I donated my kidney to help a stranger. But what about the person I couldn’t help?

“Piecing together the reasons I chose to give someone I’ve never met a kidney has led me to examine my many privileges and failures – all the times I could have been generous, but wasn’t, all the times I gave, but could have given more. It has also forced me to reckon with a deep well of regret over the one life I wish I had saved but did not.”

Wency Leung – The Globe and Mail – June 2020

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Perverts Like Us

“There was a time when I had orgasms that had nothing whatsoever to do with fantasies. I had them by accident. I remember having them in gym class all the time. We had to prepare for some Canadian Fitness Exam. We had to take it very seriously. As a child, you are supposed to accept what adults put in front of you and denote as important. There is an element of nonsense in the life of any child. That was why Nonsense Literature is so appealing to children.”

Heather O’Neill – Hazlitt – June 2020

Blood Tithes: A Primer

“‘When you were born you were the apple of everyone’s eyes,’ Mother said. I could never tell whether she was pleased by this or not. A is for almost, as in almost died. I was born premature, and spent my first days of life behind the glass of an incubator. While I struggled for breath, my family collectively held their own. They wondered, would I live? Which side of the coin — maternal/paternal — would my racial ambiguity land on?”

Rowan McCandless – The Fiddlehead – Winter 2019

My Black ancestors fled America for freedom. I left Canada to find a home. Now both countries must fight for a better world

“When I moved to the U.S. a decade ago, I thought those ghosts would welcome me home. I felt like I was returning to the land of my ancestors, the country they built, where they prayed, and sweated, and toiled, and were tortured, and resisted, and fought, and wept as their children were stolen and sold, and were traumatized as they were raped for profit and murdered for sport; the country where they died, the places they still haunt. They escaped, and I returned to lay claim to the opportunities they were denied and the humanity they were refused.”

Debra Thompson – The Globe and Mail – June 2020

Go ahead, transition

“Transition is a universal experience. Some people want to imagine transness as uniquely pathological, but in truth, many cisgender people seek to change their bodies for similar reasons trans people seek to change ours: social perception, personal comfort, identity and community. Though these experiences are diverse, the essential logic is shared. Cis or trans, as human beings, our bodies are laboratories, experimental terrains, perpetual works in progress always in need of an adjustment.”

Alex V Green – Xtra – June 2020

My Weekend Canvassing for Bernie

“It was our ‘Bernie Journey,’ the official campaign name for out-of-staters travelling to the early primaries and caucuses that would set the tone of the leadership race. For a few long days in mid-February, we would slog through slush and slide over ice in the foggy eastern state, knocking on doors as part of a massive grassroots operation.”

 

Martin Lukacs – The Walrus – March 2020

My Double Life

“Elizabeth was more street-smart than I was. ‘I have a weird feeling about these guys,’ she told me. I shrugged it off. I was already gone by that point. She stopped coming on the drives, but I wasn’t about to give them up: I finally had friends. That summer, I lost my virginity to Shawn. I didn’t think he was my boyfriend or anything. I just thought that in order to be cool, you had sex. And I liked him so much. More importantly, he liked me. That was enough.”

Michelle Furgiuele – Toronto Life – February 2020

Stay Tacky, Niagara Falls

“It was on a chintzy patch of street in Niagara Falls called Clifton Hill that I was first alerted to the possibility that civilization was a mistake. There, in the shadow of an enormous sculpture of Frankenstein’s monster eating a branded Burger King Whopper sandwich, my underage mind muddied on enormous schooners of beer procured with a fake ID from an adjacent Boston Pizza, I watched two other drunk loafers come to blows in that messy, soused, all-Canadian way—where they sort of thrash each other and toss out soft punches, which roll off buttery cheeks gone red with drunkenness, the brawl resolving when one combatant attempts to jersey the other by pulling his shirt over his head like they’re in a hockey fight.”

John Semley – The Walrus – February 2020

Social Media Is Revolutionizing the Way We Protest

“I certainly never saw myself becoming an organizer—partly because, before my early twenties, I had no idea the role existed and partly because, if you had told me that fighting for change was something one could do, I wouldn’t have thought I was special enough to do it. I think there are some people who believe themselves to be special, or who are believed to be special, because they are remarkably smart, or beautiful, or tall, or tenacious, or whatever else we value in society. I had just enough of these qualities to get by, minus the height (which, through Prince, I am at peace with), but would never have thought myself special enough to fight for something massive, like changing societies and the conditions within them.”

 

Janaya Khan – The Walrus – February 2020

Why I was hated in Quebec and abandoned in Toronto

“In a way, the onslaught I experienced was reminiscent of China’s Cultural Revolution, whereby victims would stand, heads bowed, while others spewed invective, hate and spittle. But then, I thought: No, this was merely an Internet stoning. Of course I would be fine. Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me.”

 

Jan Wong – National Post – May 2012