enmeshment: a love story

(repost from the Juvenescence archive)

I was in my early teens when I first heard the clinical term “enmeshment” -- not from a psychotherapist, but my best friend at school who, like me, was a precocious child of divorce. 

This was in Toronto in the 90s – a city once accurately described as “New York run by the Swiss.”  My friend and I were classmates at a selective state-funded secondary school for the arts in the city’s north end. I lived with my single mother, a magazine journalist, in a basement flat in Chinatown, having followed her to the city from the small-town where I’d grown up.  My girlfriend and I were the free-range children of urban intellectuals in a school that worshipped at the shrine of Antoin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty -- breaking the fourth wall (the dissolution of boundaries in general) was the order of the day along with high self-esteem and “being yourself.” My mother, in particular, took this to heart.