We were in Chicago at a local Bennigan’s, and we were supposed to stay at Lara’s aunt’s place that night. I don’t remember why, but Lara and I were on the train back. Lara really needed to use the bathroom, and the train stops were so far apart that we started bickering. I told her to hold it, but she started crying, and I was mad. We were being over the top. I think we finally got off somewhere where she could use the bathroom, and we waited for another train to get back on. We gave each other the silent treatment the whole way back.

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I went to sleep first in the room we shared, and Lara stayed up chatting with her aunt. I woke up not long after falling asleep to what I can only describe as tiny racing cars speeding all around my stomach. I was sweating bullets. I managed to crawl to the top of the stairs and sat down, calling out to Lara. She came running, took one look at me, immediately said, “Oh my god, you have a fever!” and ran me a bath. She sat with me while my fever broke and kept me calm.

The next day, Lara fell sick too. Every time we stopped at a gas station, which was often, we were both violently ill in the bathrooms. Lara had broken blood vessels around her eyes, and I couldn’t even keep water down. At one point, while filling up the gas, the smell of fuel made me so ill that I couldn’t speak. Moments before, Lara had handed me a litre of ice-cold water, and all I could do was pour the entire bottle over my head in the backseat. Lara looked back horrified, thinking I had thrown up all over the seats. I was trying everything not to. Sean, who was in the passenger seat, was staring at us both, asking, “Why are you so sick?” He ate at the exact same place as us and didn’t get sick at all. I still question that.

During that road trip, we stayed at an almost deserted and definitely flooded hotel in New Jersey. After spending the night at a comedy dinner where the servers were all comedians paid to make fun of you, our server had finger puppets. She slid down a banister to enter the room and take our order, speaking to me through her puppets and stating I looked like Shane from The L Word. We laughed so hard we cried that night. We stayed out late in the heart of New York at some dive bar, playing pool and watching rats crawl by. When we finally made it to the subway platform, we spent hours waiting for the morning trains to start running again. We only slept in that stinky hotel room for maybe two hours.

When we passed through Toronto, we met up with our friends, Dario and Cristina. We did an open mic in that city, and it was so much fun. Cristina and Dario played Cher’s “If I Could Turn Back Time” for me at the open mic. My heart has never been so full. We all cried, laughed, and sang. Everyone who knows me knows I love Cher, so to me, learning and playing that song was such a special gift, something I’ll never forget.

When we entered Canada through Saskatchewan again, we passed through my grandpa Louie’s town a bit too early in the morning and didn’t stop by to say hi. Later, when my mom told him, he was really disappointed, stating he was actually awake. A few years later, he died. I hadn’t seen him or said goodbye. My family was never close, at least not with me. Maybe I wasn’t close with them either. The most devastating part about his death was my mom telling me how she would call him every day after he died, forgetting that he was gone until the phone rang and no one answered. One day, the line went dead too. That was probably around the time my mom and I started to talk more and slowly became friends. I was afraid to leave her on her own, so I put myself aside once again. I let everything from our past slide away to the back of my mind.

I don’t remember exactly when or where we met, but I do remember he showed up with his guitar to a practice with me, Lisa, and Jen Foster, our drummer (and drummer for The Flairs, who was also previously a drummer for the band Tulli that we listened to as kids). He was really over the top rocking out so hard that we all couldn’t help but laugh, but he was also very good. He was a good improvisor, a great guitarist, a writer, and a backup singer. He towered over me. I remember thinking about that and then thinking, “Damn, everyone is taller than me.”

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In 2007, when Lara was in film school, we filmed a music video in the sound stage of her school. They had everyone so far behind me that it forced the perspective that I wasn’t as short as I am. I think that’s so funny and disheartening all at the same time. I struggle with body dysmorphia. I’ve had it since I was barely seven years old, when I was still so thin and eating more than everyone else. I never put on any weight, and my mother took me to see a lot of doctors to test me and find out why. They didn’t seem to do much other than force feed me. I had to drink those Ensure drinks with every meal. Just imagine how absolutely sick I felt at and around all meal times from then on.

I was told I had low bilirubin and a high metabolism. (Gilberts syndrome) They truly thought I was just not eating, except that I was. I was also horrified by puking, so I wasn’t bulimic either. But the heavy focus on my body has been there from a very young age. I carry that with me to this day. I don’t know what it is that makes people feel empowered to speak on my body, but it comes up so often. People are just so comfortable talking about thinness and how I should eat more or maybe if I wasn’t vegan, it would be easier to gain muscle. I’ve been on both sides of it, and it just doesn’t work that way. It’s frustrating, and I also fear triggering people, so I don’t usually comment much back when this topic is being discussed. When I do, the offence on people’s faces grows fast, as if I don’t know what I’m talking about and haven’t lived a life of intense judgment.

It’s fine; I don’t expect anyone to understand. We all live such layered and multi complex timelines. There’s no one right way to care for ourselves. We have to do the best we can with the tools we have. Some people would say I’ve been blessed with genetics, but is that really true? Knowing my story up to now, I’ve felt rejection so deep from the people who created me, the people I spent my formative years around, and I still struggle to be understood in this timeline. I’m exhausted and have been for what feels like my whole life.

I’ve often mused about how other people wouldn’t have survived had they taken my place. I guess the early rejection and never being anyone’s priority numbed me to these situations and also attracted the type of manipulative people I’ve encountered.

Not long after Lisa moved into the hell house, I moved down the street about seven houses down and rented a room in the basement of a house. I became fast friends with the upstairs neighbours, Shane and Elliot. Those hell house party days were next level.

We had mainly musician friends all in bands. We had The Smears, The Flairs, and my band, Ready.Set.Die. We would all play shows together, and we had a whole scene. Our shows were the ones to be at, and the hell house parties were the parties to be at.

This is also where I was first introduced to The Friendgineer. She attended all the parties with food for everyone and inserted herself wherever she could. Like many of our group of friends, she got her hair done by Angela, who would dye and cut it to look “cooler”. She also wore a dark red bomber style jacket. At times, I felt bad for her. She was a struggling cook with a catering business that didn’t seem to be doing well most of the time. She had been single for a long time after a failed relationship with someone she would describe as the love of her life. Instead of healing, she would show up to parties with food and birthdays with cake she made from scratch. She would come to the hell house to pick up our gear for shows and pack it back in her truck after shows, barely getting any help from anyone else because they would all be drinking after the shows. I helped as much as I could, but looking back, that obviously sent the wrong message.

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There was a point when I was maybe 20 or 21, and this woman at that time was well into her 30s. She sent me a long Facebook message about how she couldn’t wait around for me to grow up and be mature, and that she had to stop being friends with me because it wasn’t healthy for her. I didn’t know it then, but upon looking at that message today, it seemed as though my extra care and help (probably because no one else cared or helped even a little) made her think I wanted something more with her. The fact that I was not as mature as she saw herself was infuriating to her. I remember somewhat responding, but everyone else told me to ignore the message and that I was still welcome at all the parties. If she said anything to me at all, just ignore her. I don’t know what she thought doing all that would do, but she was now the one on the outside, and that only lasted a few months. Then she would invite me over for tea to “talk,” where she would conclude that she needed to expect less from a literal child. It was one of the strangest conversations I’ve ever had, and one that I had to endure so that everyone, including me, could stop hearing about it.

I remember a particularly rowdy party where Ryan was doing flips in the living room and flipped through a window onto the grass, breaking it but not his bones. Everyone was shocked when he was okay, and then we all laughed. Angela and Rene were freaking pissed off and yelling at him. He had to fix it. If I’m recalling correctly, he either did or at least replaced it. Honestly, maybe he just broke the screen… I know something broke!

After the short stint of living down the road from Lisa, I would move further into East Van, closer to Commercial Drive, with a friend I made at some gay events. Gen and I lived in the basement of a house where we shared a desktop computer that lived on top of a kitchen table, which we would maybe turn on once every few weeks to check our MySpace pages. They had a drum set in their room. They always wanted to be a drummer but didn’t really ever get there, but we would still have fun and slam on them, taking turns and dancing. That summer, I would turn 22. I remember because it was my Champagne birthday (born on the 22nd of July). I had everyone dress up 80s themed, and no one disappointed! I do have some pictures from back then. Everyone was there. It was a heat wave summer, and I had just gotten my cat, Love, as a kitten. I was very worried about her overheating, so she was in my room, and I would go in every hour or so and ice her little head with ice cubes and water.

In attendance were Lisa, Chris, Angela, Rene, Heppy, Remple, Friendgineer, Fiddy, Gen, Milton, and Jenna (our upstairs neighbours and friends). The list truly does go on. There’s a point to the name dropping that I’ll get to later. Despite it being hotter than a witch’s tit out there, that was one of my more memorable birthdays. We mostly sat outside my place on couches we pulled out onto the carport, listening to music, and everyone was drinking (still not me), eating, and just talking for hours.

When I stepped off the plane, I had only seven dollars in my pocket (no exaggeration), but I couldn’t have been happier to be back in Vancouver. I quickly got a job at the bingo hall as a card seller. One of the roommates in our apartment, Erin Hepburn, also worked at that Main Street bingo hall called Planet Bingo. I was living there rent-free at first, though I think I started paying rent once I started working.

I don’t know why, but I was bored, and when I started working there, I decided to put on an Australian accent. It was one of the most tragically funny things I’ve ever done purely for my own entertainment. People would ask where I was from, and I’d never lie. “Edmonton,” I’d say. Keeping that accent up for the entire year I worked there was hard. I’ll never be an actor.

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I love me from the past. What even was that? I was way more unapologetically weird in those days.

To be fair, when I moved there that time, I had stopped taking all my medications cold turkey. I didn’t have coverage in BC or any money to refill them, and truly, I did not want to take them anyway. That was probably one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. Those medications are no joke. I was emotional and all over the place for months after stopping them, and my skin got so bad for years. I developed deep, pitted acne scars that lasted a long time. They’re still faintly there.

Thankfully, at one point, my friends Madix and Nick knew I was self-conscious about it and got me this incredibly strong acne cream. It was so intense that it actually bleached my cheeks for a while. But it also made the acne go away and softened the deep scars.

I remember thinking that gesture felt like love for the first time: someone listening and trying to actively help me without me even asking for it. I would absolutely never. It eats at my soul to even ask people to repost my songs. I’m independent to my own detriment at times.

I spent about a year living in that small storage closet and witnessed, as well as participated in, some wild parties. These included watching people try cocaine for the first time. I’ve never encountered more delusional and talkative people who believe every word they say is gold. (Says the person writing a memoir about their life.) I’ve never done drugs to this day, except for one time on a boat party when I think I accidentally drank someone else’s (or my own spiked?!) drink that had MDMA in it. We’ll come back to that.

This was the year of my undoing.

Living there, I also discovered foods I never would have eaten otherwise. Like nutritional yeast and olive oil on popcorn. I still love that combination to this day. Trust me.

There was a KFC down the road, and I would go for Two-Dollar Tuesdays to get two of those small chicken sandwiches. That would become one of the many things that eventually put me off chicken and mayo.

For years, without realizing it and simply being labelled “picky,” I slowly removed foods from my diet that made me feel ill. At this stage in my life, I had already stopped eating beef and pork. I found them absolutely revolting. Those two-dollar sandwiches were simply what fit my budget.

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Eventually, I moved down the road into an apartment building with a shared bathroom. It was incredibly cheap, around $410 a month, and you only had to share the bathroom with one other person. The man I shared with was incredibly strange. I would often hear him in there sounding like he was having an exorcism, which was scary.

Chris eventually moved to Vancouver and stayed with me in that apartment for a while before finding his own place. It felt safer having him there, but we were chaotic and poor together. That year, we started putting popcorn dill spice in our Mr. Noodles, which was our staple food. Those were the malnourished years.

Not long after, Lisa joined us in Vancouver. By then, I had started getting my hair done at AXIS, a salon I’d heard about through Angela, who worked there. I met Angela and her then-girlfriend, Rene Botha, at a show and we became fast friends. I actually remembered Angela from the Calgary Stampede, where she had been Bif Naked’s drummer’s drum tech.

One day, I had a phone call with Lisa before she moved out. I told her that Angela was doing my hair, and she was instantly jealous. She had the biggest crush on Angela. I think that might have been her final motivation to move to Vancouver, along with the fact that Chris and I had already done the thing we’d all talked about doing together for years.

I remember hanging out with Lisa and one of her first girlfriends, Jade, as the third wheel. One night, we all lay in Jade’s bed to pass out. They promised not to do anything with me in the bed and even had me sleep in the mi…

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In some ways, I understand it. In others, I don’t. I was just a kid, and a well-behaved one, especially compared to my wild o…

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It was an incredibly hard thing for me to share my memoir. I obviously wrote it with the intention of sharing it, but I wrote it last year after I finished recording my album. As far as songs go, I expressed everything I needed to back then, during filming the documentary, and after its release. After reading some very concerning Reddit posts about how some people saw things, I felt like I needed to get this off my chest.

After many years of bullying and gaslighting, you start to wonder. For me, the easiest way to sort through all of that was just to write it out. As I was writing, the memories came flooding in. I was comparing timelines using my first rental agreement for my apartment, which I still have, and checking in with my friend Lara, who has a better grasp on timelines than I do. I wanted to focus on what wasn’t really shown in the film and share more about me. Who I am, how Tegan and I met, and who I was, am, and am now.

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When you hold in a lot for so long, it doesn’t come easy to just be vulnerable or openly cry. At a lot of points in the doc, you can see that I’m getting visibly upset and maybe even tearing up, but I’m more used to holding it all together because showing my true feelings felt like a crime all its own.

I digress. I mostly just wanted to say thank you for reading along so far. I made this Substack with the intention of allowing people to get to know me properly. When the one thing people know you for is a catfishing doc, there’s really no room for redemption. Most people don’t have the attention span to actually pay attention, or they decide who you are before they even watch it.

The last time I opened the memoir was in March. I didn’t forget about it. I’ve just never written anything other than songs before in my life. Songs are easier. They have the truth in them, but it’s done artfully and doesn’t add much in the way of a redemption arc. I want to be clear that I’m not trying to flame anyone in this memoir. I genuinely believe there are just a lot of missing details that need to be told.

If you would like to continue to read along, consider getting a paid subscription. My other and only intention outside of telling my side of MY story is being able to gain back what I lost from all of this, which was a pretty awesome time playing music and making art with a community I once loved.

Xoxo JT

PS: The next and last part of Chapter 1 is out Monday!

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From then on, we hung out all summer. I recall almost every hangout—not in chronological order, because timelines always trip me up—but here’s a few months’ worth of our adventures. Because according to her, we “only hung out for coffee maybe once.”

We hung out on the largest patio in Gastown. At the time, it was called Chill Winston (The Local now). One day, she came to my work to surprise me with our mutual friend, the Friendgineer. I worked part-time at a gelato place in Gastown that had this massive stuffed buffalo. She popped out from behind it, looking very shy and funny. I was mortified because no one knew I worked at that job—let alone her. I can still see her face peering around that gigantic stuffed animal. I don’t think she cared. She just wanted to see me and say hi, I guess.

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Another time, she insisted on going to her “favourite” Indian food place. It was in Tinseltown Mall (International Village). I was laughing so hard that day that I still don’t love eating around people. I remember pushing my food around more than actually eating it, and she made a comment about me playing with my food.

I was also about to pay rent. At the time, I was paying rent in cash for some reason. My other part-time job at Lick—the lesbian bar under the Lotus Hotel in Gastown—also paid me in cash. So I had a massive wad of cash in my wallet, and she laughed and asked me if I was a drug dealer. I most certainly was not. My straight-edge lifestyle was still going strong during that period of my life.

Another time, we met for sushi. I remember she had me meet her outside her financial institution after an appointment she had. I want to say it was called “Tangerine,” but maybe I’m just recalling the colour of the building. I was exactly on time because I had left my place late and was practically running down the street to make it. I arrived just in time to hear her tell Lindsey Byrnes, who she was on the phone with, that I had just gotten there.

At the sushi place, I was trying to impress her. I used all the proper names from the menu (I had actually worked at a sushi restaurant in Alberta when I was 15) and accidentally ordered salmon when I meant to order cucumber. When it arrived, I was shocked and asked the waitress if this was kappa maki. She said, “No, that’s what you ordered.”

I said, “Of course…” and just ate it. (I wasn’t vegan at that time.)

Another time—maybe after sushi—she took me to her place and gave me the fastest tour imaginable before we headed somewhere else. I remember tying my shoes in front of her, and she commented on the way I tie them. Apparently adults don’t tie their shoes the way I do. I still tie them the same way now, so I don’t know what to tell you.

We also sat in the parking lot outside the Waterfront SkyTrain station one day, facing the water, perched on one of those concrete parking blocks, just talking for hours. Eventually, we only left because Tegan said she had to go to the bathroom and didn’t like using public restrooms.

On one occasion, she had me over to her place with a group of her friends and her sister, who sat next to me and said nothing beyond our introductions. At that time, I was trying to fit in. I was still straight edge, but I brought some energy drinks with me (not very sXe), so I wouldn’t look like the only one not drinking, since I assumed people would be drinking at this gathering.

I don’t remember what the occasion was, but I do recall Tegan being annoyed that no one ate the massive amount of baked goods she had laid out for everyone. She said we should bring it down to people in the Downtown Eastside so it wouldn’t go to waste.

Another notable event: I was with her when she got a call telling her to go to the Commodore Ballroom to meet Dallas Green for the first time. She brought me with her. We went in and stood at the side of the stage just before his soundcheck. He blew past me to say hi to her. I just stood there, saying nothing to anyone. She did not introduce me.

I should have gauged her character from that interaction alone. But I was still in my very early twenties—naive, wide-eyed, and captivated just by her presence.

Even though I wasn’t, at that moment, a fan of hers, I’m not ashamed to admit that I grew up as a young, closeted queer with her music on mix tapes that were made for me. I had even purchased a few of her albums before I moved to Vancouver. As much as I was more ingrained in the punk music scene at that time, I definitely listened to a lot of female-fronted folk artists. I started out practically as a fetus, listening to country, ’80s rock, and pop—basically everything my mom and dad played in the house. Everything from Cher, David Bowie, and Queen to The Judds, Garth Brooks, Tom Cochrane, and Bryan Adams.

I’m not ashamed of where my music tastes started, or what they’ve evolved into over time.

There were other hangouts, but you get the idea. No coffee was ever had—despite what’s mentioned in the film. It wasn’t casual. We became quite close over time, in ways that felt both obvious and unspoken.

One night when I was working at Lick, she asked to be put on the guest list. I’ll never forget it.

She showed up with a group of friends. I was in the back room on a fifteen-minute break when she pushed past me. She was with my manager, this tall skinny, gaunt lesbian woman who often stood around topless, tits swinging, collecting one-night stands like souvenirs. I truly didn’t understand the appeal. She wasn’t even particularly kind as a person.

They pushed past me to make out, right in front of me.

I wasn’t forward about my feelings back then, but that was the first time Tegan hurt me. My stomach dropped. My breath left my body. I remember thinking, What do I do?

I didn’t want anyone to see me cry. So I walked to the front, went behind the bar where my bag was, grabbed it, climbed over the bar, and quit right there. I never went back.

I dropped her off at my friend Adrienne’s to stay for the week while I unpacked. Love was my first pet, excluding a betta fish named Fernandez, so I was extra careful. Considering our last living situation had been stressful for both of us, I didn’t want her overwhelmed with boxes scattered all over our new space. I planned to have everything unpacked and smelling like home before bringing her back, so the transition would feel easier for her.

During that week, Adrienne called to let me know she had invited a friend — Tegan — over for dinner and thought it would be good if I dropped by. She told me, “Just act like you’re visiting your cat.”

I got the feeling her guest wouldn’t know me, or even know I was going to be showing up. It felt like my friend was showing her off to me, as if to say, “Look who I know.” Adrienne really liked to impress everyone around her. She fancied herself the chef of the group, making elaborate cakes for everyone’s birthdays. She hauled around everyone’s gear — we were all musicians — and even called herself the “friendgineer.”

I recall one of the many reasons I moved. One of my then-roommates, Breanna, told me Love had peed on her bed, but my cat never did things like that. She never misbehaved and always used the litter box. I asked her, “Well, what did you do to her?” She said Love was just a cat and not to “psychoanalyze” her. I’m sure, to this day, she scolded my gentle baby or worse — probably hit her. She well deserved that pee on her bedsheets.

The other two roommates were heavily influenced by this woman, who was very intense and bossy. She always had a problem with someone or something.

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One of my roommates was my guitar player in Ready.Set.Die… and the other was the girlfriend of another band’s (The Smears) guitarist, Dustin, whom I was friends with. This outsider roommate obviously felt she needed to make herself important outside of all our music friendships, since she wasn’t quite a part of that world. I had actually gotten her the warehouse job she worked at.

She was the type of person who made it clear she thought she was better than everyone. I ran into her again many years later at the salon where I worked. The high-and-mighty attitude was still very present. I was still polite.

Lara, a friend of mine, came by to help me pack, and we played the most obnoxious CDs from my collection loudly from my room, just to annoy those horrible roommates. We laughed and hauled my things out of there.

The Friendgineer often bragged about other musicians I had either heard of or was a fan of, as if their success were her own. Like Todd Kerns, Dawn — who was in the girl group Tuuli — and Jen Foster, who would later become my drummer for a time.

I always found her behaviour strange and questioned it often, but everyone else in our friend group — the ones benefiting from her desperation — told me not to say anything and to just be nice. I was a lot more hardheaded in those days. I wasn’t as thoughtful with my words when I spoke. I often tried to prove how tough I was, especially since I was the only sober (sXe) person in our group of punks and musicians.

Straight Edge is a hardcore punk movement that includes, but is not limited to, abstaining from alcohol and substances that distort reality. I wouldn’t have even taken an Advil in those days. I guess that lifestyle actually suited who I already was, since I had grown up Mormon.

So, back to the invite to drop in on my cat at Adrienne’s (The Friendgineer). I confided in my neighbour and childhood friend, Chris, who had moved here from Alberta after me, about this possible setup. He was pumped. He was actually the one who pointed out that it was a setup.

Chris had just finished hair school and was working at a salon, but he wasn’t busy enough yet, so he had time. He booked me in to cut and colour my hair. He wanted to do my makeup too. I was not into it. I think I still let him do it, though. I was naive about it entirely, even with Chris’s insistence. I thought he was being absurd — as he often was.

Chris and I met when we were 14 or 15, when I moved to Calgary to be in a band with Lisa (Sinner). They had been friends for years prior.

On one hand, it was obvious, in the way things were unfolding, that I was being set up to meet Tegan — not just because it would “impress” me that Adrienne knew her, but because she thought Tegan would like me. I wasn’t so sure about that, but I let Chris do his little makeover for this “casual” drop-in to say hello to Love.

I don’t remember walking in, or whether we shook hands, but I do remember sitting cross-legged on the floor, petting Love and reassuring her that she would be coming home with me in a few days. I recall looking up at Tegan, who was sitting at the little countertop island in the Friendgineer’s kitchen, and into her eyes. I saw very tired eyes — one of which drooped slightly.

Later, she would point it out in her band’s promos and talk about it — something called ptosis. I guess it’s from stress.

How tiring it must be to keep up appearances.

The very next day, I got a text (which, by the way, is funny because this was 2006, and we had text messaging, but it generally cost 10–20 cents per text after your phone plan’s 50 included messages ran out, lol). It said something like, “Hey, it’s Tegan. Adrienne gave me your number. I’m going to be watching hockey at my place with some friends later. Do you want to come and watch with us?” I think that was the text verbatim.

If you enjoyed this excerpt, consider subscribing or sharing it with someone who loves 2000s indie scene stories. Part 2 drops soon.

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