Self Abuse

Above: "The Annex" of Inglewood Junior High School (that later became part of West Vancouver Secondary School). This building, and the room with all the grilled windows, was a classroom of mine whilst in school there and my homeroom for my first year of teaching in 1970.

Renunions
I went to the West Van High class of '74 reunion on Friday night. (Two months ago, I went to the class of '73 reunion because the accelerated students of that class of '74 graduated a year early).  And just as at the first reunion,  I could not last too long. It is so incredibly intense seeing faces from forty years ago; many of them trigger massive emotional rushes of intense affection.

These people are 58/59 years old now and so the age difference between us is almost invisible. Perhaps that is one reason for the intensity of these reunions. I feel far freer to express my affection now and not at all guilty about liking some of these people so much.

I faced a couple of challenges that night. One was seeing a young woman whose family moved away when she was about to enter grade twelve. She wanted to stay and graduate with her friends, so she was billeted by a couple who were friends of the family and I and some other teachers at school were assigned to liaise with her. A decade later the man who billeted her came to where I was working to carry out 400 hours of community service. He has been jailed for sexual offences against young people.  She is fine and we had a great reunion, but her host during that year was the first thing we talked about.

The other challenge was being greeted by a guy I'll call I.M. He put several tabs of acid in the coffee pot in the teacher's staff room and a lot of teachers had quite the afternoon—one a horrid, horrid afternoon. I don't like I.M. at all because of what he did and did not know how to handle talking with him—all I wanted to do was get away from him as soon as I could.

But seeing everyone else was a treat. Especially those with whom I did plays extra-curricularly.

Mystery
When I was really young, I thought I was going crazy because I would see the walls of my bedroom receding. I was about twelve when this started happening and I somehow discovered that in the bathroom, where we left the lights on at night, the walls would not move. So I would sleep in the bathtub. That is how I learned to sleep in light which I still do easily.

I never told anyone because I thought I was crazy. But when I was in my forties and enamoured by the mind and writing of Oliver Sacks, I read his book about migraine headaches and discovered that the moving walls were actually a hallucination that is part of having migraines. The condition is called Todd's Syndrome or Alice in Wonderland Syndrome. I mean, if you are going to have a mental health issue, wouldn't you want something called Alice in Wonderland Syndrome?

Well now another weird thing is happening to me. About two weeks ago, I woke up and there was blood on my duvet—on the outside. I freaked out and checked out Leon but there were no signs of any problems.  Then I discovered scrapes on both my arms that DEFINITELY were not there when I went to bed. And they were scrapes, not scratches from Leon. Well, this morning I have awakened with a bump on my forehead that is now turning a lovely deep blue. It is the size of a nickel.

I have a history of sleep walking and falling out of bed. I have had spells over my life,  of nocturnal activity and I suspect I am in another phase of this and I am doing things at night (that I see no evidence of) and somehow hurting myself.

Once, when I lived with my parents, in my sleep during the night one night, I emptied two boxes of papers and hid the papers all through the house. We found them in clothes pockets in closets, in bowls in the kitchen, in the toilet, in the laundry basket, in the freezer and in every cupboard in the kitchen.