I had no job to go to Monday. The union was striking. I had no money to speak of, no friends close enough to call, nothing waiting for me on the other side of the weekend. Just the walls, the quiet, and the particular kind of stillness that only happens underground — that feeling of the world carrying on somewhere above you while you sit perfectly still beneath it.

I was forty-four years old.

I had a lifetime of things I had never felt. Anger I had swallowed. Shame I had carried so long it had stopped feeling like shame and started feeling like skin. Grief I had outrun for decades — for a father who stopped coming around, for a mother who should have protected me and didn't, for a marriage that ended not with a fight but with an erasure, for a version of myself I had never once been allowed to be. All of it was in there, packed down tight, the way you pack a bag when you don't know how long you're going to be gone.

For three hours I sat in my bedroom and sobbed in a way I had never sobbed in my life. Not quiet crying. Not the kind you can manage or contain. This was something older and louder than that — something that had been waiting behind every wall I had ever built, and now every wall was gone at once.

"I cried for the boy who stood outside in the morning waiting for his father to say happy birthday. I cried for the teenager who wrapped a belt around his neck in a basement because he couldn't think of another way out."

And somewhere in those three hours — I don't know when, I couldn't have told you what time it was — something shifted. Not healed. Not fixed. Something closer to a door opening that had been sealed shut so long I had forgotten it was there.

I finally walked out of my bedroom sometime in the small hours of the morning.

On my wall there's a print from The Shawshank Redemption. I've had it for years. I've walked past it a thousand times without really seeing it. At the top of the print, the words:

Fear can hold you prisoner. Hope can set you free.

I stood there for a long time.

Then I said, out loud, to nobody, to myself, to the boy I used to be and maybe still am somewhere underneath everything —

Okay. Things need to change.

That was the beginning.

— — —

To understand how I got to that basement, you have to go back to the beginning. Back to Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, sometime in the early 1980s. Back to a small boy standing in a front yard, waiting.