Feed Your Good Wolf

I can definitely recall at least three separate times in my life where I’ve teared up in a Starbucks. There’s something about Starbucks nowadays which seems to make it socially-accepted receptacle for this sort of basic human activity. I mean, its pretty much an internationally-recognised public toilet nowadays, in addition to a cheap crack service in the form of over-sugared, over-caffeinated drinks. And Starbucks is the perfect setting for emotional wobblies in public, it’s simultaneously cosmopolitan and gritty. You can’t go either way beyond Starbucks, either. Something about “I cried over my gluten-free red velvet muffin this little independent cafe in Kensington” says that you take yourself too seriously — you’re not trying out for a guest role in Lena Dunham’s Girls, for chrissakes — meanwhile “I cried over my breakfast bagel in Tim Hortons,” is very sad and probably means that your life really needs a good looking-at.

But I was so over emotional wobblies in Starbucks — the only reason I was having one here right now was because of the lack of wifi in my apartment, otherwise I’d be wobbly-ing in private. Harriet and Mum were trying to jivvy me up with some sense of excitement for this whole Canada Phase 2 thing. I’d finished my internship only three days before, and already I was wallowing in this sense of Extreme Loneliness and dejection. I’d been looking at life with the Lonely Lens: you know in those Disney cartoons when the lead character has lost their companion, and they’re walking sorrowfully through a park and literally every living thing they see is paired up with another of its kind, even the bloody butterflies seem to be going steady. That’s how I felt — not really in a romantic sense, but more of a friendship sense. Where were my butterflies?

The main part of the problem was that (and still is, I guess) I wasn’t making an effort to connect with people. That initial “woo-hoo” feeling that I rode in on when I came to Canada was gone, but it was now almost halfway through the year and I still felt the same sort of alone-ness that I had when I first arrived. I’d made connections but now one was planting trees in Saskatchewan and the other might as well have been planting trees in Saskatchewan, for all I cared. I took this lack of friends as a sign to focus on myself and become STRONG and INDEPENDENT and CREATIVE, but now all I was feeling was overwhelmingly lonely.

Mum and Harriet told me about an allegory they’d heard, a Native American tale that explained how there lives two wolves inside of us: the first wolf is the Good Wolf, your source of positivity, strength and kindness; the second wolf is the Bad Wolf, the one that fills you with hate, sadness and worry. These wolves fight inside of us, and which wolf wins? The winning wolf is the wolf you feed.

“Feed your good wolf!” they clamoured at me through Skype. I laughed and pictured my good wolf: he was a lot like a wolf I’d seen on Sesame Street as part of their Three Little Pigs Sketch — there’s a police line-up, and the pigs have to identify the criminal that blew their houses down. As part of the group that the police call in, there’s a Small Bad Wolf, a Big Bad Chicken, and a Big Good Wolf, who comes in, sniffing a bouquet of flowers. He’s absolutely adorable, and he is my Big Good Wolf, who I need to feed.

It shouldn’t be too difficult to feed my Good Wolf in this setting. My apartment is in an incredibly leafy, lovely part of town, with big houses full of families. My room is clear and bright and cool, and there’s a stoop outside the front door which I can sit on in the sun, in fact I’m sitting and writing there right now. Just down the road is the West YMCA gym, which is a bit of a step-up from the Trinity-Bellwoods Community Centre, let me tell ya. On these warm nights I can walk around the block without the fear of being accosted by some toothless madman (ah, Parkdale), I can instead look up to the sky and see constellations, and if I want to I can take myself ten minutes down the road to Little Italy for Sicilian ice-cream. The only thing that is missing is people to share this all with.

My new flatmates are nice, but not really friendship material. They’re all guys, and I like to think of them as my own brand of X-Men. First of all, there’s Sergei, who was the first to arrive after I moved in. I was only having a minor panic as I sat in my new bedroom and heard the whirring sound of a 6-foot Ukranian wielding a power drill as he set up his furniture. My sister and I joked that the power drill is actually one of his many interchangeable appendages at the end of his arms — one day it could be a spatula, the next, a screwdriver. Then there’s Nadim, or as I like to call him, The Texan Mind-Bender. Nadim is in Toronto for the summer on an internship which has got to do with an engineering project which sounds a lot like telekinesis, like, a lot. And he's from Texas. So he’s the Professor X of the group. Then there’s Chris. Chris hasn’t moved in yet, so he is the Invisible Man. All the guys are nice but they serve their purpose as flatmates just fine: clean, quiet, courteous.

So it’s up to me to make a move over these next couple of weeks. In addition to finding a new job (because the cafe I was talking about last week fell through — boo!), I’m going to try and make some friends. Oh, and I’m going to try and write a novel in a month (but more on THAT farce LATER!). Those are the long-term goals for this summer. The short-term one is simple: eat clean, exercise, practice gratitude and feed my good wolf.