“Roots”
Or How Gardening Helped Me to Overcome My Digital Ennui
6 AM —
It’s raining outside. I know this even before I open my eyes because I can hear it: a steady but gentle tip tap that is a sharp contrast against the klaxon that serves as my morning alarm; an alarm that shakes me into existence. My partner, a landscaper, is already up and getting ready for work. I let out a single and very morose sigh. I guess I might as well start my day too.
I pull on my boots and throw a jacket on. Like most Torontonians, I favour form to function when it comes to clothing and am ill-equipped to deal with most inclement weather conditions. I head into our backyard garden with my coffee and am soaked in minutes. My dog, normally excited to lay in the yard, stands at the doorway staring at the miserable scene. He gives me a look as if to say, “Are you sure about this, bud?”.
No, I am not, but these beans and cauliflower sprouts aren’t going to plant themselves and class starts in a few hours.
I have never considered myself a morning person. I spent my entire 20s working in the restaurant industry in various roles: I cooked, I washed dishes, I ran restaurants, I served. When I worked somewhere and something needed to be done, I did it. I did inventory, covered line cook shifts for sick coworkers, and sometimes I hacked together plumbing solutions to keep operations running until a real plumber could be sent out. I would start work at 8 am and finish late at night and unwind with drinks — often to excess. I didn’t sleep much and when I did I relished sleeping late into the day. I deemed waking up any time before noon masochistic. But last year a switch flipped in my brain and I can’t sleep in anymore. Well, more accurately I don’t really sleep much at all these days.
When COVID-19 forced our government to implement dining restrictions lots of folks, myself included, were laid off. I had just returned to Toronto from a month long visit to my home in the Philippines and had taken a temporary cooking job to make a little money while I regrouped. I needed to think about career options. The chef started my training and within two weeks indoor dining stopped being a thing, and so did my job.
I was terrified but also incredibly relieved; the universe had given me an out.
I was already disillusioned with the restaurant industry. Conversations in the cultural zeitgeist had started to shift towards class inequality and the exploitative nature of capitalism. There are many folks in the industry who are passionate about food, about the artistry and theatre involved. I love food and working with my hands, but working in the industry wasn’t so much pursuing a passion as much as it was a means of survival. I endured the long hours, the emotional (sometimes physical) abuse, and the garbage pay because as a first-generation-poor-single-parent-household-immigrant-high-school-dropout-stealth-trans person the options for carving out a living for myself were depressingly few and far between. My mum couldn’t afford to pay my university tuition even though she desperately wanted to. I had bills, food, and rent to pay for. After nearly a decade of working paycheque-to-paycheque I was exhausted and felt a constant white-knuckled rage bubbling under my skin.
I questioned my worth as a person and perceived myself as less-than compared to my peers who I felt romanticized the lived-experiences of marginalized identities. But I didn’t have generational-wealth to fall back on when times got lean and when I said I was broke it often meant I only had 2 dollars total across my bank accounts. I was embarrassed and wanted to change the trajectory of my life and career. I wanted a job that would allow me to not only be self sufficient, but raise a family as well.
I thought long and hard about what I wanted to do and after chatting with friends who pivoted to tech I decided to learn about front-end web development. I started doing Codecademy courses with all the free-time I suddenly had and eventually took an intro course through Juno College of Technology (where I am currently taking a web-development intensive bootcamp). I was initially drawn to web-development because of the great compensation I saw listed on job postings but found myself enjoying the mental stimulation it provided. As someone who struggles with nuance and reading in-between the lines I like the black and white nature of programming languages. It imposed rules and order on a day-to-day existence that was starting to feel more and more chaotic. But the structure of coding wasn’t enough to wrangle the unraveling tendrils of my existence.
The initial COVID-19 “lockdown” that started in March 2020 stretched into months and is still ongoing in 2021 with no end in sight. Against our collective wills our lives shifted into an entirely online format and for better or worse the way businesses structure their work forces has been altered forever.
The last time I spent this much time staring at a monitor was during a particularly destructive depressive episode in my late teens. And similar to what happened during that period, I stopped sleeping. I started to lose my sense of time. My sour dough starter experiment lost its lustre. The novelty of chilling at home wore off. I couldn’t stand the constant barrage of news outlining how the folks charged with governing us had failed vulnerable groups again. And again. And again. I had exhausted my supply of Thoughts and Prayers. The white knuckled rage returned full force and I felt quite literally trapped.
I was a restless, grumpy, and sleep deprived monster.
My partner noticed and in an act of kindness (and maybe a touch of pity) she asked me to come help her work on a personal landscape project. A friend of a friend hired her as a freelance contractor and she didn’t have the bodies to help. I was thrilled for the opportunity to work outside and move my body in a physically demanding way. It was hot and gruelling work but I loved it. I savoured the feeling of dirt and mulch between my fingers. Relished in the scent of freshly cut grass. Interacting with world in a physical, tactile way was healing.
I obsessively started thinking about how I could introduce plants and gardening into my day-to-day life. It was the only safe way to spend time outdoors apart from walking my dog. I tried to grow a vegetable garden and failed miserably because I had no idea what I was doing — I was born in Metro Manila and raised in Toronto. What did I know about farming? I managed to grow two tomatoes. Neither tasted great. But I pushed on and I’m continuing my foray into gardening/urban farming this year. I have a thriving colony of house plants and have planned and researched growing vegetables more carefully this year.
As my coding bootcamp program ramps up, I grow more and more thankful for the work balance that gardening affords me. Waking up early to tend to the garden beds has normalized my sleep. While I took a JavaScript course, I drew up plans for an 8 x 4 foot raised bed to plant corn in. Today I learned about the CSS grid system and thought about how I wanted to space out my lettuce seeds. In a weird way I feel tethered to reality by the baby leeks and strawberry shrubs that are growing in my yard. Listen, I am excited to grow as a developer and to see what shape my career takes, but I am equally as excited to see how many tomatoes I can grow this year.
