I am a survivor of neglect and bullying. Its long-term effect has limited my ability to form human relationships and make sound decisions throughout my life. As a child, I was seldom spoken to, except for command, criticism or ridicule, always with the assumption that I was about to misbehave.

Out of loneliness, I developed a habit of attention-seeking from any available adults, and also took to ‘talking to myself,’ making up stories for myself and acting them out. This, and my mother’s social pretensions caused other local children to consider me a freak and throw rocks at me. My mother said that iff I wasn’t such a ‘stupid little goof’ (her words) it wouldn’t have happened. When my parents went out in the evening and I was left alone in the house, (I was eight), the same gang would come to throw rocks at the house. When I informed my parents, they went out more often. I came to avoid any contact with my peers, knowing that it would result in ridicule, and probably violence.icule, always with the assumption that I was about to misbehave.

I escaped by developing an addiction – to reading. I stayed up until four a.m. night after night, reading anything I could find – Winston Churchill’s history of the Second World War, Will Durant’s Story of Civilization, Gone With The Wind, Les Miserables, anything. It worsened my isolation and lack of social skills, but served me well academically, enough to get the most generous available category of scholarship for post-secondary education.

Higher education promised to lead to a ‘good job’ but not the human connection for which I was starving, and failed at every attempt to achieve. Without motivation, I dropped out, and discovered that there was one social group where I could gain acceptance: hippies and left wing radicals, based on my dedication to the current cause, whatever it was. I showed up at every plausible demonstration and the occasional implausible one, including the attempt by myself and members of a precursor organization to Greenpeace to blockade Granville Street…the day after the War Measures Act was declared.

To become a more effective environmentalist, I returned to university to complete a degree in social geography, and met the world’s kindest and most forebearing man, a disillusioned ex-student radical, who saw something worthwhile in me despite all my deficiencies. We’ve had each other’s backs against the world for over fifty years. Because activism doesn’t pay the rent, we (mostly he) managed to launch and sustain three different small businesses in Vancouver: an out-of-print bookstore, a printshop, and a desktop publishing firm.

Even so, my scars were still there, and not even he could repair them. Every so often, I would disappear for hours at a time to reappear later shamefaced, having spent the interval in the drugstore or thrift store reading book after book. There were still the crockery-throwing rages, the fights with neighbours, the extremist rants, the crying spells, the nightmares, the thoughts of suicide. After we became parents, it became even more of an issue; I struggled, but felt I could never do anything right.

The ultimate failure came in April of 1994, when I went to call my fifteen-year-old youngest son for breakfast, and found him dead. He had hung himself, accidentally, while imitating the auto- erotic asphyxia he had seen in a movie. We four survivors – myself, my husband and two older sons – all had each other under unacknowledged suicide watch for the next year. I blamed myself for my incompetent child-raising, believing that I was not just doomed, but damned, with any connection with people I managed to achieve becoming a source of pain for them.

No anguish of mine would excuse adding to theirs. The one way I could help them was to find a way to survive myself, in the hope that it would serve as an example. I returned to SFU in 1995 to study philosophy, to find a reason to stay alive; and community economic development, because the university required post-bac students to be enrolled in a specific program and that was one for which I had the prerequisites.

Their combined effect made me wonder if the issues which had troubled me all my life were not because I was innately defective, as I’d been led to believe. Rather, the social infrastructure that should have provided me, and those around me, with skills and guidance and even resilience, had long since disintegrated. I wondered if it would be possible to use the techniques I was discovering in community development studies to reclaim my life, to become the person I could have been.

I partnered with a neighbour to organize a Block Watch, interviewing the members for a term paper a year later to gauge its effectiveness. With my graphic-arts experience, I volunteered to design community newsletters for a nearby neighborhood house, and went from that to researching and writing articles for them. Some residential-school survivors who gathered there became my heroes and role models, because however many defeats they had suffered in their efforts to reclaim lives that had been torn apart, they never gave up.

Building upon the experience with the Block Watch. I was now able to approach strangers and interview them. For my graduation project I designed and tested a method to measure a community’s own perception of its problems, strengths and opportunities.

https://web.archive.org/web/20021027113056/http://www.sfu.ca/cedc/students/404/fletcher/files/index.html

I used the information from this project to instigate the formation of the Hastings-Sunrise Community Policing Association, which is now the flagship community policing association in Vancouver. The governance model it uses, of an elected civilian board responsible to each local community, which we pioneered, was in 2019, still unique among community policing organizations in North America.

wanted, as its first co-ordinator, to employ the community development and restorative justice concepts I had used, to first survive tragedy, then to confront social disintegration, and ultimately, to heal myself. Any of our sucess confronting crime on an ad hoc basis would be ephemeral, unless we addressed the social disintegration that was the seedbed of crime. My directors considered that this was exceeding our mandate, and so we parted ways. I then attempted to promote the concept via political means, and was met with complete bafflement from well-intentioned social-democrat politicians. Ultimately I realized that political action would only follow cultural evolution, and that to promote the concept, I must gain recognition for it, and popular culture can provide the means.

This project makes me feel a bit like the ant that wanted to move a rubber tree plant. However, I know from my own lived experience that it is needed, it is important, and that it works. So I am trying to create the literary equivalent (What is Dogma 2022?) of what Dogma 95 was to film, a covenant to produce a work on this theme using the principles it outlines. I am just a clumsy beginner. If more able people can be recruited, we could accomplish wonders.

I no longer have nightmares, no longer want to read obsessively, no longer feel constantly on the edge of being tipped into berserk rage. While the self-reclamation project is still a work in progress, progress is taking place. The most telling indication was that I was able to use my newly-acquired compass, of both demonstrating and demanding respect and responsibility, to manage the relationship with my mother during her final years.

I was able to shepherd her to her monthly opthalmologist appointments, deliver her favourite foods to the care home, arrange her hundredth birthday celebration and letter from the Queen, all without unseemly friction or being manipulated into faking non-existent affection – for the same woman, who had abandoned me to bullies and who throughout her life criticized or ridiculed me every time she addressed me. For the woman, who when I was living on my own in the city, and was sexually assaulted, told me not to return to the small town where I grew up, because it would embarrass her in front of her friends. After the care home phoned to say that she had died, I scurried down to make sure she really was dead, then went out and celebrated – because finally, I had accomplished an elegant kind of victory, over her and over myself.