Although the roots of my journey with Mad Pride extend back to 2006, when I was invited to join a fellow survivor in Vancouver for a gallery event at Gallery Gachet, it wouldn’t be until my break from reality that I would become more heavily involved with my local chapter, and the birthplace of Mad Pride, Toronto.

Later in that same year, I felt a call to focus deeply on my soul, not sure as to where to take my life. I had made poor life choices, was a heavy cigarette smoker, and felt drawn to better myself. Dreams began to get very strange, I became obsessed with interpreting the tarot, and using the ouija board. One day, while smoking marijuana and focusing on opening my mind’s eye, something went strange, and I felt flooded with horror. Without going into too many details, my break from reality meant a call to compose myself while under the circumstances, for it felt that I was being invaded by an evil spirit. (I had had weird experiences with ouija boards as a 14 year old in high school, and this was all coming back, once again.)

I was thrown into a visionary state with symphonies of sound, compositions that might as well have been Tchaikovsky, only never written, angels, devils, trance states, channeling, glossolalia, kinetic bodily movements resembling yoga positions, energy body shapeshifting… the kind of thing one might experience in a shamanic initiatory crisis, or a variant of kundalini awakening. Of course, this led me to psychiatry, and at one point, a community treatment order. Later, I was hospitalized for long term care, one month shy of a year in CAMH’s Unit 2-3. Life was a disaster.

It was later in 2009 that I got involved with the Empowerment Council, and began talking to Lucy Costa about the local Mad Pride chapter. I was able, later, to get involved with the organizing committee, and took part in the Toronto Mad Pride Bed Push for 2009. All the while, I was hard at work on my first completed graphic novel, “Asylum Squad Side Story: The Psychosis Diaries”. The psychiatrist in long term care had diagnosed me with schizoaffective disorder, which I never fully embraced, although when I was promoted in the media, it was sometimes suggested I identified with this condition. I would later shed that interpretation entirely, but I will get into that in a moment.
There was a contest one year for Mad Pride Toronto to design a logo to represent the city’s mad movement, and I happily entered a design I came up - a pictogram of a person shouting, breaking a chain, with the expression “The right to be free, the right to be me”, which was a protest of forced treatment. It was accepted by the committee as the logo they wanted to use. Little did I know until years later, Mad Pride chapters all over the world would adopt a similar logo.

Also, in an experiment to come up with a flag, I once hosted a site called “Mad Pride Flag Design Campaign”, where fellow activists and I experimented with designs for potential Mad Pride flags. Later, I would find out that one I created was adopted - a pink and purple striped flag based on the Cheshire Cat of the old Disney’s “Alice in Wonderland” cartoon. I have since seen swag online promoting it. It is such an honour that two things I created for Mad Pride activism resonated enough to make it in the movement overseas.

My father passed away in 2017, which was a major turning point in my life, and in my soul’s journey. I decided to knuckle down on solving what made me unwell. After more soul searching with St. Jude and Jesus, it hit me that my fight with the dark spirit was in fact real, so instead of ignoring it like it was a delusion, which was the advice psychiatry gave me, I took arms with crucifixes, holy water, trips to the local cathedral with my rosary, and anything I could think of, Catholic or otherwise, to solve it. It seems I did solve levels of it in 2018, when I used sweetgrass and invocations of seraphic angels to bring about the beginning of the end. I had learned to embrace my Anglo-Catholic roots, but with an eclectic vibe, and the more I worked on it like it was a legitimate religious conflict, the healthier I got. Treating the problem like it wasn’t real kept me sick, treating it like a real battle got me out of it. What’s also wild (and my mother can confirm this) is that the rosary I used to fight this problem transmuted from pink plastic beads to white glass ones, after a certain point in the struggle! This to me was a sign from God that it all meant something.

It was around this time that I began my current blog, “The Wayward Nun” (waywardnun.blogspot.com), where I catalogue my process of recovering from spiritual madness, and my journey with art and spirituality.  Often the blog was disjointed, angry, bleak even, and some of my conclusions were not quite there yet (some of the odder things I did included putting holy water in a bong while smoking pot, and offering to gods who would never work with me), but as time went on, the writing improved as my psychology improved.  I now identify as a mystic, as a magician, and as a variant of the Christian, where I work with other gods too, which arguably could happen, according to folk religion.
My work has become about spiritual emergency, and the need for it to be taken more seriously in mental health spaces.  The care I got in the system was abysmal, apart from seeing a very good Jungian analyst for 8 years, but that came out of my own pocket.  I believe we are in a time where our souls will be confronting themselves more and more, and so spiritual care will be just as important as general mental health care, but I found most of what was available in my region to be add water and stir in quality.
The nun persona for my blog is a latex clad funny woman who longs for heaven, having endured hell.  Having had a phase where I considered becoming an Anglican nun (hoping it would solve my problems), God told me I would make a terrible nun.  As a result, the joke was that I indeed became a terrible nun, buying that silly costume and presenting as I did. I do take occasional retreats in convents and monasteries, I veil every day for my own reasons, but I am a tourist of these spaces, although my soul still yearns for sacred space

I am convinced that my soul was my conflict, and as a result, my mind suffered, but I did not in fact have a brain disease. I have shed the old interpretation of schizoaffective disorder, with a current diagnosis of severe PTSD instead. I received it after doing the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM (SCID), which I apparently needed to do a long time ago. Now, I am weening off of Latuda.

“Asylum Squad” was completed in 2018, the final book self-published around the beginning of the pandemic. I wanted a twist that was so wild, it turned the whole series upside down, reinstating the wildness of the series with a new take on what it all meant. Eventually, I will likely publish an omnibus collection of the back issues (minus “The Psychosis Diaries”, which I want to leave in the past). In the meantime, I still have what’s in stock of what remains from the first runs, and the comic can of course be read at www.asylumsquad.ca . I felt that “The Psychosis Diaries” was too dark, sometimes problematic, and not representative of me or what I became, so I wanted to let it go, although it did help me to get back on my feet again, having written it during one of the worst periods of my life. These days, I am painting illustrations for local gallery shows, pieces that are mostly about spirituality. I still blog, waiting to figure out my next major art project.

Sadly, Mad Pride Toronto seems to be a chapter that is not currently active, at least, not that I know of. Hopefully, this movement will get stronger here again, but I am pleased to see how Mad Pride has come a long way, elsewhere in the world.

My journey with the Mad Pride Movement, and with my transformative crisis