If you missed my first few dispatches & would like to read them, please find them here! 🧡
A quick note: Dispatches, fairytale poems, and poems-in-progress are on pause! I’ve pre-scheduled this post + The Little Mermaid Part 8 next week. These were both meant for July, but took me much longer to write than anticipated. I’ll be away from writing here until September 14th, navigating rest + some personal things. Please look forward to more essays & poems in mid-September! Thank you all so very much for reading. 🤍
***
On the evening of July 8, 2026, I walked down steep concrete steps to the court after watching the Toronto Tempo play the Golden State Valkyries at Coca-Cola Colosseum. The jumbotron still cast a bruise-purple hue across the empty plastic seats, haloed by decades of Toronto Marlies’ jerseys. One of my best friends plays for the Valkyries, and when I reached the bottom step, I perched in the court-level stadium seats waiting for her to exit the locker room.
My hands shook as I slipped my jean jacket over my shoulders to hide sweaty armpits, though no one would’ve noticed anything; the dim lighting was meant for a white, reflective hockey rink, and the residue of beer, popcorn, and poutine hovered in the stale air. I bowed my head so that my curly bangs shadowed my eyes, and very nearly put my sunglasses back on as I saw others descending toward the court—others who, ten years ago, knew me very well.
I timed my upward glance poorly, accidentally making direct eye contact with a Team Canada staff member and former teammate. But as I tried to suppress that feeling of falling at the edge of a dream, they kept walking.
I’ve long been afraid of being recognized by the coaches and teammates of my past—many of whom I haven’t spoken to in a decade. Surely, I’d need to explain myself, my life, and why I don’t play basketball anymore. But when the time came, as I knew it eventually would, it was the look of ‘un-recognition’ that startled me. Realistically, they were busy and preoccupied. I know this. What unsettled my heart was that I not only felt relief, but that it wasn’t tinged with hurt.
Later that night, on the 11:00 p.m. train home, “Neverland,” from the Broadway Musical, Finding Neverland, played on shuffle in my headphones. All children grow up, don’t they? Except one, so it’s said—the one who famously lost his shadow in the Darling children’s nursery.
I wondered: Did my coach and teammate not recognize me now? If I were still playing basketball, would it be in a sort of Neverland? If I ran into them, not shadowless but ignorant of ever having one, would they have recognized me? Perhaps. But I know my shadows well now—hopefully well enough that they no longer detach from my feet and reattach to others.
***
In mid-December 2015, my high school team played in a tournament at the ESPN Wide World of Sports Complex on Walt Disney World property (Lake Buena Vista). The resorts, parks, transportation systems, and complexes alike were dripping in lights and holiday decor, bolstering the already immersive theming. I’m certain the three-person pirate ships flew on the Peter Pan ride in Fantasyland, and Tinkerbell, surely, rode that glittering zipline from Cinderella Castle.
But I don’t remember seeing either. And I don’t remember any of our games.
A few months prior, my grandma had suffered a stroke after walking home from my basketball game. At this point in December, she was still in the hospital, unable to speak. On December 6, one of my childhood friends, also an athlete, had died by suicide. In succession, and with the pressure to perform, I became someone I never meant to be on this trip.
The only way I could grasp control was by (obnoxiously) showing my team around a place I knew eerily well...
In her book, A Flat Place, Noreen Masud explores ‘empty’ landscapes, naming complex trauma that “flattens her emotions, blanks out parts of her memory, and colours her world with anxiety.” Before it was Lake Buena Vista, the land that Walt Disney World (WDW) sits on was a marshland called Reedy Creek. Did my body know, somehow, what once lay beneath the pixie dust-sprinkled sidewalks and parades? That the land was purchased slyly for almost nothing, because marshlands and flatlands are violently dismissed ecosystems? Maybe. But what I did know was this property—embarrassingly well—as one might know the house they grew up in.
Up to that point in my life, I’d never had friends over to my house. No one, except in a plumbing or electrical emergency, has ever set foot in my childhood home (besides my immediate family). Truthfully, I’m not at liberty to share why. But walking around those theme parks with my team—the only place besides my grandparents’ house that I visited every year prior to playing sports—felt like the next closest thing to having friends over (when I needed that feeling most).
WDW was the first place that pain didn’t quite touch—before I ever picked up a basketball. Growing up was learning what a profound privilege and deep devastation that was.
One evening during that December trip, a teammate asked about waiting in line for one of the faster rides as the park neared closing (the rule was that you had to be ‘in line’ before the park officially closed). But in this park, in particular, there was also a show—my favourite—that began at park closing. You had to choose one or the other.
As lights strobed to animated movie scores, blaring through the park’s hidden speakers, I stopped walking and sat down on a red-painted picnic bench. Cotton candy stuck to my shoes as I scanned the table for a space without spilled Coke or ice cream sludge. My head fell into my hands, and I broke down. The entrance to the ride was adjacent to the show’s amphitheatre seating. Most of my teammates chose the ride over the show, and I wept.
I was humiliated at the time, but now, I see a scared young woman who just wanted to share something—somewhere—with anyone. And who desperately wanted control.
Every flavour of grief and loneliness I’d ever tasted intersected in that moment. Years of teammates and coaches have teased me, over time, for how much I “loved” Disney movies, songs, and characters. My family loved them, too. Disney was a seemingly permanent anchor for a whole lot of pain.
My grandma’s stroke would shift her home away from a place of refuge. And in the wake of my friend’s death, I thought about suicide every day until I attempted in February 2017.
During my senior year, between September 2015 and June 2016, I told several friends—who were on that high school team—that I was dying because I couldn’t tell the truth.
I dragged black eye shadow under my eyes to look the part; a gradual, visible decay felt like the only doorway to being offered care. And the only way my pain could be seen and validated.
I often say that multiple, seemingly conflicting truths can coexist. But there’s tension between them. I captained Team Canada the summer between my senior year of high school and my suicide attempt in February 2017.
How do I hold that alongside everything else, compressed into just a few years? A loud, controlling, dictating person everyone hates in a theme park. A tortured manipulator. And a leader on a global stage, voted as such by her teammates.
This is the task of our lives, arguably. We are Peter, Wendy, Tinkerbell, Captain Hook, and The Lost Boys—at the same time.
***
As a teenager, I was completely unaware of my shadow, roaming around telling manipulative lies with the wound of separation from my body. As you can imagine, this is a part of my life I’m not proud of.
But I think about Neverland now, and how fervently I’ve healed in the past ten years. If I’d remained in certain spaces, literally and metaphorically, I wouldn’t have grown up in the ways I’ve needed to. In this sense, ‘growing up’ isn’t an insult or a threat. It means knowing where our shadow is. It means growing into the grief that our shadow is always younger than us.
Over the years, I’ve been gifted immense support from exceptional people—many Wendys who’ve sewn my shadow back on while I clawed to get away. And I’m glad, truthfully, that my coach and teammate didn’t recognize me. Indeed, I look different. But if the eyes truly are a window to the soul, then my soul must have looked different, too, when I made eye contact. Unrecognizable.
The truth is that I’ll always recognize my seventeen-year-old self. That’s the shadow I cast and carry. Most importantly, I’m not here to make excuses for harm I caused under the guise of vulnerability. But when I look into the sky and see the second star to the right, I’m grateful I didn’t follow it until morning. I’m grateful that I hauled that anchor up on deck, tucked it away, and learned to dock with new people and places again. I’m grateful that I spent a long night awake in the dark, terrifying as it was, because eventually, I learned to believe that morning would come, always with the light necessary for shadow.
Out Now…
A new issue, hot off the press at The 44 North, featuring my own writing but so much more.
The next installment of my fairytales-in-verse series: “The Little Mermaid” - Part 7. Part 8 coming next week!
For the one-and-only, wonderful Conscious Writers Collective, I write previews for our upcoming guest speakers! Take a peek here.
Full archive here ❤️🔥
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