LOAD BEARING

After the strokes, I began referring to them as “the fire.” It was the closest analogy I had for what happened to me. There had been destruction, confusion, collapse, panic, and afterward came the accounting process. I kept thinking about the things I had lost or nearly lost in the fire: my voice for a period of time, confidence, certainty, endurance, energy, and parts of my body that no longer responded the same way. The version of myself that existed before April 2023 was gone.

What frightened me most afterward was sleep. That sounds strange because sleep was also the thing my body required in order to heal. Every specialist, every doctor, and every article I read pointed toward rest. My brain needed sleep desperately, sleep stopped feeling restorative and started feeling like surrender. Exhaustion always won because post-stroke fatigue is unlike anything I had ever experienced before.

It was not ordinary tiredness. It was cognitive, a kind of neurological tsunami that could arrive without warning and flatten everything in its path. I could feel myself functioning normally one moment and then become completely depleted the next, as though my brain had reached a limit it no longer worked past. Before the strokes I could force myself through almost anything with enough stubbornness, adrenaline, caffeine, anger, or momentum. Afterward my brain  stopped negotiating with me. That was difficult to accept.

I still require more sleep than I used to, and I tire differently . But I am no longer as afraid of sleep, but I also no longer fear death with the same sharpness I once did. If I do not wake up one day, so what, that feeling of terror doesn’t exist anymore. Sadness perhaps. Loss certainly, but definitely not terror. It feels inevitable in a way I resisted before.

What took me longer to understand was that fire also reveals structure. When enough burns away, you finally see what was load-bearing. That has followed me through almost every aspect of my life since.

Before the strokes, much of my life had been organized around protection. Some of that was conscious and some of it deeply subconscious. I spent years trying to become large enough not to get hurt. I wanted to feel physically larger, socially larger, financially larger, allm in an effort to be difficult to dismiss. I built armor in every direction I could think of.

Some of it was literal. I weightlifted, covered myself in tattoos, shaved my head every Monday morning with ritualistic consistency, and rode motorcycles. I took up physical space intentionally when I entered rooms. I relied on humor, competence, and usefulness. I became professionally indispensable. I became the person who could solve problems, organize complexity, manage pressure, and build impossible things on impossible deadlines.

And honestly, much of it worked. The larger I became physically and socially, the safer I felt. I grew up feeling vulnerable, so I began constructing myself to prevent future harm. Some people become invisible. Some become agreeable. Some disappear entirely. I became visible on purpose. I wanted to be large enough that people left me alone before conflict even started. Large enough that nobody shoulder-checked me in hallways anymore. Large enough that I rarely felt physically vulnerable in public or private spaces again. There is grief attached to how much of my identity had been constructed around avoiding pain. The strokes interrupted all of it, philosophically and biologically. My body and brain decided they had different plans.

That loss of negotiation changed something fundamental in me. Before the strokes I believed, somewhat arrogantly, that discipline and force of will could overcome almost anything. If something hurt, I pushed harder. If something was exhausting, I kept moving. If something frightened me, I became louder, sharper, faster, or more impressive. Momentum itself became part of the armor.

None of that mattered afterward. My body no longer cared about momentum. That was terrifying for a while, but something else emerged from it. The anger I had carried for years dissolved. Even when I was funny, successful, or productive, there had always been anger underneath everything. Some of it was earned, some inherited, and some created through years of feeling unsafe in ways I did not fully recognize.

That anger is gone now. What replaced it feels better. That may be one of the largest changes of all. I care deeply now, sometimes overwhelmingly so. I cry far more easily than I used to. Emotional regulation has become inconsistent at times. Certain conversations, stories, or experiences hit me with a level of emotional weight I previously would have deflected with humor, work, or anger. Some of that vulnerability has been uncomfortable. Some of it has been humiliating. But some of it also feels strangely honest.

For most of my life, intensity had been easier for me to access than peace. Momentum felt safer than stillness. Anger felt more functional than vulnerability. Even silence often felt defensive rather than restful.

I once heard Bruce Lee say that peace is not something you find, it is something you choose. That stayed with me because I am not entirely sure I understood the difference until after the strokes. Silence feels different to me now. Less reactive. Less protective. More intentional. I do not know whether that arrived through exhaustion, neurological rewiring, age, or some combination of all three, but the effect has been substantial.

I still shave my head every Monday. I still weightlift. I still ride motorcycles, partly because reclaiming my balance after the strokes became enormously important to me. That word keeps returning now: balance. Physical balance. Emotional balance. Psychological balance. The motorcycle feels different now too. I no longer ride because I need to appear masculine, intimidating, or larger. I ride because the experience makes me feel present inside my own body . I no longer feel the need to enter rooms loudly. Oddly, I carry more presence now than I did when I was trying much harder to project it intentionally.

Presence and intimidation are not the same thing. That arrived through the people who stepped into my life before and after the strokes. Eddie, Archie, Rose, Jen, Pieter, Colin, Kelley Ann, Patrick, Rebecca, Kirsten, Caitlin, Wendy, Janna and most importantly my mother. Countless others showed up when I needed them most. Most of them were not trying to rescue me. They were present. They remained. They listened. They made space. They helped stabilize me long enough that I could eventually stabilize myself.

That understanding altered my relationship to my artwork itself. Before all of this, I spent most of my life manufacturing physical things. Monumental things made of steel, lighting systems, architectural installations, and public artwork. I spent years in fabrication shops that were covered in metal dust and noise while coordinating welders, electricians, engineers, programmers, fabricators, logistics teams, installers, and artists trying to move impossible ideas into physical reality.

There is something satisfying about watching cranes lift a finished piece into place after months or years of work. Standing in front of an object and knowing I helped build it creates a particular kind of pride. But after nearly dying, everything became clear. The steel won’t come with me. The objects won’t come with me. The installations, awards, scale, and perception of success do not follow me either. The only thing that remains are experiences.

That reorganized my understanding of value completely. I became less interested in creating static objects and more interested in creating experiences people physically move through. Transformation of Dangerous Spaces is not an object. Neither is The Listening Room or The Crucible. Neither is this book. They are all containers people enter temporarily. The real artwork exists afterward inside memory, reflection, discomfort, silence, and conversation.

I saw that clearly during the first Listening Room. One attendee later described  “The room itself shifted throughout the evening. People initially hesitated to clap after speakers shared their stories because applause felt inappropriate against the weight of what had been said. Gradually applause emerged, hand by hand, until the room developed a kind of collective attentiveness where everybody understood instinctively how to behave inside the space.”

That is why immersive and experiential work feels more honest to me than object-making. It asks for something active from people. It asks for presence, attention, reflection, and witness. Perhaps I needed those things myself long before I understood how to ask for them.

There is another u truth I have been approaching. I was not living honestly before the strokes, not dishonestly in a malicious sense, but structurally. Much of my identity had become performance organized around safety, capability, usefulness, and control. The larger the armor became, the harder it was for anything genuine to reach me through it.

The irony is that it took catastrophic vulnerability to dismantle enough of that armor for presence to emerge. Not completely, of course. I am still myself. I still love beautiful objects, motorcycles, cars expensive eye cream, and good lighting, plus all the pleasures that make life enjoyable. Thank goodness… I would be unbearable otherwise.

There is less performance now. There is  less energy available to maintain it. The strokes reduced my capacity to sustain the constructed version of myself indefinitely. Certain illusions became exhausting. Certain social performances became difficult to justify. Some things  require more energy than my nervous system is willing to provide.

Oddly, that exhaustion created clarity. One of the most emotional parts of this experience has been watching the work begin evolving beyond me. Researchers are interested in studying whether experiential artwork can create measurable shifts in the conversations surrounding intimate partner violence and gender-based violence. Municipalities across Canada continue expressing interest in hosting it. Organizations want to participate. People offer help before persuasion is required.

That still feels surreal to me because I spent so many years helping other people with their visions. Supporting other people’s voices. Fabricating other people’s ideas into existence. This is the first time I get to stand inside my own work. For two decades I worked inside fabrication, architectural systems, lighting, experiential environments, and public installations. Some of those projects were enormous, beautiful, technically ambitious, and publicly celebrated. I became very good at helping others see their complex visions at scale.

There is safety in that role. I devoted most of my professional life to building culture while remaining slightly protected from it at the same time. The risk belonged somewhere else. The architect’s name was attached to the building. The artist’s name was attached to the installation. The institution absorbed the criticism. The client absorbed the rejection. Someone else became the visible author while I remained the invisible infrastructure underneath it.

I do not say that bitterly. I genuinely loved much of that work. There is something satisfying about helping impossible things become physically real. But part of me also understood instinctively that building other people’s visions carried far less danger than risking my own. Because once the work becomes mine, the rejection becomes mine too.

That terrified me more than I admitted for many years. It is one thing to fabricate a monumental public artwork for another artist. It is another thing entirely to stand publicly beside my own idea, my own philosophy, and my own emotional architecture and say, “This came from me.” There is nowhere to hide after that. No client. No institution. No creative buffer. No emotional distance. If people reject my work, they reject something much closer to my interior life.

That is why Transformation of Dangerous Spaces took so long to emerge publicly even though pieces of it had likely existed inside me for years. The project required something psychologically different from me than fabrication ever had. It required authorship, visibility, vulnerability, and exposure. It required me to stop hiding inside usefulness.

The strokes accelerated that transition because surviving them altered my relationship to time itself. The idea of spending the remainder of my life suppressing my own voice began feeling impossible to sustain. The “fire” changed the math. Afterward, I no longer wanted to help construct objects for other people. I wanted to risk leaving behind something unmistakably mine. Something monumental.

I cannot fully understand the metaphorical dimensions of TDS. Maybe I never will. But I no longer think uncertainty is a failure. This uncertainty may just be the condition of living inside something while it is still becoming itself.

I have also become aware of how certainty behaves in rooms. The same voices. The same men. The same confidence delivered with absolute rigidity. Politics. Religion. Morality. Masculinity. Ideology. People perform that certainty as dominance.

And perhaps that is part of what this work is reacting against . I have lost interest in people who possess absolute answers for everything. I am much more interested in people capable of uncertainty without paralysis. People capable of remaining present inside difficult questions long enough to hear something underneath their own noise.

That may ultimately be what I am trying to create. A container for discomfort, honesty, silence, contradiction, and reflection. A container where people can sit with themselves long enough to see something they may have spent years avoiding. This book may also be trying to become that kind of space. An honest accounting from somebody trying to understand what remained after the fire and what still deserved to be rebuilt afterward.

I am not finished understanding any of it yet. Perhaps that is the point.