Chapter 9

One morning on his drive in to work Colin heard on the radio that he had been fired as the Town’s FCSS Director. He sued for wrongful dismissal and won an out of court settlement that included a non-disclosure agreement.

After his firing from the Town of Hanna, Colin moved to Pincher Creek to sell advertising for the Pincher Creek Echo. He lived in a beautiful log cabin in Beaver Mines with the paper’s editor’s wife and their young adult son.

Pincher Creek welcomed Colin with open arms and he began to settle in. 

Colin: Hey Dad, guess what? I was invited to join the masonic lodge in Pincher Creek. 

Bill: By who? 

Colin: One of my customers. He owns a local business. He said since you were a long-time member, I would be a shoe-in for membership.

Bill: Why do you want to join?

Colin: To meet people, network, make good business connections. You know.

Bill: That's not why you join lodge. That's not what it's for.

Colin: But I just want to get ahead.

Bill: Then do it honestly.

Colin: huh?

After a year in Pincher Creek, he realized that living in Pincher Creek was a lot like living in Hanna. He had not escaped at all and he eagerly moved back to Edmonton in 1990. 

He moved into a bachelor apartment with a view overlooking the North Saskatchewan River and started selling advertising for The Bullet arts magazine. He met many wonderful and interesting people in the arts community and was soon feeling more connected to his true self. 

On the morning of June 19, 1990, after another night of heavy drinking and drugging he rolled over in bed and saw a handsome young Indigenous man. He had no memory of the night before, as usual. He staggered to the bathroom but saw no sign of a condom wrapper. With a head splitting pain and looking into the mirror he said: “I’m sick of being sick”. And he quit everything cold turkey: booze, drugs, and cigarettes.

He joined Alanon because he thought his parents were the cause of his heavy drinking but soon realized he had to make a big change. He joined Alcoholics Anonymous for a few months but soon realized that as an atheist he could not “turn it over to a higher power” and he was simply being a phony putting on religious airs. So, he went out on his own to seek a recovery journey that would transform him.

One night after an AA meeting in the basement of a local church a friend said to him: “Colin who are you? You can be anyone you wish to be. Just look around at all the wonderful qualities you see in others and make those your qualities. You’re not stuck, you can be anyone you choose to be.”

And he set out to become someone he would admire and respect, his own best friend.

The AIDS pandemic had been raging since 1983 when he heard about a mysterious illness that had taken the lives of numerous gay men in New York and San Francisco. Doctors did not know what the cause was so they called it a syndrome – Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome or AIDS.

Leaders of the American fundamentalist Moral Majority movement were calling AIDS the Gay Plague. They said it was God's wrath upon those who they believe live in sin. Doctors didn't know how contagious AIDS was or how it was spread and were taking precautions to protect public safety. AIDS victims were being quarantined in hospital and there was reportedly no risk to patients or staff. Soon the virus HIV was revealed as the cause for AIDS and victims rejected the victimhood label for the label People Living with HIV.

Colin had been completely disconnected from the gay and lesbian community since he fled to Hanna during a psychotic break in 1983 but one of his customers at The Bullet magazine was the Executive Director of the AIDS Network of Edmonton Society.

He offered Colin a job in fund development and in 1992 he left The Bullet for greener pastures. Working at ANE Colin reconnected with the Gay and Lesbian community and experienced a rebirth of his love for Edmonton.

Delwin Vriend also worked for ANE as their IT technician. He showed Colin how to use a computer for the first time and soon Colin was spending hours on a keyboard in front of a screen. In those days you saved your work regularly because you never knew when the next system crash was going to happen and you might lose a whole day’s work as a result. Colin used to joke “Sure, Jesus saves. But Colin saves more. Control S”.

One of the great acts of human kindness to turn the tide of discrimination against people living with HIV was when Liz Taylor stood up for her friend – Rock Hudson – and the world saw there was nothing to be afraid of.

He joined GALA – Gay and Lesbian Awareness social activists – and had the pleasure of getting to know many other kind hearted spirits fighting fearlessly for social justice. They organized letter writing campaigns and pride parades and one year they hired Colin to be lead organizer of the Edmonton Pride Parade. 

Colin donated a painting to the AIDS Network in 1994 and it still hangs their offices to this day.

NRTI drugs — the best known of which is AZT, also known as zidovudine and originally developed by GSK — were a big advance in HIV treatment when they first emerged in the late 1980s. They extended patients' lives and helped make HIV a manageable chronic disease rather than the death sentence it once was.

The ANE offices were shared with the Feather of Hope Aboriginal AIDS Prevention Society – FOHAPS. There he met many good Indigenous men and women and two-spirited people. There the seeds of allyship were sown in Colin.

In those days there was a ventilated smoking room in the office and many a good story was told over coffee and cigarettes. Colin met an elder from the Enoch Reserve. She told him when Indigenous people see one of their own completely out of their mind on booze and drugs they say “they are not themselves – that their spirit has left them”.

Colin’s latent arrogance shone through often. He was particularly hard on the Executive Director who one day fired him for good reason.

He kept involved with GALA for a while and was there at the beginning of the Delwin Vriend case when GALA was raising money to hire a law firm, Chivers, Greckol, and Kanee, to sue Kings University, a Christian school funded with public money, for wrongful dismissal of Delwin when he worked there. That case ultimately ended up in the Supreme Court which ordered the Government of Alberta (Ralph Klien) to include sexual orientation as a ground prohibited from discrimination in Alberta. The gays and lesbians and allies sued the Alberta Government and ultimately won in a Supreme Court of Canada ruling. Result.

At that time Colin connected with a friend and they formed the HDL – Homosexual Defense League. They went after Alberta Report magazine for it’s virulent hate filled reporting against the gay and lesbian community. They researched the back issues of the magazine in the downtown public library for the names of advertisers and then called advertisers up to ask them to stop supporting hate mongering. All declined except the Chateau Lacombe, the only union hotel in town, and they pulled their advertising from Alberta Report. Result.

One day Colin joined a group of social activists in a protest on the steps of the Alberta Legislature. They were protesting the savage killing of young Matthew Shepard by two homophobic hate filled red necks who baited Matthew and took him out to the country and tied him to a fence post and beat him do death in Larame, Wyoming, USA.

Determined to become a human rights lawyer Colin enrolled in the University Transfer program at MacEwan University to study Law in the fall of 1994. He passed his first year of a Bachelor of Arts with top marks and began his second year when he met a gay lawyer who was just starting out his legal career. They spent Christmas vacation in Hawaii on lavish treats like convertible cars, luxury hotels, and a helicopter tour of Kuai, the garden isle. Foolishly Colin spent most of his student loan on the vacation.

When they got home his new partner dropped Colin like a lead balloon and he was crushed. With no income or a job Colin reached out to his mother for help with the rent but she would not hear of it. He reached out to the government and applied for Income Supports program which paid $394 per month. His monthly rent was $400 so he was going to the food bank and sneaking cigarette butts from ashtrays in hotel lobbies. He finally got a job doing day labour on industrial sites.

Alcoholics Anonymous offered a wellspring of support and understanding to a man thirsting for personal growth and acceptance. He learned that anger, anxiety, guilt, obsession and doubt were toxic to him. He learned about honestly, open mindedness and willingness – keys to recovery. He learned the language of recovery and it made perfect sense to him, except for one fairly important concept. In order to progress through the program one must perform each of the twelve steps, not necessarily in a particular order.

Colin stepped up to the front of the old church basement to speak.

Colin: Hi my name is Colin and I'm an alcoholic and drug addict. I am pleased to be here tonight but I am also saddened. I recently realized that since one of the twelve steps is turning it over to a higher power that I won't be able to complete the steps. I don't believe in a higher power, or a God of any sort for that matter, therefore I have nothing to turn it over to. This will be my last meeting. Thank you for all the support and understanding you've given me. That's all. Goodnight. 

Colin continued to practice the lessons of recovery. Once he was told by a fellow member that he could choose to be whoever he wished to be. “Look around at the people in your life and see the qualities that you admire. Choose to make them your qualities. So if you admire honesty then start being truly honest with yourself and others. You can be whoever you wish. You can be someone that you would admire.”

In time he watched himself change, take the risk of trying on new behaviours, new ways of dealing with life and learning to grow, sweet personal growth, one of the greatest gifts.

All that change all of a sudden overwhelmed Colin. The losses through sobriety, were too great and he began to hallucinate from the stress. Without booze and drugs to self-medicate he had few tools to cope with things and he collapsed into a psychotic episode, his second at the age of 40.

During this second episode Colin became obsessed with the idea that “they were coming to get him” so he packed a meagre bag with pictures of family and friends and headed down to Jasper Avenue to wait for “them”. One evening he saw the waste disposal truck pull up to his building and he realized that this was “them”. He opened the passenger door and climbed up.

Truck driver: Hey man what are you doing.

Colin: I'm so glad you're here. I've been waiting for days.

Truck driver: What the fuck.

Colin: I can't wait to get back home.

Truck driver: Jesus.

The truck driver kicks Colin out of the truck with a firm boot to the face. He lands hard on the pavement and wonders “What the fuck. Wasn't that my exit?”

The next day Colin became possessed with the idea that there was a bomb in his apartment so he ran to the neighbors and called 911. Shortly, an ambulance arrived and he was asked where he wished to go, to which hospital. He asked what were the choices and chose the Grey Nuns Hospital because it sounded like a spiritual place and Colin was convinced he was having special spiritual experiences when he hallucinated or heard things. 

The ambulance driver assured him he had a right to refuse treatment when she dropped him off at the hospital. He was taken to a small room after a brief interview with a woman who cried during the interview. After a lengthy wait a male doctor came into the room:

Doctor: So what’s going on for you right now Colin?

Colin: Well I’ve been really depressed lately. I lost a lot of things. I was suicidal at the age of 13 because I was bullied for being a gay teen. I think my parents knew. PFLAG says parents often know they have a special child before the age of five.

Doctor: That’s a bunch of horse shit.

Colin: No you’re full of shit. I’m leaving.

Colin said goodbye to the woman at the desk and she started crying again. He caught a bus home and was certain he was being followed. When he got home he decided to kill himself and made preparations to do so when the sun came up. But as the sun rose he started to sob: “I’m not Jesus. I’m not sacrificing myself for humanity. I’m just a guy who’s sad and it hurts.”

He went to see his doctor who proscribed medication, and his symptoms abated. Some rapidly and others, like the paranoia, clung like the smell of acrid smoke.

He finally received a diagnosis of mental illness, at age 40, first depression and later bipolar, he was relieved. Now the bizarre behaviour, wild mood swings, foolish choices, failed relationships, suicidal thoughts, began to make some sense. Life began making a bit of sense.

With the help of prozac he began to see some of the patterns in his life. At first he was nervous about taking an antidepressant as a treatment for a brain illness but as he gained more and more consecutive days and then weeks and then months free of symptoms he began to develop a certain trust and gratitude flowed from there.

One night he was playing pool at a local gay bar called The Roost and he ran into a young woman he had once supervised as a summer student at the AIDS Network. She said she had just quit her job at the Schizophrenia Society and they were looking for a fund raiser. The next morning, he phoned their office and then met them for an interview that afternoon. Anne Packer and Patricia Stevenson hired him on the spot.

Colin worked hard all summer on the Schizophrenia Society’s 1996 Walk & Run and they held their most successful event to date with over 100 runners and walkers raising money for the SSA. The board extended his contract and Colin worked with them for 12 years, becoming their executive director at one point. 

Colin lied in his job interview. When asked what he knew about mental illness he deliberately failed to tell them that he had just experienced a bout of severe depression and psychosis and was taking an antidepressant. He thought he would be judged harshly if he divulged his secret.

Occasionally he would be working alone in the office and a person living with mental illness would come in, hallucinating and delusional. This scared him so he kept a screwdriver in his top desk drawer, just in case. He thought people with mental illness were people to be feared.

However, after two years of meeting and working with individuals and families with lived experience of mental illness Colin realized he had nothing to fear and put the screwdriver back in the tool kit. In fact, working in the field of mental illness and mental health was a real eye opener and he grew a little. 

Soon Colin was telling anyone who would listen that he too had experienced depression, that his first suicidal desires were at age 13, that he took a psychiatric medication daily. But Colin wasn't telling the doctor everything. He was experiencing routine manic highs, episodes that might last for a few hours or a few days. These seemed normal to him as he'd had them for most of his life. In fact, he was using the antidepressant to get a little lift every morning. Chemically recharged he would plow into the day’s work and just go, go, go.

People with bipolar can respond poorly to treatment with antidepressants. And while they can be most effective as a means of treating and preventing depression; they can give mania to those with bipolar. One of the best treatments for the mood swings among those with bipolar is lithium. Good old, naturally occurring lithium salts.

Over that first ten years Colin took on more and more responsibility receiving some excellent mentorship from his board of directors, volunteers and the organizations membership. He met weekly with Anne Packer and they became fast friends. The more he learned about mental illness, mental health, and addictions the more his world made sense and he came to know the folly of judging people for the symptoms of their illness but rather loving them for their potential, that recovery is possible for everyone and in terms that can be meaningful for them.  

As he grew and learned he became more confident and with that came his old nemesis, arrogance. It manifest in many ways; the most disturbing for Colin was sporadic outbursts of anger. These were sources of great embarrassment to him and his friend Anne tried to get him to talk about it but Colin was frozen with fear and unable to reconcile his behaviour beyond feeble rationalization.

His success with mobilizing volunteers, grant writing, program and operations management. His attention to detail. His sheer love of people gained him the respect and endearment of his employers and he felt a burning desire to keep doing more and more. He didn't bother to take all the holiday time due but rather worked late and on weekends and in his tenth year he discovered remote desktop – the ability to connect to his work computer from home.

Soon most of his waking time was spent on the job and he was burning out fast. No one realized what was happening and all were saddened when he asked to be released from his contract because he wished to pursue other avenues. Some wondered if he was having a relapse and in fact within a few months he arrogantly stopped taking the meds.

His friends Giri and Virendra were routinely stopping by for coffee, just checking in they said and he was thrilled for the company.

Colin: Hey guys. How's it going?

Giri: Great.

Virendra: How about you?

Colin: Oh I'm just fabulous.

Giri: What's all those tubs stacked up against the wall.

Colin: Oh I've been very busy. I don't want to leave a mess for my family so I'm packing everything I can in plastic tubs. Nice eh, colour coordinated.

Giri: You going somewhere?

Colin: Yes and I'm packing up the apartment to save my family the trouble.

Giri: Where are you going?

Colin: Well I'm 50 years old. I've had a life of great privilege and it's time to pack it in.

Giri: Are you talking about killing yourself?

Colin: Of course.

The look on Giri's and Virendra's faces, the look of shock and dismay pierced Colin's bubble of delusion. Tears welled up.

Colin: Oh my gosh. I'm sick again. Oh no, not again.

Giri: I'm calling Dr. Mowat.

Colin: Okay, just a second I'll be right back.

Colin fetches his meds from the bathroom and returns. Giri hands him his phone.

Dr. Mowat: Hi Colin. How are you doing? Giri tells me you've been thinking of killing yourself.

Colin: Yeah I just realized I'm sick again. Damn.

Dr. Mowat: Are you still thinking about killing yourself?

Colin: No. I see that I'm sick and I've got some meds here that I'll take in front of Giri and Virendra.

Dr. Mowat: I don't think you should be alone tonight. Is there someone who could stay with you? Do you need to go to hospital?

Colin: No. I'll be okay. I see that I'm sick again. It's not the first time I've been suicidal. I've been down this road a few times. I'll get through tonight okay, thanks. And I’m taking my meds right now.

Dr. Mowat: If you're sure you're okay tonight then I want you to call me first thing in the morning and make an appointment.

Colin: Thanks. Thanks so much.