If I could go back in time and tell myself something, I don’t think that I could be limited to telling myself just one thing with everything that I now know.
I would probably tell myself to get a copy of my social service records from Alberta and Ontario. That way I would have learnt from an early age that my father had some very serious mental health issues.
How exactly that would have helped me is kinda up for debate, but at least I would have probably written Richard off much earlier in life.
I would have paid a lot more attention to the documented failures of the military justice system. This may not have helped me, but at least I wouldn’t have naively believed in 2011 that the Canadian Forces National Investigation Service was remotely competent to conduct a sexual assault investigation, let alone an investigation looking at child sexual abuse.
Maybe learning the truth about how the Canadian Armed Forces willingly sacrificed my mental health to put a lid on the Captain McRae matter would have got me on anti-depressants and mood stabilizers sooner which would have made things appear externally calm. But I don’t think that these meds would have helped “fix” anything.