The Person She is Today

By Alecs Kakon

Photos by Jen Fellegi

Is there an “I” a priori to the discovery of the self? Does she live behind those eyes, in her mind and body waiting to be explored and found? Or, does she come into being through circumstance; given shape and depth through lived experience? Or, better yet, is the answer some shade between these two pendulous options? Before you can say for sure on which side of the swing you stand, a more matter-of-fact approach to this esoteric question can be found in the answers to whether or not one needs to know where she comes from to truly know herself, if it is possible to evade the impact of lived experience, and so on. My happy balance has been found in Heidegger’s claim that “who we are might be predetermined, but the path we follow is always our own choosing.” I’ve always looked out onto those with a positive outlook, rosy glasses as they say, to investigate where their joy comes from. I thought that if I followed their happiness down that yellow brick road, perhaps I might find the source. But, that’s not always the case. I’ve had so many enlightening conversations with women who have proven that although the odds were stacked against them, we choose who we are and those choices bring us close to happiness. Sitting down with Allison, we walked down memory lane and discussed hardship, loss and gratitude, and how everything in her life has found meaning in the contours of the woman she is today.

After her parents’ divorce when Allison was only one year of age, she lived between her father’s house with her step-sisters and her mother’s house with her half-siblings. Raised amidst chaos, Allie’s home life was less than conventional. When Allie was only in grade 5, her mother, who had long-since been a drug addict, attempted suicide. “I came home from school and she was in her room. No one would let me up there. It was all very weird. I went up to her room and it was trashed. She was just wild, and I know now it was probably drug psychosis, but what did I know then?” Allie explains. “She had picked up a piece of broken mirror and tried to kill herself in front of me.” Allie’s paternal grandparents picked her up and she lived with them for the remainder of the school year. Her father then took her to live in Oakville with him. But, living with her father didn’t offer more safety nor comfort. “My dad was really violent with me. He beat me all the time, and I remember one time, when I was 14, he went ballistic and almost ended my life. I still have the scars in my mouth from a shattered jaw.” Allie ran away back to her mother’s in Montreal. Although her mother didn’t parent her with emotional sustenance, “at least she didn’t treat me the way he did. She was a junkie, but she didn’t ever hurt me or make me feel like I wasn’t wanted.”

Living with someone who abuses drugs had become the norm, the only life Allie had ever known. But since she had moved around so much, it took a while for the school system to catch on to the fact that Allie’s mother was a drug addict. They eventually removed her from her mother’s care and put Allie into the Batshaw system. “There were no beds available near my location, so they threw me into a maximum security unit in Rosemère where I was required to attend a Shawbridge school. I lost the life I had built for myself, I had to leave my school with my friends and quit the part-time job that I loved. All of a sudden, this was my new life. I wasn’t angry before that happened. My life was fucked, but it was the only life I knew. This was different. I was being punished for something I didn’t do.” Just like that, Allie’s life took a dark turn. “I remember we were only allowed out for 30 minutes a day. One day, two girls and I went for a walk and they decided to jump and rob this girl at a bus stop. It didn’t go well, we were picked up by the cops. They were released and I was sent to a maximum security jail for young offenders. I was there for 9 months. I slept on a metal bed. There were no shoelaces or belts permitted, there was barbwire fence, and we weren’t allowed to go outside. It was jail. I actually celebrated a birthday in there. It was brutal. Eventually I went to the Shawbridge campus, then Renaissance,” Allie says. “I was the girl who just kept fighting and it wasn’t until this one woman told me that if I kept fighting, then I would I would never get out of there, but if I just smiled and shut up, they’d let me out. It worked.” Allie was finally released back to her mother’s custody. But on her very first meeting with her social worker, she found her mother had overdosed. “When we got there, we walked in and found my mother foaming at the mouth. My first thought was ‘please don’t put me back in,’ and they didn’t.” Allie was afforded independent living and was closely followed by a social worker. Her apartment was paid for with a forty-dollar weekly allowance. Allie continued to live the life she knew: she spent some time stripping underage, abusing drugs, and then eventually, at 19, she moved out West with friends and got pregnant. Inadvertently, that was her saving grace. “It changed my life. There was something in me that just wanted to have this baby. It changed things for me, because I became a mom. I worked two jobs just so I could take care of my kid. I remember I used to bathe him in a Rubbermaid bin,” Allie says. “It was tough taking care of him on my own, but he also gave me purpose; he gave me family.” Without knowing what had been missing all along, Allie had created her own family. She was endowed with purpose and felt the significance of her role as a mother. She found meaning, and that ultimately helped her find her way out of the darkness.

At 25, Allie met the man who would later become her husband. He immediately took her son on as his own and they were an instant family. A few years later Allie’s daughter was born. “Before I had my daughter, I completed my conversion to Judaism. It’s the strongest thing in my life – it gives me hope, family and a sense of belonging. It’s the only way of being I’ve ever known.” Anchored to a community that fills her with support and love, Allie had a newfound sense of self-worth from which she drew life lessons to teach her children. “I never had parents around to teach me how to value myself or teach me how people should treat me, but boy am I raising two amazing humans.”

Using all of her experiences as stepping stones toward a lighter future, it was only 3 years ago that Allie reassessed her life and acknowledged that she was unhappy in her body. Her weight yo-yoed during each of her pregnancies, but after she had her daughter, she was 365 pounds and couldn’t lose the weight. Her father had passed only just a couple years prior and the loss had taken its toll. “I was so lost, I just stopped trying. But, a couple years later, I was in so much pain I could barely walk. I knew I had to do something about it.” Having always felt pain, it wasn’t uncommon for people to blow her off telling her that she wasn’t hurting, she was just “fat.” But, she had tried to lose the weight herself and nothing was working. Allie decided to get Gastric Sleeve surgery. During the surgery, GIST tumours were found and after having almost gone septic, Allie had an emergent bowel resection where they removed a 16cm tumour. “A lot had gone on after the surgery and it was only six days after I got home that I lost my mother to an overdose. So many ups and downs, but the most validating thing was finding out I had this rare disease called Hashimoto.”

Allie shed the weight of her past, metaphorically and literally, and has finally come into a space of positive self-worth. “This last birthday was the best birthday ever. For the first time in my life, I know who my friends are and I’m so happy. I love me. I want to ski and go on rollercoasters and do all the things I could never do. There is so much on my checklist, I’m just happy to be here,” Allie says. “I’ve been through so much, but it’s all driven me to be the person I am today. My children are my everything and they give me purpose, I just started living and I want to do everything with them.” There was darkness and what felt like interminable suffering, but through the hardship, Allie recognizes that she made it out, she survived. “Every day, I get to wake up and breathe fresh air and I get to love and be loved. I know that I’m a little bit extra, but if I love you, I will smother you, because, I know what it’s like to have a final conversation with someone, I know what it’s like to lose. We can always find a reason to be unhappy, but I choose to be happy.” Allie very simply could have been a product of her circumstance, the path was laid out for her. But, she chose a different avenue, one paved with family, love and gratitude. Her past does not define her; she controls that narrative. “In a world filled with reasons to be angry, I decided I want to be happy, love myself and be a positive impact on my children.”