This Is It

Content Warning: Professional eating disorder, fulfilling your enormous potential, Jean Vanier from L’Arche getting #metooed in a very upsetting way. Certain names and identifying details have been changed for privacy purposes

(I didn’t think it was my place to include pictures of the VIP folks in this essay so I am illustrating it with random photos, including this collage of my grown-up self fulfilling my enormous potential in a giant inflatable unicorn.)

In my youth, I invented the This Is It Boyfriend. I believed he was out there waiting for me, at the next café or my first day on a new job. Or magically next to my window seat on a train ride back to Ontario. When I met him, I would know. This would be it. He would lead me out of my perpetual state of angst and longing and sugar cravings and around the corner into a charmed existence of fulfilling my enormous potential plus three-to-seven decades of endless and glorious, good hard fucks from behind. (In my youth, I often conflated these two things). Back when an eating disorder caused me to puke in my mouth, I believed that my This Is It Boyfriend would cure me of this. This Is It wasn’t just a boyfriend. It was a place. In the land of This Is It, I’d be at peace with my life. I wouldn’t obsess over thighs or lunch choices or emails to my deadbeat of the month. I would not obsess.

But This Is It almost never turns out the way you expect. For example, you might be blessed enough to come upon a This Is It Boyfriend at a bowling alley or potluck. He’s gorgeous. He’s funny. He’s perfect. Perhaps he even reads books. This Is it. And yet, after a fleeting season of miraculous possibility, your hopeful existence fades into a whole bunch of barbecues with your in-laws, shopping for couches, and maybe the odd blowjob on a Sunday afternoon.

When I was seventeen, my This Is It was finding God (or even better, Jesus), and becoming a writer. And I wanted to flourish through university with a magnificent grade-point average. And to keep the straight, thin thighs I’d had at the height of my professional eating disorder. And to master one-way digestion which I hadn’t managed to figure out despite two hospitalizations and four months spent in intensive eating disorder day treatment.

How that went was, two years later, it’s 3 a.m., I’m staring at a blank computer screen, my thighs spread out across my hand-me-down office chair. The cursor blinks in time with me rolling the chair back and forth across the crooked floors of my dilapidated office. I was supposed to be extracting some brilliant analysis from William Blake’s poem, The Chimney Sweep, the version from the Songs of Innocence where in a dream, an Angel flies by with a bright key and sets all the sweepers free—Dick, Joe, Ned & Jack. Instead, I cried like little Tom Dacre. The narrator could scarcely cry, weep, weep, weep, weep. I could scarcely stop.

Regurgitated Cheerios and soymilk infiltrated my disintegrating teeth. I re-swallowed and threw up the mixture again. Though I rarely purged completely, vomit permeated my existence, up and down, up and down after just about every meal and snack. It helped me focus. It kept me relatively calm. It was so gross. But I figured it was an intermediary step to the full recovery I longed for. I’d get over it, grow out of it. How that went was, I spent the better of a decade with vomit in my mouth.

Meanwhile, God and/or Jesus was nowhere in sight. Outside on my warped balcony, I could see hunched over middle-aged men plod into the Coloniale Bathhouse next door.

In my life’s great mythology, this is where I quit university. Or at least decided I’d bail after the term. Beyond that, I’d need to go looking for God somewhere else.

L’Arche, by Jadwiga

When I was really sick with my eating disorder, my tiny and adorable mother had told me about a place called L’Arche. In the sixties, inspired by Jesus and a pervy priest, the Governor General’s son Jean Vanier was moved to invite two men with intellectual disabilities out of a mental institution and into his home. He named the house L’Arche after Noah’s Ark, and now there are 149 L’Arche communities are all over the world. L’Arche’s mission is to, “Make known the gifts of people with intellectual disabilities, revealed through mutually transforming relationships.” People without disabilities can live and work there for six months, a few years, or forever.

“It’s so beautiful,” my mother gushed. “Jean Vanier really believed that we’re here to take care of each other.”

Not long after his death, Jean Vanier was me-tooed. The allegations were horrendous and this is deeply disappointing. The community has tactfully acknowledged and apologized for his abuse, with zero justifications or victim blaming. And luckily the legacy of L’Arche lives on without the founder.

But before all the scandal, my mother gave me Jean Vanier’s book, “Becoming Human.” I remember the last page, where JV writes about the young people who come to L’Arche to be assistants and live alongside people with intellectual disabilities.

“They spend a year, and when they leave, their hearts are transformed.”

I remember reading this and thinking, that’s what I want. A transformed heart. I decided to take a late gap year to become an assistant. The people with intellectual disabilities would reveal their gifts and transform my heart. I’d find Jesus, and rest, and write in my spare time. This would be it. 

At my L’Arche house, L’Esquif, or “The Skiff,” I lived with five core members, the community’s name for its residents.

There was Isabelle, like me, 19 going on 20. Unlike me, she ate from a feeding bag that hung from a pole and dangled its tube directly into her stomach. She skipped the entire geography of the digestive spine that caused me such grief. Often I wished that eating was that simple for me. I used to take Isabelle out rollerblading along the Lachine Canal. She’d giggle and reverberate from her wheelchair, her hands clenched in fists and her arms frozen in V-shapes on either side of her. Everyone used to ask if we were sisters. I loved that.  

Both in their forties, the two men had Down Syndrome. Every morning, Jimmy took the metro across the city where he worked in a curtain factory. He had seven versions of the same t-shirt, each one depicting a different colour of Power Ranger. Whenever he went out, he carried a fanny pack with his flip phone and change wallet and a notebook which he used to write messages to the Power Rangers and hulk superheroes. Adam didn’t write or leave the house by himself. He’d created his own vocabulary, with a special nickname for all his friends. His special nickname for me was Cocococa. He nailed it.

Then there were the two older ladies.

“Well, Erica, I am six-eight. Sixty-eight,” said Jadwiga. Jadwiga grew up during the war in Poland and was endlessly concerned about her next meal. “About five o’clock. Erica. With an “s” we will have. The snack. Supper.”

“I’m gonna be sixty,” said Margaret, knitting from her La-Z boy. She grew up in an upper-class family where she had learned to stir sugar into her tea and sip daintily. To thank your host and laugh at key moments. It was hard to know what Margaret did and did not understand because she was so good at imitating what was expected. But behind her glasses, her wide, anxious eyes often gave her away.

And there were little glitches in her speech. “I’m not fussy about pasta,” she’d say, meaning she didn’t really like it. Like my youthful self, she was very concerned about the environment. She’d heard somewhere that the polar bears were not doing very well and that throwing out our batteries was making the problem worse.

“I love the polar bears, Erica. They’re my compassion,” she’d say, handing me a Ziplock bag of batteries to recycle at the drugstore.

When assistants talked too fast, or in French, she’d get quiet, the bump on her upper spine expanding as she hunched.

 “That’s something I don’t understand, Erica,” she’d confess. It could have been Quebec separatism, or blanching broccoli.

When Margaret came to L’Arche she had the biggest dreams. She wanted to get a boyfriend, to learn how to take the metro by herself. And most of all, she wanted to learn to read. At fifty, she’d never learned how. “No one taught me,” she’d say. “I never learned.”

L’Arche welcomed her into a beautiful, family-like atmosphere. It was a place where she belonged no matter what. But there was no boyfriend in sight and daily objectives had to do with sharing chores with her fellow residents and following pictogram charts of her morning routine.

“Margaret, did you do your three things?” assistants would ask. The three things were, go to the bathroom, brush her teeth and comb her hair. All this before adapted transit—and not the city bus—would pick her up to drive her to her sheltered workshop. There, between decaf coffee breaks, she’d colour in guided drawings of flowers and dogs and people with thin-lined smiles and three-fingered hands and snowman eyes.

Years before I came to L’Arche, Margaret dreams had collapsed into a life of brushing her teeth, catching taxis, and making greeting cards and laminated placemats. As the possibilities folded in on themselves, so did her hope.

She fell into a deep depression and could barely get off the floor. For 13 months, she lived in a mental institution where doctors struggled to perfect the multiple handfuls of drugs that would eventually get her out of bed and keep her vaguely cheerful.

“We almost lost Margaret,” said Nathalie, my co-worker and Mother-Theresa-level Catholic who had already passed her tenth year at L’Arche when I arrived. “She’s our miracle.”

“I like my life, Erica,” Margaret would say. “I like to knit. I like my friends. I like my garden.” But as the French say, she has angoisse—anguish, distress that that quietly nibbles on our insides.

For Margaret, L’Arche was her This Is It. All the disappointments of her life would dissolve. Finally, she’d live up to the heartbreaking expectations you feel when you grow up different in a pre-choreographed world. The world’s heartbreaking expectations, and her own. 

“I never learned to read, Erica,” she always told me. “I never learned.” At our twice-weekly Catholic masses, she’d stare at the lines of the hymn book like a teenage girl scrutinizes her silhouette in the mirror, willing the lines and the shapes to make sense.

In my youth, there were so many This Is Its to look forward to—the boyfriend, the sex, the no-more-puke-in-my-mouth, the having-more-than-five-dollars to buy coffee and duvet covers and airplane tickets with. The no-more-puke-in-my-mouth was a big one. I truly thought the heavens would part. And though the absence of vomit in my life was certainly a relief, I waited a really long time for my prize. Sometimes we have to wait a really long time for the prize.

Plagued with Gifted Children Syndrome, I grew up clinging to my promise and potential. Everyone gushed at all my talent—though I’d skipped a grade, I still shone above my cohort in swimming, violin, and especially writing.

“You have a career that’s waiting for you,” wrote my French teacher Madame Baker beneath my apparently brilliant journal entry. I was eleven. Now I am 36 and I am still trying to figure out where my writing career is waiting for me.

#gifted

America’s most beloved novelist Ann Patchett compares writing with playing the cello. Not everyone gets to be Yo-Yo Ma, but it’s still deeply satisfying to make music. Even if you didn’t get to be Margaret Atwood, you can still luxuriate in the joys of the em-dash, in joining words together, in making the page a place where the insides match the outside

And even if you never learned to read, you can still write a poem.

Happy Birthday, Love L’Arche (Drawing by Margaret)

“2-9 it is today,” Jadwiga would announce the date every morning as she poured her measured milk onto her Cornflakes. “Somebody’s birthday. I don’t know them.”

“B-b-b-bir-day, sha-na-na-na-na, Cocococ-ca,” chanted Adam as he sliced his breakfast banana. He sang this over and over again, whether it was my birthday or not.

At L’Arche, the world stopped for birthdays. Weeks ahead of time, Nathalie would order a special homemade card and happy birthday banner from the workshop where Margaret and Jadwiga made their customized crafts. You got to choose your favourite meal and invite your favourite peeps.

I’d been at L’Arche two months when I had my 20th birthday. My mother, my friends from university, five core members, Nathalie, and two other assistants gathered around the table. Nathalie read a verse from the Beatitudes, in the Gospel of Matthew. “Blessed by the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” She said that in addition to my coeur pûr, I had émerveillement, a sense of wonder and magic in what was right in front of me. Maybe God would not be so hard to find after all. 

All the guests wept as they passed a candle around the table, taking turns saying thanks for what they loved about me. Isabelle squealed and giggled, reverberating from her wheelchair.

One of the assistants, Judith, had helped Margaret write a poem. Margaret nodded along as Judith read it out loud.

“A twentieth birthday is a special day.

And you are a very special person.”

She thanked me for taking her to library, for singing songs, for telling stories, for making Isabelle laugh.

“There is love in your heart.

So let your love grow.

Yes, let your love grow and grow.

Happy Birthday, Erica.

Thank you for being you.”

After the party, my friends, my mother, and I sat, tear-stained, and stunned. We’d never seen anything like it. What had just happened? What had happened was, This is it.

This Is it might cross your path at a performance or a birthday party. A finished project, a wedding, or the revelation of a career that’s been waiting for you since grade 7. 

But for me, the life of my wildest dreams is scattered across my week. Greeting the pink walls of my miracle apartment that welcomed me home after a house fire and months of mattress hopping throughout the height of the pandemic. Meeting golden friends every Friday night for a slice of pizza the size of my face. Getting back to writing after a break. Tearing apart my kitchen as my tiny COVID bubble and aspiring ukulele band belts out Wrecking Ball before curfew, that time the government cancelled New Year’s Eve. The resonance of a New Yorker cartoon. The relief of naptime surrender. The laughter of my favourite peeps as we narrate our lives and our laundry over the phone.

Even when we are rich and famous, these will still be the best parts. This is already it.