At City Hall for the last Council meeting of the term, and it’s fifteen years to the day since that marathon Executive Committee meeting that was my introduction to Toronto City Hall. In some ways, it feels like I’ve come full circle: on the outside, out of the loop, utterly ignored, just an odd little person hunched over a laptop or a phone, posting to a handful of people.
But everything else is different, too. Security checks and metal detectors. Far fewer councillors with far less say in the budget, thanks to an increasingly intrusive, petty, and capricious provincial government. Familiar councillors, staffers, cafeteria staff, reporters—all gone. The freewheeling, open atmosphere that had the potential for so much change and created space for public participation has steadily eroded. (To say nothing of the fall of Twitter and the attrition of local journalism.)
And I, I drifted away too. At some point—it was like for a few brief moments in my 20s and 30s, I could somehow connect with people the way you’re supposed to do, and then that mysterious veil separating me from the world of other people descended again. Over the first years of the pandemic, it was like I forgot all those painstaking lessons in proper socializing, or else simply could not make myself do it any more, perhaps similar to what people say “autistic burnout” is like.1
At least I’m not as desperately poor as I was back then. And I transitioned, which didn’t solve all my problems the way it seems it does for some people, but it did solve some problems. I was less depressed for a good long while, but now here I am, as despair-filled as I’ve ever been, constantly feeling like I have wasted almost everything I have been given and bring mediocrity to everything I get involved with and everyone would be better off without me, etc., etc.2
Still, I had no idea in 2011 how much my life would change when I went to City Hall on a whim. Everything is very grim and disappointing now, but maybe there could be something else ahead as different and unexpected as the past fifteen years have been compared to 2011.
- Occasionally I do wonder about myself, but then I conclude it isn’t worth the bother of finding out. It is such a long and expensive and involved process and there are way better things I could be doing, like organizing all my bug photos into phylogenetically accurate nested folders. ↩
- Don’t worry, everyone, I have resolved to wait until I am fifty at least. Forties is obviously tragically young, but I feel by fifty you can fairly be said to have given it an honest try. So I will be sticking around for basically a decade at least. ↩