English as a Second Language in Which to Have Anxiety Meltdowns
Some sort of essay-memoir thing about the 1995 referendum, English as a second language, and growing up with video games.
Igrew up a little before the internet era, in a quiet, medium-sized French Canadian town located about 200 kilometres north of Québec City. My hometown has an aluminum plant and more or less just one street with bars on it and the first ever, I think, Walmart that tried to unionize, only to be shut down as a result.
My parents only spoke French, so my first contact with English was through video games, which I would play with my two older sisters, passing the controller around. We would ignore all text prompts, which we didn’t understand, make up our own story instead. We had no idea that “Bros” meant “Brothers,” so for us, the main character’s first name was “Mario” and his last name was “Bros.” “Bros” is also close to “Brosse” in French, an expression that means, “Getting drunk,” so we had complicated theories about how Mario was maybe some sort of recovering alcoholic, which the game didn’t seem to support.
At the time, English often seemed, to me, like an imaginary language. At school, we were taught English for about an hour per week, but since everyone around us spoke French, it felt like an odd skill to master, like learning how to churn butter by hand. At home, none of my family’s television sets had access to cable. They relied, instead, on some sort of antenna thingy to get four television channels in French, plus one in English. The only English television channel we had access to was CBC, which felt, to me, like a kind of nightmare channel compared to the other four. Even simple sports programs like curling or track-and-field were impossible to watch on this nightmare channel, as they would pair bizarre, alien commentary with visuals of athletes sweating.
Socially, I didn’t fit in, didn’t have many friends, wasn’t sure why. I would go to school, experience failure or rejection, return home, sometimes cry a little, and then watch reruns of The Simpsons dubbed in French to make myself feel better. “Bart Simpson,” I thought. “Wearing a hat backwards,” I thought. “Owning a skateboard = being cool and popular,” I thought. The reruns were almost always episodes I had seen before, but there was something comforting about watching the same jokes take place in the same order, as if they were glitches in the space-time continuum. What I got from the reruns was stability, which seemed valuable in a period of my life during which I couldn’t stop growing, couldn’t stop becoming incrementally bigger, faster, wiser.
One day, without warning, the television channel that aired The Simpsons dubbed in French simply stopped carrying the show. I felt baffled by this decision, couldn’t understand the reasoning behind it. From my point of view, someone, somewhere, had cancelled what was clearly the best program on television, all five channels of it. “Why would they drop The Simpsons?” I thought. “That would be like taking out your best player because he’s hitting too many home runs and yelling at him to go sit in the car or something.”
A few months passed. Eventually, I discovered by accident that CBC, the nightmare television channel, was showing all-new, non-rerun episodes of The Simpsons in English. When I realized that I still had access to The Simpsons after all, just not in the right language, I immediately felt an intense yearning to revert to my old routine. I started watching my favourite program in English. Though at first I was barely able to understand the sequence of events in an episode, I stuck with it. “The Simpsons,” I thought. “Note to self: buy skateboard,” I thought. Bart Simpson, an academic failure on television, became for me a kind of unofficial English tutor. Over time, the episodes began making more sense, and my grades in English at school improved from middle-of-the-pack to top-of-the-class in the span of about a year. One afternoon, our teacher congratulated me in front of our group, seemed impressed by his own teaching skills.
Later, I added to my English television regimen reruns of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, which were new to me. When I think about this now, it seems either beautiful or completely insane to imagine myself at age nine or ten, living in a cold town in Quebec, familiar with only French Canadian culture and trying to understand and relate to the adventures on television of an African-American family located in California.
While my sisters mostly lost interest in video games over time, I didn’t. Using my new English skills as a kind of springboard, I became obsessed with Japanese role-playing video games translated in English, whose convoluted, text-heavy plots about true evils and dark wizards and last crystals and stuff I was now able to understand. “Legendary sword,” I thought. “Treasure chest,” I thought. “Ambushed in a dark forest by a popular red goblin and his goblin friends,” I thought. Somehow, the English I had learned from Bart Simpson and Will Smith and Will Smith’s makeshift family seemed to carry over into this new realm.
In game worlds, I explored oversized maps, discovered hostile caverns, encountered difficult battles with dragons and fantasy creatures every couple of steps or so. Japanese role-playing video games, I thought, simulated very well the feeling of living in a universe that hates you and wants to kill you.
Though school exposed me to French authors like Baudelaire, Guy de Maupassant, Molière, and Boris Vian, I failed to connect with them, didn’t get into reading or literature until later in life. Role-playing video games, with their epic, soap opera-like stories, were the only environment I had to think about life as a human being as something removed from my own shitty self, in terms of mortality, morality, love, relationships, values, etc.
At one point, my parents grew tired of parenting, or so it felt that way to me. They were less hands-on with me than they had been with my sisters, would vaguely supervise my grades, which seemed fine but, I knew, could have been better. They didn’t mind that I was playing video games all the time or that I was quiet. What they didn’t realize, I think, was that I was turning my imagination inwards, going deeper and deeper inside myself, a kind of spelunking. During the day, at school, I would often drift off into daydreams, think about whatever role-playing video game I was playing at the time, and try to anticipate what would happen in the story next. Later, when the plot would unfold in a way that was different from what I had imagined, I would feel disappointed, betrayed a little.
“Role-playing video games, with their epic, soap opera-like stories, were the only environment I had to think about life as a human being ... ”
A lot of things happened in my life in 1995. Quebec held a referendum for the second time, asking voters to decide whether or not the province should become an independent state, separate from Canada. Many excellent Japanese role-playing video games were released in North America, including Chrono Trigger, Breath of Fire II, Earthbound, Ogre Battle, and Lufia II: Rise of The Sinistrals. My parents finally got cable.
I was 11, had a mildly successful paper route and still no friends, but several time-consuming video games to play.
My sisters and I had no interest in politics, but we cared about the referendum. We would ask our parents if they were planning to vote YES or NO and they would say, “We can’t tell you.” In general, my parents didn’t talk about politics around the house, didn’t even want to say which party they were planning to vote for, because they didn’t want their political affiliations to automatically become ours. For a while, I thought that everyone functioned like this, that it was socially unacceptable for some reason to reveal which party you were planning to vote for. I wasn’t sure how polls worked. “Is it okay to tell the polls which party you’re planning to vote for, but not other people?” I thought.
At first, the referendum seemed, to me, like a choice between “Something exciting happening” and “Nothing happening at all.” I wasn’t sure why anyone would vote NO. Though I wasn’t old enough to vote, I was old enough to understand that there was something important at stake. Overall, I felt a kind of powerlessness toward the vote, and it seemed strange to me that I had no control over a decision that would probably affect my life just as much as my parents’.
Though I still remember the plot of many Japanese role-playing video games that I played that year (Maxim and Selan die heroically at the end of Lufia II, it’s sad), I don’t remember the campaign leading up to the vote very well. One thing I do remember is my parents receiving random phone calls from Canadians living in other provinces and hoping to convince them to vote NO, an approach that was probably more annoying than helpful.
The night of the vote, my parents watched the referendum. When the television told them that the NO had won by a small margin, they seemed okay with it, neither particularly upset nor particularly happy. Maybe they were still trying to avoid revealing which side they had voted for by hiding their emotions from my sisters and me, like playing poker. Even now, I still have no idea which side they voted for, though I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that they both voted YES. Wikipedia tells me that our riding had one of the highest concentrations of YES votes in the province, with about 75 percent of the population voting in favour of separation from Canada.
“I felt a kind of powerlessness toward the vote, and it seemed strange to me that I had no control over a decision that would probably affect my life just as much as my parents’.”
After the referendum, I became, and probably still am, a maladjusted teenager with unstable self-esteem and occasional anxiety meltdowns. I wasn’t goal-oriented or enterprising, wasn’t charming or handsome or a good conversationalist, had below average dexterity and hand-eye coordination, making me not particularly talented at sports or music or visual art.
I had confidence-shattering acne issues, a nonexistent fashion sense, and equally maladjusted friends.
Throughout high school, my maladjusted friends and I didn’t discuss things like life goals, relationships, or worldviews. Instead, we joked around constantly, as if to forget how shitty we all felt about ourselves. We all liked nonsense and off-the-wall humour, used our imaginations too much. Though I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life, I also didn’t know how to stop and think about these things. Back then, when I thought the word “Career,” I would experience anxiety, or simply visualize myself being hired by the local video store after graduating high school, playing video games for free all the time, eventually becoming manager, wearing a polo shirt of a different colour than the other staff members, maybe a backwards hat, ride a skateboard to work.
Though Quebec wasn’t a country, it seemed impossible to visualize myself leaving it one day, to go live elsewhere in Canada. The farthest I would go, maybe, would be Montreal, but I was secretly intimidated by it. On television, Montreal was presented to me as a city of extremes, a city of murder, crimes, social protests, drug wars, biker gangs, movie premieres, and popular bands. It seemed both cool and terrifying.
After high school, I moved away from my hometown, began living in Québec City, which seemed less scary to me than Montreal. I became an anxiety-prone adult. I never bought a skateboard, never became manager of the local video store. I rarely watched The Simpsons anymore, and if I stumbled on an episode on television, I would identify with Homer more than with Bart. Eventually, I lied outrageously during a job interview and was hired by a studio that made small games for web browsers. Working in video games was something I had always wanted to do, but because of low self-esteem, I wasn’t sure it could actually happen in my life. Once I started, it felt both perfectly natural and like a kind of fantasy.
“Though Quebec wasn’t a country, it seemed impossible to visualize myself leaving it one day, to go live elsewhere in Canada.”
Though internally, the studio functioned entirely in French, most of our clients spoke English, so my language skills became fairly useful. I could contribute to design documents, write in-game instructions, and send emails to clients. By working in games, I gained self-confidence, proved to myself that I wasn’t bad at design or creative work. Over time, my personality changed, and I began to feel unsatisfied with making small browser games. Outside of my job, I had very little going on, so I wanted my projects at work to matter, to feel artistically fulfilling instead of just collecting a pay cheque. I wanted to work on one of those big console games that would be covered by the video game websites I read every day and be announced to the press at a major video game expo.
I grew depressed.
“Everything’s hopeless,” I thought.
I began viewing video games in this manner, applying a kind of all-purpose filter of gloom and meaninglessness over them. I was no longer jumping on stuff, or sorting jewels, or racing cars at a high speed, but hopelessly jumping on stuff, hopelessly sorting jewels, hopelessly racing cars at a high speed. I got less and less enjoyment out of games, until at some point, I stopped feeling excited about them entirely. My identity, up until then, had pretty much been built around video games, so picturing my life without them felt like removing the ball from a game of Pong, leaving only two paddles going up or down for no reason.
When it came to my depression, I felt like video games no longer had any wisdom for me. “Shoot armed men in the face,” one game said. “Fight fantasy monsters but, like, strategically,” another said. “But I am in pain,” I thought. “I am having, like, a crisis. Instead of telling me to kill monsters, couldn’t you give me life advice or something? You want me to feel like I am a god of war, but I don’t feel like that at all.”
It seemed odd to me that video games, the medium I had felt closest to for most of my life, had no idea how to comfort me and thought of me as “weird.”
I turned to my family for help, but the best they could do was like putting a Band-Aid on open heart surgery. We all had adult lives now, were heading in different directions: my parents toward retirement, my oldest sister toward a music career in Quebec, my other sister toward building a family. In late 2008, my parents, my sisters, and I came together for Christmas, which ended in yelling and the use of excessive force to close doors. After that, our family situation became kind of a mess, everyone doing their own thing in separate corners.
I moved to Montreal to escape my depression, give myself new options. Though I told myself that it worked, that I was “cured” from depression, the move only provided temporary relief, like some sort of spiritual Aspirin. The depression came back. In Montreal, though, I had greater access to English bookstores, and it was through them that I became interested in contemporary literature. I began buying books at random, following writers online and reading like a desperate person. During my first year in Montreal, I read authors like Miranda July, Ann Beattie, Lorrie Moore, Tao Lin, and many others, found in their works useful life advice and a clearer understanding of myself.
My job in Montreal was almost entirely in English, which wasn’t a problem. I started having friends in the anglophone community and feeling like I had maybe more in common with them than with my francophone roommates. Moving into English, for me, felt like a fresh start, like going back to the drawing board with my identity and allowing myself to doodle.
After a while, I realized that to finally beat the depression, I would have to set my life on fire. I remember telling my mom, who I would talk to on the phone every couple of months or so, that I was going back to school part-time. She didn’t understand my decision to apply to Creative Writing at Concordia instead of something like Création Littéraire at UQAM, seemed dumbfounded by it. It dawned on me that maybe I had moved too far into English, that where I was heading, outside of Quebec and toward North America, would mean alienating myself even more from my family. From now on, some part of me would always remain bizarre and alien to them, the way the nightmare channel had appeared to me as a kid.
“In many ways, the NO was actually a sort of YES in disguise. It was a YES to Canada, and a YES to the complicated path my life has followed since.”
I can’t even imagine what my life would look like today had Quebec voted YES in 1995, then gone ahead with separation. Maybe I would still be close to my family. Maybe we would have found other reasons to grow distant. The anglophone community in Montreal would look completely different, as it would be more difficult for creative types from elsewhere in Canada to move here. Montreal probably wouldn’t have nurtured artists like Grimes, Sean Michaels, or Majical Cloudz, among many others. I wouldn’t even be with my girlfriend of the last two years, who moved here from Newfoundland in 2010.
Quebec choosing NO in 1995 was an eye-opening experience for me, as it made me realize that the province contained a multitude of voices, wasn’t as united as I had previously thought it to be. In many ways, the NO was actually a sort of YES in disguise. It was a YES to Canada, and a YES to the complicated path my life has followed since.
Last fall, when I was travelling throughout the US to perform at readings and other things, I began to notice a strange trend. The further I moved away from my hometown, the more I would end up talking about it, usually with people who only had a vague idea of what Quebec’s culture is like. In a strange way, it made me feel like I carry Quebec and my upbringing with me wherever I go, like it’s something I can never dissociate myself from, even if I wanted to.
