I’m struggling to find the right selection and combination of words to honour this moment in a commemorative way. Up till this sentence, my thesis idea has existed largely in an incubator in my head. Any attempts I’ve been coerced to making in throwing together an elevator pitch have, in all its newness, involuntarily added new layers or pointed to yet unseen routes.
I’m not going to downplay it; as far as ideas go, it’s big. But I think that at this stage, that’s okay and maybe even a good thing. Better to ruminate over the best parts to fuse and whittle down. I’ll need to do so in a quality and timely fashion so to avoid getting forced into settling for the sake of deadlines drawing in… admittedly an area where I’ve hit the occasional roadblock in the past.

The idea… the long of it.

If you were to look up my application essay to the Digital Futures grad program at OCADU, you’d find a lofty idea about global connectivity via public LED displays as a means of confronting isolation (note: this was a year before the pandemic).  I had an intense but fleeting infatuation with the imagined potential of colour hues with RGB values, and for a while was trying my ideas out for size on other people.   Skipping right over the messy business of the technology, I would attempt to dazzle them with visions of public light displays that could exist subtly amongst the foliage of the trees in a given Toronto park, for instance.  People could interact with light by means of hand gestures, downloading an app on their phone or even through on-site screen displays.  I then explained how somewhere in a park in Sao Palo, a similar display existed with similar interaction capabilities.

The big moment in the pitch, when I watched carefully for the reaction of my captive listener, came when I connected these remote displays together.  You, during your evening stroll through Queens Park, could liven up a display with the wave of a hand, and simultaneously have the same effect on the LED display in the park in Sao Palo.  A passerby there would soon take notice and would engage in their own display as a response, with visual feedback of their ‘work’ outputted in your own display.  Thus two strangers, in remote places across the globe, could interact with each other through the public art.

It’s still a lovely concept.  Many concepts are though, especially while they marinate in the incubator, unperturbed by the constraints of budget, engineering, technology and a tangled coil of complications that would never cease to put Occam’s Razor to the test.  Still, it was enough to get me into the program, and maybe the committee was curious to see if I might be able to actually pull that off.

There is a compulsory course in the first semester of the Digital Futures program called Creative Computation.  The name sounds like it was pulled from an after-school computer club in an elementary school’s computer lab in the 90s (ours was called Computer Patch), and fittingly so.  The list of bits and pieces we were sent out to get at a local electronics shop were up to scratch by modern robotics standards (the Arduino Nano microchip had Bluetooth, although we didn’t get that far).  But the element of DIY craftsmanship that sometimes led to weaving pipe-cleaners together at 2am or piercing holes through pingpong balls with a glue gun at 4am did make it feel like an (albeit stressful) adult version of summer camp, and if nothing else, forged similar bonds among us.

I was quickly reminded through this class that as far as hardware and code is concerned, rabbit holes are rampant.  I’m no stranger to that lesson, but it was a well-served wakeup call to stick with what I’m good at.  In my case, that’s a few things: making art, writing, teaching, researching, and forming concepts from a grab-bag of seemingly unrelated ideas.  For me, technical rabbit holes are far too easy and common to fall down, and far too hard to climb out of.  The ratio of falling vs. climbing out does not do justice to what I could do with an illustration in that amount of time.

In the case of that application essay, the point was not the LED displays or how many shades of a hue were achievable with a precise measurement of RGB values (and wow, is that a chore to hammer out in code).  Fortunately, the inspiration and heart of the matter very far from technical.  What I care about most was addressing loneliness.  It was about falling deep into the crevasses of your own very unique and internalized despair.  It was about wanting desperately to reach out to literally anyone who happens to be near in the acute moment when you are feeling overwhelmed and can’t see your own way out.  It was less about the immediate danger of suicidal thoughts than the thousands of difficult moments over time that pool into a  sense of hopelessness.  It was about how hard it can be, in those moments, to know to whom or where to turn, even if there are people in your life that can and will help.  Sometimes the shame trumps the trust.

Although I was genuinely enamoured with the creative potential of LED displays, I see it now as an early iteration of a brainstorming process.  I imagined someone walking alone through the park, lost in their own darkness.  Coming across an inviting and easy to use LED display might have served as a subtle but romantic distraction. A bit of play they could engage in with a stranger hailing from some unknown place, whom they will never know.  That you could paint together with light might hopefully provoke a sense of wonder.  At the very least, it would mean you were less alone.

I’ve been holding on that imagined moment since, looking some new technological embodiment it could call home.  I felt it needed to be a more direct artistic experience, something that connected to an intuitive and impulsive form of self-expression.  It began to take root in VR but evolved the way it did thanks to a long-standing insecurity.  I’d come across Tilt Brush for Virtual Reality and thought, well that’s it.  I’ll get really good at painting in VR while somehow building a thesis out of it.  Then I promptly fell down a rabbit hole.  I spent exactly one evening ‘researching’ Google’s Tilt Brush (read: watching YouTube clips).  Not long into my journey I came across (read: YouTube ‘suggested’) a tutorial wherein a young developer teaches us how to DIY our own version of Tilt Brush.  In the hour-long video, he walks us through the steps of coding out a suite of painting tools and controller inputs using the programming language C#.  My logic: if he could do it in an hour, then I could probably pull it off in a few months.  Then I could basically make a better tool than Google had made, and tweak it exactly as I want.  Not knowing C# or having much aptitude for writing code seemed like a small roadblock – nothing a bit of inspiration couldn’t fix.  Eventually I caught myself, and accepted that it might be okay to lean on Google do to the heavy-lifting, while I focused on yes, what I’m good at.  Painting, teaching, and learning how to help people through a combination of both.

I need to backtrack here, to when I was still mustering up my OCAD application essay.  In the months leading up to that deadline, I had shifted the priorities in my life around helping a loved one navigate their way through the terrifying early days of a bipolar diagnosis.  It began with an intervention, and the following day with the unavoidable first step of the initiation process into the mental health stream in Toronto.  This entailed a planned visit to the emergency department at CAMH (Centre of Addiction and Mental Health).  I had learned fairly quickly that there was no rule book, nor a preordained set of steps beyond that.  The social workers staffed at CAMH assessment were exceptional, and any blind spots encountered in the public health system were only overcome thanks to the voluntary overextending of their duties.   In going through the experience of building someone’s support network, that is to say beyond trusted friends and family and comprising of a tailored set of professionals, I quickly learned the process is not unlike setting out to make a quilt from scratch, with no sewing skills or guidance from YouTube tutorials.

My research began as so many starting points should: with a trip to my local (Parkdale) library.  The first step was learning everything I could about bipolar disorder.  Side note: it was this very trip that ignited my motivation to apply to the Digital Futures program.  The section next to the shelves of mental health books was about futures; chiefly that of technology and its affect on society.  I walked home that day with a pretty eclectic bundle of books; half pertaining to mental illness and the rest covering a range of topics such as how 3D printing could bring sovereignty to the citizens of marginalized communities worldwide and creative electronic projects for artists.

Through reading these books (as well as a few others ordered from Amazon that had more direct titles like “Helping a loved one with bipolar disorder”), I was able to piece together the role objectives needed for the support network.  Once that structure was in place, the next task was finding people to fill said roles.  What was needed at that moment of foundation-building: a psychiatrist (medication and ongoing monthly treatment), a psychologist (Cognitive Behaviour Therapy, ideally specializing in BPD on a bimonthly basis),  a peer support group, a case worker to help with coordinating, and one-on-one, peer-to-peer support.  Upon entering CAMH, I knew not only what was needed, but what roles CAMH could supply and which I would have to source independently.

Once that ball was rolling, the rest fell into place easily, almost to easily.  A quick Google search led me to a psychologist who was a top specialist in the city for CBT treatment for Bipolar disorder.  The rest of the players fell into place over the next few weeks.  Aside from the support group (facilitated by CAMH) which ran its course, most of these roles remain in place today.  Not only that, but I was also led to a support councillor as well as a group for myself as a care-giver, and this proved to be instrumental in educating me about establishing boundaries.

Since then, although we don’t tend to make a big deal about it,  the changes in our lives have been remarkable.  Through CBT treatment, my loved one was able to make adjustments in their reactions and emotional states.  The practice of mindfulness is a part of their everyday life now, but if you had told me that would be the case five years ago would have laughed my way out of the room.  And because I was able to delegate many of the pressure that had been pressed on me for support, I was able to direct more focus on my own wellbeing.  But staring me right in the face all the while was a concern I have not yet been able to fully tackle: the question of isolation.

My loved one lives alone, as do I.  In the summer months this doesn’t tend to be too big a problem, as there are, even in a pandemic, easy and readily available ways of feeling connected with the world.  Even if that just means sitting in a park or going for a bike ride, there’s a means to enjoy at least some part of the day, whether or not in solitude.  In the winter it’s a different story, one that no amount of streaming options, SAD lamps or audiobooks is able to coax towards a happier outcome.  This story isn’t exclusive to those facing mental health issues, but in fact what I have been realizing is that to some extent or another, mental health is really a spectrum and every one of us falls somewhere on it.  More on that later.  I have a hard time even thinking about those months now, never mind writing about it.  For a bit of perspective, this is my present situation: (insert pic).

The winters for the past several years have blended together into one endless-feeling tunnel.  I’m lucky to have a floor-level apartment and the rent is affordable, but my dwellings are small and can get more than a little claustrophobic.  It can get challenging, but I’ve maintained a busy enough schedule to not have time for long bouts of loneliness.  Still, I wish it were avoidable somehow.  I love living in Canada but I’ve never liked paying the price of living two-thirds of the year in winter.  I know, I know.  It’s very un-Canadian to point out how boring it is to complain about it.