The University of Toronto is an urban campus. The law school fronts onto a wide boulevard that runs north–south through the heart of the city, and it backs onto a park known as Philosopher’s Walk. It is an appropriate setting: the thoughtful academic idyll sits alongside the rush of the city and its commerce. The law school had been established in opposition to the trade school approach of other law schools in the country, with an original mandate to be more scholarly, theoretical, and academic than the others. Law schools serve two purposes: to teach the law in a scholarly fashion and to prepare students to become lawyers. There is a tension between treating the law as an academic area to be studied and as a trade to be taught, and its physical location striding the line between the commercial and the philosophical was perfect.
My plan for law school was less than slightly half-baked. I had saved up money from a summer job as a counselor at the Manitoba Adolescent Treatment Centre, a facility for youth in crisis (I could also have been a patient, not just a counselor). I arrived in Toronto with no place to live, assuming I’d easily find a place to rent.
Unlike when I went away to Princeton, where everything—tuition, room and board, even a job on campus—had been arranged and financially covered beforehand, this was a different experience. This was really my first step into the real world, for now I had to find a place to live, acquire some furniture, get some dishes, and provide my own food.
I had arranged virtually nothing ahead of time. A Princeton roommate from Toronto, Michael Denham, was going away to the London School of Economics the very day I arrived, and he graciously introduced me to his family, who had offered me his room in his home until I could find a place to live. But it was a long way from the campus, and I quickly sought out alternatives, even as I looked for something more permanent.
I crashed on a few floors after meeting fellow students during first-week orientation. One student was living in his family home very close to the law school, and he took me in for a few nights. He put me into one of their extra rooms, one filled almost to its very high ceiling with museum-quality antiques and with carpets and artwork piled everywhere. I had to maneuver around stacks of woven rugs, vases, paintings, and sculptures just to find the bed. I was very concerned that I would stumble into something, that I would break something, or that I would throw up on or into something when returning from our law school orientation parties. That, and the fact that he had a twin brother wandering about who to this day I still can’t distinguish from my friend Peter, made everything seem, well, quite disorienting.
Fortunately, I discovered that the law school had a meeting room with a couch that could, if I was careful enough, serve as an ideal base. I surreptitiously lived inside the law school for over a week, using the gym locker room at Hart House, the main building in the center of the massive University of Toronto campus, to shower. It was all I needed. One of the good things about believing you deserve nothing is that you need nothing, and I stayed there until I found a room to rent in a house with shared facilities on the Danforth, the Greek part of Toronto, close to the subway line and very accessible to campus.
The first year of law school is pretty much an all or nothing proposition. The curriculum was the same for all first-year students. We studied core legal areas of the law, and at the end of the year we wrote exams that were worth 100 percent of our grade. There were two exceptions to that grading system.
First, in one of the core subjects, our classes were much smaller and were conducted in seminar fashion, sitting around a table with our professor. These classes, referred to as “small group,” were far more interactive than other classes, and the grades were determined in part by participation as well as by papers written throughout the year.
Second, there were several weeks during the year, “bridge weeks,” during which certain classes would be suspended and the entire body of first-year students would study an emerging field in legal practice or theory, at the end of which a paper was assigned and graded. No other grades were issued for any students in the law school until the first bridge papers were assigned and graded, about two months into our school year.
The word that most aptly describes the law student population is “keen.” I used many other words back then to describe my fellow classmates, but let’s go with “keen” for now. Keen students tend to be very focused on grades. You have to be pretty focused on grades to get into law school in the first place, but once in law school, there was now a group of like-minded students looking at their doppelgängers and realizing that they would have to up their game to come out at the top of the class.
Some would say the same about what it takes to get into Princeton. But I found the students at Princeton to be, at least when I was there, much more well-rounded, more naturally inquisitive, more intellectual, and yet at the same time more grounded in the real world than were my new classmates. After having been immersed in an academically expansive and multidisciplinary environment like Princeton, I was shocked to see so many driven yet narrowly focused students in law school, most of whom seemed to read nothing out of class other than assigned coursework. I sensed immediately that, because of this, I had an advantage.
At the conclusion of our first bridge week, the faculty appeared to understand the “keen-ness” and grade-focused nature of the first-year students. So before making the graded papers available, the professors running the bridge week made a point of going over the grading system to ensure that mass panic did not result. They informed us that “there would be a number of A’s, some B-pluses, many B’s and B-minus/C-pluses, a good number of C’s, and some grades below that. And oh, for a couple of you out there, where your work was truly exceptional, we agreed that we had to give you A-pluses.”
I didn’t rush to pick up my paper. I knew I had done very good work. I knew that whenever I did the work, I was among the best. I know how awful that sounds. But the scoreboard inside my head was fine with things, knowing that I had put in an effort.
A friend eventually grabbed my paper and handed it to me. I got an A-plus.
I followed that up with A’s on my research papers for small group.
As at Princeton, I had shown immediately not only that I belonged but also that I could succeed at the highest level. But you already know where this story is going.
I don’t deserve this.
I’m a fraud.
The person you see trying to look normal isn’t real.
The real me is a failure.
You want to see failure? I’ll show you failure.
So, me being me, that initial success immediately triggered a self-destructive response. I stopped going to classes. I stopped caring about school. I started to seek out ways to hurt myself. I explored Toronto and found it to be a most suitable place for somebody looking for ways to numb the mind, the body, and the soul. In contrast to Princeton, where I had roommates, a campus job, initially a sport, and a social structure that all required me to go to great efforts to hide my self-abuse, at law school I was on my own that first year, living by myself in a rooming house. That room became my safe place, where I stared at the ceiling and revisited the past, where I tried to make sense of what had happened and was still happening, and then tried to forget about it all.
I had so very little back then, a mattress on the floor of the single bedroom I rented, a desk, a chair, and an old dresser. Nothing on the walls. It was all I needed to get those early great grades, and it was all I needed as I slipped further and further into hell. I could stay there in my room and nobody, nobody at all, would care. And I did stay in that room. And nobody cared.
I would emerge for classes that interested me and for social events I thought would be fun, but I was having a harder and harder time engaging with the world outside my room. Self-doubt, the feeling that you’re a fraud, the fear that people know you’re a fraud, is debilitating. I wanted to hide. The more I hid, the less able I was to go out, because it had been some time since I had gone out. The fear of going outside gr
ew. Withdrawal, living like a hermit, increasingly became my new normal.
I had less and less of the outside world and its reality to counter the reality playing out inside my head. The more I isolated myself, the more strongly I believed that I was a fraud. I spiraled deeper and deeper downward into depression, isolation, and the reality inside my head that kept me from engaging in life, until I just didn’t leave my room, other than for brief trips to go to the corner store down the street, for about two weeks.
In my room I was all by myself with nobody to speak to, nobody to care about, not even myself. I wasn’t lonely. I was where I needed to be, away from all of the energetic students with things to do. Oh, I wanted to be with them, but I needed to be with myself more. With them I had no control, by myself nobody could hurt me. The isolation was intoxicating. The things I took to go along with that isolation, they too were intoxicating. I lay on my mattress, closed my eyes, and the world disappeared. To get to that point I had to line up my supplies, and the juxtaposition between the panic and stress of being out and about in the living city and the serene isolation of being in my own room was immense. In my room, I could drift wherever I wanted to go. In my room, I was the supreme commander of my affairs. In the real world, I was terrified every single waking minute.
I would lie down on my mattress on the floor and wonder what was happening.
Why can’t I just get over it and move on? Why can’t I just accept that it happened, that I am still me, and nothing can ever change that? But what does that mean? The real me walked back to him over and over again. The real me is somebody who craved his attention, who got jealous when I thought he was with someone else. The real me is somebody who couldn’t make it stop. The real me is somebody who hates himself for not being able to stand up for myself. The real me is somebody who wanted it, who needed it, who needed him. The real me is worthless, somebody he could just walk away from at the end. The real me is nothing but his discarded garbage. The real me wants, needs his affection, his protection. The real me misses him. The real me misses his attention.
And that is one of the scariest things I can ever admit.
BUT I AM much stronger than I sometimes give myself credit. I was able to eventually pull myself together and get myself out of bed and back to school. I just willed myself to push through it all and get myself going. I just knew that I needed to keep trying.
There were days when I would make it to the bottom of the stairs and then have to go right back up to my room. There would be times when I would get to the subway station and then go back home. I started making a game out of it, something I could win. I would promise myself that if I could make it to school, I would treat myself with this or that item of food, a chocolate bar, a meal at McDonald’s. Food, always an issue with me, continued to be a coping mechanism, but I had figured out how I could use it to both make myself undesirable and safe and try to re-engage at school. As always, if I couldn’t control anything else in my life, I could always control what I put in my mouth, as well as what I would throw back up out of it. Bingeing, purging, gorging—it all helped.
And that’s another thing about living on the Danforth—the markets are open twenty-four hours a day.
A good binge and purge required some planning and execution. When I was planning and executing, I wasn’t thinking about him.
I always started with a good liquid base, usually a large bottle of Diet Coke, although not all upfront. It provided good lubrication, more than enough flow for the purge, and had the added benefit of being acidic and thus assisting with the breakdown of whatever I inhaled.
If possible, I followed that with ice cream, because it worked both as a liquid and a lubricant. Ideally, pasta came next, because it was soft and the warmth felt good, and because temperature transitions would allow me to mark where I was with my purge. Bags of potato chips were cheap, but I had to be careful to chew thoroughly and drink Diet Coke at the same time so they entered the system closer to a liquid sludge than a dry solid. Usually I topped it off with chocolate. For a successful purge I would never, ever use cheese or peanut butter—they put too much stress on you when you try to bring them back up, glomming onto whatever else is in your system as a type of glue. The only exception to this was if I was in a particularly dark place, when the pain of trying to regurgitate large masses was what I thought I deserved.
My heart would start to beat faster in anticipation of the binge. Once started, always in front of the television to distract me from the insanity of what I was doing to myself, the key was to never stop and to keep drinking liquids throughout. If I had too much food in front of me and hadn’t budgeted enough Diet Coke, I would need to use water, though I can’t stress enough how unsatisfying it is to have tasteless water in among the various flavors. Having to use water was always a letdown, as I thought better of my bingeing skills.
The feelings you get when you’ve ingested that amount of food and drink are intense pain and a need to purge. Your body is actually telling you it’s at serious risk if you don’t get rid of everything you’ve ingested. The faster I could get out of my room and down the hall to the shared bathroom the better. A shared bathroom in the rooming house was potentially problematic, but not as much as the large shared facilities at Princeton had been. Here all I had to do was chart an appropriate time when others were out at work or, if that wasn’t possible, explain that I had the stomach flu. Again.
The sense of relief on purging that pain, on successfully making myself throw up, was indescribable. A sense of accomplishment at having planned and controlled everything at every step. Knowing that I and nobody else had caused my body that pain, and that I and nobody else had brought that subsequent pleasure. It’s my body, not his, and I, not he, will do whatever I want to it.
“Purging that pain.”
On some twisted level, it kind of makes sense now, doesn’t it?
I ENGAGED SOCIALLY whenever I could, and my peers would probably even say I was well liked and popular. As long as I was strong enough to put on the figurative mask, hide what was really going on with me, and confront the world at large, I was fun to be around. The emotional late-bloomer I had once been was now somewhat more mature than most of his peers, having had experiences most of them could never have understood.
Whenever I showed up, I greatly enjoyed law school. I found the subject matter fascinating, especially given my circumstances. It was an interesting perspective to have while sitting through a criminal law class, delving into the proper way to approach sentencing. The thing that struck me most was how easy it was for academics to diminish or ignore the victim, for while the cases are studied as historical disputes between contrasting legal principles that emerge to develop “the law,” the teaching of the law seldom, if ever, mentions, let alone focuses on, the victims.
It is a most inhumane way to look at things. The victims in all these cases were real people. Who were they? How did they live? How did the crime impact them? What were their struggles in the aftermath?
The legal system as taught when I was in school removed the victim from the equation. Thoughts of vengeance quite properly have no place in our judicial system. But at the same time, my peers and my criminal law professor seemed unable to consider that there were real people, victims, behind every case, and that there are indeed monsters among us for whom no sentence could ever be enough.
“MR. GILHOOLY. IT’S your turn today. Can you tell all of us what the rationale is for excluding this evidence in these circumstances?”
The details are mostly long gone. The example involved an offender who had committed a particularly heinous offence. The issue involved whether, to convict him, evidence could be introduced to show he had previously been convicted for similar crimes with similar sets of facts. Against that was a fear that such evidence of previous similar crimes would so cloud the judgment of anybody looking at this specific situation that the accused would suffer undue prejudice against him should it be introduced.
I
started to answer with trepidation, because I was pretty sure I was about to disagree with my professor, who had already telegraphed his approach to the law. I believed he would focus on the need for the system to protect the rights of the accused, the crux of mainstream legal teaching, and that the evidence should be excluded, that only the specific facts from this specific case mattered.
I understood and agreed in theory, but at the same time I disagreed and suggested that there needed to be a better balance between the rights of the offender and those of the rest of society. I disagreed with the concept that once an offender had served his or her time, he or she had done all that was required, and I suggested that perhaps we as a society should understand that the criminal, in committing the crime, had also flagged a willingness to breach the social contract and was responsible for whatever else went with that. I said that we as a society could in no way ever determine whether or not that criminal had been truly rehabilitated and that, accordingly, it would be naive for us to discount or ignore the fact that the criminal had already shown a willingness to break the law. I noted that, absolutely, against this was an obvious need to allow the criminal access to fair treatment in the future. But, I asked, does fair treatment mean we’re not entitled to draw inferences, especially where similar-fact situations warrant it? In the end, how do we find a balance? We can’t always default in favor of the criminal, can we?
“And,” I added, “what about the victim?”
The discussion was on. Of course the criminal deserves a second chance. Of course. Yet nowhere in the discussion was mention ever made of the victim other than to say that any talk of the victim invites vengeance. Not once did the professor or anyone in my class ever for a moment consider that the victim also needed to be rehabilitated, that the victim needed a second chance, that the victim needed to understand that society was taking steps to protect him or her.
I Am Nobody Page 12