When I was seven years old, a woman came to my home to ask me questions. I was told she wanted to talk to me specifically—not my brothers, not my friends, no one but me. When I arrived home from school, she was waiting for me in our family living room, the one without the TV. This irritated me because it was right at the start of TV time; a marathon of TV watching that began after school and went until bedtime, with the only interruption being dinner.

The woman sat across from me in a chair with a notepad and tape recorder. I don’t recall what she looked like, but I do remember she leaned in to be at face height. Every question she asked had to do with TV. What’s your favourite show? Why do you like that show? Do you think you’re old enough to watch that show? How much TV do you watch in a day? Despite being excited by someone asking me about TV, I answered quickly because I knew that every second I was in here, I was away from the TV.

Sometimes she would ask my mother questions instead. Did she monitor what I watched? Did she think TV was affecting my behaviour? Could I read? My mother answered thoughtfully while I sat vibrating with impatience, staring at the clock. I couldn’t tell time, but I knew there was a big difference between a 3 and a 4 in determining what was on. I had already missed Sailor Moon.

The woman finished asking her questions and told me that we were going to take photos. She led me to the TV room. Waiting for me was a photographer. He told me to sit on the couch and look relaxed. He asked my mother if my brothers could join me. She said yes.

“I want you to pretend like you’re watching TV,” he said.

As I began to mimic watching TV—flipping through channels, screaming excitement, sinking into the couch—I began to grow anxious. The clock on the VCR showed 5:00, which meant The Simpsons reruns were starting. If I missed it now, I would only be able to watch three more episodes that night, with the 7:00 and 7:30 episodes being repeats of the 5:00 and 5:30.

“Can I actually watch TV?”

My mother laughed and threw up her arms in defeat.

“Sure,” she said.

The relief was immediate. My shoulders loosened. My palms stopped sweating. I calmed down. I could breathe again. Behind me, the adults talked to each other while the camera clicked, but their voices became distant as I became absorbed into the TV. I was safe.

A few months later, as I was walking home from school, a friend’s mother stopped me and told me how much she enjoyed the magazine article. She thought it was “very cool.”

I didn’t know what she was talking about.

When I arrived home, I asked my mother about it. She told me that I was on the cover of a magazine. She then pulled out the most recent copy of Maclean’s. There on the cover, under the title Toxic TV, was a picture of a kid who looked exactly like me, coming out of a TV. Under the picture was the subheading ‘What Television is Doing to Kids.’ According to Maclean’s, TV was the reason I couldn’t read.

By the time I was nine, I had been diagnosed with dyslexia. Both at home and in school, this meant disappearing.

At home, it was a constant fight over the TV. I would kick and scream if I wasn’t allowed to watch it. After 6 hours at school, all I wanted to do was watch TV and retreat into it. I would refuse to do my homework. It was too hard. I couldn’t figure out simple mathematical equations or how to structure a sentence. I would lie and tell my parents I didn’t have any homework. When a test was scheduled, I would pray to God to let me pass. I received no answer.

Everyday, kids in my neighbourhood would get up and walk to school together. I, instead, was picked up and dropped off for tutoring for the morning period. The school refused to work with my parents on my reading comprehension. Instead, they pointed to TV as the main issue. If only that pesky idiot box could be conquered.

My parents paid out of pocket to provide a tutor for me, even if it meant removing me from French and Music class. I still can’t speak a lick of French to this day, and my recorder skills are not much better.

The tutoring helped. Like all good teachers, my tutor recognized the best way to help me engage with the subject was to frame it around something I was interested in—Sunday morning comic strips. Through the adventures of Calvin and Hobbes and Foxtrot, I was able to work out sentences and tricks for spelling without panicking. 

After a year of tutoring, I returned to school on a normal schedule. But, other people had noticed that I was gone.

To accept help is one of the most difficult things to do. As a child, it was thrust on me. I didn’t want help, I wanted the TV. It was the right decision, but at the time, it marked me different. Being different doesn’t help in a school setting. It’s an easy excuse for children and adults to be cruel.

One parent referred to my mother as “the mom of the famous child who can’t read.”

Hearing those kinds of things only cemented in my mind that the pay off of help was not worth the mocking. I was determined not to ask for help anymore, no matter how much I struggled.

The Maclean’s article blamed television for my inability to read. This was the 90s, when adults were convinced TV was melting children’s brains. Every newspaper columnist in the world seemed to think cartoons were creating a generation of illiterate psychopaths. I happened to be Canada’s illiterate psychopath.

But, television never felt wrong. Compared to school, it felt organized and safe. Things would happen in a predictable order. You would learn a lesson in twenty-two minutes. If you didn’t understand it, you would just watch the next episode, which would have the same, predictable pattern. 

Around this point, the balance of TV being both entertainment and cover for my anxiety began to tip more towards cover. It got worse as school got harder. I started to skip classes to stay home to watch TV. Missing a show could wreck my entire day.

Once, my older brother wouldn’t let me watch Friends. He wanted to watch some CanCon shit instead. I threatened to call the police if he didn’t change the channel.

He didn’t budge, so I called the police.

I hung up, but not before someone answered. An officer showed up at my house half-hour later, deep into the episode, and lectured me that emergency services were not there to settle television disputes.

Nobody thought this had anything to do with anxiety.

As the curriculum grew more complex, so did analysis. It required deeper reading, something I found difficult to do since I was stuck at a 6th grade reading level. Even when people would try to engage with me about TV, I would discuss trivial facts rather than discuss what the storyline meant.  

Eventually, I started lying about having seen something. I figured that reading a synopsis off Wikipedia was as good as seeing the show. In fact, it was better because it was easier to recognize patterns and didn’t require breaking down subtlety. I would regurgitate well-known episodes and arguments for cover, and when people asked for a follow up or further explanation, I would shut down. When people caught on that I hadn’t actually watched or engaged with the show, a whole new anxiety emerged.

I had dreams of going to NYU after high school, but my grades weren’t good enough. I was barely literate. I drifted around my hometown, working dead-end jobs. I would drive into the city late at night to watch movies and sit in a Tim Hortons imagining fan scripts. One of them was an Escape from New York and Evil Dead crossover called Escape from the Dead, which I was convinced was incredible.

Movies became the lies I lived in. They held a fantasy that I was more capable than I was.

Eventually, my parents, desperate to see me succeed on some level, sent me out east for university. Because Ontario’s grade requirements were low enough to accommodate someone with terrible marks, I was a university student. I told myself it would be different there. That if I studied hard, I would finally get serious.

Instead, I skipped classes and didn’t seek help the same way I always had. The difficulty of academic writing and reading was too much for me. I retreated back into TV.

Most of my second year was spent smoking weed and watching movies. I mostly watched them because I thought they would fix me.

I became obsessed with The Matrix trilogy and Wim Wenders’ Until the End of the World. I was convinced they held hidden secrets. One particular film that stood out to me was Synecdoche, New York. There’s a scene in the film where a woman moves into a burning house and when asked why, explains that we all pick how we go out. I felt like I was picking depression.

Somehow I ended up at the campus radio. The few friends I made on campus decided to do a movie review show and asked me if I wanted to join. I’m not sure if they knew I was depressed or just thought it would be fun, “Nick likes Batman, after all.” I thought, why not. I can do this. I’m smart. 

It turned out to become the first place where watching and talking about something required me to be present. You couldn’t bluff your way through a live segment. If I hadn’t actually seen a film, it showed immediately with dead air.

For the first time, TV and movies stopped being something I hid behind and became something I had to engage with directly. I had to pay attention, form an opinion, and say it out loud. That shift helped, even if I couldn’t articulate it. Stumbling through a new experience with friends who were equally as amateur helped. If we all sounded like illiterate idiots, at least we could do it together.

Because I enjoyed doing radio, journalism school felt like a logical next step. But it was just another version of the same avoidance. I didn’t ask how to actually improve at reading or writing. I loved talking about film and I assumed that being close to the media would be enough to overcome that. It wasn’t. 

The same problems resurfaced. Assignments took me far longer than they should have, reading remained slow and frustrating, and I still refused to ask for help because doing so felt like confirming that I wasn’t capable. At my CBC internship, that fear was validated. I was told this wasn’t the job for me, and instead of asking how I could improve, I accepted it and left.

My twenties were shit. I worked as a linecook and went to screenings. I read movie news and listened to film podcasts, but didn’t know how to build anything of my own from them. Eventually, I moved back west. I was convinced that I would work mindnumbing jobs, watch movies, and think about a different future without ever moving toward it.

Then everything collapsed at once. The stress of wildfire call-taking, layered with the isolation of the pandemic and an autoimmune diagnosis, pushed me past whatever coping mechanisms I had been using. The routines that once helped me regulate my anxiety—drinking, weed, and movie watching—stopped working. Television and film could no longer carry the weight I had placed on them. For the first time, I couldn’t hide behind them. I couldn’t out-watch what was happening. 

I decided to go back to high school to redo English. I would be joining Billy Madison and Thornton Melon. Sitting in a classroom, working through material I had avoided for years, forced me to confront what I had spent most of my life trying to hide. But it was also the first time I approached learning without pretending. I began to work slowly through the basics (the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell!) I began to understand not just how to read and write, but why I wanted to. I no longer wanted to just consume TV and film. I wanted to respond to them, to talk about what they meant and why they mattered.

I still struggle with my anxiety and on most days I feel illiterate. I second-guess sentence structure, pause over spelling, and sometimes spiral over something as small as a typo in a Letterboxd review. I still watch Khan Academy videos, sometimes repeating the same lesson over and over. I still ask for help when I need it. The work is ongoing, and so is the anxiety.

I sometimes look back at the Maclean’s article and wonder about the other kids featured in the article; the ones where TV was blamed for the violence they inflicted and experienced. The current panic over the internet makes me think of them. What was TV masking for them? What comfort was it providing? And why was it easier to blame TV than anxiety, learning disabilities, isolation, or whatever else was happening in their lives?

I wonder if they remember the feeling of vibrating into a couch, if they still hold anger when they miss a show, if they Google how to spell basic words, or if they still look to a VCR to figure out what time it is and what’s on next.