Nobody Cares

by Anne T. Donahue

  Death’s cruel silver lining is that it forces us to reconsider life. It swoops in and reminds us there’s one thing we can never control. But at the same time, it eliminates the background noise. When it shows up, nobody remembers your Twitter stats or your best nine Instagram photos. Nobody gathers in small circles talking about your impressive bylines or marathon times or how terrific you looked in slacks. You are remembered for how you made people feel, how good a friend you were, how hard you fought, how you made everyone laugh, how when someone was speaking to you, you actually looked back at them and listened instead of scrolling through your phone. Death reduces us to our most basic, our best, our worst. It couldn’t care less about your Next Big Thing.

  So, no, we can’t control death. But we can control how we breathe, how we act, the type of work we do. We can control what we say yes or no to, control who we choose to surround ourselves with, control the way we make the people we love feel. We can decide to be kind, to try our best, and to be honest. Those are the things that outlive us. When we’re faced with the harshness of how quickly someone can be taken away, we also see how we’ll likely be remembered: as human beings who are far more than the successes and failures we tend to define ourselves by. After we’re dead, we just get to be people.

  Hometown Glory

  I’m from a city called Cambridge and an area called Hespeler, and I hated those things about me for a very long time.

  I grew up a proud Hespelerite. My dad and his brothers were raised in Hespeler, their parents still lived in Hespeler, and most of my friends were bred to happily represent H-Town — by going to Shamrocks hockey games or by starting fights with the girls we didn’t like from the Catholic high school I used to go to. Teen summers were like Dazed and Confused: we’d spend nights drinking in parking lots — or better, in the basements of friends whose Cool Parents didn’t care. One year, inspired by the movie Deuces Wild, a few of us nicknamed ourselves the Deuces and documented dozens of mall hangs, dinners, and joyrides on a handheld camcorder. (And every day, I’m thankful that footage has since been lost.) I loved being part of something that felt deeply rooted in community, and I thrived on the town pride that defined most of our adventures. I assumed that I’d grow up and marry my high school crush, and we’d raise our kids to love Hespeler too. And while it seemed like a small-town cliché — not to mention professionally limiting — I felt content with my overromanticized ideals of friends growing up to marry friends and expanding on the world our parents built for us.

  But my parents never built that world for me. Yes, they lived in Hespeler, and yes, my dad had grown up there, but neither pressured me to stay or to get married or to do anything but find a career that would ensure my financial independence. All they ever wanted was for me to be happy.

  Soon after graduating high school, friends moved away to Toronto, to London, to Australia, and the group I’d hung out with in high school weren’t really my friends anymore. Plus, I didn’t want to date or marry anybody I already knew: most of the guys I knew had grown into lovely young men, but we certainly weren’t romantically interested in each other. And the more I grew into the person I was becoming, the less I saw my future being defined by a specific part of town. So I decided to break up with Hespeler. And I started talking shit.

  Feeling cornered in my retail work as a result of my own academic floundering, I began lashing out at my hometown and painting it as an embarrassing, intolerant, and small-minded place that demanded a life defined by white picket fences and limited dreams. I fueled myself with that brand of resentment, using it as a way to excuse my inability to find my own place and my own spot and my own future.

  When I started university, I was at peak animosity. Seeing my hometown as a weakness I needed to parlay into a punchline before anybody else could, I accompanied my tales of Cambridge with eye-rolls and condescension, implying that I was somehow better than the whole populace while telling anybody who’d listen how my writing would take me far and away, where no one I’d grown up with would reach me. Friends who’d never heard of Cambridge or Hespeler congratulated me on “getting out” while I reveled in their understanding that I was obviously superior to the people I knew and loved. Sure, I had friends who still lived in Hespeler, and I had family who lived there, too, but none of that mattered compared to the narrative I got to write for myself. The one I would use to rise above them all.

  Which, despite the fact that I was faking it, is a classist, elitist, and dangerous way of thinking. But at no point had anyone made me feel small about my dreams or told me I couldn’t achieve something. Nobody had shamed me for being single or suggested setting me up with the only other person in the city who was unattached and/or unmarried as a means of fulfilling my destiny. Hespeler even had an arts community that likely would’ve been kind and welcoming if I’d chosen to join it. Instead, I chose to overlook the way it survived and thrived, and I focused on its inability to be like Toronto or New York, as if cities could just become that way. I told myself it was Hespeler’s fault I’d taken so long to find my way. And now it was time for it to suffer.

  So, shortly after I moved to Toronto, I wrote a blog post. After visiting home one weekend, I’d gone to a bar I used to hit up religiously and failed to have a good time. High on my belief that this meant I was better than every person that darkened its door, I wrote about it in a way I thought made me seem smarter and worldlier and worth more than everyone I’d spoken to that night. I wrote about friends’ relationships, chiding them for being with the same people for years, and wrote about people I didn’t like, blaming them and our inability to get along for why I’d felt so listless and unhappy during my teens. After I posted it, a friend commented, “We’re not that bad,” and I deleted her comment angrily, telling myself she couldn’t handle the truth. I had moved to the city and didn’t need their feedback or critiques. I was better than where I’d come from, and I took a mean joy in letting whoever was reading know it.

  Of course, I was the only person allowed to trash my hometown. While friends who’d moved were free to bad-mouth Cambridge and Hespeler, it hurt when music journalists I worked with poked fun at my hometown. But, scared to look uncool or oversensitive, I rolled with their punches and told them not to even bother mentioning Cambridge. I laughed at their jokes and tried to absorb their senses of superiority — even though the more I did it, the bigger the pit in my stomach became.

  And then I moved back. Poor and in debt and sick and sad, I moved back in with my parents in April 2012 and was forced to reconcile myself to what I deemed a massive step backwards. I told anyone I ran into that it was temporary, that I didn’t know where I was going but planned an inevitable move stateside. I said I wasn’t a huge fan of Toronto, and was reassessing my next steps. I said anything to cover the truth: that I didn’t hate being home. I liked being home. I liked Cambridge, and I liked Hespeler, and while I still didn’t want to get married or settle down there, I liked being close to people I really knew and who really knew me.

  But I also believed that you were defined by where you chose to live. And staying home meant being stagnant, job on the internet be damned.

  The thing about looping back is that it doesn’t mean you’re not moving forward. Life isn’t Super Mario Bros. Sometimes you have to retreat, reassess, and rebuild. For me, there was no aha moment or specific falling out with a friend that prompted me to reevaluate the way I’d been talking about people I knew or the town I grew up in. That’s because it takes an inordinate amount of time, therapy, reexamination, sobriety, and prescriptions to tear away your emotional shield. It takes rebuilding and accountability and painful realizations that you probably can’t come back from some of the things you’ve said and done. But I remember one winter day, about two years after moving back, when I looked at my hometown happily, reveling in its history and its messiness and the way it’s never been anything but itself. I remember feeling proud of where I was from because, like me,
it was also scrappy and complicated and storied and had seen some shit.

  They say you can’t go home again, but you can. And while it won’t be exactly the same, be thankful: neither will you. I’ve written about constants — about death and about insecurity and imposter syndrome — but one of my most important constants has been my hometown. It’s been Hespeler, where I spent the best nights of my teen years and also the worst. It’s been Cambridge, where I was awarded enough space to grow into the woman I am. The nights spent walking around, hanging out at the park, and sitting in various parking lots may seem throwaway as parts of larger stories, but they were the backdrops to real talks and problem-solving and emotional crises that shaped me. The friends I made are lifelong. And while we are not the same, and our dreams and lives are different, it doesn’t matter. Friendship isn’t about specifics. Life isn’t about specifics. We are always the sum of where we’ve been and what we’ve done.

  Last summer, a friend and I went to the Hespeler Reunion, a party that happens every ten years and takes place over a July weekend. My Uncle Bill emceed, and my Uncle Dan rode in the parade after being inducted into the Cambridge Sports Hall of Fame. I spent the afternoon with both of them, watching in awe as they shook what seemed like an endless stream of hands — of friends and acquaintances and even distant family members. And that night, I ran into almost every person I’d grown up with. I remember feeling happy and proud, relieved I was next to a best pal I’d grown up with, who could acknowledge the simultaneous awesomeness and ridiculousness of being catapulted back into the feeling that comes with being at a glorified high school reunion. But I still liked being there, running into former classmates I used to party with who were moms and dads or aunts and uncles or, like me, actively deciding whether or not to flirt with the person they’d liked in grade nine. I looked around the main street of my hometown, and felt proud to be part of a community who took recessions and economic hardships in stride. I felt proud to be related to my uncles and my dad and to come from a family with a lot of drama and even more grit. I was proud of the high school I’d gone to and of the teachers who’d pressed me to try harder (and of the teachers I’d resented enough to try and prove wrong). I was thankful for the people I’d grown up with, suddenly aware that I had always felt safe around most of them at parties (a low, albeit important, bar) and had learned the importance of respect through their own demand for it. I was thankful I’d worked at the McDonald’s across the street from my house that was just a step from where everyone hung out in the parking lot. I was — and am — so, so thankful for Hespeler and so lucky it was where I got to spend my time getting my shit back together.

  Last week, I moved out of my parents’ house after five years spent fixing my life from the comforts of my childhood bedroom. I moved someplace close to the remnants of an old factory that my grandma and grandpa and great-grandma worked at, and my balcony overlooks the row houses three generations of my family lived in. I’m two blocks from my dad’s childhood home and next to the hotel his grandma once ran. I am surrounded by history and by memories and by the imprints made by people responsible for me being alive right now. And while I’m not the same girl I was at 16, or the same woman I was at 25, or even the same person I was at the Hespeler Reunion (although I still have all the same clothes), I am the sum of those people and I wouldn’t be here (or me) without them.

  My favorite part of who I am is the result of where I’m from. And while the messiness of being alive has taught me never to presume to know where I’ll end up, Hespeler — and the people I love who live and lived here — will always be my home.

  Acknowledgments

  In the immortal words of Allison Janney accepting her Oscar, “I did it all by myself!”

  Just kidding. (Like she was.) Mostly.

  First, thank you to my agent, Carly Watters, who believed in me years ago when I pitched her the book that never actually got published. It’s meant a lot to have you in my corner and to know that even when I was beginning to lose faith in myself, you kept it. Our lives have changed a lot over the last half decade, but I’m so happy to still have you in mine.

  Thank you to Crissy Calhoun and Jen Knoch, who quickly morphed from my editors into family and therapists. You kept me together when coffee and fish and chips were my glue, and I wouldn’t trust anyone else to help me write about the best and worst parts of my life. Your patience, kindness, and willingness to listen have meant more to me than you could possibly know, and I still feel the same way I did when I first met you at ECW: Holy shit, I get to work with these women? We’re friends for life now. Deal with it.

  Thank you to Avril McMeekin and Rachel Ironstone, who combed through my copy to make sure I didn’t sound like a total disgrace. You’re as sharp-eyed as you are kind. (Read: very.)

  Thank you to Jessica Albert, whose embroidery skills stopped me dead in the mall when she sent me the cover art. How dare you be so good at something I will never, ever have the patience for. And thank you to Natalie Olsen, who turned said embroidery into such a beautiful cover. It’s super hard not to take credit for your work, and I resent you for having such an amazing eye.

  Thank you to Susannah Ames for not running out of the ECW boardroom when I used a series of expletives to convey how serious I was about getting to work. I went full “I’ll show you how valuable Elle Woods can be!” and you championed it. I’m sorry for how many emails I’ve sent and will send in the future.

  Thank you to Nicole Villeneuve for being the first person to read this book and for making me feel like it was finally real and something to be proud of. I may not have siblings, but you will always be my sister. (Whether you want to be or not.) I am proudly the Dwight to your Michael.

  Thank you to Scaachi Koul, who fielded my countless questions about book writing for months and held my hand through many small meltdowns. Your friendship and support kept me afloat through some hellish moments, and while I know you’ll hate everything I just said, believe me when I say that I don’t care and I adore you. Let’s go shopping.

  Thank you to Jessica Hopper, Emma Gannon, and Dolly Alderton, who were always very quick to remind me that it was natural to want to walk into the ocean after reading and rereading your own writing a million times. I owe you each many dinners for texting and emailing me back so quickly, and for creating work that inspires me constantly.

  Thank you to my editor-turned-friend-turned-manager-but-still-friend, Sara Koonar. You’ve helped me remember to be myself and stop comparing my work and trajectory to anybody else’s. If I could include a gif of Rihanna crowning herself here, I would. You are a true queen.

  Thank you to the editors I’ve worked with and am still working with. You’ve all helped shape me into a writer whose work is actually readable.

  Thank you to my grandpa, Antanas Laugalys, and my aunts, uncles, and cousins. Even when you had no idea what my job actually was, you’ve always been nothing but supportive.

  Thank you to the Dell’Aquila and Franks families, who I grew up with and never let me think for a second that I should give up and quit even when I felt like an absolute failure. Erica Dell’Aquila and Catie Brooks, in particular: there’s no one else I’d want to have survived Catholic school with.

  Thank you to Sarah Hagi and Kiva Reardon, who forced me to get psyched about work and life and this godforsaken book, especially after casually flashing the cover art in a Chapters and saying, “It’s not a big deal!” to your quite-appropriate looks of “What is actually wrong with you?” I love you so much, let’s go eat steak.

  Thank you to the friends who reminded me through all of this that it was okay to be vulnerable (ugh) and have feelings (terrible): Randi Bergman, Judith Ellen Brunton, Alexandra Donaldson, Sara Hennessy, Jessica Hobson, Ashley Kowalewski-Pizzi, Ashley King, Carly Maga, Sarah MacDonald, Amanda Brooke Perrin, Steph Perrin, Amanda Renaud, Alana Wakeman. I put you all in alphabetical order because I don’t want anyone to know I�
��ve ranked you guys.

  Finally, thank you to the staff at Starbucks on Hespeler Road in Cambridge. I would’ve perished without those lactose-free concoctions, and see? I told you I’d thank you in the book.

  About the Author

  Anne T. Donahue is a writer and person from Cambridge, Ontario. Her work has appeared in publications and websites such as Esquire, Marie Claire, Cosmopolitan, Playboy, Nylon, Flare, and Rookie. She is the host of the podcast Nobody Cares (Except for Me), and has contributed to CBC’s q. You can absolutely find her on Twitter and Instagram at @annetdonahue, baking or screaming into the night.

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