The first couch I remember sleeping on was at Alex’s house. His mom was out pulling a graveyard shift at a second job, and we’d spent the last week hatching plans to pull off the greatest night of snacks, movies, video games, and sports our little brains could dream up.
It was the summer of 2012, a date I can produce not by memory but through the cross-referencing of our email correspondences with the patch notes of the video games we played together in those days. After an afternoon of biking to the park and kicking a soccer ball around, we booted up his older brother Rich’s old PC, ooh-ing and ahh-ing as the RGB fans and keyboard spun to life before spending hours stuffing our faces with Smarties and taking turns playing flash games.
Alex and I were alike in a lot of ways - neither of us had many friends in elementary school, we both had brothers who were more naturally talented than us, we were both mostly raised by our divorced mothers, and we both played soccer (although he was much more skilled than me, and often offered generous handicaps in our 1v1 skirmishes). Most importantly, we shared a boyish childhood admiration for any fictional character with a big sword, a motif that remains as a jutting idiosyncrasy in my adult aesthetic sensibilities.
As the late summer sun eased its grip on Alex’s sleepy neighbourhood, Rich returned home, leading his posse of pimply 16 year old friends into the living room like a pirate captain who’d just plundered a ship full of cheap shitty booze and corner store junk food. Alex and I didn’t drink any of the booted liquor, but the rest of that night still plays back in my mind in the same montage format that is typically reserved for my college-age memories of intoxicated benders.
We kicked the evening off by watching a pirated copy of 300, a movie that was way, way more explicit than anything my 11 year old retinas had ever perceived. I spent what felt like half the movie peeking through a tiny gap in my fingers as an oiled up Gerard Butler spilled fake blood on the screen for nearly two hours.
Rich had found a single pair of boxing gloves in the closet the week before, so after the movie we headed to the backyard for a pre-planned sparring match under the moonlight. Alex and I squared off with the older boys forming a loose ring around us - he generously accepted the left-handed glove despite us both being right-handed. I remember throwing a few weak swipes before blinking and realizing I was flat on my back, the lawn tickling my ears as I wondered whether the stars in front of me were from the midnight sky or from getting socked in the nose.
I nursed my double nosebleed over a plate of chocolate ice cream cake we discovered in the garage freezer, watching as Alex installed a suite of ridiculous mods on his freshly cracked copy of Skyrim. His brother would occasionally reach over his shoulder to correct the occasional typo on the command line, to remind him of a setting he’d forgotten to configure, or to point out a particularly funny porn ad on a pirating website.
Even Alex and I could only spend so many hours roleplaying as a fictional muscle man slaying dragons with big swords, and by 3 in the morning we were all squeezed onto the couch playing Super Smash Bros Brawl. One of my fondest memories is of racking up KOs on Rich and his buddies as they hurled racial slurs at me with a level of creativity and enthusiasm that only 16 year old edgelords are capable of.
By this time, our once-flush supply of chips, cookies, candies, microwave meals, and chocolate cake was completely exhausted. Naturally, we saddled up on our bikes (Alex “lent” me his sister’s bike on her behalf) and made our pilgrimage to the nearest McDonalds, fries spilling out of the side pockets of our backpacks as we cruised back downhill toward the first hints of an early summer sunrise.
I remember going to the bathroom to wash my hands, then waking up a few moments later to someone knocking on the bathroom door, finding myself to have somehow dozed off on the bathmat. Everyone else had already devoured their food, and I stumbled my way from the bathroom straight to the couch, where I fell through a viscous haze of teenage B.O. before landing with my limbs splayed haphazardly across the old black leather. Unidentifiable crumbs and spills penetrated the back of my t-shirt, the faint scent of cigarette smoke trailed from the upholstery into my nostrils, and the now-risen sun was glaring through the blinds directly into my eyes. I fell asleep more quickly and deeply than I ever have since.
Sleeping on someone’s couch is an inherently vulnerable experience. In the dozen or so years since that sleepover, I’ve crashed, passed out, snored, and drooled on my fair share of couches. I find that these situations tend to materialize amidst spontaneous or merry circumstances: after a night at the club, at a well-attended sleepover, visiting friends abroad, impromptu late night adventures, etc. Circumstances like these tend to imply or establish a level of mutual trust that justifies the act of sleeping in an open, often unfamiliar space (and, conversely, inviting someone to stay inside your home while you sleep).
Hand in hand with this vulnerability comes transience - a couch typically does not afford the private space and long-term spinal comfort that most people tend to desire from a sleeping situation.
The year after the sleepover at Alex’s, my dad moved to an apartment on top of the International Village Mall in Chinatown. It was small but nice enough, with a tiny solarium connected to a bright kitchen across from a bedroom, bathroom, and shallow den. With my dad crammed into the bedroom with his third wife and my newly-born brother, I was designated to the small red couch in the middle of the living room.
Being a spry (although slightly tubby) middle schooler, I didn’t pay much mind to the lack of back support during my weekend visits to see my dad. There were, however, a notable series of realizations that arose from my first short stint as a young periodic couch surfer.
First: one thing to know about International Village Mall is that it’s on the border of Vancouver’s infamous Downtown East Side, typically known for its widespread poverty and drug use. There’s no charitable way to put it - it’s dirty, sticky, and smells like piss. The neighbourhood around this apartment was by no means a dangerous place, but it was still foreign (and at times frightening) for a kid who had spent the last couple years in one of the city’s quietest and safest suburbs.
In this apartment, which lacked AC and had floor-to-ceiling windows that let in unbearable amounts of heat in the summertime, we always left the living room windows open at night to let the cool evening breeze circulate. Laying on the couch against the window at night, I would almost always be kept up or woken by screaming, singing, wailing, or moaning from the streets below, occasionally pierced by any one of the three emergency vehicle sirens. Eventually, this had an interesting effect on me - it was strangely comforting that the man outside the mall who screamed incomprehensibly at me on the street also screamed incomprehensibly at other people, laughed hysterically with his friends, wailed at the moon, and sang sad songs in the small hours of the morning. It made him and the other people on the street real - real in a way that was continuous and tangible and surprising, a way that simply hadn’t clicked in my previously sheltered childhood.
Unlike ghosts or monsters, the idea of something frightening becoming “real” wasn’t scary in the case of the homeless people outside the mall. The initial shock and unfamiliarity faded. I began to recognize familiar needs, emotions, and behaviours within people who were originally indecipherable and unrecognizable to me. At the same time, I caught a glimpse of the unimaginable breadth of experiences and circumstances that a life could traverse.
Of course, these ideas that were stewing in the back of my prepubescent, Minecraft-addled mind were far too big for me to reason about or put into words. One thing, however, was clear to me: that small red couch was fundamentally the only thing that separated my life from the life of the screaming man outside the mall.
Simultaneously, and much closer to the forefront of my attention, another transformation was taking place during my first tenure as a regular couch-sleeper. The aforementioned lack of personal storage space that comes with a conventional bedroom imposed a strict physical constraint on what I could do and have during my weekend visits. My little blue backpack couldn’t hold much more than my clothes, toiletries, and homework, so I wasn’t able to pursue my typical weekend obsessions with Star Wars LEGO or 3D puzzles. To make matters even worse, I was too far away from my buddies in the suburbs to meet up for games or sports.
If I have any tech-bro bones in my body (which I will vehemently deny until the day I die), they probably grew as a direct result of these conditions. Saving my Minecraft worlds on Google Drive, talking to my friends on Skype, levelling up my characters in online games, following long-running series on YouTube - all of these experiences showed me how I could maintain a sense of growth, accumulation, belonging, and continuity, regardless of where I was or what objects I had on hand. I could keep my physical self light while carrying the weight of all my interests with me on that light-speed, hyper-real, liquid-crystal ether that is the Internet. This was a pivotal shift in mindset that was established early and deeply in my life, and was largely accelerated by the constraints of this Couch Era.
It was also around this time that my dad began imparting his own unique old-school flavour of tech-bro-ism (tech-bro-ology? tech-bro-ery?) to me. He really emphasized to me that beyond the computer, it was deeply important that I hone and refine my own mind - after all, it was just a computer that I happened to carry around with me inside my skull. Furthermore, the ideal for computers (and minds) was efficiency. After all, rationality and optimization were the only things we could cling to in this world aside from God and the S&P 500. Everything else was superfluous and unreliable.
So, on the cusp of my formative teenage years, I had collected a couple of big ideas that I still believe to be true: that life is diverse and transient and hopelessly interdependent; and that computers & self-improvement provided efficient avenues to navigate and control my life. Unfortunately, being a stupid 12 year old kid, I took these ideas and came to an utterly tragic conclusion: I needed to become as independent from everything as I possibly could.
Of course, it isn’t entirely fair to lay all the blame on some greasy, clueless 12 year old. I was bullied fairly regularly throughout all of elementary school, never severely but always consistently. I generally had a tough time making friends and was never really up to speed on what was cool at any given moment. On the home front, for as long as I can remember, my mom had expressed her doubt in my dad’s ability to properly take care of me, and vice versa. While their concerns were well-intentioned (and maybe occasionally well-founded), it ultimately put me in a position in which I felt I had to be looking out for myself and be generally distrustful of people. And so, I set my sights on independence - I didn’t want to have to rely on other people providing a couch for me to sleep on.
Needless to say, my plans failed miserably and continuously for the next several years. I became severely depressed, squandered a variety of friendships, developed a chronic psychosomatic illness from stress, and picked up an ever-expanding arsenal of coping mechanisms. Ironically, in my blind scramble for independence, I crippled myself so badly that I became extremely dependent on my friends and family in very burdensome ways. I’m endlessly grateful and indebted to my high school buddies who would meet me at my most pathetic lows and could make me laugh at any moment from any distance.
Just as I was settling into university and beginning to think hey, maybe I’m okay after all, maybe I am really independent from everything- what’s that? It’s the COVID-19 global pandemic, dropping onto my head with a steel chair.
The couch I have spent the most nights sleeping on is the one in my mother’s basement, the long end of a sectional sofa orphaned from the short end of its original “L” shape and tucked into the corner of a converted storage room behind the townhouse’s garage. This was the couch I sheltered through the quarantine on. I spent many groggy afternoons watching recordings of my online lectures folded against the couch’s armrest with my laptop nestled between my knees; motionless hours oozed by as late nights folded upon themselves into cold sunrises, days impossibly crumpling into weeks and then months as time passed silently through me.
I said earlier that the act of couch-sleeping implies transience, holding only for a moment in time. For me, this particular moment lasted a whole year. I spent the year more depressed than I’d ever been, failing all my classes, and helplessly reliant on my family to feed me, pay my tuition, and provide a couch to sleep on. Again, I would not have made it through these times mentally without my friends constantly reaching out, keeping in touch, and patiently meeting me in the same old ruts time and time again.
Finally, the end of quarantine drew to a close, and I was once again drawn to the promise of living away from home, improving myself, and having more control over my life. For a while, things really looked up - I worked on my technical skills, I began dating, I got a dream internship at a big tech company, I met new and exciting friends.
But what had really changed?
A close friend and I began to run into conflict with each other - under the guise of self-protection and meeting my needs, I simply cut them off to better enjoy my independence.
My dad crossed an important and painful boundary I had laid - rather than reconciling, I affirmed that I no longer had any need for him and vowed never to speak to him again.
I wanted to move across the country for my girlfriend and my internship, but I was in the middle of a lease with my roommates - I simply cut off my lease and foisted a new roommate upon them with very little notice. After all, I couldn’t let their inconvenience stop me from pursuing my career.
As my relationship grew more serious, the steel trap I had placed around my heart only grew tighter and more dangerous - how could I really feel safe around my girlfriend if I was dependent on her? How could I be truly vulnerable to the person who could hurt me the most deeply? These fears cut painfully close to those old childhood wounds that inspired my need for independence in the first place. To love is to loosen the floodgates of your heart, and my greatest efforts could only muster a meagre trickle against these towering old mental blocks I had laid to protect myself years ago.
Finally, the palace of contradictions, expectations, and delusions I had constructed around myself came crashing down in spectacular and catastrophic style. I had a mental breakdown and spent a couple months in the deepest depression of my life, doing all the stereotypical corny sad stuff you see people do in movies like crying in the shower with my clothes on and intoxicating myself into a stupor for days at a time. It’s pretty absurd in retrospect, but I really didn’t know what to do or how to make sense of anything I was thinking or feeling - I felt like I had spent so long trying so hard for an ideal and ended up with some twisted, cruel, inverted version of it instead, spiralling deeper and deeper into a vicious cycle of guilt and coping.
Eventually, I broke up with my girlfriend and found myself booted out of the apartment we had been living together in. At this point, my internship had already ended and I was back in Vancouver taking classes again. Clinging onto my overnight bag and my last scraps of dignity, I came crawling back to my old roommates whom I had previously screwed over and asked to stay on their couch for a few nights while I got back on my feet.
On that first night, my old roommates lent me a spare pillow and blanket, stayed up chatting with me to make sure I was okay and helping me take my mind off things, offered me their snacks and tea, and rescued me from one more buzzer-beater mental breakdown. I felt truly safe, fortunate, and cared for. Laying on their slightly too short, slightly funny smelling couch that night, I finally started to realize how much of an asshole I’d been, what I had gotten so wrong a decade earlier, the flaw in the goal I had worked myself half to death towards, the lesson that the COVID pandemic had beaten me over the head with a steel chair with every single day for over a year: in my quest for independence, I had become completely, hopelessly detached. Even if it was possible, independence wasn’t the key to happiness.
Wow. Really? That was it? That’s incredibly, unbelievably simple and obvious. I’ve been making a concerted effort this whole time not to be too defensive or self-critical while writing, but that’s just crazy. I wrote all of that just to say that this one, very particular value is not the sole key to happiness. Wow.
So then an interesting question to ask is: how the hell did I convince myself that that was what I needed for 10 years, and why did it take multiple complete collapses of my sanity to realize I was wrong?
Laying on that couch in the apartment over International Village 10 years prior, slowly realizing that my life’s circumstances were as fragile as a snowflake, I was terrified. Through my transient experiences between physical spaces, I learned to turn inwards and to rely on technology and rationality to navigate and control my life. And so I spent half my life trying to navigate and control my life in the hopes of preserving my circumstances, stuck in a cycle of fear and failure. I detached myself from anything that controlled me in ways that I couldn’t control.
What I’ve come to learn is that this is both a pointless and impossible end goal.
It’s pointless in that there are an endless, beautiful myriad of circumstances adjacent to my current circumstances that are full of beauty, surprise, and wonder, alongside their own struggles, pain, and losses. As I grow older and more experienced, I become more confident in my ability to appreciate the good and survive the bad. I’ve spent the last $10 in my bank account on cheap groceries. I’ve held a fluffy cat in my arms as its purrs reverberate through my chest cavity. I’ve watched a friend die. I’ve hugged my kid brother so hard he has to tell me to stop through his laughs. What used to feel like a narrow tightrope now sprawls out like an endless jungle gym as far as the eye can see.
But the eye never can see very far. It’s impossible to collect perfect information about the world, and without perfect information there is no perfect control. Computers and rationality are efficient tools, but efficiency and tools only get you so far - not far at all, in some senses. We do the best we can with what we’ve got, of course, but sometimes the universe won’t cooperate - that pipe in your ceiling bursts, or a global pandemic puts the world into quarantine, or your heart stops on your bike ride home from work - no amount of consumer software or discipline will ever fully protect you.
When I look at the kinds of messages I took from Western media and society growing up, I can see how they could have reinforced the fallacies that kept me stuck in this cycle for so long. So much of youth culture revolves around finding your niche, epitomizing what makes you unique, and finding ways to stand out in the crowd. These ideas aren’t inherently bad, but within the context of my negative framework they only served to further distance me from other experiences and perspectives. On the other hand, consumer culture and marketing tactics of the modern era focus on selling circumstances rather than products - a food brand is selling family gatherings and relationships, a watch brand is selling a luxurious lifestyle, and clothing brands are selling social status and beauty. All of these examples overstate implications that reinforce the illusion of control.
To be entirely honest, though, I think I was simply seduced by the lie itself. For me, it’s easier to be detached than to be vulnerable. It’s easier to work on superficial technical skills than it is to work on complicated emotions and relationships. It’s easier to pretend you’re not a liar and a coward and a slacker when you isolate yourself from people. Finally, being independent granted a subtle, manipulative sort of power that was extremely addictive and powerful to me. It granted me the ability to simply get up and leave, to take my ball and go home whenever I wanted to. I wielded this power indiscriminately against friends and family and foes alike for many years, and I’m fairly confident I caused untold emotional damage to others and reputational damage to myself in the process. Thinking about it all makes me feel sad and tired.
Now, I’m writing to you from the secondhand couch in my new apartment. It’s been just over a year since that night I landed on my roommates’ couch, and in the time since then I’ve landed on my feet quite nicely. I’ve just signed a 1 year lease, and it’s the first time I’ll be living completely alone with no roommates in my own place. I’m working a full-time job that I love, and I spend my evenings walking around the neighbourhood alone, slowly turning this place into my home. In almost every way, this is the most independent I’ve been in my entire life.
If anything, this is the moment of maximum danger, the point at which it would be easiest to slip back into that old mindset, to be charmed away by the same lure of control and safety and detachment. It’s never easy to break mental blocks and habits, and the past year hasn’t looked anything like steady improvement - it’s more like one of those spiky stock charts that a data analyst assures you is trending in the right direction. When I compare where I am now to where I was even a year ago, though, I know I’m in a much better place. I feel like a captain who’s spent his whole life paddling his sailboat against the current, and is just now learning to hoist the sails and read the wind.
Spending more time with other people makes my flaws surface more often, but it also helps me to work through them and better understand them. Even better, spending more time with other people helps to bring out the best in me, and vice versa across the board. Still, it’s difficult at times not to be afraid. My gut reaction in painful or uncontrollable situations is still to remove myself, to dissociate, to detach, and to push away. There are days I’d rather stand on a chair in the cafeteria and scream nonsense than be vulnerable with a friend, and there are days I’d rather throw my phone off the 42nd floor than reply to a single awkward text. I guess if there’s one thing I should know about myself by now, it’s that I’m a really, really, really slow learner.
It’s 9:23AM, and I’ve been laying on this couch reflecting and writing for almost 8 hours straight. It’s rare that my thoughts, feelings, and memories come to me with such clarity and urgency… it’s probably some combination of luck, the act of laying on a couch, and possibly the 12oz cold brew I chugged 16 hours ago. Thanks for sticking with me through to the end, by the way - writing this all out to share with you has really helped me work through and understand some important themes and events in my life.
If there’s anything you take away from this glorified trauma dumpathon, it’s this: when I think back on all those quiet hours I spent working towards superfluous achievements, all those sleepless nights I spent in quarantine, worrying and speculating about the future, and all those years I spent waiting for better times & better circumstances, they all blend together into a sort of smudgy grey. Even if I squeezed it all together with the greatest effort my memory can muster, it still wouldn’t add up to half of what I remember from that one sleepover at Alex’s house.
If I had simply taken the time to reflect on the brightest, most vivid, and most fulfilling memories, the times when I forgot myself and simply danced to the rhythm, the interactions in which I truly connected with people, when I shared a perfect snack or exchanged a knowing look - I think I would have found a much happier balance in my life much sooner.
I hope this blog post finds you happy, healthy, and well. I hope you find some time in each of your days to do something that adds a bit of colour to your memories. I hope your sword is sharp and sturdy (maybe with spikes or lightning shooting out of it) and slays huge dragons.
Anyways, this is basically a long-winded way for me to ask all my homies if they wanna hang out sometime. Lmk
- Matthew