I arrived in Winnipeg on October 2, 1990. It was a Tuesday. I had the clothes I was wearing and a few hundred dollars. Within a few weeks I got a job. It was part-time working in a hotel.
I also found a place to live. It was a room in a rooming house. A rooming house has shared kitchen and bathrooms, and very cheap rent. Having a job and a place to live gave me the perfect opportunity to finish high school. I enrolled at Daniel McIntyre Collegiate Institute and started there in January of 1991.
The rooming house I moved into had some real characters living there. Most of them were on welfare, but there were a few with jobs as well. Many of my roommates had mental illnesses. Ronald Bruce Clay had schizophrenia. Tim Anthony had dysthymia, which is a mild form of chronic depression. Mark Proznik had manic depression and there were a few others with depression.
As if that weren’t enough, the place I moved into was right across the street from the Health Sciences Center, which is Winnipeg’s largest General Hospital. The house itself was one block over from the Adult Mental Health building, which as I learned, is where people who are depressed go for treatment.
I was no longer carrying that piece of paper in my pocket, the one that listed the reasons for why I thought my dream was real or not. However, I still remembered reason number 3 of why I thought it was just a dream.
Whatever ignorance I had about mental illness and depression was completely wiped clean living in that house. It was as if God himself took me by the scruff of the neck and immersed me in it. Exactly one year later I learned that people really do go to the hospital when they are depressed.
As shocked as I was to learn that, my stubbornness remained. I thought about Neve a lot back then. I still remembered her being a very happy girl when we played together as kids. She was getting paid to take ballet, which she loved. She had everything going for her. I desperately wanted to believe that she could not possibly have any reason to be depressed.
I also found a place to live. It was a room in a rooming house. A rooming house has shared kitchen and bathrooms, and very cheap rent. Having a job and a place to live gave me the perfect opportunity to finish high school. I enrolled at Daniel McIntyre Collegiate Institute and started there in January of 1991.
The rooming house I moved into had some real characters living there. Most of them were on welfare, but there were a few with jobs as well. Many of my roommates had mental illnesses. Ronald Bruce Clay had schizophrenia. Tim Anthony had dysthymia, which is a mild form of chronic depression. Mark Proznik had manic depression and there were a few others with depression.
As if that weren’t enough, the place I moved into was right across the street from the Health Sciences Center, which is Winnipeg’s largest General Hospital. The house itself was one block over from the Adult Mental Health building, which as I learned, is where people who are depressed go for treatment.
I was no longer carrying that piece of paper in my pocket, the one that listed the reasons for why I thought my dream was real or not. However, I still remembered reason number 3 of why I thought it was just a dream.
Whatever ignorance I had about mental illness and depression was completely wiped clean living in that house. It was as if God himself took me by the scruff of the neck and immersed me in it. Exactly one year later I learned that people really do go to the hospital when they are depressed.
As shocked as I was to learn that, my stubbornness remained. I thought about Neve a lot back then. I still remembered her being a very happy girl when we played together as kids. She was getting paid to take ballet, which she loved. She had everything going for her. I desperately wanted to believe that she could not possibly have any reason to be depressed.
