My Mirrorball Years
My Mirrorball Years
Julia Bartel
On the Displacement & Dreams of Young Millennialism
It’s unusual, as a twenty-something in an urban centre, to live in the same place for five years. But I have. Friends who visit my third-floor walkup unit always comment on the stairs, huffing and puffing while I take them two at a time, used to it. “It’s leg day every day,” I tell them.
The hot water goes out here every once in a while. If you’re really unlucky, the water goes out too. There’s no air conditioning on sweltering summer days and in the winter all the building’s heat rises to our top floor, forcing us to open our windows. We have a balcony with a great view of the nearby hospital, if staring at hulking buildings is a pastime of yours. We don’t have an oven. We do have a fancy toaster. But if you run it at the same time as the microwave, you might blow out half the unit’s power, including the fridge, which is only fixed by tromping downstairs to the basement unit where three longsuffering undergrad boys have access to a panel of dials and switches. The boys move behind the door to flip it back on while I stand there in duck slippers with my hair dripping from the shower.
I have spent seven years in the city, five years in this house. It has been hard not to take personally the revolving door of roommates, some whose names I don’t even remember, moving in and out while I twiddle my thumbs and wait for something exciting to happen to me. I have gotten used to a cycle: making space in the cabinet for a new set of dishes, cross-legged chats on the floor beneath the glow of fairy lights, boyfriend visits (theirs, not mine), date night outfit checks (theirs, not mine), grocery runs, and “how was your day?” and Christmas gift exchanges, and “let’s keep in touch,” all often ending the same way: their boxes loaded into a van, their wedding photos on Facebook or a new job in a distant city, and me gradually recognizing that we’re not as close as I hoped we were or thought we’d be.
*
It took me a long time to realize that Toronto isn’t my home anymore. In August, I returned after something like eight months away from the city and found myself curled up in my reading chair telling God, I just so badly wish I could be anywhere but here. I meant it physically, but emotionally and spiritually, too. I missed North Carolina, where I grew up and where I’d visited. I didn’t want to move back there, but I started thinking that maybe I should. Coming back to Toronto had a weight that I could feel pressing down as soon as I reentered my apartment: perhaps the accumulation of all the stressful detritus of early adulthood, or just the way it has felt to navigate it all from the same unchanging eye of the storm. I began to unpack my suitcase, staring down the barrel of another night chilling alone with my cat and Netflix. I looked around my bedroom and thought, is this what coming home is supposed to feel like?
Jonathan Borba
For the first time in seven years, I’d been away from Toronto and I’d liked it; I’d felt lighter and happier. It had once been impossible to imagine that I might not one day love the city where each morning brought a new coffee shop to visit, a new street to explore, another dazzling corner filled with adventure and possibility. I once believed with great hope that I’d be in Toronto for my whole life. But Toronto, I began to realize with shock, had become the problem: a despairing place, a reminder of grief rather than a source of joy. And by now I think we all know what to do with something that no longer sparks joy.
*
When Taylor Swift dropped her sister albums folklore and evermore during the heights of COVID panic, they seemed to perfectly articulate the time’s collective yearnings and fears while also providing a beautiful escape, woven with a sense of dreamy longing: long-lost lovers, childhood tree swings, forgotten old cardigans. Swift crafted a soundscape of mythic stories that wind their way across both albums. In one song, a ghost haunts her funeral and the traitorous friend who put her in the ground. In another, a young man walks up the driveway of the girl whose heart he broke, imagining what will happen when she opens the door.
The album gave me an anchor. In those summer days, cooped up in my apartment with the virus raging out there, I could close my eyes and suddenly see the world as folklore imagined it: overlaid with a film camera filter of black and white, rolling with cool fog, and carpeted with soft moss.
*
Looking back on my years in Toronto, I see a theme: I should have left a lot of things behind a lot sooner. A line from folklore’s “peace” feels evocative of my recollecting: “Our coming of age has come and gone / Suddenly this summer it’s clear / I never had the courage of my convictions / as long as danger’s near.” So often in the past years, I stayed in unhealthy patterns or unhealthy places; I weathered disappointments and heartbreaks and spiritualized it all as my cross to bear and as the laying down of my life I believed Jesus had called me to, even though it made me chronically heartsick. I kept getting stuck in rumination spirals, like in the song “evermore” where the narrator “rewinds the tape but all it does is pause / on the very moment all was lost.” I knew I was in pain, but I didn’t know I had the option not to be. I was so loyal to my communities, my friendships, and my mentors that I suffered onward rather than face how scary it might be or how judged it might make me feel to leave, move, change my situation, or do anything that would have helped me get better. I came to believe that God didn’t like me very much; that he wanted me to suffer, and that in order to heal, it was going to feel worse before it felt better. And it did feel worse. It felt worse for years. I remember lying in the dark staring at the ceiling while Swift sang, “I had this feeling so peculiar / that this pain would be for evermore.”
*
When Dane C. Ortlund released Gentle and Lowly, a treatise on the tenderness of Christ, it caused ripples in the Christian world for its transformational understanding of Jesus’ character. I’ll admit that I read it feeling confused about all the hype it was getting, as if the gentleness of Jesus was some revolutionary discovery. Jesus’ gentleness is actually the part of him which I’ve always felt the most kinship towards—the part of him I know most intimately. Dallas Willard, when asked to describe Christ in one word, chose “relaxed.” I’ll never not be drawn to Jesus’ words about himself as a good shepherd and the images those words conjure: simplistically beautiful, folklore-like, and reminiscent of the Lake District. A picture of quiet care and pursuing love.
I can’t imagine Jesus would ever say to me the things I heard in the words of others, or the things I told myself: that forgiving someone who deeply hurt me meant letting them back in without question, that being uncomfortable with this notion or suffering panic attacks because of it meant I wasn’t being obedient, that unity and the greater good mattered more than my individual wellbeing. “I’ve never been a natural,” Swift writes in “mirrorball”; “all I do is try, try, try.” It’s a song about reflecting others at all costs—“I can change everything about me to fit in”—even at the expense of losing one’s true self. It’s not lost on me that what makes a mirrorball pretty and attractive to people is that it has been shattered.
Swift also writes in “mirrorball”, “I’m still a believer, but I don’t know why.” I do know why. Jesus himself said his yoke is easy and his burden is light, but in his name I took on a backbreaking load. Nevertheless, he has been so kind to me, waiting for me to put it down and look to him.
*
I left, and am leaving. Very soon I will sit cross-legged on the hardwood floor of my empty room, which I haven’t seen bare since I first arrived in 2017. My paintings and polaroids will be stripped from the walls, my shelves will be emptied and packed away; I’ll clear out the nooks of my closet that haven’t seen light in years, and I’ll find all the things I’ve lost because they slipped beneath my bed.
This is all because my email inbox pinged in December, announcing an acceptance letter to the grad program I’d been obsessing over for half a year. It aligned perfectly and providentially with the way I’d started to feel about Toronto: “That old familiar body ache / the snaps from the same little breaks in your soul / you know when it’s time to go.”
If I am like folklore and evermore in their familiarity with rock bottom, I’m also like them in their rose-coloured glasses and their romantic, hopeful dreaming. And I feel like the Lord has been so kind with my dreams, holding onto them for me when I insisted on putting them aside, surprising me with the promise of an upcoming year in Scotland, studying theology and the arts. It has been my turnaround for the ages, my comeback story with the best of them. Even if the only one who ever really sees that is me and Jesus. As I contemplate leaving Toronto at long last, so much of folklore and evermore’s lyrics—the ones that sing the feeling of being seen and loved—feel more true to my life than they used to: “And when I felt like I was an old cardigan under someone’s bed / you put me on and said I was your favourite.”
Julia Bartel
Writer & Student
Julia currently studies at the Institute for Theology, Imagination and the Arts
Photography by Jonathan Borba