On Finding Oneself Between the Beats

What makes us who we are? It’s different for each of us.

The older I get, the less I know the answer. But I keep lookin’.

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Identity is all down to happenstance, really. I think many people never find out who they are because who you are unfolds through experiences and education. Not post-secondary, not big-ticket experiences — it’s not about privilege and wealth, really, but about taking chances and going through life with eyes wide open.

Would I even write today had I not had a straight-girl girl-crush that prompted me to take creative writing in grade 10? Maybe not. Life is who we meet, where we go, and what we do. Don’t meet people, don’t go places, don’t try things… good luck in learning the multitudes you contain.

Lord knows, all the travelling I’ve done — my multitudes got a little loud and somewhere in the maelstrom that is me, the finer points of my identity slipped adrift.

I don’t know when I felt like I started losing myself — I’m not sure we ever really know where it goes awry. It’s like our identity is just grains of sand in our hands, and no matter how tightly we hold it, some always falls from our grasp.

During my nomadic chapter, I travelled to Scotland and drove through the Scottish Highlands, where my ancestors emigrated from in the 1700s. Later, I spent eight weeks in the Maritimes my parents left behind for new lives and West Coast living. I didn’t find myself amidst the heather and thistle of the Highlands, nor was my identity hiding in the lobster pots and red sand of my parents’ PEI.

I didn’t find “myself” by the Mekong, or on the hills of Lisbon, or in the sands of the Sahara, or under the centuries-old vines of Angkor Wat.

So, then what makes me tick?

Some weird part of me is glad I can’t answer the question easily. I’m glad it’s ever-changing, as am I.

But in some ways, what makes me tick never changed, nor did I.

Recently, one of my oldest, closest friends came to the Island for two nights. I miss living close to my friends and it’s not an experience I have often, so I needed that reconnect.

I think, for a friend like him, my quiet seaside life like stepping into some bizarre time-warp. He’s in a solid marriage, couple great kids, good life — but BUSY. Marriage and family, right? It’s living 24/7 with a loaded calendar.

Me? Flipside. Self-contained party of one. I make my schedule. I account to no one. I have no obligations beyond the obvious ones, and those I choose. And, after a few years of tight finances and health issues, I live a selfish life out of necessity, with no apologies. I’m a big fan of living for the moment.

So, when a busy-busy friend comes to stay, they enter my Chill Zone.

But my friend and I gave each other important gifts that week. You know, the gifts you can’t buy.

The gift I gave my friend was remembering how great it is to be boring.

Eat, be boring, eat some more, be boring some more, get some rest, then be boring again. I have turned being boring into an art, inspired by the old Spanish proverb goes: “How beautiful it is to do nothing, and then to rest afterward.”

The gift my friend gave me? Reminding me how much I love music.

What a strange thing to forget!

•

It’s easy to get used to the idea of background music — this ambient swirl on the edges of our life, everywhere, always. Every store, every movie, everywhere.

But I haven’t been an active participant in listening to music for years and years — not making playlists, not listening to new things, not even vaguely interested in discovering new songs.

For instance, I’m forcing myself to listen to Taylor Swift today, so I can at least stop being ignorant about the most successful creative person of our times. Not my style, but hey. Now I know. But last night I listened to eight hours of terrific music of all kinds, non-stop. What a great night it was.

In the before times — before Napster, before Spotify — I used to read music magazines. Plural. Many. All the time.

A well-written review dropping buzzwords and artist comparisons that ticked my boxes would prompt me to buy a CD. Wouldn’t even try to hear a sample track first. I’d just buy it, because that’s how discovery worked. (Didn’t like it? Took it to a used shop, got credit, walked out with something else. Win/win. Ah, the ‘90s.)

I’d regularly bus after school to A&B Sound for import or weird albums none of my friends “got.”

While most of my high school gravitated to routine pop or hard rock, I somehow found my way through the British invasion, alternative, and US college bands. If it was on Rolling Stone’s “College Radio” top 20, I was intrigued. My friend introduced me to Pearl Jam, the Tragically Hip, and countless others. I introduced him to to Nick Cave, BRMC, Grant Lee Buffalo, Tom Waits, and other stuff that flies under the common radars. We benefitted each other’s nerdish musical intrigue — until I went adrift.

•

So, getting dinner ready, buddy played many tunes, all just ‘background’ for me, but then a song I used to love come on — K’s Choice “Not an Addict” and — BAM.

I just remembered.

Who I was, how I used to feel, this edge I used to walk through life with — an edge I loved walking through life with.

That song, the specific memory it unlocked for me, was the trip I took before my world changed. It was spring 1999, just about 3.5 months before my mom would die, and of course I had no idea.

I’d just bought a car ahead of a four-week solo road trip down the American West Coast. I stayed in hostels up and down the Coast, in what was probably the height of hostel culture in America. Back then, Hostelling International ran amazing locations in California, including lighthouses and old military sites.

It was four weeks of me rocking down coastal roads, meeting cool people. The woman who most inspired me, I met in San Marin Headlands. I remember that afternoon.

I’d done the Beat Generation grind, checking out Vesuvius Books, trying to find the “Church of John Coltrane,” and having my fortune told by a woman who lured me into her Haight-Ashbury apartment to read my palm. Quite the day.

Went to the hostel to barbecue a burger and do some reading.

Hanging in the kitchen, chatting with a guy, I said I liked to write, so Blowhard goes to his car and brings a bullshit manuscript in to get me to read it. I was such a people-pleaser in my youth, so I took the stack of pages with ambivalence.

I gave it a couple minutes’ glimpse while drinking an Anchor Steam beer on an old wicker deck chair of an old Army Officers’ quarters in the Headlands. The view looked West to the Golden Gate Bridge and the Pacific beyond her, as a sunset fog rolled in.

And I looked at this stranger’s manuscript and realized I didn’t give a fuck. Sunset! Fog! Marin Headlands! Not this tired-ass writing by some hackneyed new-age Blowhard.

I put his tired writing down, told him I had things to read for me, and he got testy about it. My “nice Canadian” mode stopped. Told him to join a writer’s workshop ‘cos my ass wasn’t one. He huffed away.

•

The above-mentioned woman, Tara, was crafting a sandwich. She giggled at dude’s indignation when I refused to sacrifice my vacation to critique his “I read The Celestine Prophet and think I have profound words for the world” attempt at a manuscript.

So that’s how Tara and I came to be sitting in my hatchback under the swaying cypress trees north of San Francisco on a spring night with a full moon, smoking a joint, and listening to K’s Choice “Not an Addict” on repeat for 30 minutes. She’d never heard it before and loved it like I did, so we just kept replaying it.

Talking to her that night made me realize I’d never wanted kids and still didn’t, and I wanted to live an interesting life, if that was an option up for grabs.

She was 15 years older, shared parenting with her ex, and travelled a lot. She made me a list of books; stuff open-minded folks should read at least once. We stayed in touch a few months, but anyone transient back then inevitably fell away from us. Life before social media had its downsides.

But that song still takes me back to someone I was, and that I soon lost, as grief and untimely adulthood were thrust upon me just weeks after my return.

That’s the power of music, and when we’re the kind of people who plug into a song the way stereos plug into the wall, removing music from our lives is akin to becoming a drummer without a beat.

Good thing is, the right song, the right moment — a switch flips. That’s all it takes. K’s Choice was my switch.

•

Far pithier people than me have said “you can’t go home again,” and it’s true of going back to who we were too.

I’ll never be that girl in the car again. Do I wanna be? No.

I’ve hurt too much, I’ve lost too much, I’ve seen too much, I’ve learned too much. I’ve lived too much. I don’t want to unload all I’ve learned about life just because I’ve lost people and I’ve hurt and I’ve struggled.

What an incredible world I’ve seen. What a unique path I’ve had through this weird lonely planet, whatever it has cost me. And it’s far from over. What’s yet to come? Shrug. Like I know? Like you do? That’s where it gets fun.

The trick with aging is we get nostalgic for the simplicity of those days, but to go back often means undoing so much that has made us who we are. I guess “undoing” who you’ve become is down to whether you like who you’ve become or not.

For a long time, I didn’t. Or I thought I didn’t.

But it turns out, making better choices, followed by hospitalization and surgery, and subsequently becoming healthier, revealed that, deep down, I hadn’t changed much at all. I was just tired. That’s all.

Throw some music into the mix of “me” and I’m even closer to who and what I once was — just older, wiser, tougher, more resilient, and unburdened by having fewer fucks to give about platitudes and performative niceties.

I wanted an interesting life.

I’ve had one.

I just needed to be reminded that was the goal, and I’ve done it, and I’m still doing it.

All this is to say, if you’re missing who you’ve become in the mess of life and all its obligations, maybe all you need is a good playlist and a two-hour walk.

I prescribe guitars and drums, my good friends. Lots of ‘em, loud.

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