Gone at Midnight. Jake Anderson
a simulation of her life in which her past memories and thoughts were on a looped reanimation tour.
Elisa had decided to take a solo trip, her “West Coast tour.” But why? To discover this, I had to go back further and collate posts from both of her blogs, as well as her social media accounts. By the time I was fully locked and loaded I had before me over one hundred pages of single-spaced entries.
I proceeded to get lost in someone else’s past, a past that only existed on paper and that began to intersect and cross-pollinate with my own present and future.
THE LONELY REBEL
Elisa went to a small, competitive high school, where she received exceptional grades and was devoted to academics. She began taking grade-twelve level courses in grade eight.
Elisa loved to read. Awake and Dreaming, Lois Lowry, and all of Kit Pearson’s books had gotten her through elementary school (where, she claims, she began her adventure in being a “hermit”). Her grade seven teacher assigned The Outsiders, paving the way for a love of reading that persisted through her life.
Her English teacher, whom she described as excellent, introduced her to short stories by Asimov, Bradbury, and Atwood; an even better grade twelve English teacher inspired a love for analyzing literature and the classics (which, she says, could be referred to as “dead white guys”). She hungrily absorbed Hamlet, Catcher in the Rye, The Great Gatsby (a book that would become an obsession for her), For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Importance of Being Earnest. She read poets like John Donne, Wordsworth, T. S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, Dickinson, Yeats, and Keats. Poetry, she admitted, was not her favorite. She preferred complete sentences.
Elisa wanted her education to involve “REAL discussions about life, death, love, society, humanity” and all the stuff you didn’t hear on the television.
She also participated in student council and a variety of extracurriculars, such as volleyball and cross-country running. She was diligently laying the foundation for getting accepted into a university, though she hadn’t yet decided whether she wanted to stay in Vancouver and attend the University of British Columbia or light out for a new course and attend school in a different city.
In some ways, Elisa fell into the mold of her peers. She was academic but also loved Harry Potter and a rich variety of popular culture and consumerism. In particular, fashion, which she blogged about with feverish delight. She found comfort in her two Mr. Potato Heads, named Darth Tatar and Spider Cloud, Twilight books, and orange and blue hydrangeas, the movie Drive, Reese’s pieces, a good latte, Diptyque candles, Emily the Strange T-shirts, Stars & Regina Spektor, Halo, and, above all, Tumblr. She was thrilled beyond words to find black leather Repettos for under $200.
But Elisa had an anarchistic philosophy brewing in her, a contrarian streak that at times turned her blog into a manifesto of personal rebellion and eco-feminist empowerment. She evinced a disgust for the very trends she followed, the generation she typified, and was keenly aware of the socio-emotional toxins polluting society. At one point she even wrote of wanting to visit São Paulo, Brazil, to see what it would be like to live in a country that has outlawed outdoor commercial advertising. This passage stunned me because I’ve considered the same trip for the same reason.
She wrote that “her generation is only interested in self-promotion, media only caters to sensationalism—gigantic web of marketing, national sport of hipsters, everyone branding themselves, was this the result of commercialism run amuck, capitalism so entrenched into our DNA that we have an intrinsic desire to sell ourselves.”
Perhaps as a partial result of this rebellious nature, Elisa began to feel the sting of isolation. Unlike many of her friends, she had no desire to party or drink. Since she didn’t go out with them on weekend adventures, she was labeled a prude, uninteresting, and found herself excluded from plans. And even though her high school had a large Asian population—with many second-generation students with roots in Korea and mainland China—she noticed early on that her ethnicity at times caused her to be ostracized.
Elisa also realized something about herself from a young age. She wasn’t able to pinpoint an exact event that caused it and she couldn’t trace how it had grown from the tiniest embryo of a sensation into a fully grown everyday reality, but Elisa knew that she suffered from an ailment that most of the others in her peer group did not. She called it depression because she didn’t know how else to classify it, though it made her feel like a walking cliche, so she didn’t talk about it much.
But there was no denying it. She experienced dark moods that washed over her like a storm stripping the land of its life and identifying features, torrents of negative thinking and despair that made her want to hide in bed. She’d always had a habit of hanging out under the covers. For a time, she thought it was to evade the light. But now she realized it was an early defense mechanism for avoiding the way the everyday world made her feel. It was like hibernating during deep winter, when there’s no hope for food or warmth.
Maybe this is just adolescence working its sinister magic, she had told herself. As hormones began to infect their every thoughts and actions, puberty became the dark lightning that divided her school’s social groups. The “haves and the have-nots” don’t just apply to wealth; it’s also a form of ableism that applies to physical beauty and personality.
All people experience sadness, sure, sometimes painful sadness. But did it hit them for no reason for several days at a time and essentially incapacitate them? It didn’t seem so. It seemed, rather, that most of her peers were surging into professional adulthood while she was scrambling to understand her own mind and sometimes struggling just to get out of bed.
BETRAYED
Things changed again for the worse in grade twelve. Elisa documented in her blog that she was betrayed by many of her close friends. One friend’s act of betrayal upset her so much that she wrote an angry letter and left it on the windshield of the friend’s parent’s car.
It felt like her best friends were leaving her behind, substituting other “cooler” friends in her place. This haunted her for years.
The summer before grade twelve, Elisa participated in a five-week j-explore program in Quebec. The housing was in the middle of nowhere and it was the first time she had lived away from her family. She learned a couple of truths about herself during this time. One was that she despised small-town life. She was a city girl. The quietude of rural scenes too closely approximated her own inner isolation and this overlapped with the second realization, which was that she was not good at meeting new people. She was confounded by the prospect of representing herself to strangers—and as a result, she didn’t make a single friend during the entire five weeks.
Once again, she felt rejected for not going out and partying and wearing hip, sexy clothes. Everyone around her, she mused, so easily slipped into new friendships and groups, so effortlessly navigated a labyrinthine social structure she found alien and meaningless. Everyone seemed capable of wearing masks and then discarding them based on the crowd at hand.
Another source of disappointment she cites from that time is the decision she made to drop cross-country running in favor of volleyball. She called the decision a terrible one. While she didn’t consider herself particularly good at long-distance running, she felt a sense of comradery and warmth from the racing team. Later, she realized her discontinuation of running precipitated an overall dearth of exercise that probably compounded her depression.
Her volleyball coach was a “dick wad,” who apparently was notorious for racist and sexist innuendo; he gave her barely any game time, deferring to the popular grade eleven girls in which he saw more athletic potential. Finally, at the end of the season, he told her straight out that he felt guilty for this, confirming that she had essentially wasted her term on volleyball.
She left the gymnasium and burst into tears. And at that exact moment, the cross-country team trundled by during their practice. Teammates she felt guilty for abandoning saw her weeping as they ran by.
DEPRESSION
This feeling, a sense of existential despair, grew more pronounced. Reading some of her early posts, you can sense Elisa first coming to terms with