Case File: The Extraction
Incident Date: January 2026

AAA was supposed to be an escape for that moment in time. A loud, unassuming pub where ambient noise could drown out the static in my nervous system. Under the small, sticky wooden table, the warm weight of my dog, Drake, pressed against my boots—my last clean tether to a world that had not completely collapsed. Across from me sat a man who had recently positioned himself as my helper. At that point, I still thought I was meeting someone who wanted to steady me. I didn’t yet understand that there are people who can sit across from your unraveling and see, not a person in pain, but an opening.

A few weeks earlier, when my life was in freefall, he had bypassed my boundaries around money and wired it directly into my account. I had said no. More than once. I had tried to explain that financial dependence was not a neutral subject for me, that money had never felt simple, clean, or free of emotional consequence. He brushed all of that aside with the confidence of someone casting himself in a role he deeply wanted to play. There are no strings attached, he insisted. But the thing I would eventually learn is that the most dangerous forms of control do not announce themselves as control. They arrive as generosity. As relief. As exactly the thing your body is too exhausted to refuse.

By then, I was a queer, neurodivergent man stepping back into independent adult life for the first time after a fifteen-year relationship had ended. I had just moved into my own place. I had just lost my job. And then came the stalking campaign: strangers sent to my building, my own sexual images turned into bait, my buzzer shut off, my sense of safety burned down to the studs. My nervous system was running on iced flat whites, ADHD overdrive, and pure gay panic. So when someone appeared offering support—material, immediate, impossible to misread—I wanted to believe it was help. I wanted, more than I probably understood at the time, for one thing in that season of my life to arrive without teeth.

Part of why that kind of help worked on me is that I was raised in a house where love and money had long been confused for each other. My parents did not say “I love you.” Not to me, anyway. In my family, money often functioned as proof, reassurance, leverage, apology, and control all at once. It stood in for emotional presence so often that, by adulthood, I had developed a deeply warped relationship to being helped: I craved support, distrusted it, and felt guilty the second it arrived. Vulnerability itself was not especially welcome in the house where I grew up. If you were hurt, you were dramatic. If you needed comfort, you were needy. If you had big feelings, you were a problem to be managed. So when someone offered me care in a form that looked tangible and immediate, I was primed to read it as safety even while some older part of me was already bracing for the bill.

At AAA, the conversation began to turn before I had the language for what was happening. He started dropping little distortions into the room with unnerving calm—statements about my recent trauma, my choices, my actions toward him that were not just unfair but demonstrably false. I responded the way I often do when reality starts slipping: I got precise. I opened my veins and bled out facts. Timelines. Context. Receipts. I genuinely believed we were navigating some brutal miscommunication and that if I could just explain it clearly enough, he would meet me in the truth. Instead, the more accurately I spoke, the flatter he became. Every correction seemed to drain something human out of his face. I was treating the exchange like a mutual search for clarity. He was treating it like a perimeter test.

Then came the grievance that clarified the scale of the distortion. He looked me in the eye and demanded that I carry guilt for missing his annual White Party back in the summer. He claimed my absence had sent him into such a dark depression that he didn’t know what might have happened if a friend had not stepped in to get him through it. The disproportion was almost surreal. My life had been detonating in real time — a fifteen-year relationship collapsing, a job gone, strangers sent to my door, my body running on fumes — and he wanted emotional reparations for a missed party. Not because the party mattered, but because his ego did. He expected me to coddle his disappointment as if it belonged in the same moral universe as my actual survival. That was the moment the room began to feel airless. Not because I understood everything yet, but because some part of me had started to realize that we were not having the same conversation at all.

Before I could fully articulate what was wrong, my body had already started answering for me. I reached under the table and dug my fingers into Drake’s fur, grounding myself in the one thing in that room that still felt unquestionably real. The asymmetry of the exchange had become suffocating. I was trying to clarify. He was trying to reposition. I was trying to keep reality intact. He was quietly testing how much of it I would surrender just to make the conversation survivable. Long before my conscious mind was willing to name the danger, my nervous system had already started clocking it: the unsolicited money, the forced proximity, the casual erasure of my truth. That particular kind of dread does not arrive like a thought. It arrives like pressure in the lungs.

And when rewriting reality didn’t break me, he changed tactics. The generous benefactor did not disappear so much as get replaced by another role entirely: the wounded friend. His shoulders slumped just slightly. His voice softened into a performance of injured sincerity. He told me it seemed like I didn’t genuinely enjoy spending time with him. The audacity of the statement was almost enough to make me laugh, if I hadn’t been so exhausted. I was barely surviving. I was sitting across from him in a dog-friendly pub trying not to psychologically leave my own body, and somehow I was now being asked to manage his bruised ego. Then he twisted the knife further. He complained about the way I hadn’t prioritized him, the way I used to drop everything for other people, the way he had not been granted the same immediate access to my life. It was a masterclass in emotional asymmetry: I was in active collapse, and he was pouting over his placement on my call log.

The reason that tactic worked on me was simple enough, even if it took me years to name it. I did not see a man testing the perimeter of my sanity. I saw a friend I was disappointing. And once that frame locked in, my survival reflex took over. I did what I have done too many times in rooms that were already turning against me: I escalated honesty. I pushed harder toward clarity. I started trying to explain my pain so precisely that it might buy me grace. I thought that if I handed him the rawest parts of my interior, he would finally understand that my distance was not rejection. I did not yet understand that some people hear confession not as intimacy, but as access.

So I opened the vault. I leaned forward over the chatter of the pub and started handing him the least protected parts of myself. I told him I could not bear the feeling of failing another person right then. I told him the distance he was reading as indifference was actually the shape of my own collapse. And then I reached for the memory that, even now, still feels dangerous to say out loud. A few years earlier, at a Christmas party—the first one I had made it home for after the pandemic—I had been with my cousins when a casual conversation cracked open into something much more honest. I started crying. Then sobbing. I told them I didn’t understand why I hated myself so much. I told them I was terrified that the ugliest way I saw myself was probably the way everyone else saw me too. Sitting across from him at AAA, I offered that memory the way people offer up proof in desperation: not because it is safe, but because they hope it will finally make the truth undeniable.

He stared at me with a flat, unblinking vacancy and asked, “But why do you hate yourself?”

The question did not land like concern. It landed like a blade. Not because it was loud, but because it was so surgically empty. And then came the silence. Absolute. Heavy. Engineered. It sat there between us like a vacuum designed to force me to fill it, and I did. I started listing my flaws. My insecurities. The reactions I hated in myself. The things that made me feel broken, excessive, humiliatingly difficult to love. He did not interrupt. He did not comfort. He just sat there and took it in. That was the moment the shape of the encounter changed completely for me. I could feel, with a kind of cold horror that started at the back of my neck, that he was not receiving my pain as something to protect. He was absorbing it as information. Inventory. Leverage. There was no shared humanity in the silence, only the sickening realization that I had mistaken access for care.

I had spent much of my life believing that if someone wanted the truth from me, it meant they wanted me. That if they asked the intimate question, if they held eye contact, if they stayed in the room while I unraveled, some meaningful form of connection was taking place. But wanting access to someone’s interior is not the same thing as wanting to care for it. Some people respond to vulnerability with tenderness. Others respond to it like they’ve just been handed a map. The most dangerous forms of control do not arrive as threats. They arrive as help, offered in exactly the shape you’re least equipped to refuse, and they deepen through intimacy that is really just surveillance with better manners.

My body moved before my mind finished the sentence. I pushed my chair back so abruptly that the wooden legs scraped against the floor with a screech that made a few people glance over. “I need a minute,” I muttered, though my voice sounded strange to me, hollowed out and remote. He didn’t protest. He didn’t reach out. He didn’t ask if I was okay. He simply leaned back into the booth, his posture relaxing again into that expansive, satisfied calm, as if part of his work for the evening had now been completed. I reached under the table for Drake’s leash with trembling fingers. The solid weight of him was the only thing keeping me attached to the earth as I stood up and walked away from the gravitational pull of that booth.

By the time I reached the dim hallway near the restroom, I still did not have the full picture. I did not yet understand the scale of what I was inside, or the extent to which the man who had forced financial help on me had also positioned himself to benefit from my dependence. But my nervous system had already translated the warning my brain was still resisting. The forced generosity. The casual rewriting of my history. The dead, flat silence after I handed him the most fragile thing I had. I had mistaken containment for care. I had mistaken being studied for being supported. Standing there alone in the hallway, trying to regulate my breathing while the noise of the pub carried on as if nothing had happened, I realized that the terror of the encounter was not only that he wanted something from me. It was that he wanted it in a form I had been trained, almost all my life, to hand over.

What made the moment so destabilizing was not just that I felt manipulated. It was that I suddenly understood how familiar the mechanism was. Help had arrived in the exact form I had been trained to respond to: immediate, material, slightly overriding, impossible to refuse without looking ungrateful or unstable. It did not matter that some part of me had been uneasy from the start. My body learned long before my mind did that care could come braided with leverage, and that the price of receiving it was often some softer, more humiliating surrender. At that table, the old equation came back online in real time: accept the relief, then absorb the cost.

I would eventually understand more about him, and more about the architecture surrounding that period of my life, than I did in the hallway outside the restroom that night. But the deepest truth of the encounter did not arrive through investigation. It arrived in my body first. In the pressure in my lungs. In the way my hand clamped down on Drake’s leash. In the sickening clarity of realizing that the person across from me had not been moved by my pain, only sharpened by it. Some people hear your worst confession and move closer. Some hear it and start calculating.

That was the part I couldn’t unknow once I felt it. He was not keeping me afloat. He was building the tank.

I called 911. The responding officers told me it was “weird for them.”

That was day one of five months.

The Temu Saviour. Part one of two.

According to family lore, I used to stand in my crib soaked in pee and sing. My mom would say I was “pissed to the two eyes,” which is a phrase that really only works if you can hear it in the specific kind of Newfoundland accent that makes bodily disaster sound both biblical and casual at the same time. What she meant was that I had somehow managed to cover myself from head to toe, that the diaper had long since surrendered, and that instead of crying or calling out for rescue, I was upright in the crib, performing through it.

There is something humiliating about knowing this story exists in the family archive, but there is also something about it that feels, unfortunately, like evidence. Before I had any language for queerness or neurodivergence or the strange lifelong feeling of having too much weather inside my body, I was already trying to turn discomfort into a musical number.

I do not remember the crib, obviously, but I recognize the child. I recognize the refusal to let the body’s embarrassment interrupt the performance. I recognize the instinct to sing before I understood what the song was for. That’s the thing about family stories: even when they are told to embarrass you, they sometimes preserve the earliest version of a truth. In this one, I am not yet the kid who has learned to monitor himself. I am not yet shrinking or trying to pass his joy through a safer filter. I am just standing there, wet and apparently unbothered, behaving as if the show had already started and everyone else was late.

I was, by all available evidence, a very specific kind of child. I loved Barney, because who didn’t. I loved Sailor Moon, duh. I loved Care Bears, which feels less like a preference now and more like foreshadowing a false reality: bears with symbols on their stomachs, solving emotional conflict through colour, care, and occasional light beams. Spoiler for young Justin: life doesn’t work that way. I loved Stickin’ Around, that old Canadian cartoon that looked like it had been scribbled by kids and somehow got past the adults to be aired on television. I don’t know how many people reading this are fluent in deep-cut Canadian children’s television, but the premise was basically two kids whose drawings could pull their imaginations into real life, usually to help them deal with school, bullies, parents, or whatever everyday problem had suddenly become too boring to face directly.

Which, looking back, is almost offensively on the nose. Of course I loved the cartoon where children solved life by drawing a more interesting version of it. I had a Stickin’ Around backpack going into Grade 2, which at the time was just a backpack, but now reads as one of those early personal branding decisions nobody asked me to make.

I also wrote stories. Fictional ones. I don’t remember every plot, and I’m sure some of them were less “promising young writer” and more “child with access to pencils,” but I remember the impulse clearly. I liked making up worlds, characters, scenarios, versions of life where something could happen because I decided it would. I liked songs for the same reason. Songs had structure. They made feeling less abstract. A song could take something floating around inside your body and give it a place to go, even if that place was just a chorus you performed too seriously in a room where no one had requested entertainment.

That seriousness is probably the part I recognize most. I was not casual about the things I loved. I loved them fully, sometimes in a way that feels funny now because the objects of devotion were so small and so extremely of that era: children’s shows, cartoon backpacks and lunchboxes, pop groups, game shows, Spice World on VHS, the kind of media landscape where a kid could still believe that writing a letter might actually lead them to the world on the other side of the screen. I wrote to that show Zoom with all the kids, or tried to, because Zoom made it seem possible that regular children could send something in and be answered. A letter, an idea, some kind of science-project or invention-type submission — I don’t remember the exact contents, only the feeling that there was a door somewhere and maybe that piece of paper could open it.

I wanted to be on Uh-Oh! too, because obviously. It was chaotic, so Canadian, and seemed to reward the exact kind of child who had too much energy and not enough official programming to contain it. Since no one from national television arrived in St. Mary’s Bay, Newfoundland to hand me a helmet and a slime-related destiny, my brother and I made our own version in the driveway. We did not have slime. We had buckets of water, which, to be fair, is very much the Newfoundland public-access version of slime. We made obstacle courses. We made rules. We made the format work with what we had, which is maybe the earliest version of a creative principle I still live by: the budget was not there, but the vision, tragically, was.

I don’t want to overstate it. I was a kid playing in a driveway, not a young auteur fighting the system. But there is something in that memory that feels important because it shows up again and again in my life. If I couldn’t get inside the thing I loved, I tried to build a version of it in my universe. If the real show was somewhere else, I made the driveway version. If the screen did not answer, I kept writing anyway. It was not realized ambition in the adult sense yet. It was more like an instinct to participate, to be part of the world instead of only watching it happen from the couch.

The place around me had its own kind of performance, of course. Newfoundland is not a quiet place. It is not short on drama, music, storytelling, or people who can turn a trip to the store into a three-act structure with stormy weather, betrayal, and cameos from half the town, b’y. A man who insists he’s only had one beer can become a full community theatre production by the second chorus of a Great Big Sea song. Honestly, a Pitbull song too. People know how to hold a room. They know how to tell a story. They know how to make ordinary inconvenience feel mythic by the time it reaches the kitchen table.

But Newfoundland also has rules about what kind of performance belongs where, and small-town boyhood has even more. Loudness was not the problem. Loud was fine if it came through hockey, hunting, ATVs, sheds, skidoos, fishing trips, kitchen parties, or someone’s shitfaced uncle yelling Irish Descendant’s lyrics with a beer in his hand. Loud was fine when it had the right costume on. What felt harder to place, though I couldn’t have named it then, was the kind of loudness that came from a little boy with a Stickin’ Around backpack who wanted to reach for the stars with S Club 7 and make driveway game shows.

And I was an S Club 7 kid. Deeply. Spiritually. Probably in a way that should have been documented by a child development specialist, if only for archival purposes. Their world made sense to me: everyone had a role, a colour, a little piece of the formation. Pop music took emotion seriously without making it boring, which is still one of its greatest gifts.

The Spice Girls lived in that same part of me. Actually, they occupied a way larger space. I loved Spice World with the kind of commitment that only children and future gay men can bring to a film that is somehow both nonsense and scripture. Baby Spice was my favourite, which now feels so obvious it’s almost rude. She was pink, playful, bubbly, soft, and completely unserious in a way that felt like freedom before I understood why freedom looked like that to me. I loved the mansion sequence, the obstacle-course, the camo outfits, the idea that a mansion could become a playground and a group of girls named after spices in the kitchen cabinet could be so fucking cunty. I did not know what camp was. I just knew I wanted to live inside whatever that was.

Colour, in hindsight, was already telling on me. Or, looking back it feels that way. When I was little, I said orange was my favourite colour. Years later, in Junior High school, my friends found one of my old notebooks in the crawlspace, one of those childhood personality-question things where you answer prompts with total sincerity and no awareness that your future social life may one day be affected by them. The last question of the quiz was something like, “What is your favourite colour?” and I had written orange, followed by the line underneath, “and that is my life.” Naturally, this became comedy. “Orange is my life” is an insane thing to write, and I respect my younger self for the commitment. But I also understand the orange of it all now in a way I couldn’t have then. Orange was bright, but safe. Colourful, but not too revealing. Fun, but not pink.

Pink would have said too much. Pink was Baby Spice. Pink was soft. Pink was girly in the blunt way childhood makes everything a verdict. Pink was probably closer to the truth, which is exactly why I avoided it like the plague. Then, by high school, when I was trying to bury anything in me that felt too readable, my favourite colour somehow became brown. Brown. During the colourful Dell Inspiron era, when those laptops came in every colour of the rainbow, I chose brown. Out of all the available options, I picked the colour of a waiting room clipboard and called it a personality. At the time, I probably thought it was mature. Looking back, it feels like a closeted teenager trying to disappear into office furniture.

Eventually, after high school, after coming out, after slowly letting myself become a person with a little less plausible deniability, I admitted that purple was my favourite colour. Pink was high up there too, obviously, waiting in the background like, “Girl, I’ve been here.” That colour progression says more about me than I wish it did: orange as the safe brightness, brown as emotional camouflage, purple as the return, pink as the thing I had been circling the whole time.

While those colours were a quiet, internal way of figuring out how much of myself I was allowed to show, I still needed a physical place to let the loud parts out. If the hyper-masculine town outside wasn’t ready for a pop-star, I would just have to build my own arena indoors. Thankfully we had a large basement.

The basement in my childhood home was basically my first mixed-use creative facility, though I’m not sure anyone in the house truly realized they were living above a very ambitious entertainment district. Whenever I could get away with it, I staged family concerts down there, which I’m sure were received with the same enthusiasm most families reserve for a child announcing there will be a mandatory performance after supper. Audience members may have paid twenty-five cents, or possibly a discounted price, because sometimes you have to slash ticket prices to fill those seats. Either way, they were getting a good show. I took the entertainment lineup seriously. The slots had to be full. If that meant recruiting cousins against their will, so be it. Some were performers, some were venue operations, and some were purely victims of my creative leadership.

I also set up little stores in the playroom, selling art or random objects with the confidence of someone who had not yet been introduced to overhead costs. At some point I made a fake movie rental store too, laying out my VHS tapes so people could browse and “check them out,” as if our basement had suddenly become the local Blockbuster and I was its deeply committed franchise operator.

None of these enterprises were especially necessary, which was sort of the point. I was not waiting for someone to tell me there was a stage, a storefront, a lending system, or an audience. I was just making one. A family basement could become a concert venue. A playroom could become a shop. A stack of VHS tapes could become inventory. The production value was whatever we had lying around, but I liked the structure of it: the sign, the setup, the transaction, the performance, the feeling that something unofficial had briefly become official because I had arranged it that way.

I think that is why I am careful when I talk about childhood creativity, because the word can make it sound too polished, like some obvious gift sitting in the middle of the room waiting to be nurtured. For me, it was scattered through ordinary things: the songs I loved, the stories I wrote, the shows I wanted to be on, the driveway versions I made when the real thing was out of reach, the colours I chose or refused to choose. It was not always announced as creativity. Sometimes it looked like obsession. Sometimes it looked like too much energy. Sometimes it looked like a child taking children’s television extremely seriously. But underneath it was a consistent impulse: to make the world feel bigger than what was immediately available.

The kindergarten concert belongs to that same archive. I was small, excited, and almost certainly taking the event more seriously than the event itself required. That has always been one of my problems. Give me even the faint outline of a stage and I will immediately locate the stakes. I don’t remember every detail clearly, but I remember I was both excited and extremely nervous. I know that singing already felt like something my body understood. That school gymnasium felt like a venue.

And then I got the hiccups.

There’s something too predictable about a kid who loves to sing being betrayed by his own diaphragm at the exact moment he is meant to perform. It is funny now because it’s a great childhood story. A tiny child prepares for his big musical moment and his body says, “Actually, let’s bring in percussion.” But the memory has always felt larger than the hiccups themselves, not because hiccups are some grand trauma — they’re hiccups, and I do believe in remaining proportionate where possible — but because early moments of being seen often come with something else attached. Embarrassment. Disappointment. A laugh that may not have meant harm. A small lesson your body files away before your brain knows what to call it.

What matters in those moments is what happens around them. A child can survive embarrassment if someone helps him place it somewhere kind. Someone can say, “You still did it.” Someone can say, “You were brave.” Someone can notice that the desire to sing survived the interruption. My kindergarten teacher, Ms. Lee, saw something in me. Apparently, she told my mom once that I should take voice lessons because I have real potential. I only heard this story a few years ago. I don’t know if teachers understand how long a small piece of recognition can live in a child, especially a child who is not used to being understood in the exact place where he feels most alive.

But being noticed is not the same as being nurtured. That is one of the lines I keep circling. People can see something in a child and still not know what to do with it. They can find him funny, expressive, dramatic, talented, bright. They can repeat the stories, enjoy the performance, mention the spark. But a spark still needs somewhere to go. Otherwise, it becomes another family anecdote instead of a doorway.

To be explicitly clear, I’m not implying I think every missed opportunity comes from cruelty. Sometimes people simply don’t know what they are looking at. Sometimes a family loves you in the ways it understands while missing the parts of you that require a different kind of attention. Sometimes creativity is treated like a cute feature instead of a signal. Something entertaining, not a seed to water and watch bloom.

There were exceptions. My Aunt Melanie represented a different kind of adult life, one where creativity was allowed to be practical and fun at the same time. She became an interior designer, which feels more significant now than it did then. She knew that colour mattered more than just “pick one.” She knew rooms had feeling. She knew taste was not frivolous just because other people did not know how to measure it. She victimized the entire family one by one during her sponge painting era in the late 90s… and we have no choice but to stan.

It comes as no surprise that her oldest daughter — my cousin Mackenzie — grew up to be an extremely talented singer, with Melanie supporting as her “momager”. Watching Mackenzie unapologetically take up space with her beautiful voice, and having her be so fiercely supportive of my own creative journey today, has been incredibly inspiring to me. There is something really special about watching a family member use their voice like that; she can open her mouth at a family event, and 70% of the room is crying immediately. Add my pop Joe Kielly to the performance, and we’re easily at 100%. The Kiellys are an emotional, chaotic, and fun bunch.

It was exactly through this supportive, eccentric orbit of Melanie’s that I was exposed to extra sprinkles of creativity — including a random babysitter connected to her who helped me make a pig out of a two-litre plastic bottle and toilet paper rolls wrapped in shiny metallic purple paper. Technically, it was a craft. Emotionally, it was an icon. A plastic bottle, some cardboard tubes, and shiny purple paper became this strange little object with more presence than it had any right to have. I loved it. It was made out of literal garbage and still had star quality, which is unfortunately one of the more consistent themes of my life.

That purple pig has stayed with me because it taught a lesson I keep having to relearn: you start with what is available. You make the version you can make. You don’t always get the studio, the slime, the stage, the proper materials, the invitation, or the adult who knows exactly what to do with your spark. Sometimes you get a driveway and a bucket of water. Sometimes you get a backpack, a notebook, a hiccup, a colour you are brave enough to admit to, a babysitter who encourages using the metallic purple wrapping paper instead of something boring.

That is why this still feels like the right place to begin. Not because “pissed to the two eyes and still singing” is dignified, obviously. It is not. It is bodily, embarrassing, deeply specific, and exactly the kind of family story you wish had expired before becoming useful. But I don’t think I trust dignified origin stories very much. They usually sound too clean, like someone went back and edited out the stains. This one has stains. Piss stains.

But it also has the thing I keep recognizing underneath everything else: a kid covered in the evidence of his own mess, still trying to make sound. He was reaching for the world through songs, stories, letters, colours, game shows, basement concerts, and whatever else he could turn into a format. He had not yet learned which parts of himself were considered too much, too soft, too strange, too loud, or too revealing.

The voice was there before the permission was. Not polished, not protected, not yet worried about who was listening or what they would do with it. Just there. Upright, soaked, and still singing.

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People close to me have been telling me for over a year that I need to write a book. Usually they say it after I’ve finished explaining some new development in my life that sounds, unfortunately, like it was written by a room full of gay interns with unresolved attachment issues and a flair for legal risk. I would laugh it off, because what else do you do when someone tells you your pain has strong narrative potential? My brain would skip past the obvious answer — to write — and start building the pilot episode, the narrative treatment, the soundtrack, the full emotionally unstable cinematic universe.

Writing itself felt harder. Not because I didn’t love to write, but because somewhere along the way I had learned to be afraid of it.

That fear started in high school, with an English teacher who made me feel like I was not a real writer. Not just that I had written something that was bad, which would have been fair because I was a teenager and therefore both dramatic and under-edited. It landed deeper than that. It made me feel like there was a correct kind of person who got to write seriously, and I was not it.

So I found other ways around the page. I kept making things. Concepts, videos, events, songs, half-built ideas with names before they had budgets. I could turn almost anything into a format except, apparently, the truth sitting directly in front of me. A TV pilot felt safer than an essay. A big concept felt safer than a sentence. A pitch deck felt safer than a paragraph. That is one of my more reliable talents: avoiding the simplest emotional truth by giving it a production plan.

But this past year and a half did not politely invite me back to writing. It dragged me there by the balls.

It’s been, without a doubt, the hardest period of my life. Not in one clean, cinematic way. More in an unraveling, true-crime sort-of way. A 15-year long relationship ending. Then, a new one with trust breaking almost immediately. Losing my job of almost eight years. A five month long harassment campaign, making me feel like my own life had too many narrators and not enough truth. Friendships becoming collateral damage.

I’m being careful with parts of that story, not because I want to be vague, but some things need to be approached carefully and not thrown online just because the upload button exists and I happen to have a flair for saying too much.

But I know this: people can misunderstand you. They can decide what role they need you to play and they will play whichever role they decide for themselves. They can tell stories about you that sound convincing to anyone who wasn’t there. But they do not get to rewrite you. They do not get to take the pen out of your hand and call it closure.

One thing I have not lost through all of this is my ability to narrate. If anything, it got sharper. Probably too sharp, at times. I could be hurt, furious, embarrassed, confused, fully spiraling, and still some small exhausted part of me would be clocking the structure. Noticing the callback. Understanding that whatever was happening, one day I would have to find a way to tell the real story.

And then I lost my dog this year.

There is no clever way to write that. I can dress almost anything in a joke when I need to, but losing a dog who has been with you for thirteen years is not a bit. It is a room going quiet. It is a routine disappearing. It is grief showing up in the smallest places: the empty spot by the door, the missing sound of him shifting his position through the night, the moment your body still expects them before your brain remembers.

That loss clarified something for me. Not in a “life is short, chase your dreams” way, although annoyingly, yes, sometimes the clichés are undeniable. It made me realize I could not keep waiting for a clean season to become the artist I kept neglecting. There was not going to be a perfect moment where the grief was processed, the money was stable, the relationships were simple, the archive was organized, and my brain was suddenly quiet.

I had to start from the mess. So that is what this is.

GAYDHD is where I’m putting the pieces: essays, side quests, commentary, memory, heartbreak, humour, family lore, receipts, and the patterns that are glaringly obvious once you stop pretending everything was random.

I started writing because I had to. Because the story was getting too loud to keep carrying privately. Because the hurt pushed me back toward the part of myself that knew how to make something from it. Because if people were going to make such an effort to misunderstand me anyway, I might as well become extremely clear and poignant.

The first real essay will be posted this week, and it starts at one of the beginnings: a little boy in Newfoundland, soaked in pee, still singing.

Which feels ridiculous. But also very correct.

Welcome to GAYDHD. My life, unfortunately — but at least now I’m the one grabbing it by the balls and telling the real story.

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