Two years ago, I was unemployed, a college dropout, and had just recently moved back home to Winnipeg following my 3 years of attending Niagara. I had immense difficulty finding work, and in particular work that held any kind of interest of my own, and my savings that came from the prior summer had begun to run dry. I was under a new kind of financial stress I had not yet experienced, and felt like I was living in a new town again, despite making my way back to the place I had grown up. The feelings of loneliness, of displacement, and of apathy that I had become accustomed to for the past 15 years didn’t subside the way I had imagined it. I had a fantastical perspective on moving back home: I associated the image of Winnipeg in my head as a totally known quantity, and there was no way in my mind that I could still be unhappy if I moved to a city where I knew hundreds of people. I had a social longing, an intense desire to belong, to feel loved, to feel wanted by my peers. I couldn’t have been more wrong about how my two years back in Winnipeg would play out.

While I felt a sense of rekindling my past high school friendships in the city for the first month or two, this feeling proved to leave as quickly as it came. Once employment became an issue, I found myself getting more unmotivated day by day, and my lifestyle quickly snowballed into a self-destructing pattern: my diet slipped and the takeout boxes piled up, my obsession with social media kicked in, and I would rarely, if ever, exercise, despite paying $35 a month for a gym membership. Despite frequently displaying the image online that I have my mental health constantly in check and that it doesn’t affect me the same way as it used to, this just wasn’t the case. I was lost, lonely, and looking for love in the all the wrong places.

One of the few positive commitments in my life at this point was coaching a high school senior volleyball team, and for the first time in my life having the opportunity to pass on my knowledge and experience to some incredibly gifted student-athletes. I was given relative freedom to teach the way I wanted by the other coaching staff, and it felt like the kids responded fairly well to my coaching philosophy.

In the evening of November 9th, 2016 I was driving to practice from my place. It was the hardest day for myself emotionally in years, due to all of the stressors mentioned prior which accumulated into a load that I could not carry. I should not have been driving, as I knew I was both a threat to myself and to others on the road due to my mental state. I was halfway across the Assiniboine Bridge, and I felt like I was moments from jerking my steering wheel hard right, with a serious desire to not survive the fall. That evening, I wanted to die. I didn’t want to wake up in a hospital bed hours later. I didn’t want to wake up at all. It was my first time being suicidal in years, and I sincerely thought this was the day that my previously held desire became reality.

I made it to practice, and tried my best to act as though nothing had happened. Practice carried out as expected. However, the entire practice, the only thing I was thinking about was how much I wanted to drive off the bridge on my return home, how that frozen river was the place that my pain could finally drown itself and I could be free. Practice ended, and my brother, a player and I walked out together to my brother’s car. I asked if I could ride along, an offer which he accepted. The entire ride I couldn’t muster up a single word to say, so I sat there in silence while we drove. When we dropped the player off, I was asked what was wrong. We must’ve sat there for 20 minutes before I could say anything. I told him I wanted to die, I told him I wanted to kill myself, and I told him that I didn’t feel safe being alone tonight out of fear of finally doing it. I didn’t sleep that night or the next. I got set up with a blanket and pillow on his couch, and I sat there despondent until the sun came up, and repeated once the sun returned to the west.

The next day, he laid out a plan for what we were going to do to get past this: I was going to start seeing a family doctor regularly, I was going to start eating better, and I was going to enroll in counselling in a more intense, regular routine than I had done previously.

I called a close friend whose mother owns a private counselling practice, and he was able to set me up with emergency counselling within an hour or two, and so I saw her that day. When I first walked into our first session, I was given a tablet and asked to rate how happy I was in 4 different categories: socially, individually, close relationships, and overall. Each category was graded out of 10, for a combined total of 40. My first score was an 8/40. For reference, anything below a 20 was considered potentially dangerous, either to themselves or to others. I attended this counselling weekly for months, and eventually due to a whole bunch of factors including the counselling, diet, exercise, finding prescriptions that worked for me, and finding healthy ways of expressing myself, my numbers gradually improved. Counselling usually involved telling stories, talking about my relationships, and talking about politics which has recently become a passion of mine. This was my social interaction, and was something I looked forward to every week. I loved every minute I spent in that office, and it helped me immensely in ways that a scoring system could never explain. I attended this practice for 50 sessions, and on the 50th session my final well-being score was 38/40, despite still feeling socially isolated and still craving that sense of belonging.

Toward the end of 2018, I started talking to my parents about how Manitoba was feeling less and less like a place where I could ever achieve my goal of happiness, and I decided it would be in my best interest to move out to the West Coast to get a new shot at finding what I was looking for. I knew this was where I wanted to be, but I didn’t know what I wanted to do yet. To find this, we consulted a Japanese concept known as “Ikigai”, or “a reason for being”. Ikigai is a method used to assist in determining what career is suitable for you, giving four categories for finding meaning within your career: what you’re good at, what you can be paid to do, what you love, and what the world needs. I’ve always desired post-graduate education, and after talking for months with my counselor about my academic and career goals, we found a career for myself that would fill these four boxes perfectly. A career for myself that has fit all these categories is practicing family law. I initially wanted to do post-graduate work in psychology, but the path of social work as my undergraduate studies into law post-grad studies filled in more of these boxes and appeared to be a straighter, more common-sense path forward for myself.

I have never been so excited about school, about my future career, or about where I am living than I am now. To imagine that two years ago I wasn’t sure if I would wake up to the sun again to now be where I am is just staggering. It is a feeling of sweetness, of peace. I have reason, I have drive, and for the first time in my life I have love for myself. I don’t believe I am exceptional, but rather I believe that I was given opportunities to work on myself that would never have been possible if I had been born into a family without financial stability or high educational attainment. It isn’t fair. The opportunity that I was granted to change my situation is one I wish were available to all peoples, but sadly that is not our reality. There is a reason that socioeconomic status and suicide are so strongly correlated.  A goal of my career is to be to provide similar opportunities to improve the living conditions of children and families that were not fortunate enough to be granted the same privileges that I was. I have a strong desire and motivation to work toward provision of equality of opportunity.

The last thing that I crave has been a sense of belonging, of feeling wanted, to feel loved and connected with other people. The primary emphasis of the counselling services I received was on finding and establishing meaningful connections, which resonated with me as it was these kinds of connections I was hungry for and unsure how to find. This summer, I believe I’ve felt this kind of connection for the first time. Through one friend that I made two summers ago on the West Coast, I have found myself being invited out to more social outings than I’ve ever had, with a group that I feel like I can be myself around, a group to which I can express myself without fear of judgment or ridicule. Just a few weeks ago, my friend who initially pushed to including myself in his social activities said something to me that I don’t know if I’ll ever forget. The words have been tattooed on my brain for weeks, and just having it cross my thoughts fills me with such an intense joy that I will never forget. He said “Garrett, everyone you’ve met here loves you. Everyone I’ve talked to has said that they’ve felt like you’ve been friends with us for years, not just one summer. I’ve been friends with these people for most of my life, but it feels like you’re already one of us.” My sense of belonging is finally forming, and I have never been so excited in my life to see the consequences of moving here for the foreseeable future.

Because of these conditions, I have no desire to be elsewhere. In just a couple days, I am going back to Winnipeg for my brother’s wedding, and outside of seeing and celebrating with family and a few friends which I love, I feel no desire to return. My father has recently expressed this same sentiment, which I didn’t understand until I felt it myself. We love our family back in Winnipeg, and we would do anything to be closer to them, but this is the place where we have finally found and felt social belonging. We have found peace. The concept which inspired my olive branch tattoo, finding inner peace with my mental health, is finally an attainable reality despite feeling like an unrealistic fantasy just months prior. I’m at peace with my environment, with my goals, with my family, and most importantly, for the first time in my life, I am at peace with myself.

“Those who have never despaired have neither lived nor loved. Hope is inseparable from despair. Those of us who truly hope make despair a constant companion whom we out-wrestle every day owing to our commitment to justice, love, and hope.”

-Cornel West