From Shadows — Submission Package

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Project Overview

From Shadows is a personal and emotionally charged memoir about a woman who spent decades misreading herself, only to discover in midlife that she is autistic and has ADHD. Moving from a childhood shaped by masking to a late diagnosis that rewrites her past, the memoir explores the toll of invisibility, the collapse of a life built on survival, and the slow, uncertain path toward reclaiming truth and creative voice. 

Told through vivid, scene-driven storytelling, From Shadows invites readers into the inner world of someone who always felt out of step, and shows what it means to finally come home to oneself. 

From Shadows reads as a literary memoir with strong narrative drive and novelistic depth.

Manuscript Snapshot

Title: From Shadows
Genre: Narrative Memoir
Word Count: 46,000 words, with minor revisions ongoing
Status: The complete manuscript, consisting of fifteen chapters plus a prologue and epilogue, is available upon request.
Structure: A fifteen-chapter memoir, with a prologue and an epilogue, tracing the arc from internalized masking and emotional entanglement to late-diagnosed neurodivergence, financial collapse, and the slow reclamation of voice through creativity and advocacy.

Project Summary

From Shadows follows a woman who has spent her life striving to meet expectations she never fully understood. From a childhood shaped by perfectionism and pressure to perform, to an adulthood defined by burnout and collapse, her story reveals the quiet toll of living unseen. Each chapter moves through moments of confusion, survival, and gradual understanding, leading to a late autism and ADHD diagnosis that reframes her entire past.

Told through vivid, scene-driven storytelling, the memoir explores the cost of endurance and the slow emergence of self-understanding. From Shadows is a story of recognition and return, showing what it means to finally come home to oneself.

Synopsis

From Shadows tells the story of a woman who spent her life feeling out of place, never knowing why. From an early age, Patricia MacDowell learned to perform, adapting, blending in, and pushing through anxiety and sensory overwhelm she couldn’t name. Misdiagnosed for decades, the emotional toll mounted: confusion, burnout, and a deepening sense of failure.

It wasn’t until the collapse of her dream café and the brink of homelessness that she received a late autism and ADHD diagnosis, a moment that brought both relief and grief. Told across a fifteen-chapter arc, this memoir traces her path through family secrets, financial hardship, emotional unmasking, and creative reemergence. It explores what it means to live unseen, to question everything you thought you knew about yourself, and to finally begin again, not by becoming someone new, but by reclaiming the self that was always there.

Comparable Titles

These memoirs share thematic resonance with From Shadows, exploring identity, late discovery, and the quiet endurance beneath self-reinvention.

The Collected Schizophrenias by Esmé Weijun Wang — A deeply introspective and precise exploration of mental health, identity, and resilience, balancing emotional clarity with literary control.

I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy — A raw and sharply honest memoir about performance, control, and self-understanding, told with restraint and dark humor.

Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Asperger’s by John Elder Robison — A bestselling account of growing up undiagnosed and learning to navigate life through the lens of neurodivergence.

About the Author

I’m an independent filmmaker and storyteller based in Montreal, focused on late-diagnosed autism and mental health. My feature film Sweeping Forward won Most Popular Canadian Feature at the 2014 Montreal World Film Festival. In the past, I received development support from SODEC for both Sweeping Forward and a second script titled Separation Anxiety. I’m currently developing a nonfiction documentary, Shadows to Spectrum, highlighting untold stories of late-diagnosed autistic adults.

I also founded Café 2 Mains, a specialty coffee shop that celebrated the entire bean-to-cup process and supported women coffee producers in Honduras and Peru. The café’s compostable packaging won a Best in Class Award at the 2024 PAC Global, along with an Award of Distinction for its microgreen packaging design. Though the café ultimately closed, its story and the emotional toll of its loss form a pivotal part of my memoir.

Prologue + Sample Chapters (1–3) 

Below are the prologue and first three sample chapters of From Shadows. The full manuscript draft is complete and available upon request.

Update Notice

The following prologue and sample chapters (1–3) reflect the most recent revisions, finalized on November 22, 2025, for agent review.

From Shadows — A Memoir 

by Patricia MacDowell

PROLOGUE — The Shifting Lens

For most of my life, I carried a persistent sense of being out of step, though I couldn’t explain why. I masked, I adapted, I performed. I worked so hard at it that even I believed the performance. Beneath it all was a steady exhaustion I didn’t know how to name. It wasn’t until my mid-fifties, with a late diagnosis of autism and ADHD, that the truth finally came into focus.

Looking back, I see how the world pressed against me in ways I couldn’t escape. It was the unpredictability, the sudden loss of control, the invisible force that left me bracing for what I couldn’t name. Small changes left me on edge. I told myself it was just anxiety, that everyone else was stronger, steadier, better at handling life. But even the simplest social exchanges could leave me heavy and depleted, and I would sink into a silence so deep I felt myself become invisible in a room full of people. I rehearsed conversations in my head and replayed every word afterward, questioning how I had come across. I didn’t know this was sensory overload and autistic shutdown. I only knew that no matter how hard I tried, I never seemed to keep up.

I see now that the common thread was simple: when you cannot do the things you want to do, something deeper is wrong. I couldn’t recognize it then, but that undeniable truth was the measure of my life for decades. I envisioned what I longed to do, pushed myself through it each time, and paid the price in anxiety. That anxiety was a weight that consumed me until I could no longer force myself forward.

On the outside, I was considered shy, sensitive, antisocial; too intense or too quiet. But none of those assumptions captured the truth; I was trying to cope in a world that overwhelmed me.

And with understanding came grief. I grieved for the girl who tried so hard to be good, to be less complicated. I grieved for the woman who drove herself into collapse. Time after time, never understanding why her efforts were never enough. I grieved for the years spent chasing a version of normal I kept reaching for but could never hold.

This was the slow, painful recognition that the problem wasn’t that I was inherently broken. It was that I had never truly been seen. Not by others, and most painfully, not even by myself.

This is the story of how I learned to stop disappearing, and how I began, at last, to find myself.

Chapter 1: The Language of Shadows

I was ten years old when we left the States and moved back to Quebec in December of 1980. The shift had been gradual, a slow migration east from the sun-drenched familiarity of California through the crisp air of Massachusetts to the quiet woods of New Hampshire. But nothing prepared me for stepping off the plane in Montreal. The air hit my lungs like a physical blow, a jarring cold that settled deep in my bones, stealing the breath from my chest. All around us, the world was muffled by the heavy silence of snowfall, an emptiness so profound it felt like an absence. My younger sister and I stood together, our small bodies huddled against the unfamiliar chill, both of us holding a silent question: what now? We weren’t especially close, our bond more a pact forged by shared circumstances than a closeness chosen freely. Yet in that moment, under the vast, indifferent Quebec sky, we were all we had, clinging to each other in a world that felt suddenly, terrifyingly new.

As a child, my understanding of geography was shaped by longing.

I didn’t truly know where we were heading; I simply heard “South Shore” and immediately conjured images of something warm and familiar, like the California I had missed so desperately, remembering those weeks we spent at the Howard Johnson’s while our new home was being renovated. My sister and I swam in the pool while our parents and Grand-Maman sat on the deck, talking and laughing. When it was time to come out, my father would scoop us up, still soaking, and plunk us gently onto the straw-woven chairs lined up beside the pool. We’d sit there dripping, toes wriggling, while a smiling waitress brought my Grand-Maman her tea in a round glass vessel, the kind with a band around the middle so you could hold it without burning your fingers. Then, with a little wink, she served us Shirley Temples with tiny umbrellas and fat slices of orange. It all felt so clever, almost magical.

One memory sparkled like sunlight on water. The next was a cold shock. At our home in Simi Valley, during a party, my father, as a joke, pushed me in the pool fully dressed. One second I was standing beside him, the next I was under water, shocked and gasping. It terrified me, the suddenness, the breath knocked out of me. I came up crying, humiliated in front of strangers. To my father, it was all in good fun, the same kind of humor that had him pressing our faces into birthday cakes or leaping from bushes to roar when we came up the walkway. But to me, it was both embarrassing and frightening, a feeling I couldn’t shake, brushed off with his, “Oh, come on, don’t be like that.”

My father had a way of smoothing over a moment before anyone noticed its weight. To everyone else it was just another joke. But something in me always caught the quiet sting beneath the surface. 

Still, I held on to the softer memories, the ones that let me believe the South Shore would feel warm and familiar, a distant echo of California. But what we stepped into was sharper, colder, nothing like the place I had carried in my mind.

I believe my parents, perhaps out of kindness, allowed me to cling to that feeling. At first, it even felt like an adventure, a return to roots too ephemeral for my young memory to fully grasp. But then the Quebec winter descended, and the weather wasn’t just a detail; it was a brutal, physical betrayal, a cold slap of reality. And so too was everything that followed. Something precious within me, something literal, idealistic, and deeply hopeful, was profoundly hurt by that lie. Not the deliberate cruelty of a person, but the uncaring, almost accidental cruelty of a world that tells you one thing, then delivers another, and then, effortlessly, forgets the wound it inflicted.

My Grand-Maman lived with us for as long as I can remember. She came from a big family, with more brothers and sisters than I could ever keep track of, and my mom grew up surrounded by loving aunts and uncles. For New Year’s we’d have family get-togethers on my Grand-Maman’s side, and I’d watch my mom with her aunts, everyone dressed up in shiny sequined tops, laughing, dancing to ABBA, a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other. From another room came the men’s voices, booming with laughter, my father among them, the sound carrying through the house. Together it was music and easy laughter, and my sister and I took it in with wide-eyed wonder. In those precious moments, family felt like home.

But memory is selective. What we hold onto doesn’t always reflect the full truth.

Looking back, a sharp dissonance emerges when I recall the superficial abundance of our lives. We traveled often and lived in beautiful homes, a veneer of normalcy. There were many family dinners at restaurants where we laughed easily, comfortable around waiters and service staff, like we belonged. My father was well known in many of those places, always performing, always the center of attention. There were vacations too, snapshots of sun, sand, and smiles tucked into glossy photo albums. We were kids, and we genuinely enjoyed those times out, the sense of occasion, the warmth of being together. From the outside, we looked like the picture of a well-off family.

That image followed me into school, where the illusion of ease sometimes felt more visible than I was.

When I started high school, my father sometimes drove me. When he pulled up in an Audi, classmates noticed, and I was seen as someone well off. I didn’t particularly like the attention; being looked at that way made me uncomfortable. There were times before I got out of the car when he would press money into my hand for lunch and tell me to get what I wanted.

Walking down the hallways, everything felt big. The building was immense, the teachers unfamiliar, and waves of students moved past me in every direction. Once I found my way to the cafeteria for lunch, classmates began joining me at the table, and it felt welcoming.

But slowly that shifted. They would reach over for my fries, ask if I was going to finish something on my tray. Even if I had planned to eat it, I gave it to them. Then they began asking for money, just some change, a few coins here and there. Happily, I handed it over at first, but it became too frequent. What had felt like friendship started to feel more like I was a commodity. It got to the point where I had to find other places to eat in the cafeteria, because avoiding them felt safer than having to say no.

It was then that I began to sense an elusive language I couldn’t seem to grasp, the one everyone else spoke with such effortless fluidity. A social choreography of unseen cues I tried to follow, echoing gestures that never quite felt like mine. I didn’t have the words for it then, not for this deep sense of alienation, just the constant calibration required to keep up.

At home, the cracks in our life were becoming harder to ignore.

The unraveling began quietly, then gathered force. The country house was gone, taken back by the bank. Then the cars disappeared from the driveway, one after another, each loss another fracture in the facade of stability.

My parents argued constantly, their voices sharp and blaming, and the tension in the house became its own kind of presence, thick and suffocating, like a heavy blanket draped over every surface. That’s how it started, not with a singular, dramatic loss, but a series of small, internal fractures, each one leaving a trace, a hollow ache in my gut, a low thrum of unease that never fully receded, settling in as a permanent resident within me. 

The air in our house was heavy, and being outside was the only place I could breathe.

At the park at the end of my street, the older French kids would gather, smoking cigarettes. I hated the acrid taste, the burn in my throat, the way the smoke clung to my clothes, but the pressure to join in was undeniable. In the 1980s, everyone smoked, and conformity felt like the ultimate currency of belonging.

A boy from the neighborhood, a few years older, began showing up at the park more often, until one afternoon his presence reached my basement window. The sudden tap on the glass caught me off guard but quickly dissolved into a hesitant curiosity, and I let him in. That was the unassuming beginning of something that unfolded with a chilling, gradual inevitability. He didn’t force anything, not initially. It was a slow dance of suggestion and flirtation, a slow, encroaching push against the tender edges of my comfort, each movement barely perceptible until it was too late. With every visit, the touching advanced a little further, a creeping violation. I didn’t say no. The words felt lodged somewhere deep in my throat, a foreign language I hadn't learned. My body, already trained to adapt and appease, went still. I told myself it was normal. Maybe this was just how it was supposed to go, I reasoned, hoping to make sense of a discomfort I couldn’t articulate, let alone refuse.

When things eventually escalated beyond what I was ready for, a heavy silence descended upon me, a silence born of a desperate need to be liked, to avoid being seen as dramatic or difficult. He dressed quickly, and I sat there wanting to disappear, to quiet the noise in my head, the mix of shame and confusion pressing in. When he told me to meet him at the park later, I felt a fragile relief, hoping it meant everything was okay.

But just before I reached the park, another boy stopped me, his voice low and urgent, warning me not to go in. “He let us smell his fingers,” he said. Behind him, I saw the others making crude gestures and laughing when they noticed me.

That’s when the truth detonated.

I felt ambushed, violated. The shame was immediate, a hot, creeping flush that burned my skin. I stood there frozen, every muscle in my body locking into stillness. That betrayal unsettled deep inside me. Looking back now, the chilling realization isn’t just what happened, but how quickly I trained myself not to react, to absorb the blow without a reaction.

That day carved something deep inside me, teaching me how shame could masquerade as acceptance, and how easily that disguise ends in silence and self-erasure.

At home, that silence reshaped itself, molded by my father’s insatiable need for emotional co-presence. His relentless demands echoed through the house: “Come look at this,” “Isn’t this funny?” The message underneath was always the same: stop what you’re doing and see what I’m seeing. It transcended mere enthusiasm; it was a persistent, overriding pattern that chipped away at my early autonomy. The implicit message was undeniable: whatever internal world I inhabited, whatever task I was immersed in, was always secondary to his immediate need for attention. Being busy, tired, or simply distracted was never an acceptable state. So I learned to interrupt myself, not as an occasional courtesy, but as an ingrained way of being, a constant snapping of my own internal thread. This dynamic systematically taught me to question my right to focus, to prioritize my own attention, or to articulate a simple “not now” without a crushing wave of guilt. It relentlessly reinforced the idea that my boundaries and my precious inner world were perpetually subordinate to his.

That imbalance seeped into the very air of our home, invisibly shaping everything, especially the way my parents related to each other.

While we lived in the States, their marital tension remained a quiet hum, often unseen. My father's constant travel kept him largely absent, returning only for brief, transient visits. Looking back, those years seem like parallel lives, gently diverging, rarely intersecting. But once we returned to Quebec and he settled into a predictable nine-to-five routine, the strain between them tightened, palpable and impossible to ignore, a pressure that squeezed the air out of every room.

My mother didn’t carry quiet, she hurled it, transforming it into a percussive landscape of dissatisfaction. She slammed drawers, cupboard doors, dishes, anything that could punctuate her rage with a hard, echoing crash. The house itself vibrated with sound: sudden, relentless, a constant assault on my nervous system. My father, for all his surface charm, contributed his own brand of chaos. One morning, while my father was making breakfast, my parents started bickering, and it escalated until he began whipping eggs across the kitchen toward the table where we were seated, the eggs flying at us, smashing against the walls and the floor. I was trembling, crying, too stunned to move. Hours later, my father came back as if nothing had happened, pulling us close, saying he was sorry. I would tense in his arms, instinctively pulling away, but refusing him never felt like an option. His sorry carried its own demand: accept it or risk his anger flaring again. It always seemed to be like this, the rage, the wreckage, then the embrace that was supposed to make it all right. 

It was the noise I remember most. Not just loud, but constant. Voices clashing, drawers slamming, tension vibrating through the walls, carrying down the hallways. Together, my parents orchestrated a world perpetually vibrating with noise and tension, a deafening storm in which my sister and I felt ourselves shrinking, slowly disappearing from their view. In the 1970s, silent endurance may have been the prescribed default for many women, a silent swallowing of pain. But by the time we returned to Quebec, my mother’s capacity for silence had ruptured. She fought back, loudly, constantly, her voice a relentless torrent. I understood later that no one desires to be treated like a fool, but what I remember most vividly was the constant negativity, the palpable edge in the air, a refusal to engage that felt like a physical barrier. It was her desperate way of making her profound dissatisfaction visible, undeniable. I was caught, suspended, unable to side with either of them, a slow, simmering resentment building for both. Their battles made everything else fade, even us.

My childhood home wasn't just chaotic; it was a vortex of unpredictability, a churning current that pulled me under again and again. I still hear the echoes of commands: “Sit still. Don’t talk. Don’t move. Don’t cause trouble.” I learned to navigate this treacherous terrain by walking on eggshells with an expert, almost unconscious precision. The tension wasn’t merely emotional; it was a visceral, physical sensation. I could feel it, a prickling awareness on my skin, the moment before I opened a door, before I stepped into a room, as if the air itself was thick with unspoken warnings. My body learned to brace, constantly on high alert. I adapted the only way a child caught in such a storm could: by shrinking myself, making myself smaller, quieter, less noticeable. My sister and I were inextricably tangled in the same story, thrust into identical circumstances, shaped by the relentless pressure cooker we lived in. We didn’t always get along, but we had no choice but to share this crucible, becoming the only witnesses to each other’s lived experience. And that shared witnessing, even when it held its own painful truths, mattered more than words could say.

Sometimes, on outings with our father, my sister and I would find ourselves in the company of other women, elegant, polished, unmistakably not our mother. I didn’t fully grasp the infidelity, the emotional architecture of what was unfolding, but a persistent, vague unease settled in my stomach, a child’s instinct for something deeply wrong. Later, at the dinner table with both our parents, an innocent remark about having lunch with him and 'someone else' would be met with a swift, sharp kick under the table by my father, a silent, sudden command to silence us. In those physical jolts, we learned, without words, what not to say, what carefully constructed fictions to uphold. We learned to lie, to become unwitting accomplices, and, unwittingly, to admire what he admired: these articulate, refined, impressive women, everything he subtly taught us to value above who our mother actually was. I don’t know if my mother ever fully realized the extent of these wordless betrayals. But looking back, I imagine it must have felt like an utter abandonment, as if no one, not her husband, not even her own children, was truly in her corner. Just the silence, heavy and unrelenting, that settled around her like a shroud. We were being trained, not with explicit instructions, but through lived experience, to keep secrets, to mask our internal truths, to meticulously preserve the illusion, no matter the cost.

When my sister was around thirteen, she ran away. I remember the phone ringing, my mother’s voice tight with panic, and then my father barreling into the house and ordering me into the car. I didn’t have a choice. He drove through the city like a man possessed, tearing through streets and parking lots, speeding over yellow concrete parking stops meant to keep cars in place. Every time someone called the car phone to say they’d seen her, he pressed harder on the gas. His knuckles were white on the steering wheel. I sat beside him, shrinking into the seat, terrified of him and furious at my sister for dragging me through this madness. She was the one who ran. She made the choice. But I was the one trapped in the fallout, a silent passenger in a terrifying chase.

When he found her, I heard everything. Her screams. His voice filled with rage. The struggle. Then he forced her into the car. The drive home was silent, but the air was heavy with fear. 

When we reached the house, the violence was still there. My father shoved my sister through the front door and kicked her forward, sending her stumbling down the hallway. My grandmother was sitting in her rocking chair watching television when this unraveled. My mother stepped into the hallway, shocked, telling him to stop, but he was already grabbing shoes from the entrance and throwing them at my sister, anything within reach. I stood there, frozen and terrified, unable to move or make sense of any of it.

Witnessing my father’s violence cemented a chilling truth. Resistance came at a high cost in our home.

No one ever articulated the unspoken rules of survival, yet I understood them with brutal clarity: silence kept me safe. I adapted quickly, with the innate, desperate resilience of a child. I learned to be agreeable, to conjure a polite smile even when confusion twisted my insides or fear tightened my throat. I became an expert in noticing the fleeting, subtle cues that others missed, diligently absorbing information to predict and prevent. I began performing, meticulously crafting a version of myself that made interactions smoother, easier, for everyone else. Looking back, I see how readily people perceived what they wanted: a polite, well-behaved child, even gifted. But underneath that carefully constructed exterior, I was perpetually holding my breath, my body a silent testament to constant bracing. For years, I lived this way, collecting micro-moments of profound confusion, of being jarringly out of sync, of knowing with a gut-wrenching certainty that I’d missed something crucial, yet never knowing how to ask what it was. I didn't have the words for it then, but I remember the deep, persistent ache of it in my chest, a feeling that resonated with the profound isolation of standing just outside a brightly lit window, endlessly looking in, never truly part of the warmth inside.

So I grew up internalizing a pervasive narrative: that I was simply… wrong. Damaged, perhaps. Too sensitive, feeling every ripple with an unbearable intensity, an overflowing well in a world that demanded stillness. This silent condemnation shaped my every step. But that, I know now, is not the whole story. Because even in those early, bewildering years, long before I had a name for the invisible force that made me different, I was already, unconsciously, collecting the fragments that would one day coalesce into understanding. These seemingly disparate pieces, these moments of rupture and revelation, would eventually weave themselves into a coherent story, one that would finally become wholly mine.

Chapter 2: The Unseen Battle Within

The constant readiness to shrink and adapt wasn’t merely a response to the tension at home; it was a shadow that followed me, settling deep within my bones long after the front door clicked shut. This was the silent training ground for an unseen battle, a visceral conflict between the churning landscape of my internal experience and a relentless world that simply demanded I be ‘fine.’ Before I had any language for what was happening inside me, my entire body was registering every sharp sound, every abrupt movement, every unpredictable shift as a direct threat. The profound, aching sense of being ‘wrong,’ ‘too sensitive,’ or ‘too much’ settled deep in my body, a knot in my chest compelling me to shrink and disappear, to painstakingly manage an entire inner world that remained utterly invisible to everyone else. This agonizing pattern, where my instincts were overruled and external demands took precedence over my internal truth, was etched into me from the earliest dismissals of my inherent needs.

Even before consciousness fully formed, a deep-seated apprehension of doctors coiled within me. I vividly recall an early memory, perhaps around five years old: the stark white room, the metallic tang in the air, and the looming needle. My small body erupted in a fierce, primal protest, every muscle tensing, every limb thrashing, completely determined to defend my own space, my inviolable bodily autonomy. The nurses, their voices growing sharper with frustration, saw only an 'uncontrollable' child. Ultimately, I was forced onto a cold bed, my small frame physically pinned down by adult hands, my pleas muffled by their sheer will. The needle, a sharp, cold invasion into my helpless body, injected not just medicine, but a profound terror of being overpowered, held down, and physically violated. This moment, a raw, lasting trauma, etched itself so deeply that a profound apprehension of hospitals and injections became a persistent, physical dread that haunted me for decades.

When I was six or seven, my parents decided I needed tubes in my ears. I remember the bewilderment, the slow, creeping sense that my reality was being actively distorted. I was a quiet child, often lost in my own world. They mistook that stillness for a defect. They played games to prove their point, turning their backs, whispering under their breath, then spinning to demand if I’d heard what they said. Of course I hadn’t. No one would have. Yet this charade became their indisputable evidence that I needed tubes. My deepest instinct screamed against it, a quiet but firm no inside my head. Still, I was brought in for surgery, and in that same silent, unconsenting sweep, my tonsils were removed too, a detail never shared, another part of my body altered without my knowledge.

The tubes were meant to fall out naturally, but mine clung stubbornly. When the doctor removed them prematurely, my parents later told me I’d need another operation to reinsert them. Something inside me snapped. I snatched my plastic toy doctor’s kit, stuffing a few meager belongings into its fake pockets, and fled. I sought refuge under a solitary tree, a small, defiant figure refusing to re-enter a world that consistently overrode me. The anger wasn’t just a flash; it was the injustice of being stripped of choice, a powerlessness I already knew too well. But my father found me, and I was taken in anyway, my frightened protest extinguished. Even as a child, I recognized the profound wrongness of having my voice dismissed, my instincts pushed aside. It sank in, a chilling lesson learned too early: what it meant to be overruled, my internal truth irrelevant. I often revisit that little girl, still hear the echo of her unheard no, a sound that reverberates with decades of similar quiet struggles.

The efforts to improve me only became more visible.

Around ten, even at home, my body was monitored for signs of being “wrong.” I was told that if I didn’t straighten my back when I walked, I’d end up trapped in a full-body brace for life. The warning terrified me. I don’t know if it was true or just something meant to scare me into compliance. All I knew was that fear became the lever. Again and again, that was the pattern: if I didn’t adapt fast enough, I was threatened with what I might become.

And it wasn’t just my body being trained into compliance. At school the pressure shifted from posture to performance. Not long after we came back from the States, I was held back in Grade Four. My parents told me it was because the U.S. used imperial and Canada used metric, as if a simple conversion could somehow erase the deep, seeping shame of my inadequacy. They were trying, in their way, to make it easier for me, and I wanted to believe them, because otherwise I was left with nothing but the weight of being a disappointment.

By the time we arrived in Quebec, years of uprooting had already left me without a steady foundation.

Being held back soon after only deepened that instability, carving into me the feeling that I wasn’t enough.

School only made it more visible; in ways I couldn’t hide. In class, surrounded by kids a year younger and a head shorter, I drew attention I didn’t want. Every curious glance made me feel exposed and self-conscious. This wasn’t just about being in the same grade; it was about questioning where I belonged, if I belonged at all. The weight of it pressed into me, heavy and crushing.

At home, the attention took a different shape.

My father liked taking his old trophies and ribbons out of storage to share with me. The colors had faded by then, but he handled them with pride. He would say I was built like him and that I should run. He was convinced I was more like him than I was like my mother. At that age, I did not understand how quietly diminishing that was, or how easily a child can absorb the idea that one parent is worth mirroring more than the other.

As a family, my father would bring us to the squash club downtown. As soon as we entered the fitness center, the sounds from the courts reached us. The sharp pop of a ball hitting the court wall. The exerted calls of matches in play. But even there, something sat slightly off inside me. Inside the squash court, surrounded by glass on all sides, the echo felt too close, and when the door clicked shut behind me, a small part of me always wondered if it would open again.

My mother decided I should take aerobics classes with her, so I followed her in, but the music was loud and the steps moved too quickly for me. I tried to keep up, tried to match the ease everyone else seemed to have, but I always left feeling scraped thin. The only moment that felt rewarding came from the juice bar, when the smiling woman behind the counter handed me a warm brownie.

My father encouraged me to take up running, so I joined cross country at school. Running became his idea of who I should be, a direction I followed without questioning. The running was not what unsettled me. It was the disruption around it. Competitions meant different schools, different hallways, different crowds. Each place left me slightly unmoored. I pushed myself because I wanted my father to be proud but there was an effort in holding the version of myself he imagined. It never felt entirely like mine.

By the time I was fifteen, I had already learned what it meant to be undone by something no one else could see. When my older cousin invited me skiing with his friends, I tried to go along with what should have been an ordinary winter outing, but the moment we stepped onto the cold, snow-packed hill, something inside me pulled tight. It wasn’t a physical ailment or an injury. It was a gnawing dis-ease that permeated my entire being, an internal unraveling I couldn’t name. I descended into the bustling chalet at the hill’s base, seeking refuge, but the noise, the relentless clatter of boots and trays, the cacophony of voices, amplified every raw nerve. My senses overloaded with such violent force that the room didn’t just feel small; it seemed to physically shrink, pressing in, stealing the air from my lungs. Desperate, I fumbled for a pay phone, dialing home. My Grand-Maman answered, my pleas dissolving into ragged sobs. “Come get me,” I choked out, a raw cry for rescue. But she didn’t drive, she never had. My parents were out of reach, their absence compounding the feeling of being utterly untethered. The one voice I craved, the one thread of comfort, couldn't bridge the distance. I have no memory of how I eventually made it home, only that the mark of that day remained with me. 

Back then, it was labeled a “panic attack,” the only explanation anyone had, and I accepted it because irrational fear leaves you reaching for whatever makes sense. But decades later, the truth emerged: it wasn’t merely fear. It was a complete, full-body shutdown, my nervous system overwhelmed and collapsing under the assault of noise, unfamiliarity, and the unbearable pressure to perform normalcy when every cell in my body screamed in protest. It was the terror of being irrevocably far from the anchors of home and familiarity, abandoned to manage a crisis without any visible support. The words eluded me then, but now the understanding is clear. It was like cold air that never left, unrelenting, impossible to ignore, settling deep and staying silent.

Later that same year, Expo 86 in Vancouver offered another lesson in silent collapse. I was with my father, my sister, and others from his circle on the ferry to Victoria when the shoreline began to recede. At first it was only distance, the city falling away and the water widening, but inside me a quiet dread swelled into something I could not control. The farther we traveled, the more I felt unmoored, as if I were being carried too far from safety. What should have been a simple crossing became a rising panic I could not calm, a fear that felt irrational but absolute. That fear sharpened as the noise around me grew, voices dissolving into a muddled blur, indistinct and pressing in from all directions. My lungs seized. My throat locked. My body simply shut down, a desperate, automatic response. I crumpled onto the cold deck, curling into a fetal ball, unable to move or utter a single word. The overwhelm was a tsunami I couldn’t withstand. People bustled past, their faces a blur of concern or judgment. Some muttered about 'overreacting,' others offered worried glances. It may have looked like I was losing it, but I was trying to hold on, trying to find my footing in a world that had suddenly gone unstable, adrift in a sea of sensory chaos. On the ferry, it was again called a “panic attack.” Now, I understand it for what it was: a total system collapse, a shutdown so complete it stripped me of language and mobility. My body, in its inherent wisdom, had been protecting me all along, pulling me into stillness when the world became too much to bear.

Even before I could explain why I felt different, music gave me space to explore, to feel, to follow emotions I hadn’t yet made sense of.

In the 1980s, alternative music wasn’t merely a collection of sounds; it was a resonant signal, a quiet, intricate code exchanged among those of us who felt too much, thought too much, and stubbornly refused to fit the prescribed mold. Its haunted melodies, its raw, unapologetic lyrics, were like a voice finally articulating the profound ache I had only ever carried alone in my head. It wasn’t about sadness; it was about learning to listen for what stirred below the surface, the feelings without names, the signals without words. It was about courageously embracing a world seen through a different lens, daring to feel its every nuance. The subtle, persistent ache of not belonging, the gnawing sense of being perpetually 'on the inside looking in,' of relentlessly questioning what others accepted without thought, this music didn’t create those feelings. It simply recognized them, amplified them, and in doing so, created a sacred space for their existence. There was a profound, bodily validation in hearing those amorphous inner questions transmuted into tangible sound. The music didn’t seek to rescue me; it simply stood, unwavering, beside me, whispering: Yes, it hurts. Yes, you feel different. But you are not alone. I didn't just listen to those haunting tracks; I inhabited them, let their rhythms pulse through my veins. The carefully applied eyeliner, the meticulously teased hair, the clothes sourced from Le Château and Bedo, the heavy black boots from Aldo, these weren't just fleeting fashion trends. They were a chosen style, a visual language that articulated the depth of my internal landscape. They were a quiet declaration: I may not feel like I belong in your world, but I am not alone in mine. And I am allowed to be visible, fully embodied, in the vastness of what I feel. In a world that offered no vocabulary for my divergent way of seeing, that music became my lexicon, and through it, I finally felt seen, not as judged or broken, but simply, profoundly, seen.

I was around 22, standing on the precipice of a supposed family trip to Freeport, Bahamas, a journey fraught with unspoken dread, especially since my last public collapse on the Expo 86 ferry. My father, his second wife, my newly pregnant sister, and I comprised the uneasy group. I desperately tried to convince myself I was okay, rehearsing a composure I didn’t feel. For days before the flight, I’d immerse myself in Harry Belafonte, letting the calypso rhythms wash over me, hoping to trick my nervous system into feeling the island groove, into believing I was relaxed, or at least seemed to be. But my body, a truer barometer of my internal landscape, knew better. It pulsed with a low-frequency hum of impending overwhelm. My family doctor had even prescribed anxiety medication, a small pill meant to dissolve innocuously under my tongue, a backup plan against the rising tide of internal panic. I never liked the feeling of pills, the way they blurred the edges of my perception, but this was a trip I couldn’t outwardly refuse, even as my core self braced for impact.

At the airport, I was already a raw, exposed nerve, a wreck of a person. My breath hitched in my chest, ragged and shallow, as I desperately tried to rein in the escalating anxiety. We boarded one of those towering shuttle buses, rumbling across the tarmac toward the waiting plane, and the contained space, the diesel fumes, the collective anticipation of strangers pressed too close, pushed me closer to the edge. It was then, a whisper of a plea, that I confessed to my father, “I’m not doing well.” My distress was a visible tremor, impossible to mask. His eyes, devoid of true understanding, only narrowed. “Do you have your medication?” he asked, his voice firm, a quiet command. I admitted I had some but resisted the urge to take it. “Take it. Now’s the time,” he insisted, his words pressing down on me, silencing my internal protest. The tiny pill, meant to dissolve so easily under my tongue, felt like a lead weight. The moment it touched, the panic didn’t just hold; it roared. It surged, a violent tide ripping through me, not easing but escalating beyond anything I had known. One moment, I was trapped on that rumbling bus; the next, I was inexplicably buckled into a seat on the plane, my mind no longer tethered to my body. It felt as though a vital circuit had tripped, shutting down. The cabin doors sealed shut with a chilling finality. And whatever precarious thread of composure I had clung to, whatever last pretense of being “fine,” simply shredded and collapsed. I was no longer merely anxious; I was a taut, vibrating wire, fully panicked, profoundly stuck. The only truth, a scream inside my head, was that I needed to get off the plane, immediately, urgently.

Through a thick, disorienting haze, I registered the flight attendant’s worried gaze, the muffled sounds of my sister and father attempting to offer reassurance, their words failing to penetrate the roar of my own panic. With a voice that felt alien, barely my own, I managed to whisper a desperate plea to the flight attendant: a tranquilizer shot. I craved immediate oblivion, a forcible vanishing until the plane reached its destination. But even in that terrifying moment, a deeper, undeniable knowing resonated within me. This wasn’t simply about the plane, or the medication that had betrayed its promise. This was a fear far more profound, a nameless dread unconnected to motion sickness or chemical reactions. It was about distance, not just miles, but an infinite chasm opening between myself and anything that anchored me, anything that made me feel steady. All I could articulate was the raw terror of a feeling itself: an unbearable, untethered void, entirely illogical yet devastatingly real. It wasn't just fear; it was too much, a breaking point beyond any capacity to bear.

I couldn’t name the fear, but it was already too late.

The plane lurched forward, beginning its taxi down the runway, and in that agonizing shift, I simply broke. My terror was absolute, a raging current, sweeping away any last vestige of control. I had to get off. I remember the surreal moment when the massive aircraft actually halted, its engines quieting for me. As I was gently, but publicly, led off the plane, a figure of profound shame and shattered composure, I looked back through the residual haze of panic. My father was crying, his face crumpled. And in that unexpected display of his own pain, the burden on me became impossibly heavier. Whatever complexities had marred our relationship, in that raw moment he was simply my father, and I sensed his utter helplessness, the anguish of wanting to help and not knowing how. The details blur after that, a merciful amnesia, save for the quiet, steady presence of my sister, who stayed by my side. I recall only the cold, unyielding floor of the airport, the stark fluorescent lights, the impersonal row of payphones under which I huddled, a small, exposed heap. In that suspended reality, two warring sensations battled within me: an overwhelming, bone-deep relief at not being airborne, juxtaposed with something far heavier than simple guilt, the pervasive, aching conviction that I had irrevocably ruined everything. I sat there, utterly still, not soaring through the sky toward a tropical beach, but grounded by the sheer, unbearable weight of an invisible collapse, a silence so profound it echoed with the unseen battle within.

Chapter 3: Beautiful Without Breathing

Before the world began to shrink, there was a time I tried to expand into it, to be seen, to be chosen.

I was thirteen when the comparisons began. “You look just like Brooke Shields,” my father’s friend said. He was vice president at Clairol, one of my father’s biggest customers, and at family outings he started calling me “Brooke.” The title alone impressed me; it carried a kind of glamour that felt just out of reach. Brooke Shields was everywhere then, in movies, magazines, and jean ads. I didn’t look like her, not really, but I had thick eyebrows, and that was enough. The nickname stuck, a new identity I stepped into, not yet seeing how much of me would have to change to belong there. His wife, who had once been a model herself, took me shopping for clothes and helped me practice posing for photo shoots, the kind meant to build a portfolio and impress agents. I was flattered. It felt exciting to be noticed, to be told I had potential, to feel that external validation. But beneath the thrill, I also felt pressure to perform, to become what the industry seemed to reward. Each attempt to meet that image pushed me past something I didn’t yet know how to protect, my body holding its breath a little longer, mistaking strain for growth.

I’d always liked the fashion of that era, the models in music videos on MTV, the glossy magazine covers, the illusion of effortless beauty. Modeling is about being seen, a surface-level promise, but somewhere along the way, I learned that being seen wasn’t enough. I had to become someone else on the outside to be accepted, noticed, approved. It was like breathing in a role, every posture, every expression a careful mimicry of what I imagined others wanted.

From the beginning, the pressure to conform was there, a tightening around my own natural expressions. I was told not to smile by the photographers, by the agents, by the people deciding what “the look” should be. My teeth weren’t right. The words sank in, a quiet judgment against something so fundamental. 

I had a gap, like Madonna’s, but before that was seen as edgy, it was simply a flaw people decided needed fixing. Around fifteen, I had my teeth done. What no one saw was the fear I carried into that dental chair. It wasn’t just discomfort, it was panic, crawling under my skin in waves. First came the moldings, cold and invasive, triggering something I didn’t have words for. Then came the drilling, the grinding, the thick chemical smell of glue. My body locked up from the noise alone. I felt like I would choke, pass out, or run. But I didn’t. I stayed still. I smiled afterward. I tried to be brave, to prove I could handle it, that I was grateful. But inside, something cracked. 

The fear, the pain, the need to endure just to be accepted lodged itself deep inside me. And I didn’t know how to explain it. It was just teeth, right? A small price to pay to belong. But that creeping sense of wrongness, of being reshaped while trying not to flinch, never really left. The process itself felt like another erasure, not just of enamel, but of something unspoken and mine.

The sensation felt foreign. My smile had been sculpted into something more commercially acceptable, a look shaped to align with industry standards, not personal truth. And somewhere along the way, I started questioning my own reflection. Was it pretty enough? Was it up to standard? Was I? I became self-conscious in a way that went deeper than appearance. It touched something more internal, a quiet, growing belief that I had to be edited to be seen.

Around that time, I was selected for a Clairol hair campaign photo shoot in Toronto, arranged by my father’s friend, the same high-ranking executive who had started calling me “Brooke.” My father was thrilled. I wanted to be, but when I learned the shoot would take me out of province, something deep inside me hesitated. A quiet tension rose, something I could feel but not yet understand.

The executive flew out with me for the job. His presence was one I told myself should have been reassuring. But once we were in the air, the feeling deepened, a subtle disconnection I couldn’t explain. I focused on staying composed, trying to convince myself it was only nerves. 

When we arrived and the shoot began, the lights felt too bright and too hot. Hands moved around me, adjusting my hair, my clothes, my posture. The air smelled of hairspray and product. Every sound seemed close and amplified. I told myself to stay still, to be professional. I was far from home, steeped in an environment that felt like too much all at once. I didn’t understand it then, only that something deep inside of me had started bracing for impact. It just reacted, tightening around the noise and movement, and I slipped somewhere quieter inside myself to endure it.

After that, every booking carried an undercurrent of anxiety, a tremor beneath the calm I tried to maintain. Sometimes I’d see the disappointment the moment I walked in. “You don’t look anything like your pictures,” they’d say, almost accusing, as if I’d misrepresented myself or the agency had. When they looked at me like that, like I’d shown up wrong, something small but permanent shifted inside me. I didn’t know the word for it then, only that my worth felt measured and found lacking. Every photo, every pose, every smile started to feel like a test I could never fully pass.

One particular assignment for a Seagram’s Cooler ad in Quebec City wasn’t just another booking. It was a visible entanglement, a performance I had no choice but to participate in. It was being run by the advertising agency of the woman my father would go on to marry, a much younger woman already woven into his world. She was the one who secured my part in the ad, a gesture that looked like generosity but pressed on me with its own expectations.

Others from her agency were there too, people I recognized from dinners I had attended with my father. Sometimes my sister and I would be there too, sitting across from him and the same younger woman, the Hilton woman as I thought of her then, because that was how she was first introduced to us, as one of his clients. She was often surrounded by her friends in elegant restaurants where my father made sure everything looked effortless, with the best table, the best food, and the polished illusion of success.

Our father knew how to set the stage, his charm a potent, disarming force. The lighting was soft, blurring the edges of reality, the smiles polished, the conversation careful, each word weighed before it was spoken. He would mention McGill, slipping it into conversations as easily as the wine list, another credential in the polish he carried everywhere. We were expected to match the mood, to inhabit a seamless façade. Just like with modeling, I was learning how to perform without showing the strain, forcing my face into a neutral mask, my body rigid with effort.

He loved introducing me. “She’s going to be the next top model,” he’d say, beaming. People laughed, charmed by his confidence. I smiled too, though it felt like part of the performance. He had a way of turning everything into a show, polishing reality until it gleamed. I wanted to make him proud, but the pride he felt wasn’t really about me, it was about how I looked, how easily I could fit the image he wanted to project. His world ran on appearances, and I’d learned how to match them. I learned early how easily people saw the surface and stopped there, including him.

Everything had to look effortless, even when the internal cost was immense. Even amidst the lavish settings and his charming persona, a chilling undercurrent of pretense ran through those evenings, a silent agreement that the truth would remain unspoken. Just as he’d taught us to keep secrets with a kick under the table, a sharp, physical jolt that warned us into silence, I learned to self-censor, to choose every word carefully, to bury my own observations. I was navigating a performance that didn’t belong to me, moving through a minefield of unspoken rules, trying not to cross invisible lines I couldn’t always see.

I knew how to keep quiet. I knew how to play along, my silence a constant, internal negotiation. But the cost of that silence was starting to show. The more I suppressed, the more sensitized I became, to sound, to tension, to pressure I couldn’t name. I was absorbing more than I could process.

By the time of the Seagram’s shoot in Quebec City, all I remember is the bus ride, a metal box of sensory assault. It was crowded, the press of bodies too close, too many. Loud, a cacophony of voices and engine drone. In motion, an unpredictable sway that pulled at my equilibrium. I already felt fundamentally off, a low thrum of overwhelm building behind my eyes. Someone, assuming I was motion sick, offered me Gravol. I didn’t want to take it; a visceral reluctance tightened my stomach. I feared what it might do to me, a chemical invasion of an already fragile system. But I didn’t think I had a choice, the pressure to comply a familiar weight. The moment I swallowed the pill, everything got worse. 

The dizziness spun into a disorienting freefall. The light-headedness became a terrifying float, as if my body was drifting away. I felt slightly outside myself, still feeling everything but unable to slow any of it down. My heart raced, a frantic drum against my ribs, and my stomach churned, thick with nausea. And layered over it all was the heat of being watched, the way people looked at me with discomfort, or confusion, or pity. I felt exposed and strange. Embarrassed. Trapped in a body that was reacting in ways I couldn’t control on a bus full of strangers I couldn’t hide from.

After that day, the fear of losing control in public stayed with me. Soon after, my world began to shrink. I found myself slowly avoiding places, starting with the very thought of crowded ones. Public transit became a source of dread. Anywhere that felt too loud or unpredictable became a boundary I could no longer cross.

I didn’t call it anything yet, not panic, not a phobia, but I was already steering away from what might utterly undo me, sensing the fragility of my own internal landscape. 

Over time, that fragility became a constant undertone. It didn’t happen all at once; the collapse came quietly, my world tightening until even breathing felt like effort.

First it was buses, the suffocating press of bodies and the jarring rumble underfoot. Then subways, with their screeching turns and recycled air that felt too heavy to breathe. Theatres became claustrophobic traps, stores a dizzying maze under the unforgiving glare of fluorescent lights. The list of no-go zones grew, each one a new, invisible boundary. My body, a vessel of simmering dread, simply couldn’t take it anymore. I’d offer polite, practiced excuses to those around me: “I’m just so tired,” or “I don’t feel like going out.” But the truth was a cold, hard knot in my stomach. I was terrified, not of a specific danger, but of the unpredictable surge of sensory overwhelm that promised a full-body shutdown. Terrified I’d unravel in a public, irredeemable way, stripped bare of all pretense. Terrified, most of all, that in that moment of unraveling, no one would be able to truly help, leaving me utterly exposed.

Doctors, well-meaning but distant, offered labels like panic disorder, generalized anxiety, phobia. They prescribed pushing through, a reconditioning that felt like a betrayal of my own frantic system. But it wasn’t just fear, not in the way they understood it. It was a raw, visceral overload, my nervous system overwhelmed and utterly unable to process the sheer volume of the world around me. Even in the quiet, during another visit, another errand, another dinner, the fear still found me, a silent corrosion that reached deeper every day. My world contracted, folding in on itself until there were only a few safe places left.

But even there, the dull static of anxiety would find me, a relentless buzz that mirrored the chaotic noise of the outside world. 

Hope itself became a cruel trigger, a spark that could ignite a deeper, more devastating fear within me. Because what if I reached for someone, finally admitting the impossible weight I carried, and they simply couldn’t help? What if, beneath all the effort and the masking, there truly was no one who could grasp the complex shape of my internal struggle, leaving me utterly adrift and alone? The thought was a chilling echo in the silence of my own unspoken needs, a premonition of an isolation I couldn't bear.

Even as a teenager, a chilling understanding settled deep in my bones: the catastrophic risks of being perceived as “too unwell.” I had witnessed, in the guarded tones of adult conversations and the stark narratives of popular culture, what happened to people who couldn’t keep it together. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest haunted me with its portrayal of patients stripped of their autonomy, their very spirits extinguished by the clinical indifference of the institution. And the story of Frances, a woman institutionalized against her will, her body controlled by her own mother’s relentless will, etched itself even deeper into my consciousness. That fear became a constant companion, a cold thread woven into my daily existence, tightening around me with every passing year: the dread of forced medication, of being locked away, of losing not just my freedom, but the elusive core of myself. This was a boundary I had to hold, even when I didn't know how.

I wanted help, desperately, but only within the rigid confines of a carefully constructed boundary. I couldn’t afford to fall apart too publicly, to expose the raw nerve of my internal chaos to a world that seemed to demand effortless composure. It became a precarious balancing act, each step a calculated risk: seek just enough support to avoid true collapse, but always, always, stay visibly in control. My body, ever attuned to external demands, was a tightly coiled spring, each breath an act of performance. This relentless strain was a form of unrecognized sensory trauma, folded into endurance that kept passing for normalcy.

I didn’t yet see how much the tension inside me echoed the noise around me.

Next Chapters in Development

The full manuscript is complete in draft form and currently undergoing polishing. A full outline is also available upon request for agents who wish to see the complete narrative arc and thematic structure.

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