My counsellor asked me in one of our early sessions to describe what home felt like when I was growing up. I sat with the question for a long time. I knew the facts — the drinking, the fighting, the unpredictability. I'd carried the facts for forty years. But she wasn't asking for the facts. She was asking for the feeling. The best I could come up with was this: it felt like living next to something that could detonate at any moment. Not always. Not every day. But always possibly. And when you live inside that possibility long enough, your body stops being able to tell the difference between threat and safety. It just stays ready. It stays braced. She nodded slowly when I said that. Like she'd heard it before. Like it had a name.

From the outside, the house in Regina probably looked like a normal family home. Kids coming and going. Nothing that would make a neighbour look twice. Inside was something else. Blake's father had been a severe alcoholic who beat his wife and children. Blake grew up inside that, and whatever it did to him, he carried it into every room he ever occupied for the rest of his life. I want to be clear about something: Blake was not a monster every hour of every day. When he wasn't drunk, he could be decent. Funny, even. But the drinking was every day. Every night. Both of them — Blake and my mother — would get completely drunk, reliably, and the household would transform. We learned the signals. We became good at reading the energy the moment we walked through the door. The particular quality of the silence. You developed a kind of radar for it. You had to.

Blake was extremely physical with my mother. Slapping, punching, grabbing. Bruises she covered and didn't explain. I always felt like one of them was going to end up in hospital. I never understood why she didn't call the police. I do now — I understand cycles of abuse and the grip they have on people. But at the time I was just a child watching something I couldn't stop and couldn't explain to anyone. What Blake did to her, she transferred to us. That's the most precise way I know to say it. She couldn't defend herself against a man who was 6'2" and two hundred and fifty pounds and drunk. So the powerlessness she felt in those moments came out somewhere. It came out on Jason and me. Verbally. Emotionally. Physically.

The house had to be kept a certain way or there would be consequences. The bar moved constantly — what was acceptable one day wasn't the next — and you could never quite predict where you stood. That unpredictability was its own kind of punishment. It kept you permanently anxious, permanently checking yourself, permanently waiting for the thing you'd done wrong that you didn't know yet you'd done.

There's something I need to admit here, when she would push Blake's buttons — and she did, regularly — I would sit there and think: Stop. Just stop. You know where this goes. And underneath that thought was another one: Because it will be your fault and then you will take it out on me. I feel ashamed of that thought now. But I was nine, ten, eleven years old, and I was trying to survive, and survival is not always a noble business. What a child is supposed to do is be protected. What I had to do instead was calculate.

I was eleven the night the dishwasher broke. We were washing everything by hand that week, and after supper I worked through the dishes myself, then ran a fresh sink of scalding water and left a stack of baked-on dishes to soak so they'd come clean easier later. My mother came into the kitchen and asked what I was doing. I told her I was letting it soak. She told me to stop being a baby and get my hands in the water. I told her the water was hot. She said it couldn't be that hot, grabbed my forearms, and pushed my hands down into it. I screamed. She kept telling me it wasn't that bad, to stop being like that, while I screamed — until at some point she must have felt how hot it actually was, because she pulled my arms back out. My skin was red past the wrist. All she said was, I guess it was hot, and walked out of the kitchen. No apology. I finished the dishes myself, sobbing.

I didn't think a story like that one was worth telling for a long time. It isn't a beating. Nobody went to a hospital. But that's exactly why it belongs here. Trauma doesn't require a headline. It just requires the same lesson taught often enough — that what I wanted, what I felt, what my own two hands were telling me, mattered less than what she'd already decided was true. Enough small rooms like that one, stacked up over enough years, build the same house as one big one.

They got married in 1989. It didn't change anything about how the house worked. By then we'd been in that environment for two years and it had become, in the way terrible things become when they go on long enough, simply the atmosphere. Just how things were. Just life.

I worked very hard to make sure nobody outside the house knew what was happening inside it. That was the rule — unspoken, never discussed, simply understood. Except that it turns out my best friend's mother knew. She told me, years later, that she'd always known, because I would show up at their house with bruises. She could see it. She wanted to say something. She almost did, more than once. But this was the 1980s in Saskatchewan. You didn't intervene in other people's family business. So she said nothing. She just kept her door open and let me come over as much as I needed to. I thought I'd been invisible. I thought I'd kept the secret perfectly. The secret was just being kept by someone with more kindness than I knew.

I spent most of my primary school years in Regina inside a particular kind of loneliness — the kind that comes from being surrounded by people and still not belonging to any of them. I was good at sports, and that was my currency, and I knew it. There was a group of boys who wanted me on their team because I could run. One of them told me, directly, that nobody actually liked me — they just kept me around because I was useful on the field. I stood there and said nothing.

And then there was Kevin. We were both outsiders. Two kids who didn't quite fit anywhere, finding each other the way misfits find each other. He is still my best friend, forty-some years later. And I didn't always treat him well.

Grade five, maybe. I was trying to impress the cool kids. Kevin was standing there, and I had a chunk of packed snow in my hand, and I threw it at his face. It hit him hard. His mouth was bleeding. And the cool kids laughed and I stood there and the laugh felt good for about half a second and then my stomach dropped completely, because I knew — I knew the moment it left my hand — that I'd done something I couldn't undo.

I carried that moment for thirty-five years. In the days after my breakdown in 2023, I called Kevin and brought it up, weeping, begging him to forgive me. He barely remembered it. He genuinely, after thirty-five years, had not been carrying it. I had turned it into a monster — one of many monsters I'd built out of my worst moments and kept alive in the dark, feeding them with shame, using them as proof of what I was worth.

Growing up in the 1980s and early 90s in Saskatchewan, being called gay was the default insult for anything and everything. I heard it so many times, from so many directions, that I started to wonder. I knew I liked girls. But these boys seemed so certain, and maybe they could see something in me I couldn't see in myself.

By the time Grade Seven arrived, I was a boy who had been told repeatedly, in the cruelest possible language, that there was something wrong with the way he was. And that's the soil the next thing grew in.

I didn't tell anyone until I was forty-five years old.

The summer after Grade Seven, I was thirteen. A friend and I had a few sleepovers over the summer. Nothing unusual about any of it. Then one night, late, he asked me if I'd be interested in trying some things. Sexually. My immediate, instinctive, absolute answer was no. I knew it in my body before I knew it in words. But there were other voices, louder than my own — the ones from school, telling me for years that maybe this was who I was. And underneath that: he was my friend. If I said no, would I lose him?

So I said yes. I said yes when every part of me meant no.

I ghosted him completely afterward. What I was left with was something that took root quietly and grew for thirty years. I became the judge, and I ruled against myself. I wasn't man enough. That was the verdict. And I carried it into every room I ever walked into, into every relationship, into moments of intimacy where I should have been present but instead found myself watching from a distance, waiting to be found out.

In 2024, I finally told someone — a close friend who happened to be gay. He listened, and then he said something I hadn't considered in thirty-one years: that now I knew for certain I wasn't gay. That I was thirteen and terrified and I knew, in the most visceral possible way, that it wasn't me.

I'm still learning to breathe that air.

By the summer of 1992, we moved again — to the other side of the city, away from the only friends I'd built in five years. I was fourteen, starting over for the fourth time. That summer, I left my bike at school by accident. My mother came at me with a belt — flailing, hitting whatever it reached — until I had welts across a significant portion of my body. A few weeks later I left the bike outside unlocked. It happened again. Worse. The bruises ran from the backs of my knees to the middle of my back. I was fourteen years old. I had bruises from the backs of my knees to the middle of my back because I hadn't locked a bicycle.

I had no friends within reach. I had no father. I had a body that hurt from recent beatings, and a mind that had been carrying, for over a year, a secret I'd told no one and never planned to. Something was building. I didn't have a name for it yet. I just knew that the weight had become very heavy, and that I couldn't see where it was supposed to go.