that’s an activity that I wished I could have done as a kid. But I also have to realize that there was no way on earth that Richard was going to allow his son to skate like a girl.
When I was in Sea Cadets, I loved sailing. I knew of a sailing club on Centre Island in Toronto that specialized in sailing programs for kids from low income families. There were a lot of kids from the different Greater Toronto sea cadet corps in this club. Richard refused to cough up the menial fees that George was charging.
Learning to fly would have been cool. And yes, my father had his private pilot’s licence. Although he only ever took me up in the air once. You don’t have to own a plane to go flying. Most small charter companies will rent small planes to licence pilots. Especially to members of the Canadian Armed Forces with their pilots licence.
After I had left sea cadets at the Dennison Armouries in the spring of 1987, I joined air cadets at the Moss Park Armouries. All Richard had to do was sign the permission slip to allow me to take gliding instruction and pay the minimal fees for glider access, and I could have started on my pilot’s licence. Nope.
I had to wait until I moved out of the house in early 1988 before I could get my driver’s licence. Richard had promised me that he would sign me up for “Young Drivers of Canada”. Nope. Another false promise.
So, I’ll never know what it was with Richard and what it was that made him a defective father. Why he’d promise so many things and yet only deliver on disappointment.
Growing up with Richard, it was to the point that if I really wanted something as a kid, I usually wouldn’t get it. So I took that and turned it around to the point that if I wanted something, I would hope really hard that I wouldn’t get it. So that way, when I didn’t get it I wouldn’t be disappointed. Twisted? Yep. But it was a coping strategy.
Allowances were another constant let down with Richard. He’d promise you $5 or $10 if you did this or that. But when you did this or that, there was always some excuse as to why you didn’t earn the $5 or $10.
All I know is that looking back on things, I sure did waste a significant portion of my life trying to connect with a person who didn’t want any type of connection.
And maybe it’s that rejection of any type of connection that causes me to be isolated from others to this day.
When I went up to Morinville, Alberta in 2003 to see my father, my stepmother said to me that I should try to see my father more often. But the thing is, Richard didn’t want to be seen more often. When I became a 5th class Power Engineer in 2004, he didn’t care. When I became a 4th class Power Engineer in 2005. He still didn’t care. When I landed a power engineering position in the hospital where I currently work, still didn’t care.
Even when I got my grade 12 back in 1991 he just didn’t care.
So, it wasn’t for lack of trying.
He just couldn’t be bothered.
And I was the idiot for having looked up to him as a kid.
So yeah, it was a lonely and isolated childhood. And I think that’s one of the reasons I’ve stayed single to this day. It’s not for a lack of trying. It’s just that being alone is all I’m used to.
I don’t think I’ll ever figure this out because I don’t think this confusion was solely mine to begin with. It was kinda a group thing if you know what I mean.
Going by the number of sexual encounters I’ve had with women, I’ve had maybe 3 female partners, you’d assume that I have very little interest in women.
Going by the number of men I’ve had sex with in my life ( not including the sexual abuse), I’ve probably had about two to three dozen partners in my life, you’d assume that I’m homosexual.
Yet, every time I get intimate with a man, Captain Totzke pops into my head and starts admonishing me about my mental illness called homosexuality and that if I didn’t like the abuse on CFB Namao then I wouldn’t have allowed it to go on for so long. And then there’s my father whom also pops into my head and starts reminding me that I allowed the babysitter abuse my younger brother.
And of course, just growing up on military bases in the ’70s and ’80s would turn any queer child into a self loathing human.
And let’s be honest. I’m 50. I’ve really only had two long term “partners” in my life, and I’ve never really had any interest in a partner. This in itself probably stems from the way my father viewed his relationships and how little joy or pleasure he seemed to get from them. He was forever complaining how much his relationships were costing him in time and money and how much he had to do for the other party, so maybe that had an effect on why I’ve remained single my entire life.
My depression and anxiety couldn’t have helped much either.
Was it the sexual abuse on Canadian Forces Base Namao? What I endured and what I saw happen from 1978 until 1980 have more than likely affected me for life.
Was it my involvement with the military social worker Captain Terry Totzke, who for nearly three years had drilled into my head that I was showing “homosexual tendencies” due to what had happened on Canadian Forces Base Namao?
Was it my father’s reactions, which were in no doubt guided by Captain Totzke and the military’s view of “homosexual activities”?
Was it the sexual abuse on CFB Griesbach?
I have no doubt the sexual abuse prior to my 13th birthday probably helped to form my opinion on sex. I didn’t have my first orgasm until after I had turned 13. So sexually pleasuring those abusing me was a one-way street.
Was it the sexual abuse on CFB Downsview at the hands of Earl Ray Stevens? Earl knew that I was a military dependent. As he was a retired member of the Canadian Armed Forces he also would have known that I would have been in a deep trouble if anyone in the Canadian Forces, whether it be the military police or even my father, found out that I was having sex with men.
Was it the sexual encounters I had with the much older teen in the summer of 1985 when I spent the summer with my grandmother?
It’s really hard to say.
But I would say that these events obviously have had some effect.
Looking back I’m pretty sure that being loner and on my own set me up for a lot of the abuse. And with what I’d gone through on CFB Namao, and the counselling that I endured from Captain Totzke meant that I pretty well thought that being abused was something that I was something that I was to be blamed for.
And when you’re not getting any type of love and affection at home, when somebody sexually abuses you, at least they’re paying attention to you, right?
In my life I’ve had boyfriends.
In my life I’ve had girlfriends.
My first boyfriend was on CFB Griesbach of all places. The place where Captain Totzke had warned me about homosexuality being a mental illness. The same place where Captain Totzke said he had the military police watching me.
He was a boy my age. He lived two houses down from mine. His father was a sergeant in the Canadian Airborne Regiment. It was nothing serious, and nothing sexual. We liked to kiss. And hang out together a lot. His father caught us kissing once. My father nearly killed me. Said that he never wanted to hear again, especially not from a sergeant, that I had been kissing their son and that if he did that he’d “break my fucking neck”.
Megan wasn’t really a girlfriend. We did like to talk and hang out a lot. And there was the clothes swapping thing. Definitely nothing romantic.
In the aftermath of Earl Stevens I started to believe that I was gay. Earl had impressed upon me that men will pay for sex and that sex was always supposed to be meaningless except for the person paying.
I frequently got beat up bad in grade 8 for being a “queerboy” and a “faggot”.
I had a boyfriend in the late ’90s. It didn’t really last too long.
I wouldn’t have sex with a woman until 2002 when I had a relationship with a woman. We met at the local motorcycle hangout. Not a biker club or anything like that. It was the local Starbucks where all the weekend motorcyclists would hang out after the rides. We both had our reasons for liking each other. Mine was primarily so that I could get people to stop wondering if I was a fag or a queer. Her’s was that she wanted to have kids.
I have absolutely no interest in having kids or raising kids. She did. And even at the start of the relationship when I wanted separate beds, she wanted the beds together.
I guess my primary reason for getting together with her is that I thought that it would get a bully manager off my back at work. He kept referring to me as “Freddie” or “Liberace”. He kept telling me that if I didn’t do things the way he wanted that he’d out me to the board of directors.
In 2003 I took her up to meet my father. He wasn’t buying it, and neither was my stepmother.
Even when I got mugged in July of 1995, the attending VPD officer was adamant that I was a homosexual and that I had been beat up in a “trick gone bad”. Even when I was able to produce proof that I had been where I said I had been and that the man and woman who mugged me had followed me from where I said they did the responding officer, a VPD Constable, wasn’t listening. I was a male prostitute as far as he was concerned and until I admitted such the investigation was going nowhere.
Another thing that may have hindered my ability to form relationships is I really hate being touched. This was something that was noted in the aftermath of CFB Namao. And it’s something that persists to this day. I don’t like holding hands. I don’t like being touched. The wrong touch in the wrong place can upset me and turn me off like a light switch. Even at work I don’t like being patted on the shoulder.
I guess there’s something about a person’s mannerisms that marks them as “not straight”.
What it is, I’ll never know.
Is it the way I talk?
Is it the way I walk?
And if I am in fact gay / queer / homosexual why don’t I enjoy homosexual relationships?
Did Captain Terry Totzke and his desire to cure me of my apparent homosexuality set me up for life to be a self-loathing homosexual?
Was it the sexual abuse in my youth that taught me that sex in just a base act that one does to pleasure another person otherwise you’d get in trouble?
Did growing up in my father’s household teach me that intimate relationships are not worth the effort?
Another issue that could be at play is the complete lack of the ability to form emotional bonds. In my household, relationships were of a calculated nature.
As I said at the beginning, I don’t think that I’ll ever be able to come up with an answer for this.
To those of you that have known me prior to May of 2008, you may have known me under a different name.
In August of 2006 I had a very detailed and pointed conversation with my father relating to the events of CFB Namao and his parenting skills and abilities. These conversations continued on for about a month until Richard got bored.
It was then that I realized that there was never going to be a “father – son” relationship between the two of us. His ideals of family norms seem to have been shaped by television and popular media. Not the slightest were his ideas based in reality. This may have been a side effect of his having been in the Canadian Armed Forces since his 17th birthday and not having any idea of what the real world function like. The chain of command told him all he needed to know. His station was not to question.
I decided that seeing as how my past was acting like such an anchor I’d do something that I had always wanted to do.
Change my name.
It’s actually not a hard process to undertake, but there is a process none the less.
First, you have to choose your name and how much of your name you want to change.
I changed my entire name.
First name, middle name, and last name.
The first name was easy. I never really like the name “Robert”. As a kid friends of the family had always called me Robbie or Bobby. Both names had an appeal to me. Bobbie even more so than Robbie. Robbie was still too close to “Robert” for my liking. Bobby I didn’t like as it was too “male”. However, I did like “Bobbie”.
Bobbie is an interesting name. Bobby is the masculine spelling. Bobbi is the feminine spelling. And Bobbie is the unisex spelling. Throughout the last 100 years according to the various censuses, Bobbie has gone between being a dominant male baby name to being a dominant female baby name. The unisex aspect of it appealed to me as I’ve never really identified as either male or female.
It took a while to decide on my last name. It wasn’t until I was working as a canvaser for the 2008 City of Vancouver Municipal Election that I came across my last name. I had decided when I wanted to change my name that I wanted my last name to complement my first name. As I was making my way though a voters list I came across someone with the last name of “Bees”. I did a bit of research on the Internet. Turns out the surname Bees has quite a long history behind it.
I also liked the name “Bobbie Bees” because it actually has a lot of “B’s” in it.
So, please with my new name I decided to head off to the Vital Statistics office to initiate the process. This was basically collecting all of the paperwork required and then filling out the paperwork.
“Bobbie Bees” was almost my new name until I was ready to submit my paperwork. When I took the paperwork in, the worker at the counter asked me if I really only wanted a surname and a family name without a middle name. I hadn’t really planned on having a middle name as I’d never really used my previous middle name. The worker suggested that I should pick a new middle name as this would give me an alternative name that I could use depending on the situation. The worker suggested that I choose my birthstone as my new middle name.
My birthstone is sapphire.
The worker agreed with me that “Bobbie Sapphire” and “Sapphire Bees” both sounded like stripper names.
In the list of birthstones I happened to spy “Garnet”.
I checked the definition of “garnet” in the dictionary. It was a red coloured gemstone known for its abrasive qualities.
And Garnet was also the name of one of my favourite characters from Final Fantasy IX. So Garnet it was.
Now that my new name was chosen, it was time to finalize the paperwork and pay the fees. I also had to attend the fingerprinting section of RCMP “E” division headquarters to get my finger prints checked.
I couple of weeks later I received a letter from the RCMP notifying Vital Statistics in both BC and Nova Scotia that I had passed the records check and that there was no reason to deny me the name change request.
The next letter I received from from Nova Scotia congratulating me on the name change and letting me know how to request new birth certificates and how to properly destroy my old certificates.
All my other ID had to be updated as well.
At this point in time I’m of the opinion that people should have “childhood” names and “adult” names. Childhood names are often picked by people who don’t have any idea of what their child would like to be named and they pick the names based upon reasons that may mean nothing to the child. When a child turns 16, they should be encouraged to pick a new name that suits them, that suits their identity, and fits with their idea of the world that surrounds them.
There were some unintended consequences of my name change.
In 2008, I hadn’t spoken to my mother since February of 1992 when I moved to Vancouver, BC. When I legally changed my name, my “dead name” ceased to exist. The only place my “dead name” exists is within law enforcement. Even today, I am not allowed to use my “dead name” for any legal purpose.
My mother would have turned 65 in 2011. So she would have been eligible to collect her CPP. For some reason she had to be able to prove to CPP how many dependent children she had had. She requested my brothers birth certificate from the Nova Scotia government. But when she tried to obtain mine, the Nova Scotia government told her that my birth certificate was restricted and that she could not have a copy.
When I tracked my mother down in late 2013 to ask her about some of the answers my father had given me in a Federal Court of Canada matter she said that she was surprised to hear from me. She explained that when the Nova Scotia government wouldn’t give her a copy of my birth certificate she had assumed that I was dead.
She didn’t really seem to care that I was still alive. But I think at that point in her life she was just too broken down and defeated to care.
I’ve been Bobbie Bees for over 12 years at this point in my life. I wasn’t able to kill off Robert like I had hoped I would have been to. “Robert” lives on due to the trauma , neglect, and abuse he was subjected to. “Robert” and the people that harmed him will be with me until the day I die.
But at least Bobbie Garnet Bees allows me a respite from “Robert”.
So, I’ll spend a little time talking about my preference for dresses.
I started “playing around” with dresses at a very young age.
When I lived on Canadian Forces Base Shearwater as a child, I do remember on more than one occasion going out to play with my friends, whom were always more than likely girls than they were boys, and I would come home wearing one of their dresses.
I don’t ever remember my father catching me in a dress, as he was almost always off on exercises. My mother on the other hand was never really upset, but she made it known to me that boys don’t wear girls clothes.
As a child, I could never understand why boys weren’t allowed to wear dresses. As far as I was concerned, they were far more comfortable and functional than pants, or even shorts. And besides, girls were allowed to wear pants, so why shouldn’t boys be allowed to wear dresses.
My family left CFB Shearwater around the the spring of 1977. I didn’t get to wear a dress again until somewhere around the summer of 1981 when I was just shy of my 10th birthday.
There was a girl named Megan who went to Major General Griesbach School on CFB Griesbach. On more than one occasion we swapped clothes and went to the local malls off base.
This was during the time when the fallout from CFB Namao was fresh and I was getting counselling from the military social worker to help deal with my apparent “homosexual tendencies”. The counselling only served to make my dress escapades that much more delicious and dangerous.
Even though my father was at home more often, he never once caught me wearing dresses. He came very close once though. Megan and I had swapped clothing and went over to Lake Beaumaris mall which was just north west of the base. We were walking around on the second level of the mall when I saw my father, my stepmother, and my younger brother heading towards us. Megan and I ducked downstairs to the washroom to change back.
There was a time around the summer of 1982 when Sue, my stepmother, had threatened me that if I didn’t stop crying that she was going to take me to Sears and buy me a dress. I really wanted that dress. Imagine, my own dress. But I also realized that she wasn’t buying me a dress as a gift. She was threatening to dehumanize me and humiliate me by making me wear a dress.
It was then that I realized that there was something really fucked up with who was allowed to wear what clothing.
I was given an IQ test as a child when I was around 9 years of age and I scored 136 +/- 6, which wasn’t too shabby. Maybe, just maybe, this IQ allowed me to see that there was absolutely no logical reason that I shouldn’t have been allowed to wear dresses.
Wearing dresses didn’t make me want to become a girl. It was just comfortable clothing that I loved better than pants. I’ve always despised pants. I don’t like the way they touch me, or bunch up behind my knees, or crush my crotch, or squeeze around my hips. Dresses just hang nicely from my shoulders. They don’t really touch me. They don’t bunch up behind my knees. They cover my body without causing any discomfort.
I never wore dresses again until I was into my 20s.
As much as I loved dresses, and still wanted to wear them, I mostly had precarious employment through my early 20s. I sure as hell didn’t have a family that I could fall back on if I found myself between jobs due to my preference for clothing. I couldn’t risk my employers discovering that I liked to wear skirts and dresses. And let’s be honest, the ’90s were nowhere near as liberal and open as the ’00s.
Still wearing dresses was kinda like a “dirty secret” that I kept behind closed doors.
It wasn’t until in the late ’90s when I gained more secure employment that I would start wearing “woman’s clothing” in public. It would start off as skirts on the odd occasion. Then I worked up to dresses.
By the time I started working for my current employer in 2005 I was wearing dresses or skirts, even kilts, almost exclusively.
I wear pants at work (yech), but the work I do would chew up a dress. I do wear dresses to and from work, so it’s not like anyone at work doesn’t know that I wear dresses and skirts.
I’ve never felt at risk or in danger in the Metro Vancouver area.
What type of dresses do I like?
Nothing fancy, just plain Jane work dresses. A-line and fit-and-flare dresses are my favourite dresses to wear.
Nothing too “femme”. Being a guy who wears dresses has introduced me to women who absolutely hate dresses, and women who wear dresses, but absolutely detest “femme” dresses with buttons and bows and frills.
One thing that I have discovered is that a sizeable portion of women will never wear a dress as an adult as they despise them because they were forced to wear them as children.
I don’t have the lumps, and bumps, and curves that dresses are usually designed to accentuate, so I’m more happy with a loose fit. And as I said, I strive for more of a fit that doesn’t touch me on constrict me.
Beeshive 