Nathan Kanasawe was 23 when they first went viral. Early one September morning in their town of Sudbury, Ontario, they decided to go on a 2 a.m. drive with a friend. While driving, they saw someone testing a Boston Dynamics robot dog.

“I did a U-turn because we’re like, ‘Well, what the fuck was that?’ And then, when we pulled up beside it, we were like, ‘That’s so cool. Can we take a video of it?’” In the video, Kanasawe and their friend could be heard saying “oh my God!” and “I love you!” excitedly to Spot, the black and yellow dog.

“I was really amazed by it. I didn’t have any other thoughts other than, ‘Oh my god, it’s a robot.’ I had no real thoughts about what it meant, politically or socially. I was just like, ‘It’s a robot dog!’”

When they went to bed, the video had gained about 60 retweets. They were woken up the next morning by their notifications going off as the post reached 50,000 retweets. The video later hit 14 million views and had thousands of retweets. Boston Dynamics themselves had to put out a statement. While the video continued trending, people started digging up Kanasawe’s tweets about being a K-pop stan, and posting pictures of their face.

It was 2020 and, though many people shared Kanasawe’s wonder, others began to criticize him for being excited about seeing the robot. “At first people were like, ‘Whoa, that’s really freaky.’ But then, people were like, ‘Have you guys heard about Boston Dynamics opening up a military contract? They’re gonna use the Boston Dynamics dogs as police dogs.’ I was like, ‘That’s fucking awful. But I didn’t know that.’”

Twitter users began commenting things like, “So, you love police dogs,” and calling Kanasawe a “bootlicker.” Some even suggested that they were part of Boston Dynamics’ marketing agency.

Kanasawe, who is Ojibwe, attempted to explain his position by responding to comments on the original tweet. “I was trying to [tell] people…I understood that these things were dangerous to people of colour as well. But it was hard to respond to everybody. I mean, I’m getting hundreds of replies in just a few minutes, over the course of maybe three days. Doing damage control in that type of situation is kind of impossible.”

Kanasawe says they didn’t realize people would become so hostile so quickly. “Because all of the comments on the video were negative, it started leaking into my other posts.” Despite the fact that they tried to maintain separation between their family and social media, Kanasawe’s family became aware of their Twitter account after the video went viral. Kanasawe says they never felt unsafe, but they did feel “exposed” and “embarrassed” as the tweet started to follow them in their everyday life.

“I had no privacy. I don’t think I realized that it was going to affect my internet footprint significantly. Ninety percent of the searches on my full name, that robot dog will just show up,” Kanasawe says. The negative backlash and subsequent pile-on led Kanasawe to delete his tweet, then his entire account. Out of an abundance of caution, he made his new Twitter account and previous Instagram accounts private.

“I really didn’t want it to happen again,” they say. “I felt very out of control of whatever narrative was being placed on that video. I think that because I didn’t have any control over it, a lot of people made assumptions about me and about my friend, too,” Kanasawe explains, noting that they hated it. They ended up wondering: should they continue to be this online?

*

Why are people so comfortable being awful to others on social media?

Faye Mishna, a University of Toronto professor in the faculty of social work, has studied bullying and cyberbullying for decades. She says there are different factors that lead to people choosing to be bullies online. One of the factors is, of course, the perception of anonymity. “If you don’t know me, you don’t see the effect that you have on me,” Mishna says. “Being online can disinhibit because it seems impersonal. You don’t see the impact you have.”

Mishna’s studies focus on how bullying, cyberbullying, and more recently, sexting, affect kids and young people—groups for whom being online has always been part of life. “When we first started, every family had a computer. They didn’t have small devices. [Those] changed everything. It was as large as the Industrial Revolution. Once you have cars and the industrial revolution, you can’t act as though you don’t.”

Statistics from Media Technology Monitor say, “Two in five Canadian kids aged two to 17 own a cell phone and 60 percent have used one in the past month. Usage (87 percent) and ownership (81 percent) are the highest among teens.” If you own a smartphone, chances are you’ve got at least one social media account. The 2018 Canadian Internet Use Survey says social media was regularly used by nine out of 10 Canadians between the ages of 15 to 34.

Since devices make us more connected, there’s more opportunity for young people to experience cyber victimization. According to Elizabeth Englander for the Journal of Pediatrics and Pediatric Medicine, “Increased digital exposure to a potential perpetrator of cyberbullying seems to increase the odds of victimization, in much the same way that greater exposure to a traditional aggressor can increase the odds of becoming an in-person target.” Simply put: the more time you spend online, the higher the possibility of being subject to cruelty on the internet.

The Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA) says in a recent study that most Canadians think social media usage has a “neutral impact on their overall wellbeing.” With that being said, there is a significant increase in the number of people who feel it can be “detrimental.”

“Slightly more Canadians feel social media is harmful (20 percent) to their wellbeing than in 2020, when 16 percent described it as such. Similarly, fewer see it as beneficial,” the study says.

The effect that cyberbullying can have on a young mind is “terrible,” Mishna says. “For young people, it can affect your ability to concentrate, to go to school, to socialize. It can make them depressed; it can make them scared to reach out, it can make them anxious.”

The Health Education & Behavior study by Meaghan C. McHugh, Sandra L. Saperstein, and Robert S. Gold “OMG U #Cyberbully! An Exploration of Public Discourse About Cyberbullying on Twitter” backs up that claim. It said that cyberbullying can lead to anger, low self-esteem, depression, and suicidal ideation.

While there is ample research about cyberbullying of kids and adolescents, the data for the phenomenon among adults is more scant. Statistics Canada discovered in a 2019 study that a quarter of young adults aged 18 to 29 years old experienced cybervictimization in 2018, with receiving unwanted sexually suggestive or explicit messages and aggressive or threatening emails, social media or text messages being among the most common forms.

The numbers also show that queer and Indigenous youth, of which Kanasawe identifies as both, are also at risk for even higher levels of cyberbullying. In fact, 52 percent of youth who don’t identify as male or female reported being victimized online.

The Statistics Canada study continues, “Besides gender, the likelihood of being victimized online was greater among sexually diverse youth (sexual attraction other than the opposite sex) and First Nations youth living off-reserve.” This means young queer and Indigenous people may be less likely to express themselves online, leaving them with fewer outlets to share and connect.

*

The attacks Kanasawe faced changed how they interact with others. Now, they tend to guard their posts, when they decide to make them, by keeping them private and limiting their number of followers. “I didn’t want a lot of people seeing tweets, and if they did, then I would delete them,” they say. “It kind of changed the way that I was on social media.”

On going viral, Mishna says it’s important to know that that kind of response is a possibility. “You can’t really anticipate it except just to know that it could happen. I think we really need to provide support for people [being bullied]. One of the things is, why is it important not to do that, not to join in and shame, because it really does affect someone terribly.”

In an interview with Paper Magazine, then 19-year-old Jazmine Stabler recalled going viral in a cruel meme posted on Twitter. The meme made fun of her facial tumor, which Stabler was born with and had grown to accept. “Why post me? I’m just over here in Alabama living my best life, attending college, minding my own business.” Her comments came after her prom pictures were posted on Twitter with the explicit intent of making fun of the young woman. She took it in stride, but not everyone who unwillingly has content go viral is able to cope with all the negative attention.

In 2019, actress Constance Wu received heavy backlash for a series of tweets criticizing the renewal of the show she starred in, Fresh Off the Boat. After taking a three-year break from social media, Wu said in 2022 that the negative reception she received led her to attempt suicide.

Going viral didn’t affect Kanasawe’s mental health the way it did Wu’s. Things took a weird turn about a year after the video was posted, though. Someone had edited the audio to include the n-word and antisemitic phrases. Kanasawe could do nothing about it, since they previously licenced the video to American pop culture blog Barstool Sports and no longer owned it. This made it impossible to get the video taken down after it went to the wrong side of the internet. Kanasawe was especially hurt that people couldn’t tell the video had been vandalized, and that others were finding the edited video funny.

“My friend and I, we’re not Jewish, and we’re not Black,” they explained. “But if we had been either of those two things, it would have probably taken a mental toll on us to see not only just the video, but the response to that video. To people just laughing and cheering it on. It would have been horrible.”

One of the worst parts of facing this kind of thing is the sense of powerlessness, the lack of agency over whether and how others understand us. “[Cyberbullying] really needs to be dealt with as a community,” Mishna says. She says it’s important that people not just pile negative comments onto viral posts. “One thing that can help is bystanders intervening. A bystander can respond privately to the victimized person just to provide some support. They are incredibly important, and research has shown that when bystanders do jump in and say something, it really makes a difference.”

Nowadays, Kanasawe doesn’t use Twitter that much. They’ve mostly migrated to TikTok, an app with its own host of cyberbullying and negativity. Though, their time on the app is spent trying to help others in the queer community. They run the account More Binders, a mutual-aid program that provides free binders to trans youth. They’ve even gone viral on TikTok, but this time around, it was more positive. “When I had a video go semi-viral [on TikTok], it was for a good purpose. That video was me talking about how I wanted to send trans kids binders for Christmas,” they say. They understand how expensive binders are, and they’re committed to sending the gender-affirming clothing to trans youth who can’t afford it.

“It’s just ironic now because without that video going even semi-viral, I wouldn’t have been able to run More Binders for the last three-ish years.”

It’s not going viral that’s the problem, then; it’s how we behave in groups when we don’t like something. Taking a second to think before commenting can go a long way toward helping ensure those who are already marginalized have a safer life, both online and off.

Sometime around 2005, in the halcyon days of the internet when it was still treading its path to ubiquity, I peaked. Hunkered down late at night in a small room exclusively dedicated to housing a family desktop computer, I used the free peer-to-peer file-sharing client LimeWire to pirate the less-free peer-to- peer file-sharing client LimeWire Pro. The genius of such a move is one I will never again equal. From there, I sifted through mislabelled songs, copious malware, and recordings of Bill Clinton saying “I did not have sexual relations with that woman” until I found something called digital drugs. The pirated folder contained audio files supposedly engineered to simulate, using specialized sound waves, the sensations of different substances.

Back then, on the precipice of puberty, I knew about drugs the way I know about the concept of enlightenment now. That is, I knew vaguely what sensation I was expecting without any firm idea of when I’d know I was experiencing it. With a smorgasbord of different drugs’ effects at my fingertips, I ran the gauntlet. Beyond the whole medley that appeared in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, there were audio sequences said to recreate the feeling of certain experiences: swimming in a frigid lake, déjà vu, having sex with a co-worker on an out- of-town work trip, confessing your love to a best friend, the anticipation floating around a marathon’s starting gun. I was surprised to find that these promises felt accurate: the sounds did take my mind to another place. To some degree, each felt like dreaming for the first time, like being dropped in the middle of an already running narrative and left to gradually fumble around for my place in the proceedings before being suddenly yanked into another thread of another unfolding story only to start all over again.

Of course, I had no idea whether any of it actually was accurate, or if anything was happening at all. As it turns out, that was a more difficult question than it would initially appear. What was being advertised as “digital drugs” were combinations of sound frequencies known as binaural beats, and their legitimacy, efficacy, and potential medical and recreational impacts remain up for debate.

*

Binaural beats were first discovered by Prussian physicist Heinrich Wilhelm Dove in 1839 by striking tuning forks on each side of a student’s head and learning they heard the difference in frequency as a slow, third beat. Dove didn’t pursue the discovery further. It wasn’t until the 1970s, with the work of Dr. Gérald Oster, that binaural beats were taken as anything more than a mild curiosity by the scientific community. In 1973, Scientific American published Oster’s article “Auditory Beats in the Brain,” which outlined the differences between monaural beats and binaural beats. Oster described monaural beats as only requiring one ear to perceive. Binaural beats, on the other hand, he described as “perceived when tones of different frequency are presented separately to each ear,” which requires the use of both ears to localize and selectively filter out certain sounds, such as when eavesdropping on a conversation at a large, noisy party. His observations and insight opened the question of whether binaural beats could be a new, rich vein for cognitive and neurological research.

Later work further clarified the binaural beat effect as something akin to an auditory illusion. In the simplest terms, binaural beats aren’t a sound, per se. More accurately, they’re a perception of sound when two pure tones, played at a different frequency into each ear, create the recognition of an additional modulation of tone within the brain. This third tone is the binaural beat. Despite the technical lack of another tone, the brain registers the difference in frequency between the two tones as a third, distinct tone. For example, when a pure tone is played at an 80 Hz frequency in the left ear and a 90 Hz pure tone is played in the right ear, the brain would perceive a third tone at a frequency of 10 Hz. Most interestingly, the origin of this third tone is perceived by the listener to be from within their own head.

In the 1980s and later, neurological and auditory research began to focus jointly on the reasons our brains create this effect and on whether there are any potential usages, specifically whether it can entrain mood or perception or— perhaps—even act analogously to a drug. The optimistic belief in the ability of binaural beats to synthesize a selected result is based on two strong reasonings. One is that, for most of human history, music and sound have been used to tune into a particular headspace. All of us have a song or two that changes our mood, positively or negatively, simply by hearing it. The second reason for belief in the potential of binaural beats is due to our greater scientific understanding of brain waves with the invention and wider use of magnetic imaging.

Using an electroencephalogram (EEG), a test that reads electrical activity in the brain using electrodes attached to the scalp which looks familiar to anyone who watches horror movies, we can see how brain cells communicate by measuring electric impulses. Our brain cells are always in communication, and the frequency with which they are in communication shows up as wavy lines on an EEG recording. In 2016, researchers in the Department of Computer Science and Information Technology at the Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar Marathwada University in India used an EEG test to observe and group brain waves. Their research concluded there to be five main frequency bands of brain waves that are believed to correspond to our emotional states.

When we’re asleep, our brain waves are in Delta, low frequency, because there isn’t much to communicate beyond the messages required to keep us alive. During a deeply relaxing scenario, when our minds tend to wander into daydreams, such as being pampered at a spa, our brains are likely in Theta, which operates at a frequency between 4 to 8 Hz and relates to our subconscious mind. A slightly higher frequency, up to around 12 Hz, will likely be registered when someone is passively focused and generally relaxed. Thus, it’s likely this range—Alpha—will correspond to someone who is rewatching The Office for the dozenth time. Basically, it’s being in a general good mood free of the need to meaningfully engage with an external source. The Beta wavelength is typically our normal frequency. It operates between 12-35 Hz and can range from relaxation to anxiety depending on the world around us. The frequency band with the highest Hz, anything above 35, is Gamma, which signals a heightened degree of concentration. This is the wavelength of our brains when we’re focused on a task or situation.

All this is to say that it’s believed by some scientists, and binaural beat connoisseurs, that we can use the brain’s perception of binaural beats to simply recalibrate our current wavelength into whichever frequency band we desire to experience. But the question remains: does it work?

*

Back in 2005, I was an audio addict, digitally dosing myself on LSD, heroin, mescaline, and strange designer drugs only known by some combination of letters and numbers. As far as I knew, the sensations were similar to their physical counterpoints. Digital cannabis made me giggle. I’d have vivid daydreams on audio psychedelics. Binaural beats mimicking cocaine had me impatient and talkative, jittery with a vague sense of violence. Of course, that was the past. And time has a way of softening people, so now I use binaural beats to achieve a flow state of concentration or induce drowsiness for a power nap.

A pilot study conducted by the Oregon Health & Science University and the National College of Natural Medicine on the neuropsychologic, physiologic, and electroencephalographic effects of binaural beat technology on humans found no significant differences between the experimental and control condition in any of the EEG measures. But in that same study, the self-reported measurements of the participants saw an increase in mood and a decrease in overall anxiety. Better put: there was no scientific reason that participants felt an improvement in mood, yet they did.

There must be a motive behind why people are using binaural beats. Anecdotally speaking, I certainly feel calmer when I listen to one of the myriad binaural beats soundscapes that are easily findable online, so isn’t that the same thing as being calmer, even if my brainwaves disagree? After all: I think, therefore I am. That may be the entire point, suggests Dr. Monica Barratt, a senior research fellow at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. “There are a lot of activities that affect our nervous system and can produce psychoactive effects, including meditation, chanting, exercising, even doing art,” says Barratt. “Yes, we can consider binaural beats through [this] lens.”

And I’m not alone in using them for this reason. In 2021, Barratt was a researcher with the Global Drug Survey (GDS), an independent research study that aimed to collect data on drug use patterns and trends worldwide. When questioned on the survey, five percent of the over 30,000 respondents said they used binaural beats to experience altered states at least once within the last year.

Dr. Cristina Gil López, a cognitive neuroscience researcher and educator, writes on her website that the beats have become trendy due to our increasing difficulty to focus and be productive in our daily activities. We live in a state of permanent distraction, so we seek new ways to mentally focus and decrease off-putting distractions, like anxiety. Other studies echo the sentiment that exposure to binaural beats can boost cognition by reducing anxiety and the perception of pain, albeit modestly.

So where do we go from here? While large-scale investigations comparing the effects of binaural beats specifically and auditory beats as a whole are still rare, there are some promising case studies for their potential application. One such avenue is the Safe and Sound Protocol (SSP). The SSP is a therapeutic tool that uses specially filtered music designed to stimulate the vagus nerve, which carries signals between the brain and heart. The SSP is intended to induce the body and mind into feeling a sense of safety. There have been successful case studies that show SSP exposure can improve social awareness in children and adults with autism and help to reduce chronic pain in older patients.

Barratt herself underwent the protocol as part of her research. For 30 days, she listened to audio files as part of the SSP and may have discovered the everyday benefits binaural beats could have on many of us. “I felt some positive effects and there [weren’t] any downsides. It could all be placebo in the sense that taking time every day to listen to some special music may be an intervention in itself.”

While writing this piece, I thought about what initially drew me to these files. The truth is I have no idea. There was no larger reason behind accessing them beyond the fact that I could.

It took roughly 135 years from a Prussian physicist striking tuning forks on opposite sides of the room and noticing the effect for another researcher to even give that effect a name. Since then, we’ve seen vast leaps in technology that have allowed scientists to measure, with as much certainty as currently exists, that nothing is happening within the brain that can explain why binaural beats can improve our mood and decrease our anxiety levels. But people who listen to them claim that they do, time and time again. In defiance of the science, they feel that listening to binaural beats can impact their mood.

Maybe in another 135 years we’ll discover that they’re right. Maybe we’ll still only know that the effects are something many people enjoy. Maybe that’s all the reasoning I needed to enjoy binaural beats as much as I did when I was 12.

I know it’s all the reason I need to enjoy them now.

Illustration by Matthew Daley

My mother’s house looks like my long-repressed childhood memories. The black floral wallpaper is veiled with dust, cloaking walls yellowed by years of chain- smoked cigarettes. Everything decorative is dangerous: swords hang in place of picture frames, flanked by ominous leather ropes of unknown origin.

My mother’s house feels like a castle, but one where everyone lives in the dungeon. It’s a house made of walls that could be so beautiful, if they weren’t so broken.

When I walk back into my mother’s house nearly two decades after our estrangement—a separation born the day her drinking became too much for me to bear—everything is just as I left it, just as I imagined it after all those years.

Well, almost everything.

In my vivid visions of those dark walls, I never imagined my adult self standing within them, hugging a person who is both a stranger and my mom at the same time. And I definitely couldn’t have envisioned how I would get there in the first place—that it would take psychedelics for my mind to open enough to let me open my mother’s front door.

*

Unlike my mother’s house, my psychedelic guide’s home is a sanctuary. Her porch is enclosed by warm stone and decorated with trinkets and treasures: crystals and incense line the windowsills, spider plants spill from hanging baskets like fountains of forest. Each time we meet, we sit on the floor, a pot of magic-mushroom-steeped tea steaming between us.

My guide is an underground plant medicine ceremonialist and bodyworker who uses psilocybin—the hallucinogenic component of magic mushrooms—to help people tap into their own inner knowing. She works outside of any medical system and doesn’t call herself a therapist. Instead, she holds space for people, using mushrooms to light the way.

I visit this guide because talk therapy always fell flat for me. I could recite the painful story of my childhood mechanically to anyone who asked, but I could never texturize these tales with feeling, because I didn’t seem to have any. My emotions were invisible rocks that I carried, weighing me down so viscerally that it would take a proper excavation to set myself free. Magic mushrooms, I hoped, would help me unearth the hurt.

*

Though psychedelic therapy is slowly becoming mainstream, with the federal government acknowledging promising clinical trial results and a first-of-its-kind in Canada psychedelic- assisted therapy program introduced at Vancouver Island University’s Nanaimo campus last year, it still remains illegal and largely underground thanks to its fractured history in the Western world.

Psychedelic use dates back centuries, with early psilocybin use (called teonanacatl) linked to the Olmec, Zapotec, Maya and Aztec in what is now called Mexico. But it wasn’t until the 1950s that scientists began to study it in North America, with researchers examining whether psychedelics could treat alcoholism and various mental illnesses.

Their investigations showed some of what shamans knew all along—that psychedelics could be used to treat addictions to other drugs, recover buried emotions and process childhood trauma, or even ease the mental distress faced by cancer patients. These results were promising enough to warrant further analysis, but as psychedelics became associated with anti-war counterculture in the 1960s, psychoactive substances became outlawed. For psychedelic research, the Summer of Love became the summer of loss.

As history book authors wrote their chapters on the War on Drugs, psychedelics remained tied to a harmful, hippie stigma. It wasn’t until the 1990s that interest in psychedelic research was gradually renewed, with studies assessing the effectiveness of MDMA, LSD (acid) and psilocybin to treat depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and addictions. With tempered excitement, researchers began conducting the first human trials since the ’70s, instilling a new sense of hope in the field of psychotherapy.

Today, it seems we’re finally reaching the level of societal acceptance needed for a psychedelic therapy renaissance, with Health Canada offering some exemptions for researchers and health care practitioners to study or administer psilocybin and a number of convenient (yet illegal) mushroom dispensaries openly operating storefronts in major Canadian cities, akin to cannabis shops pre-legalization. These shifts are opening a potent path to healing for people like me.

*

At each visit, my guide asks me to begin my journey with an intention. Spilling a brave breath, I tell her I’m here to work through my childhood trauma. I want to dive deep into the cellars of my psyche that I’ve locked away from myself, to go back to the time of court orders and custody battles, child psychologists and threats of foster care—all those things that slashed the already precarious tightrope connection I had with my mother. Through my words, I pour my intention into my mug of mushroom tea.

It’s not long after drinking the psilocybin that my body feels lighter, colours become fractal and I enter that classic psychedelic state of oneness. I feel as though I am floating in bliss, embraced by levity. That is, until I’m not.

Abruptly, the room darkens and my lungs feel compressed beneath bricks. I see my heart trapped in a steel lockbox inside a pressure cooker. It vibrates like water coming to a boil, getting tighter and constricting, as toxic grey smoke billows from my body. Tears flood my face in a relentless stream. Overwhelmed by panic, I can barely grasp an inhale.

Everything that happens next happens so quickly, a lifetime of painful memories flip-booked in a nanosecond. I’m alone with the lightning inside of me and it’s terrifying. Out loud, I scream.

That’s when the lockbox shatters, revealing a white light emanating from my chest. I see my adult hand entwine its fingers with those of my child self. I hear myself telling her it’s okay, that we’re safe and we can let go of the pain now. As I do, my heart seems to release its venom. It leaves behind a void, but I see it as newfound space for the loving joy I’ve yearned for.

*

Thanks to neuroscientific research, the trippy magic of the psychedelic experience can actually be explained. It’s thought that at its root lies the brain’s Default Mode Network (DMN), which is active during states of rest and thought. With psychedelic use, the DMN slows down, creating space for new neural pathways that override the typical mental shortcuts the brain uses to process information quickly in day-to-day life. This can open the door to creativity, new ideas, meditative states and ego dissolution. It can also help us tap into deeper states of consciousness beyond our regular, waking awareness, which is likely why psychedelic users can often access buried emotions.

When these emotions are surfaced in a safe way, led by trained therapists and integrated using other therapeutic and trauma-informed modalities like somatic experiencing and talk therapy, or daily practices like yoga or journaling, people may have a chance to accept, forgive and heal from their past experiences. For many, like myself, this can be life-changing.

My guided journeys get worse before they get better, as I dig into the lingering pain of my abandonment wound. With the support of a counsellor trained in somatic experiencing, I feel like I’m knocking my own house down, deconstructing those survival-mode walls that I built for myself in childhood. I work hard to construct something new, and each day I come home from a journey, I begin to greet a little bit more of the person I want to be.

Slowly and non-linearly, I process my anger and shame, exchanging it for acceptance and compassion. I swing through depressive states and, against my extroverted nature, I isolate myself as I struggle to navigate the world wearing the mask of the old me—a mask that doesn’t seem to fit anymore. But feeling that ungrounded comes with opportunities to foster new outlooks: I’m finally able to replace a desperate longing for the maternal relationship I wish I had with an unconditional acceptance of the human that my mother is, flaws and all.

Out of the blue, I call her.

*

On the phone, my mother’s voice sounds unfamiliar. We talk about nothing, the weather, the news. The rift of almost 20 years is too wide to catch up more meaningfully. Struggling to change the subject with grace, I blurt out that I forgive her.

My mother seems caught off guard. She says thank you and not much else. But it’s the first test of my ability to love her without expectations. I forgive her as part of my own healing, and so I forgive her with no strings attached. The simplicity of the exchange is no match for the radiance of feeling unburdened—the feeling of turning my body into a comfortable home at last.

My sharp edges soften enough to bring me to her doorstep a year later, our first hug bringing me to immediate tears. We look at old baby photos and offer each other small but symbolic tokens: the rose quartz that I carried to every journey for her, and a pair of earrings from my late grandmother for me. We promise to keep in closer touch, which we won’t do, but I’m at peace with the way we are. Because standing there, at my mother’s doorstep, I could finally see that although the walls of my mother’s house may be broken, they’re still beautiful.

Photo by Mork Eman

The last time I drank I was surrounded by family. I’d just returned from a solo trip to Scotland where I drank heavily every day for several weeks. When I got home I put my foot down. Okay, only on special occasions now. Every alcoholic knows this little cha-cha. A few weeks later, my partner’s brother’s wedding: a perfect occasion. I tried to hide from my partner just how many I was having. But on the goofy, lovely school bus back to the hotel, as everyone else on the bus sang “Bohemian Rhapsody” acapella in joyous harmony, standing on the seats and clapping, I slumped down in my chair and sobbed.

I was tired of waking up ashamed with painfully swollen eyes, if I remembered enough to feel shame. My life was finally good enough to be afraid of ruining it. My new partner barely drank, not because of addiction, but just because! It helped. He helped. And I stopped, two days shy of 29.

But there were and are things he cannot help me with. He does not understand what it is like to have a substance use disorder. Alcohol was not my only drug, just my main one: the constant, looming star from which my other drug use orbited. In my day-to-day life, it remains immensely beneficial to have a partner and friends whose social lives don’t happen to revolve around alcohol and drug use. But when I’m struggling not to relapse, they can’t relate.

Among other things, drinking helped me pretend to be the carefree person I thought everyone wanted me to be with more ease. But just underneath, I was deeply sad and lonely. I celebrated six years of sobriety in August. I took myself out to dinner alone to celebrate the occasion. I have muscled through my entire sobriety without a recovery community. Not by choice, really—there just isn’t one right for me (I tell myself).

Perhaps this is just what I do. I tell myself I have to do things alone.

I’m really proud of myself. And I’m still often deeply sad and lonely.

The loneliness I felt while I sat on that bus, it stays. Would it be assuaged in a recovery group? Would it fade in more intentional community with other sober folks, whether they experience addiction or not? There is opportunity for this sort of connection. It seems more people than ever are questioning their relationships with alcohol and exploring sobriety, evidenced by the rise of mocktail culture, the appearance of sober bars, and other sober social gathering spaces. According to Statistics Canada, despite a general increase in alcohol sales during the first year of the pandemic, the reported level of heavy drinking in 2021 was the lowest since they began asking this question in 2015, with the largest percentage decrease occurring in the 18 to 34-year-old age group: down 10.1 percent from 2020 and 31.5 percent from 2015. The statistics aren’t out for 2022 and 2023 yet, but I wonder if the (somewhat controversial) January 2023 updates to Canada’s Guidance on Alcohol and Health, which say “Research shows that no amount or kind of alcohol is good for your health,” has driven even more people to decrease their drinking and explore sober spaces. Would entering these spaces help me? I have a lot of questions about this cultural moment in regard to alcohol use and sobriety, community and loneliness, and how we relate to one another within all of this. But I’m not sure I’ve found many answers.

*

The notion of an addiction recovery support group is virtually synonymous with AA (Alcoholics Anonymous) and its various offshoots (Narcotics Anonymous, Al-Anon, etc.), and for good reason—membership is estimated at over two million. As a free and widely available service, it’s undoubtedly valuable: people come together, share their stories, and help each other feel less alone. Many people owe their sobriety to the community and structure they’ve found there. However, AA has a kind of monopoly. There are other options, like SMART Recovery—“Self-Management and Recovery Training,” a program with a scientific foundation based on practical tools and self-reliance that also offers free meetings—but none are anywhere close to as broadly available as AA. SMART offers roughly 2,000 local meetings per week in 23 countries in comparison to AA’s 123,000 groups worldwide. When you’re searching for support as an addict, it often feels like AA is your only option. If you have philosophical issues with the “Big Book” (a kind of bible which outlines AA’s 12 steps, traditions and history), or with the way things are run, it can feel like you are on your own.

In 2021, when I was struggling to access care for a drawn-out health crisis mid-pandemic, I was desperate enough for support that despite my multiple qualms with AA, I attended a meeting on Zoom. But my gut feeling of uneasiness won out and I never returned. Mostly, I loathed the idea of anonymity.

My concerns aren’t just philosophical, but practical. I’m so tired of hiding. I’ve always hid my various addictions; I led a convincing double life (I think). Anonymity feels like stigma to me. I’m exhausted by the need to shelter others from these apparently scary words: addiction, alcoholic, substance use disorder. I’m not interested in being part of a support group that upholds anonymity as a part of its founding principle.

“I have a lot of gratitude for AA for my sobriety, and a lot of unease about how the program operates,” Sachiko Murakami of Toronto, in AA from 2010 to around 2018, says. “People who stop going to meetings are assumed to be drunk or dead or miserable,” she says, and when she left AA, her friendships fell apart, requiring her to rebuild her social life for years. Chris Banks of Kitchener, Ontario, who attended AA for three years, also has an issue with its members telling people if they leave, they’re going to die an alcoholic death. These kinds of messages and cutting off of friendships push members into a closed circle, entirely dependent on the group for support and community.

I understand reality: stigma does exist and people can be cruel about addiction. Anonymity is one way of protecting people from that, to ensure they can comfortably attend meetings and get help. But I think we should question the fact that the main recovery support system available to addicts props up an old-fashioned way of thinking about stigma. I want openness and inclusivity prioritized in any community I enter. That leaves me looking elsewhere.

*

Unfortunately, in a similar shame vein, in my exploration of Canadian “sober curious” spaces, sober bars, and mocktail/non-alcoholic drink stores, few explicitly named themselves as a welcoming space for recovering addicts. Sure, there was language like, “…for those of us travelling a sober lifestyle…,” or “… for any adult who is skipping alcohol for any reason including health, belief, and/or just not the right time for an alcoholic drink,” or “We are an alcohol-free space that emphasizes a life lived more fully…,” or “… for Anyone Sober or Sober Curious!” On the surface, that’s inclusive enough, right? For sober people! Okay! But I rarely found the words addiction, recovery, or alcoholic on these websites. I get it. Not sexy! Capitalism! But here I am, a sober recovering addict, wondering if these sober spaces are for me. On most of the websites I visited, I get the distinct impression that they aren’t. The exception in my (certainly non-exhaustive) search was Sober City in Halifax, “the one and only place for information, resources, and inspiration on where to go and what to do in Halifax for the newly sober, the sober-curious, and those who occasionally dabble in the alcohol-free life,” where the word “recovery” does in fact appear in the about section when discussing the founder’s personal story. I think it’s telling that in my search, this small moment felt noteworthy to me.

Megan Campbell is the founder of Sober Socials in Ottawa. When I asked her what communities Sober Socials serves, she said “…those who are looking for like-minded people on the path of living, or curiously exploring, an alcohol-free life… most attendees are sober-curious or attempting to live without alcohol for a period of time and are excited to meet people who get it and can relate.” Sober Socials are paid events which began in 2022, often focused on mindfulness, movement and mocktails, and partnered with other businesses in Ottawa, like Knyota Drinks, a non-alcoholic drink shop. Sober Socials began in 2022 and Knyota Drinks opened their storefront in the same year. I asked Campbell about her personal relationship to sobriety. “I have been sober [for more than a] year now and no longer identify as sober, but rather as living an alcohol- free life…However, as someone who has overcome addiction and recovered, I also deeply resonate with the concept of sobriety and am compassionate to those in recovery.” Campbell not only runs Sober Socials but also openly shares her thoughts about removing alcohol from her life on the page’s social media. But I have to say, as much as I appreciate Campbell’s candidness, it frustrates me that the stigma against addiction is so strong that even a group supposedly for and compassionate to people in recovery cannot explicitly state as much in their general marketing and website copy.

Am I being harsh? I am not trying to single out any one group—this seems to me like the linguistic marketing trend nationwide. But my loneliness is rearing its head again. So many of these spaces seem to be saying, we want sober people here, but not addicts. We welcome addicts, but only if you’ll be anonymous. If these are the options, I’ll go out to dinner alone instead.

And I probably won’t order a mocktail—I’m not super interested in drinking anything that mimics alcohol. But I know many in recovery feel differently. When at a bar, Murakami drinks non-alcoholic beverages—she is partial to sober paloma mocktails—“because it does feel weird to be at a bar without a drink in your hand,” whereas Banks will go for the non-alcoholic beer. If they don’t have it, he’s happy to reach for a sparkling water.

As for a sober bar, I don’t want to be in a space that is mimicking a bar without the alcohol. I only go to bars now if there is a reason to be there, like a concert or a reading. I don’t want to go to bars just to go, even if there isn’t actual booze. I don’t feel good in those spaces at this point in my recovery. Banks and Murakami are also disinterested in sober bars. “Sober [bars] might be interesting but I much prefer just going where my friends want to go,” Banks says. Whereas for Murakami, it’s more a matter of where she is in recovery: “I don’t really need that level of support to maintain my sobriety these days…I would certainly go to support a newly sober friend, though!”

Our somewhat indifference to these organized physical spaces makes sense to me given that we don’t seem to be their target audience (though mocktails and non-alcoholic drinks on their own are clearly a different story). Do some people in recovery not seek these places out because they are excluded from the marketing, or are they excluded from the marketing because they don’t seek these places out? I am unsure. All I can say is that personally, I was tentatively interested in exploring these communities until I picked up on these language choices, and then, I was decidedly not. So, who are they for?

*

I wanted to talk to some sober-curious people (though not everyone I spoke to identifies that way) and get their read on things. Are they into mocktails? Are sober bars places they’d frequent? What do we have in common?

I put out a public call on Instagram and was surprised by the number of people who responded. The people I interviewed abstain from alcohol for many reasons— medication interference, health, family history of alcoholism, not enjoying drinking culture, partners with addiction, general disinterest. They also happened to mostly fall within that 18 to 34-year-old age bracket. Sarah Kikuchi of Halifax, 32, has recently noticed more people talking about sobriety on social media, which she appreciates. She says, “I have a fairly neutral relationship with alcohol. It’s not something I care much about but it’s hard to imagine life without it as it’s so prevalent.” Namitha Rathinappillai of Toronto, 23, notes this prevalence as well: “As I began distancing myself from drinking and drinking culture, I have become more critical to the ways in which alcoholism or ‘problem drinking’ is deeply normalized…”

Drinking holds a heavy presence over our social interactions. Early in my sobriety I avoided most places with alcohol (so, most places). Even still, if I’m at a party or show where people are drinking, I try to leave once people are visibly inebriated. I know others in recovery feel similarly. “I usually leave before everyone gets sloppy and annoying,” Murakami says.

What about sober social spaces or bars? I knew I personally didn’t feel welcome after looking more closely at their marketing, but do sober-curious folks feel differently? Interestingly, most of the sober-curious people I spoke with, despite this feeling that drinking culture looms large, were uninterested in the idea of sober bars or sober-specific meeting spaces. Either because they are, as Rathinappillai said, “just not someone who would frequent a bar, sober or not,” or like Christine of Ottawa, 33, “…everything I do in life is sober and just as fun so I don’t see the appeal of [sober] spaces/gatherings,” or like Heather Krueger of Airdrie, Alberta, 45, who, not loving crowds or loud music, is unsure if “a sober bar would be a space I would want to go.”

Clearly, though, these spaces hold appeal for someone— they exist! But for who exactly, I’m just not quite sure. It doesn’t seem to be for those in recovery, and it also didn’t seem to be the sober-curious folks I spoke with (though this was far from a scientific study). The people I interviewed seemed more interested in either engaging in spaces completely removed from drinking culture or did not seem to mind being around drinking in the first place.

At one point in my reporting, I felt slightly resentful toward these sober- curious spaces. The sharp turn from hopeful—maybe I will find a space to lay some loneliness to rest!—to excluded left me feeling angry. But after speaking to more sober-curious people, that anger faded away. It’s good that these spaces exist, even if they aren’t for the people I spoke with, or for me.

Everyone deserves a welcoming space, whether they have a perfectly healthy relationship to alcohol, never really liked drinking to begin with, have an active substance use disorder, or are sober and/or in recovery. Somewhere that aligns with their values, with people who appreciate their experiences. Ideally, there would be some kind of adult space where everyone could gather and feel safe, regardless of their relationship to substances.

Where is that space for me? I still feel alone on the bus, surrounded by people singing. Where do I go when the readily accessible recovery support group is rife with issues that I’m unwilling to look past? Where are the non-support-group sober spaces that are explicitly inclusive of addicts? Is it possible to create a space inclusive of, and safe for, the sober curious, sober people in recovery from addiction, and drug/ alcohol users? I don’t have an answer to these questions, but I think they’re worth posing. In the open, out loud, and in public, where they belong.

Photo by Britney Supernault

Three years ago, Kiona Callihoo Ligtvoet and Sanaa Humayun were both working as junior employees for art centres whose staff were predominately white. Callihoo Ligtvoet is Cree, Métis, Dutch and mixed European and Humayun is Pakistani; the two friends, who co-hosted a book club together, started to talk about the isolation they felt in their respective spaces as BIPOC artists, and how they felt their agency wasn’t being prioritized. They felt safe with one another, so they shared with each other that they’d faced barriers to access.

“We started having these very real conversations,” Humayun says, “and we realized that what we were doing was peer mentorship.” The product of these conversations was Making Space, a collective that focuses on early-career BIPOC artists and is what Humayun calls “in resistance to the art world at large,” a world which demands that artists produce with aggression. Instead, Amiskwaciwâskahikan-based Callihoo Ligtvoet and Mohkintsis-based Humayun are “two babies who made a group for other babies,” Humayun says, and have created a space of gentleness, which they say is an act of resistance in itself. “We talk about the experiences we’ve had, the people we felt unsafe with, and how to move through those experiences, in a way that’s honest and transparent,” Humayun says.

The collective helps members advocate for fair compensation when freelancing or working in institutional artistic spaces. It’s offered paid skill-sharing workshops, casual in-person hangouts, and hosted speaker events with established artists, who regularly tell Callihoo Ligtvoet and Humayun that they wish there’d been a similar group around when they’d started out. Members collaborated on an art show at McMullin Gallery in Edmonton that’s on through October. The bulk of its community, however, is rooted in its Slack channel of over 100 members, a place to share opportunities, portfolios, and recommended readings.

While there are always projects and plans in the works, the collective doesn’t focus on targeted regular meetups and ongoing deadlines because it’s based in the understanding that members’ capacity to make art and take on new projects can waver. Humayun says that people in the art world speak about community all the time, though often through institutional lenses in which creators’ identities are central to their work. But Making Space is a judgement-free zone, one whose casual drop-in style lets group members choose how much or little to take on and in what capacity to be part of group events.

“So many times Kiona and I say, like, ‘Am I going to take this call from my bed with no pants on? Yeah, probably,’” Callihoo Ligtvoet says. “We all have jobs, we all have families, we all have things that we’re going through. There are times that we’ve been posting events, and we’ve entered it kind of like, ‘I’m exhausted today, I’m feeling really heavy.’ And we leave and feel playful and so happy with the people that [we’re] spending time with. It doesn’t feel extractive.”

The collective’s drop-in style format is about members taking what they need, taking “what feels most relevant.” This way of operating, Callihoo Ligtvoet says, is intentional because the group is working to counteract ideas of exploitation.

“It directly ties into that scarcity mindset of having to produce all the time. So [we keep it] a space where people feel comfortable and there’s nothing owed of them. They don’t have to step into this with obligations, restrictions, or ways that they need to fit,” Callihoo Ligtvoet says.

This process didn’t come easily; it took many virtual and in-person conversations between Making Space community members about supports that they need to take on projects with deliverables, and conversations between Callihoo Ligtvoet and Humayun about keeping the group as low pressure and flexible as possible. Instead of making regular demands on people’s time, Making Space is a cheerleader for its members’ growth, always a soft place to land if they choose to move away and then actively engage again.

“The exciting part of Making Space,” Callihoo Ligtvoet says, “is that it’s always going to shift with us and with the people who still want it.”

Illustration by Juliette Vermeersch

“I’ve been worried about you.”

I heard this phrase often in the spring of 2020, when my move into a place of my own coincided with Ontario’s first round of social distancing and lockdowns. My world shrunk to 500 square feet, bound by the drafty walls of a second-floor studio in Toronto’s Trinity-Bellwoods neighbourhood. I owned one pot, three forks, and a bed made from reclaimed barn wood that took up half my apartment. I woke up to birdsong, which grew louder in the silent streets of that time. By nightfall, the only voices I heard were those of neighbours seeping through the walls and of BoJack Horseman voicing thoughts of self-loathing.

I was alone, yes. But I was living. Settling in, for what felt like the first time. As someone who had lived with chronic feelings of loneliness, I found a sense of relief during the pandemic. Permission to be with my loneliness, without the pressure to escape it. I also felt a sense of belonging, as tweets, news headlines, and political statements were increasingly filled with the language of loneliness, signaling that I was no longer the only lonely one.

Not to suggest that I ever was. The loneliness epidemic was already upon us before COVID-19 sent us into isolation. Recognized as an emerging public health crisis in the U.S. since 2017, according to Vivek H. Murthy, the former Surgeon General of the United States, loneliness is something communities around the globe have been grappling with for years.

“It’s been a long time of people feeling this way,” says Jaylin Bradbury, a social worker and therapist who has worked in both community and academic mental health settings over the past 10 years. Bradbury confirms that the feelings of belonging I felt early in the pandemic made sense, as there was this universal experience of loneliness that helped validate what chronically lonely people like myself had been feeling in a more individualized way for years.

Today, according to a 2021 global survey by Ipsos, it’s estimated that a third of us are lonely.

In Canada, the numbers increase. While a pre-pandemic study found that one in five Canadians identified as being lonely, a 2022 Statistics Canada survey shows close to half of us now claim to experience loneliness sometimes, often, or always. And 2022 research by the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health notes that we are getting lonelier.

Although loneliness is reported at higher levels among those aged between 15 and 24, urban dwellers, and folks who fall outside of the straight, cisgendered, abled-bodied, white male demographic, it is clear from the latest Statistics Canada findings on loneliness across sociodemographic characteristics that none of us are immune. A 2009 study by John T. Cacioppo—the co-founder of the field of social neuroscience—observes proof of the transmission of loneliness across three degrees of separation, between family and friends. In other words, just like COVID-19—a contagion we’ve been fighting collectively—the chronic feeling of being on the outside can also be passed on from one person to another, with all the associated health impacts.

In his book Together, Murthy explains that feeling lonely increases one’s risk of developing heart disease, dementia, depression, anxiety, or a stroke, as well as higher blood pressure, immune system dysfunction, impulsive behaviour, impaired judgment, and lower quality of sleep—all of which make us more prone to early mortality.

Our loneliness is killing us. So why are we not still talking about it like we did in 2020? Why are we not doing more to prevent its spread?

Countries like Japan, New Zealand, Australia, and the U.K., and cities as large as Barcelona and as small as Villa del Conte (pop.: 5,400) in the northern Italian region of Veneto have either enacted loneliness ministers, launched awareness campaigns, or begun implementing strategies to address the epidemic. Bradbury believes these measures can help change our view of loneliness from a personal to societal issue. “Having it be a bigger, broader conversation helps people recognize that this isn’t necessarily a personal deficit, but more widespread,” she explains.

In the Canadian context, a national conversation on loneliness is lacking, but there are a growing number of community-led initiatives striving to address systemic issues like loneliness that contribute to our collective well-being. A handful of these initiatives were made possible by the findings of the Canadian Index of Wellbeing (CIW).

“What would it really take to measure Canadians’ quality of life?”

A board member from the Atkinson Foundation—a non-profit organization with a mandate for social and economic justice—posed this question back in 1999 upon reflecting on the irrelevance of gross domestic product, which was and is still misguidedly often cited as a marker of a nation’s well-being, to reflect the social and cultural landscapes.

The Foundation decided to change this focus on economic health by developing a measurement tool for the well-being of people and their communities, the CIW. While they’d hoped the tool and its recommendations would capture federal attention, it was local leaders and grassroots organizations that showed interest at first, approaching the developers to learn how it could help improve wellbeing within their communities.

“Our first question for them is ‘Have you organized yourself with like-minded organizations within the community?’” shares Bryan Smale, the director of the CIW, which now operates out of the University of Waterloo. Smale has found that implementing the CIW is most effective when communities unite as a consortium, “We really emphasize the role that collaboration can play.”

Rather than approaching well-being “one problem, one solution” at a time, Smale also believes we should strive for policy changes that improve well-being across multiple domains, such as introducing a universal basic income, adopting a Pan-Canadian education strategy to support accessible opportunities throughout our lives, and offering universal access to leisure, arts, culture, sport, parks, and recreation. He also stresses the importance of assessing indicators of well-being in relation to each other, rather than in isolation, as they’re all interconnected.

Loneliness is not directly included as an indicator within the CIW; however, its prevalence is captured indirectly through several measurement criteria and has been addressed directly through the community-based surveys.

Smale shares that there has been some movement at a national level since federal and provincial governments eventually noticed the uptake of the CIW at the community level and responded to it. Statistics Canada now has an entire division devoted to measuring social well-being, including rates of loneliness.

In 2017, Ontario’s Chief Medical Officer of Health at the time, David C. Williams, issued a report on Connected Communities which included the CIW as a framework for measuring connectedness. He cited “loneliness and social isolation as serious public health problems that cost us all.” And in 2021, the Department of Finance Canada released a policy paper on drafting a nationwide Quality of Life Strategy, which built on the CIW’s framework to identify 83 indicators for assessment, one being loneliness.

Bradbury notes that while it’s important to include loneliness in these broader strategies, the loneliness epidemic calls for deeper analysis and targeted solutions, if we are to make a real difference to the lives of lonely Canadians. However, Smale notes that this federal strategy has been put on hold due to shifts in government priorities and clarifies that while the CIW was integrated into the Connected Communities report, his team was only involved in its review rather than collaborating more broadly on strategy or the implementation of recommendations.

Within this context, there does not appear to be a collective roadmap for addressing loneliness or building a future of collective well-being, a future that reports to date show is desperately needed. Outside of existing measurement practices, government reports lack teeth without dedicated funding and resources in place, both to implement solutions and raise awareness within the public discourse. By and large, communities in Canada seem still to be left to fight loneliness alone. Isn’t that how we got here in the first place?

Since the term “loneliness” shifted from being understood as synonymous with solitude to a distinct, negative emotional state in the early 19th century, it has increasingly shown up in songs, poems, plays, and prose, just as much as feelings of love, loss, and liberty.

There’s Emily Dickinson’s poem, written somewhere between 1886-1896, The Loneliness One dare not sound which describes the emotion as, “The Horror not to be surveyed – / But skirted in the Dark / with Consciousness suspended / And Being under Lock.” Fast forward nearly a century, and Leonard Cohen writes in his book Beautiful Losers, “Please make me empty, if I’m empty then I can receive, if I can receive it means it comes from somewhere outside of me, if it comes from outside of me I’m not alone! I cannot bear this loneliness. Above all it is loneliness.” And more recently, Dua Lipa asks, “Is the only reason you’re holding me tonight ‘cause we’re scared to be lonely?”

The architecture and intricacies of loneliness have been studied, over the past several decades, across academic disciplines as well. Since Frieda Fromm-Reichmann’s trailblazing paper on loneliness in 1959, we have learned more about the phenomenon through the fields of psychology, neuro-urbanism, and feminist studies, amongst others. The prevalence of this research increased in the late 20th century, particularly following the creation of the UCLA Loneliness Scale in 1978 (the first standardized tool for measuring the state) and the rise of neoliberalism in the 1980s, which as Noreena Hertz explains in The Lonely Century, supported a shift to individualism in all facets of life—how we live, work, get around, and more—leaving us prone to feelings of isolation and alienation.

And yet during that same time frame, it seems that loneliness scarcely made it into everyday dialogues, with loved ones and within communities.

Fromm-Reichmann suggested this void could be partially attributed to the incommunicable nature of the state, which produces a sad conviction that no one has experienced what we’re feeling. It could also result from how we lonely people experience our condition, which, as determined through a 2021 study out of the University of Bonn, can make us less trusting of others and thus less likely to engage in conversation about the parts of ourselves we hold close.

And these days, the unwillingness to talk about loneliness may also stem from our culture of hyper-connectivity and hyper-productivity; where a busy schedule and phone filled with notifications defines our worth, forcing many to hide their loneliness out of shame. As Anthony Silard explains in his 2021 Psychology Today article titled “How Social Media Exploits Our Loneliness”:

“Social media has, strangely, created its own demand. By isolating you from your friends, your loneliness becomes greater and you feel more motivated by what the British psychologist Pamela Qualter calls the ‘reaffiliation motive’ to check your social media and see what your friends are doing.”

But rather, loneliness should be understood as a failure of modernity, and the imperialist, white-supremacist, capitalist, and heteropatriarchal systems that support it (what bell hooks coined “dominator culture”). Shoshana Magnet, a professor of Feminist and Gender Studies at the University of Ottawa, calls these systems “the loneliness-making-machine” and believes the shame we feel when we are lonely is systemic as well. And yet, so much of the discourse remains focused on the state as an individual feeling, instead of a shared experience of today’s world. Magnet put this best, “We always want to blame the tree, not the poisoned root systems that feed it.”

In the first year of the pandemic, discourse around loneliness did shift to the realm of the collective. Associated with the everyday experience of life during a pandemic, “loneliness” was thrown around just as much as “unprecedented,” “essential,” or “the new normal.” I was hopeful this would be just the beginning of a larger conversation. But like “trauma” and “equity,” the word “loneliness” seemed to become a modern-day voguism, basking in its 15 minutes of fame.

What does this mean for the lonely ones? Those who were living in their loneliness before it became the new normal, or who tapped into chronic loneliness during the pandemic?

“It’s back to that individualized view, which is very like, okay, so it’s my fault that this is happening,” says Bradbury. “Health anxiety is at an all time high. [There’s] social anxiety across all ages… but also lots of relationship breakdowns because of different views.” And with lockdowns coming to an end, Bradbury notes that more of us are in a stage where we want connection but can’t access it, or feel this pressure to be social, even if that’s not what we want. “[These are] reasons for why people are still feeling that loneliness, but… we’re not talking about it as much.”

“I’ve been worried about you.”

I rarely heard that phrase in the months that saw our lives returning to some kind of normalcy, and that brought the heaviness of loneliness back into my life at a time when it seemed like its weight was lifting for many others. It left me to feel as though the loneliness that was spoken about so much in 2020 was not the kind that I carried.

Most days, it takes a pep talk or the fear of being late for me to emerge from the four walls of my world. I’ve moved now and am living with a partner and two pandemic pets in the ground floor apartment of a converted Victorian, one neighbourhood east of my last. But on nights spent in their company, probably bingeing a show to feed my desire for escapism, I feel filled with both love and emptiness. Even shoulder to shoulder at a concert, a place that used to provide me with some refuge from my loneliness in the past, this emptiness now prevails. Since the pandemic, I’m more aware of myself and the space around me than ever before.

When I reached out to see if anybody else felt this way, through calls on social media and reading blog posts about the state, I discovered I was not alone.

Among those I spoke with was Olga, a server in her late twenties, who could relate to such feelings of emptiness. Having moved back in with her mom and brothers during the pandemic, her physical loneliness in Stoney Creek—a suburban neighbourhood in east Hamilton—is exacerbated by social media and the lack of places to make connections as a single, child-free adult.

Then there was Nina—a Torontonian in her late twenties—who, unlike Olga, lives close to her friends yet still feels lonely. “When things started to open up again, it was kind of like going back to almost being younger and being left out … getting hit with that super social anxiety again, like being so afraid to ask people to do things, or go out and just be seen.” Spending more time alone than she would like to because of this, Nina has found herself coping with a fear of being seen paired with the disappointment of not reviving her social life. “It can be such a vicious cycle,” she admits.

While women under 24 have been the hardest hit by loneliness in recent times, according to Statistics Canada, those feelings of emptiness, exclusion, and isolation are not unique to the young. Dr. GS, a 94-year-old living on the west coast, first truly felt lonely when he moved into his own place after his wife died in 2021, following years of her living with dementia. In writing to me, he revealed, “I did not know what to do with myself. I had all this time on my hands, I was basically not needed by anyone … I did not have a purpose. I realized my entire life responded to the needs of my wife and kids, my patients, and my work at UBC’s Faculty of Medicine—and now, nothing. I also had a great hole in my life … I did not want to have a girlfriend and definitely never thought of getting remarried, but I was yearning [for intimacy].”

In November 2021, Statistics Canada shared that 14 percent of Canadians aged 75 or over report always or often feeling lonely. And according to the Government of Canada’s Report on the Social Isolation of Seniors, “studies show that the lack of a supportive social network is linked to a 60 percent increase in the risk of dementia and cognitive decline; while socially integrated lifestyles protect against dementia.” The same report noted a troubling correlation between social isolation for seniors and elder abuse.

All the lonely people I spoke with for this story shared that at some point they’d found themselves wondering, “Is there something wrong with me?”

I see this question as a failure of our collective discourse.

In moments where I’ve shared my own lonely feelings with others—in writing about how cities spur loneliness or in conversation with my therapist and friends—I’m often asked what I would need to make things better. This is a question that leads me to fantasies about running away to the French countryside and spending my days labouring on a farm or vineyard. What I’m really saying is, “I need a different world.”

For me, being so aware of the systemic reasons for loneliness can make it difficult to envision a future without it. What I’m craving is a space, right here in Canada, where experts, leaders, and everyday people living with loneliness can come together to envision this different world.

Yes, the constant use of the word during more or less two years of lockdowns, bubbles, and restrictive measures did bring loneliness into everyday dialogues—at least during that time. But there’s a difference between fleetingly acknowledging loneliness and seriously talking about it with the goal of addressing the underlying issues. And I fear we spent too much time doing the former. Capitalizing on language, diluting the term, and ignoring the chronic nature of our loneliness crisis.

So, what now when we’re tweeting about it less and thinking about it less? How can we revive the dialogues about loneliness that sparked up earlier on in the pandemic and act upon them?

Emily Empel has been exploring this question through her new venture, Advance Notice—a collective of fellow futurists and strategists, as well as a Jungian-trained analyst, Akashic record reader, movement facilitator, and anthropologist, who help others envision what the future could look like and put that vision into practice. Empel first brought together this interdisciplinary group of dreamers to explore the future of collective well-being. In this project she asks, “How do we think about this at a systems level and on a societal scale versus putting the onus on the individual to solve for how they feel?”

I asked a similar question of Empel and all the other people I spoke with on the subject of loneliness. My own interviews sparked dialogues about the need for us to attend to our mental health not just individually, but collectively. There were suggestions that we conceive of new housing models and third spaces—communal places distinct from home and work—that are affordable, accessible, and responsive to our changing culture. That we bring artists, comedians, kinkeepers, a whole range of everyday people into the solution. And that we change public policies, whether that means formalizing the implementation of the CIW through government funding; including loneliness as a measure of community health just as diabetes, heart disease, or other chronic illnesses are; or providing guaranteed universal income, so everyone can afford the foundational elements necessary for well-being (housing, food, transportation, clothing and the likes).

As Shoshana Magnet shared with me, “The world will not be fixed by one big thing but a million tiny little gestures.”

We all experience life in our own unique way, and just as the pandemic has shifted our experiences of inhabiting this world, future events will too. No single solution will help us all, so we need a collective loneliness strategy for all the tiny little gestures to stem from—one that will destigmatize loneliness by continuing the conversation, inviting people living with loneliness to talk and listening to what they have to say.

The next steps? To create a foundation of contextual and embodied research on the Canadian experience of loneliness; to mobilize, based on the recommendations that come out of this research, with the support of ample funding; and as we implement solutions around our collective well-being that involve us all as community builders, to monitor progress over time. Perhaps most importantly, awareness campaigns can only take us so far: for real change to happen, we need to be guided by a collective vision for an alternate future so that we can fall in love with the solutions and begin to live them today.

COVID-19 case counts rise and fall, but loneliness remains.

Now’s the time to do something about it.

It’s not the first time Stewart has interacted with paramedics this year and it won’t be the last. But she can’t stop replaying the image of the student being dragged limp across the floor. She lies awake in bed, thinking about her resident in the hospital. Worrying. She gets up the next day at 5 a.m. to walk them home.

Now, five years later, as Alanna Stewart talks about her experience as a resident assistant (RA) at Mount Allison University (Mt. A), she keeps coming back to that night, even though it was just one tough night in a year of tough nights. She also remembers things like sleeping on a resident’s floor to monitor them after recurring medical episodes and breaking up physical fights. Dealing regularly with drunk, disorderly, or angry students, and with toxic roommate drama, eventually took its toll.

RAs at post-secondary institutions are expected to take on the roles of caregiver, rule-enforcer, and counsellor for other students. They are overworked, underpaid, and always on the clock. Although they are the first line of defence against the mental-health crisis affecting students, their stories of shouldering the trauma of their peers are rarely told.

RAs are live-in “paraprofessionals.” They are usually in their second year of university or beyond and, in most cases, in their late teens or early 20s. While small differences exist in their role from school to school, their job typically involves doing rounds on weekends, keeping residents safe, enforcing rules, and making new students comfortable in their transition away from home.

“I WANT TO BE YOU NEXT YEAR”
Mt. A is a university in Sackville, New Brunswick, with a student population of approximately 2,300 and eight on campus residences. When Stewart and I attended, the smaller residences had four RAs each, and five other student leaders, all of whom were tasked with helping first-year students adapt to their new homes.

“On my very first day as a first year at Mount Allison, I remember saying to [the head RA], ‘I want to be you next year,’” Stewart says. She started Mt. A at 21 years old, a little older than most first-year students coming fresh out of high school. “I felt like if I had to live with younger people, I wanted to have a purpose.”

Stewart was my first-year roommate. From the get-go she was deeply attuned to people’s feelings. A natural helper and fierce advocate for mental health, she spoke openly about her own experiences with bipolar disorder. Stewart was the model candidate for a Mt. A Resident Assistant, which the school website describes as someone who is “caring, has a desire to help others and an interest in building strong residence communities.”

In her first year, Stewart successfully intervened in a fellow student’s crisis, making her the top choice for assistant don (senior RA) in her second year. But she and the RA team that ended up being hired could’ve had no idea just how challenging and exhausting the year ahead would be. For many people with serious mental-health conditions, between the ages of 18 and 21 is when symptoms first appear. It’s a phase when the brain is developing rapidly. Combined with the massive transition of moving away from home, exposure to alcohol for the first time (for some), culture clashes, and even just learning to live with a roommate, it’s generally a chaotic time.

In recent years, directors of university counselling services have seen higher numbers of students seeking help with more severe concerns. A 2019 survey of over 55,000 students at 58 campuses across Canada found nearly a quarter of students surveyed were diagnosed with anxiety and nearly one-fifth with depression that year. Approximately 11 percent of students reported intentional self-harm and 16.4 percent considered suicide, while 2.8 percent attempted it at some point that year.

Meanwhile, studies of RAs found those with residents who disclose self-harm experience higher levels of burnout and compassion fatigue. The mental-health crisis is escalating at post-secondary institutions, with added stressors and isolation resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic being linked to poorer mental-health outcomes for students, including higher levels of depression, anxiety, and loneliness among students, with potential long-term effects. This means more high-stakes responsibility is being laid at the feet of young-adult RAs, who may be just as vulnerable to stress-related mental-health disorders as the peers in their charge.

ALWAYS ON
Back in 2017, burnout on the RA team at our residence was already prevalent. By the end of the first semester, one RA had stepped back because of the pressure. Another, who remained on the team, needed regular breaks from the role to keep up with school work and protect their mental health. The remaining team members became overextended, and many seemed close to breaking point.

Morgan Kelter was hired to fill in for the second semester. She went into the role with enthusiasm, “I got a fanny pack and painted it with sparkles … and I remember I got a T-shirt.” It meant a lot to her to be making a difference for younger students as part of the residence team.

During her first week on the job, there were three campus parties, which meant three consecutive late nights and dozens of intoxicated residents. “I had done all three because everyone else was burnt out,” Kelter explains. By the end of that week, she, too, already felt worn down. It was obvious her colleagues were struggling. “People that I had known for two years that I had never seen cry, I saw cry for the first time. [There were] trips to the hospital for mental health reasons. Therapy,” says Kelter.

Kelter recalls one instance clearly. “There was drama going on in residence that we were dealing with that we probably shouldn’t have been dealing with. It probably should have been in someone else’s hands instead of some 19-year-old,” she says. Her colleague became overwhelmed and didn’t shower for days. There wasn’t time to shower, they argued, teary-eyed. The former RA says it wasn’t the volume of hours, but the hypervigilance, that made the role exhausting. “When you’re needed, you’re needed. And you have to make yourself available all the time.”

The school administration would tell them they were students first, RAs second, but if someone was hurting themselves, in danger, or suicidal, it wasn’t something you could ignore just because you had an assignment due the next day. And students develop a special relationship of trust with their RA, which adds to the weight of the responsibilities of the role. “We do find that for some of the most traumatic or difficult issues our students are dealing with, it is peers that they are most likely to go to,” explains Chad Johnstone, director of Residence and Student Life at Acadia University in Nova Scotia.

Kelter’s mental, academic, and emotional life were ultimately affected by the job. “I was just like ‘I need to stay in my bed, where I’m not accessible to anyone.’” Kelter says she had to go into counselling after her first week on the job. She started missing classes for the first time. She stocked her room with granola bars to avoid sitting with friends at the meal hall, just to get a break from other people’s problems.

One weekend, when Stewart’s stress levels approached crisis point, she booked a hotel in town just to get away. “You’re so immersed in it…. It’s definitely a mind-blowing experience. You can never escape … you never really truly get a full break.”

COMPENSATION GAPS
The number of hours on paper does not adequately reflect the time and emotional investment required of RAs. It makes fair compensation hard to calculate. On top of that, there’s a lack of standardization in RA pay, even in geographically close schools of comparable size.

At Acadia, RAs get a deluxe single room covered, as well as $1,500 toward their meal plan, compensation in kind of an approximate $10,000 value. At St. Francis Xavier (St. FX), community assistants (their title for RAs) receive a salary of approximately $8,800. Mt. A does not publish RA compensation rates, but administration shared that compensation has increased 36 percent in the last five years, though they also reduced the number of RAs, which consequently increased the workload. Based on Stewart’s stipend in 2016 to 2017, compensation for senior RAs today is likely around $4,800, with non-senior RAs making less. RAs’ room fees at Mt. A and St. FX are not covered, despite the fact students in these roles need a more expensive single room to carry out their duties.

Such significant disparities across schools for the same work reflect the different value institutions place on the contributions of their student leaders. It was the student union at Mt. A that was instrumental in bringing attention to the pay disparities between RAs at Atlantic universities, pushing administration to increase pay. Being transparent about RA compensation across schools gives students the power to recognize when they’re being underpaid, so they can organize to have their invaluable contributions better compensated.

IN MISERY TOGETHER
Stewart says that while she had some supportive conversations with supervisors and school administrators about the overwhelming pressures she was experiencing, the RA team was her biggest support. “We went through so many intense moments together, and we collaborated and pulled together when we were all burnt out,” she says. “We were in misery together. I don’t know if we helped each other, but we always had each other,” Kelter adds.

While RAs had priority access to counselling at the school wellness centre, which many members of the team used, both Kelter and Stewart felt largely unsupported in the role. Having more RAs to share the workload, and opportunities to debrief more regularly with a professional facilitator, would have been helpful, Stewart says. Instead, the RAs had informal offloading sessions, “hanging out in my room all laying in bed, talking and venting.” Kelter suggested RAs could live in different residences from where they work, while still being accessible if needed, though she recognizes the drawbacks of that approach.

Mt. A has made changes since Kelter and Stewart were RAs. Residence Life has added a coordinator position, dealing specifically with student health and wellness. They say they’ve also expanded counselling services, adding mental-health, harm-reduction education, and social worker positions at the school for all students. RA training continues to evolve, too, and now includes crisis intervention and self-care programming. But, in the smaller residences there are now fewer RAs, and the ratio of RAs to students has gone from one RA for every 14 to 20 residents, to one for every 24, meaning RAs are taking on a higher workload in exchange.

Acadia now has a team of residence life coordinators on call to support RAs in crisis 24/7. They also run debriefs to help prevent overwhelm. There are more counselling services available now than there were five years ago, and there are programs specific to RAs from marginalized backgrounds to address additional stressors that they may be experiencing, says Johnstone.

But in light of the ongoing COVID-19 crisis, which has amplified stress in students’ lives, it’s still not enough to ensure a new generation of RAs can fare better than their predecessors, the likes of Alanna Stewart and her fellow RAs. Jennifer Hamilton, executive director of the Canadian Association of College and University Student Services says, “When it comes to health and mental health, this is not a university and college issue. The increase in mental-health issues is a societal concern.” She acknowledges that while schools are stepping up their efforts to support students, without a coordinated approach addressing the gaps in mental health care outside of the post-secondary environment, not much will change.

Ultimately, addressing poor mental health at universities means addressing it in all areas of life, through government policy that prioritizes mental health. The unmanageable load for RAs won’t stop until we tackle the mental-health crisis among young Canadians on all fronts.