An Intentional Canuck?

So, yesterday, in a windowless room on St. Clair Avenue, along with 78 other "newcomers," at approximately 2:30 p.m., after enduring the tiresome windbaggery of a citizenship judge, I repeated a handful of meaningless words with my hand in the air and mysteriously, magically, finally became Canadian.

And, exhale.

Weird sensations accompanied this event. I was undoubtedly excited and happy for it to happen, but in the days leading up to it, whenever someone looked to me for a reaction, I found myself forcing the exuberance I felt they were expecting. I tried to explain it to T when he did the same: it's too complex, too faceted to reduce to a single response. Perhaps it should be as simple as "Goal Achieved: Celebrate!" But it just isn't.

I suppose I first became aware of issues of geographical access when I was about 15, and along with this awareness was the slightly desperate realization that I was not among the privileged. Ever since then, 25 years of life, this single issue has driven my choices, governed my fears, and imposed a sense of helplessness and victimhood, perhaps more than any other factor, including money or sexuality. In many ways, I am a product of it; it created facets of me that I cannot even begin to enumerate. I have hated it; but it has also been a constant, a seam of the exotic to distinguish my life and character from everyone else's. It has formed my political views, my religious views; for the past 20 years, it has forced me into a consistently adversarial position with my social and political environment. It has also been a convenient excuse for underachievement. And like anyone under the sway of an oppressive force for long enough, a part of me loves it. The difference, the soapbox, the cross borne. It's a bit insane to say it, but a part of me mourned it in the days leading up to yesterday.

But I'm sort of over it all now. The ceremony itself was a lot of fun: a bunch of friends and coworkers came out, and I felt playful and powerful. On the not-serious suggestion of the pretty Taiwanese girl next to me, I put my maple-leaf pin in my ear as an earring and strode proudly up to accept my certificate. It was being there and doing that, feeling the waves of success and support, that I came around to T's feeling. For him, this is an absolutely extraordinary achievement that we pulled off against towering odds. This is the culmination of years of fear and fatigue and desperation and loneliness, the culmination we couldn't always properly envision, but for which we stuck it out all the same. This is the turning point. I have no time to grieve the ousted oppressor.

Country is nonsense. In this view I have not changed. Expressions of allegiance to objects, abstracts, notions, hereditary figureheads—drivel. Maudlin, misty-eyed anthems that momentarily create the illusion of unity and meaning and history, but which are little more than socio-political expedients to consolidate obedience around a set of geographical accidents. I do not ever foresee myself self-referring as "Canadian" with any degree of pride or ownership—but not with shame, either. The patriots will balk (and some already have), but this is about, in the end, nothing but access. The access that is allowed to some (the minority), often through an accident of birth, and arbitrarily withheld from others. That's what I've wanted all this time: simply access to occupy this world as fully and with as much permission as we all deserve.