Elementary school was lonely. High school was lonely. University is even lonelier.

In each class, you walk in, sit down, and notice that everyone around you is sitting at their desk on their phone. The person you sit beside doesn’t look up from their screen or even recognize that you are there. You’re nothing more than a body that has entered a room surrounded by people who would rather be doing anything but sit in a classroom, learning about a subject that they don’t care for, earning a degree that they don’t value, to one day have a job that they don’t understand what it means to have.

Continue reading “Pandemic” →

This year hasn’t been what I wanted, or what I expected. I had a grandiose view on what my comeback to school would entail: I was going to make a splash in my athletic career, I was going to be achieving nothing but A+’s throughout all of my classes, and I was going to be engaged constantly in different mental health initiatives around campus, most of which I had planned on organizing myself. These goals still feel achievable, yet I had for most of the school year felt myself let down and disappointed. I felt like I had failed myself, and that it was too late to start doing what I had initially set as my goals for 2019-2020.

Continue reading “A Different Kind of Pain” →

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. Continue reading “Attaining A Sense of Belonging” →

2016-01-27
Hey Bro,

I believe that men’s and women’s problems couldn’t be more unique from one another. While women indeed have a multitude of different social pressures when it comes to body image, beauty, and sexuality, I want to speak to the social influences and struggles that men go through and their effects on our mental health.

Continue reading “Real Men Don’t Cry – Mental Health & Masculinity” →

I spent 3 years in college and didn’t walk with a diploma, much less a degree. While being successful in terms of team athletics in my 3 years spent in post-secondary, I am not entirely sure if I’d consider my career successful as a whole or not. While considering my grades, establishing relationships, or maintaining my happiness, I’d have a hard time arguing that I had a highly successful 3 years, but the team successes that we experienced may alter my argument. At the end of my college career, the single largest victory that I will carry with me for the rest of my life is, bar none, the opportunities and platform that this blog has given me.

Continue reading “Reflections & Forethought” →

January 25th is, for myself personally, the least lonely day of the year. It’s when I’m most reminded that I’m not alone, and that other people deal with and support what I’ve been going through for the past 11 years. While a pretty astounding number of people publicly show on this day that they’re willing to listen, it’s ultimately up to those struggling to speak out about their health and seek help in order to completely eradicate the stigma surrounding mental health.

Continue reading “#BellLetsTalk -Removing the Stigma of Mental Illness” →

Photo credit: Ryan McCullough Photography

“Pain is gain” is an expression that has been freely used, for as long as I can remember, in two distinct areas of my life: what it means to be a man, and in competitive sports. Men are taught from a young age to mask their emotional and/ or physical pain, and to resist any inclination to let their hurt show: men are taught to adopt the mantra “fake it ’til you make it.” Continue reading “Playing Through Pain – The Absence of Mental Health in Athletics” →