I have a tangle of memories from my childhood in Saskatchewan. Riding a tricycle around our steeply sloped block in Swift Current. Pouring caterpillars through a sieve and watching them fan out, star-shaped, over the concrete step. Drawings of spiky dinosaurs, volcanoes, and sinking steamships. My father, announcing our impending journey to the Yukon.
We went in the fall without any lodging arranged. Eventually we found our way to a village of four hundred called Teslin, where I lived between the ages of six and seventeen. The community didn’t welcome us. With little to do, I retreated into computer games. My memories of that period of my life are scant. There was little mental stimulation, no real friendship. My clearest memories are of the games. RuneScape, Mechwarrior, and Pokemon.
I also remember me and my two brothers play-fighting with my dad in the living room. We would jump on him and try to pull him down like a trio of Davids locked in battle with Goliath. Time passed, and at the age of thirteen I left the community to attend the nearest high school a two hours’ drive away in Whitehorse.
Up until that point, I was home-schooled, due to my dad’s fear that we might be indoctrinated with “un-Christian” values such as Darwinian evolution and sexual tolerance. I struggled with his fundamentalism for most of my life. In high school I felt cut off by social awkwardness and a lack of shared background and interest. The feeling that came to the fore of my identity at that time was one of placelessness.
I didn’t fully realize that I was no longer a Christian until my second year of university. It was a slow transition. For a long time I’d struggled to believe, particularly in the aggressive fundamentalist strain I was raised with, and for a while in high school I classified myself as an “absurdist-theist” – an epithet I invented for myself, meaning someone who thinks that life is absurd, but that God is waiting at the end of it with a sensible explanation. What came to me early in second year was that the spiritual comfort I thought I had found in the Trinity was really just the comfort of having Christian friends. Without them, it vanished. And when I stopped finding comfort in the Trinity, it wasn’t a long step to disbelieving in it altogether.
A genealogy of religion. To me, placing Christianity in its context was a major step away from faith.
I felt alone. I made a few friends at university through alcoholism, that time-honoured ritual. But in my sober moments I was awkward and uncomfortable around them. I had neither a sense of belonging nor of purpose. I hid from these problems as best I could, always hoping against hope that I would find the answer in romance.
After a torturous false start, I did manage to find love. It was the latter half of third year by then. I met a fellow unbeliever, a never-believer in fact, and an intellectual; someone who was filled with empathy for non-human animals and hatred of humanity for harming them (an attitude I was barely familiar with). She was of three-eighths Inuit ancestry; she relates in her short story that she was once excluded from a dance for not being the full half. I felt I knew what it was to be a borderlander, and I wanted to join her in her world-between-worlds. I wanted our unity to be a world we could both call our own.
She was a survivor of trauma. I wasn’t able to cope with her pain or the needs that came from it. Our relationship was intense and brief. I hoped we could continue it after it became long-distance, but it crumbled in a few weeks. I’ve tried to contact her many times, but to this day I’m still cut off from her.
I spent the next year in a very personal hell. I dropped out of school to pursue writing (still in Vancouver), but I hated my writing because it had failed to save our love. No-one around me could share my pain. Slowly, I gathered a few close friends through clubs in town for atheists and skeptics. I soon made the decision to go back to school, a choice I’ve never regretted. It put me back in touch with the current of ideas. It taught me to be humble, to share my mental space with other thinkers and not to lust after originality.
The concept of home has always tormented me. I feel I’ve lost many homes that I might have had along my life’s journey. I’ve found passing comfort and moments of fellowship, but I’ve always been forced by conscience and circumstance to move on. Still, it would be deceitful to conclude on a gloomy note.
I’ve found that home is a habit that builds up around you. It’s rarely intended. There is a world inside me that I hope to live in one day, but as I labour to think of ways that I might realize my imagination, I can still rest in the comfort of the home that I know, however small and scattered it may be. There is love in my life again. I have a handful of close friendships. I’ve reconciled with my family – in the end, I wasn’t the only one of my siblings to make the pilgrimage out of religion. I find home wherever I happen to be, in welcoming country, earnest minds, and the smiles of strangers and strange familiars.
Christie, Eliza. “Incomplete.” Aboriginal Arts and Stories. Historica Canada. 2012. Web. June 4, 2015.
Hey Mattias,
I really enjoyed reading your Home story.
I found your closing comment really striking. I grew up moving a lot, I have been to ten education institutions (including UBC) in 4 different parts of the world and changed houses countless times. I know that does not sound anything like your story but I found that for me as well, after all of these experiences, home wasn’t specifically a single place. I especially liked your sentence about home being “small and scattered”. Thank you for sharing this, I find that your post, unexpectedly, expanded my own definition of Home!
Cheers,
Saarah
Hi Saarah,
Thanks for your kind thoughts. I think I do see a parallel in that we both had to deal with a lot of moves. People who’ve lived somewhere for a long time can develop a less problematic sense of home through a sense of place, but having to go back and forth, and to be separated from the places where memories were made and the people you made them with, makes it a more slippery concept.
I’m really glad you liked it 🙂
~Mattias
🙂
Hey Mattias,
Good for you for finding yourself amidst all of the bullshit. Life is really hard, and I commend you for being able to develop your own beliefs. Religion has always been something that barely scraped the surface in my house. None of us go to church, but we continue to celebrate Christmas and Easter like any other Christian family. We pray when my nan is in town and we put on our good Christian faces when we have to, but we don’t really believe in it at all. I live in Abbotsford (otherwise known as the bible belt) that happens to be 15 minutes away from Yarrow– a town with a population of less than 200 people with 8 churches. I don’t know if we pretend to believe to be polite or to portray some sort of “good” image to our community, but either way I’ve never been able to really get over the fact that religion (at least these days) seems to stimulate strong/passionate behaviour or nonchalant behaviour. Finding home in a place where your beliefs/values/ideals aren’t shared is really damn hard.
Thanks for sharing your personal story! Keep doing your thing.
Hailey
Thanks Hailey. That means a lot to me. That’s something I’ve noticed too, particularly in light of the ex-religious in the atheist community: it’s often people who live in passionately practicing households that end up leaving it, while many more people, I think, remain in indifferent limbo toward the faith they were born into. For me, I’d heard too many unconscionable views expressed from Christian authority to be able to reconcile it.
Really appreciate your reply.
~Mattias
🙂
Hey Mattias, I loved reading this. It seems like home has been quite a journey for you, but that you’ve learned very important and insightful things along the way. This post was very eye-opening for me and, in a way, comforting. I think there are many young people in this day and age who live transient, not-very-stable lives, and your last thought (echoing Saarah), is a very encouraging and insightful one.
Thanks so much for sharing.
– Char
🙂
Thanks Charmaine! I think you’re right, and it’s reassuring to imagine that there are other people dealing with the same problems.
Glad you liked it 🙂
~Mattias
Hey Mattias,
This was such a great read. I hope the RuneScape community made you feel welcomed when Teslin didn’t. I was such an awkward preteen and RuneScape was a game I resorted to to distract myself from personal real life problems. In a sense, the game was home for me from the age 11-12. I think familiarity and comfort have much to do with the idea of home and I was really familiar and comfortable with certain places in RuneScape; I spent a lot of my time on the island of Karamja fishing for lobsters and swordfish on the dock just north of the ships. Tons of people go to this spot to make money, level, etc and I found the environment in this area pretty good no matter which world I chose. I met a ton of people there who I thought were genuinely nice; I even added a few and talked to them over AIM and MSN about the game and other things. I remember logging on every Friday evening and Saturday morning to see the same group of people fishing and just chatting casually. I miss those days and those people.
I like the idea that home is small and scattered. The dock at the island of Karamja used to be one of my homes but it’s distant now and I doubt the people I met back then still hang around that area. People move on and change but what’s distant, small, and scattered to me now may very well be some n00b’s (who’s fishing lobbies and swordies) home right now.
🙂
Hi EJ,
I get nostalgic for it too; lately I’ve been re-listening to the soundtrack just to see if I can dredge up any old memories. Of course, the experience is never the same when one goes back to something one really enjoyed as a child, so the nostalgia is probably more valuable than anything new we could gain. The phenomenon of community in virtual worlds is a whole new topic in itself 🙂
Thanks for your comment!
~Mattias