Resilience Is Futile

The Life and Death and Life of Julie Lalonde

Julie S. Lalonde

• Publisher: Between the Lines
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781771134705
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

For over a decade, Julie Lalonde, an award-winning advocate for women's rights, kept a secret.

She crisscrossed the country, denouncing violence against women and giving hundreds of media interviews along the way. Her work made national headlines for challenging universities and taking on Canada's top military brass. Appearing fearless on the surface, Julie met every interview and event with the same fear in her gut: was he there?

Fleeing intimate partner violence at age 20, Julie was stalked by her ex-partner for over ten years, rarely mentioning it to friends, let alone addressing it publicly. The contrast between her public career as a brave champion for women with her own private life of violence and fear meant a shaky and exhausting balancing act.

Resilience sounds like a positive thing, so why do we often use it against women? Tenacity and bravery might help us survive unimaginable horrors, but where are the spaces for anger and vulnerability?

Resilience is Futile is a story of survival, courage and ultimately, hope. But it's also a challenge to the ways we understand trauma and resilience. It's the story of one survivor who won't give up and refuses to shut up.

1

Good Girl

I was smart and eager and was raised to always be kind. That’s why he noticed me. Years later, when I’d become an established advocate and public speaker, a gruff AM talk radio host asked me what “deficiency” I had that made Xavier target me, and I came up empty. But the truth is, I was keen and kind and that’s why he noticed me.

I met Xavier my first few weeks at a new school in a new city. Moving from a town of nine hundred to a school of nine hundred is one hell of an adjustment. It’s even more complicated when you transition from a remote Northern Ontario public school to an urban Catholic high school in a convent.

It was the kind of high school people don’t believe even exists anymore. The principal and several of the faculty were actual nuns. The dress code was a strict uniform of a polyester navy blue pencil skirt (below the knee), a crisp white blouse buttoned to the neck, and a matching blue vest with unflattering beige nylons and black Mary Janes. In the winter, the nuns were generous and let us wear a hideous blue cardigan.

You couldn’t dye your hair an “unnatural” colour or have piercings beyond a simple earring, and men weren’t allowed facial hair or hair below their ears. We weren’t allowed a spare period and couldn’t leave the premises on our lunch break. There were few openly queer students, and our religion class had explicitly homophobic messaging. Every year, the nuns would invite an anti-choice group to picket outside the school with graphic anti-abortion signs. My feminist heart died a little every day for three years.

It was made worse by the fact that my classmates had survived the dreaded grade nine together. Not me. I was plopped into the school in grade ten and didn’t know a soul. I was fifteen and all limbs, desperately hoping that I would disappear into the sea of starched blue uniforms.

It was English class and the teacher outlined the books we were to read that year. As the teacher listed the texts we would cover, I realized I had read every one of them the year before. Phew. I had an advantage.

When I look back on it now, I can’t for the life of me remember the question she asked, but I do remember it was about The Chrysalids, a book I adored. This was my shot. I could confidently answer a question. I did and I was right. But I soon felt my cheeks brighten as Xavier muttered under his breath “Nerrrd” like an eighties high school movie cliché. People laughed and he looked at me with the smirk that we teach young women to recognize as flirting; he teases you because he likes you.

I hated him. All I wanted was to blend in, but I took a chance and raised my hand and then this asshole made a scene of it.

It only got worse from there. This new high school had a policy of having people share lockers. They were larger than average-sized lockers, but it’s still asking a lot for teenagers to happily share the one space at school that they can call their own. And when you’re the new girl in school with no friends, it means having to pick at least one very intimate friend on your first day. I looked around and panicked as everyone else paired up and I was left alone. Fuck.

I tried to hide my panic but it was obvious, and two girls confidently approached me. I could tell right away that they weren’t “cool” girls. They were the type that have long embraced being outsiders and really leaned into it. They were weirdos with weird hobbies and weird names and they didn’t give a fuck if you liked it. I liked them immediately. We decided to share one locker among the three of us.

Suddenly, a group of cool girls swarmed me. “You can’t share a locker with them. Do you want friends at this school or not?” They proceeded to inform me that it would be social suicide to be seen with the weirdos, and though they hadn’t seemed to care about my social status moments earlier, they suddenly took an interest in protecting me. I accepted the new offer.

Having dodged Xavier’s mocking and a mean girls’ minefield, I thought I was now in the clear. But a week or so later, I heard that I was a slut. I had been trying to keep my head down and focus on learning the school’s unspoken customs and social hierarchy. But I’d been five foot ten since junior high and had waist-length blonde hair. I was the new girl in a crowd of nine hundred uniforms and I stuck out in a big, bad way. And because I only spoke when spoken to, people decided to draw their own conclusions as to how I’d landed at their school in the tenth grade.

Never mind that I was a painfully shy virgin. To the group of mean girls, I was a rabid whore who had been forced to move because I’d slept with my best friend’s boyfriend and was chased out of town. I was a slut who was keeping to herself because she didn’t want people to find out.

The truth was far less scandalous. My dad worked in IT long before it was trendy, and my family up and moved whenever he got a better job offer. But the slut story is what was told and the slut story stuck. I was equal parts mortified and confused. How do you kill a rumour that is so blatantly untrue? By outing yourself as a loser virgin? I was doomed.

I endured a steady week of side-eyes, whispers, and glares from just about every girl in school. My only constant friends were the two weirdos from day one, who clearly didn’t care if I was a slut or not. They’d already learned to be impenetrable. But not me. My skin is porous.

When my dad asked me how things were going at school, I spilled the beans. Ever the practical one, he warned me that someone was going to fight me. They were going to fight me and they were going to aim for my hair, because it was an easy target. “Make sure you don’t go into bathrooms by yourself, and if they corner you, throw yourself against the wall so they can’t pull your hair from behind.”

A violent childhood, a martial arts background, and a career in the infantry gave him some pretty intense knowledge on survival. Thanks for the hot tip, dad.

My face, my hair, and my pride were saved not from my years of martial arts training nor from my dad’s pep talk on schoolyard bullies. Nope. I was saved by the only woman in school who was taller than me and who showed up to school one day with a cast on her arm. Her boyfriend had broken up with her and she got so angry, she punched a vending machine and shattered her wrist. Andrea was big, bold, and badass and she took me under her wing. When I walked the halls with her, the mean girls got bored and the rumour died as quickly as it was born.

My school might have been on the fence about whether I was a whore, but no one could deny that I held my own on a basketball court. I’d been playing sports for as long as I can remember, and I come by it honestly. My brother could dunk in the eighth grade and my parents coached every sport I played. That first year, basketball was my saviour; I made the team and made friends. For a tournament, we drove six hours away to Ottawa, where I met Jason, a brooding stranger from a neighbouring city. As you do when you’re fifteen, I was smitten.

It wasn’t long before we dated. Long-distance relationships in the early aughts were a serious feat. Bricks for cell phones, no texting. Can you imagine? All we had were embarrassing Hotmail addresses and the “uh-oh” alerts of ICQ and, eventually, MSN Messenger. I once racked up a $120 phone bill yammering away with him for four hours straight. What we could possibly have talked about for that long, I have no idea. But we were in love and stayed that way for the rest of high school.

Jason was taller than me, which is a miracle when you’re a tall teenage girl. He was masculine in a way that made my heart swoon, a broad-shouldered rugby player. He wore zip-up hoodies and skater shoes on his size thirteen feet. I loved his shaggy dark hair, his deep, smooth voice, and the way that his bear hugs made me feel small and safe.

A long-distance relationship is expensive and hard on the heart, but it keeps you out of trouble. I wasn’t out chasing boys, and I often ran home to log on and catch up with him. It also helped me dissociate from all the drama at school. Shy, introverted, and ever the people pleaser, I was conflict avoidant and did whatever I could do to skirt drama or quell it.

It took me a long time to settle into a squad of high school girlfriends. But being labelled the school’s newest whore is always a great way of getting guys to pay attention to you.

Enter Xavier.

Not happy with simply embarrassing me in English class, he took to loudly announcing my name in the hallway when he saw me coming. For a little dude, he talked a big game. Beyond his hallway humiliations, he also insisted on sticking out in every class. He sighed loudly when homework was assigned, talked back to teachers, and muttered his disapproval under his breath at a volume that everyone could hear. He teased everyone and would do absolutely anything for a laugh.

Xavier was a troll before we knew the right term for boys like him. He would goad people for a reaction. At the time, he was simply seen as a textbook class clown who was happiest when all eyes were on him.

Short and wiry, but fit from years of competitive hockey, Xavier was good looking—and not just because the school uniform put otherwise drab young men in well-tailored suits. Xavier had dark hair and strong, broad hands. He had a Clark Kent square jawline and perfectly straight, bright white Chiclet teeth. I’ve yet to meet anyone with a more infectious laugh. He laughed with his whole self and it enabled his antics. You couldn’t help but smile at the stupid shit he did.

I don’t remember when we transitioned to being friends. I’m sure it started with me enabling his stupidity with a stifled laugh.

We teach girls from a young age to take cruelty from boys as a compliment. We teach boys from a young age to shroud their affection in brutality. I was not immune. But unfortunately for Xavier, his flirting was not returned. Not for another three years at least. I was very much in love with Jason and happy to have Xavier as my BFF.

Xavier settled himself into the role of friend and confidant. In my view, anyway. Unbeknownst to me, Xavier spent those three years feeling like he had been put in the “friend zone,” a purgatory for self-described nice guys who are kind to women but get no sex in return. We were good friends, though. And his character rubbed off on me.

I’d always been a teacher’s pet, a keener who took pride in following the rules and getting praise from adults for it. I was organized and painfully neat, and I envied girls who weren’t bothered by chipped nail polish and smeared eyeliner. I liked structure, routine, and the safety of predictability.

But my high school was run out of a convent, and the strictness was suffocating. I started questioning the rules and found myself out of my shell and embracing a bit of Xavier rebellion. One day, he somehow managed to rip his tie. The circumstances elude me, and it’s pretty telling that I have no idea how a man shredded his thick tie in the middle of the school day—but that was Xavier for you. I took the end piece and wore it as an ascot. The teensy bit of gender bending excited me, and when the civics teacher gave me a lecture about how it wasn’t part of the designated uniform and I was to remove it or head to the principal’s office, I accused him of sexism. I wasn’t actually indignant at the bigotry, but I wanted a taste of the power that comes from talking back to authority.

Xavier taught me the thrill of dissent and we both encouraged each other’s eccentricity. He was always down for whatever weird idea I concocted.

I had very chill and progressive parents who subscribed to the rule “If you’re going to do it, do it at home while we supervise.” I never drank or did drugs, but I wasn’t about to waste my parents’ hospitality, so I hosted a lot of parties. And not content to simply host underage drinking parties, I wanted them to be theme parties. At Easter, I had a Playboy bunny party. When George W. Bush declared war on Iraq, I hosted a “Make love, not war” bash, complete with hippie clothes and psychedelic music. My boyfriend Jason went along with my ideas, and Xavier was always game too. My high school photo albums are peppered with pictures of Xavier and me wearing ridiculous outfits and hamming it up for the camera. We were the best of buds.

Xavier and I once found ourselves standing in front of the school dressed as James Bond and a Bond babe. It was a school event with a James Bond theme, but no one else thought to get a Bond babe sidekick (or to use an old-school “Duck Hunt” Nintendo gun as the weapon).

I had a great boyfriend, a gang of girlfriends, and my bestie Xavier, but I still hated high school. And my home life was no better. My grandmother, at age fifty-nine, collapsed one day at work and was rushed to hospital. It was at first thought to be a stroke, but then she was diagnosed with a hemangioblastoma, a tumour on her brain stem. The surgery to remove the tumour put her in a vegetative state for months. She eventually started recovering but was permanently disabled on the left side, leaving her in a wheelchair.

My family is working class at best, so my grandmother and her dad were living together in a trailer park outside of town to save money. But it quickly became obvious that they could no longer afford her new reality as a disabled woman, and they both moved in with us.

That many bodies under one roof took some serious adjusting to, and there were many months of walking on eggshells. The house was in disarray, we were constantly bumping into each other, and the financial reality of building an accessible addition on our home, feeding two extra people, and preparing for two teenagers in university took its toll. It was a home filled equally with love and chaos.

I wasn’t exactly embarrassed, but it did require a lot of explaining when I invited people over: “Yes, this is my brother and my parents. This disabled woman is my maternal grandmother we call Oma, and this spry, able-bodied man is my maternal great-grandfather. We all call him Papère. They kinda have their own apartment but we share a kitchen, and that van in the driveway is my great-grandfather’s because he drives to the mall every day to hang out with his friends. There’s a lot of old people in my house, but they’re all very chill and it’s okay if you swear or tell dirty jokes. Oh, and Oma sleeps really soundly and my Papère doesn’t wear his hearing aids to bed, so we can make noise really late without getting into trouble.”

We Lalondes had four generations living under one roof. And it was understood that if you partied at Julie’s house, her great-grandfather would make you hangover pancakes.

I survived high school by keeping my eye on the prize. Every year put me one step closer to my childhood dream of becoming a journalist. At seventeen, I applied to Carleton University because I loved Ottawa and my uncle who lived there told me it was known for its J-school. I worked my part-time job at the mall selling sneakers and baggy jeans to white suburban kids who worshipped Eminem. I was saving up for my big move to Ottawa and couldn’t wait to pick out bright-coloured Ikea fixings for my apartment.

To make my last year of high school bearable, I committed to joining as many clubs and groups as I could. I won an award for a theatre performance and became MVP of my improv team. I went on a school trip to a ski hill and became a legend—and not because I had any skills on the hill.

I was a very weak skier, but I talked a big game and convinced the attendants to let me ride up a double black diamond hill, mistakenly believing that the more black diamonds, the easier the run. In trying to dismount from the four-person chairlift, I got the binding of my ski tangle...

Table of contents

• Note
• Prologue
• 1: Good Girl
• 2: The Beginning
• 3: Trauma on Trial
• 4: Requiem
• 5: KFC and Nancy Grace
• 6: Operation (Dis)honour
• 7: Aftermath
• 8: Carte Blanche
• Ellipsis
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author
• Copyright