When I first met concussion specialist Dr. Michael Collins, after three and a half years of suffering from post-concussive syndrome, he said, “If you remember only one thing from this meeting, remember this: run towards the danger.” In order for my brain to recover from a traumatic injury, I had to retrain it to strength by charging towards the very activities that triggered my symptoms. This was a paradigm shift for me—to greet and welcome the things I had previously avoided.

As I recovered from my concussion, “run towards the danger” became a kind of incantation for me in relation to the rest of my life. I began to hear it as a challenge to take on the project of addressing and questioning my own narratives.

When it came to learning—or indeed any activity of any sort—my father believed that everything must be for the sake of itself rather than some greater ambition. The story my father told most often about himself as a youth was one in which, at the last moment, he ran in a race he had not trained for. He had been asked to replace a sick runner to represent his school. Not caring about running particularly, and knowing he had no chance of winning, he made a game for himself: he would treat the passing of each runner in front of him as a major victory. And so he ran the race this way, trying to pass each runner as though it were the end goal, celebrating each small triumph, until the end, when he suddenly realized there was only one more runner in front of him. He gunned towards the finish line, bewildered by the unexpected ending of having won the entire race.

It was a self-aggrandizing story, but he told it with such intense drama that, listening to it, you rooted for him to pass each person he was racing against and celebrated with him each time he did. This was emblematic of his relationship to success. He believed it was acceptable only if it had been realized effortlessly, without ambition, almost by accident, and born out of a love of the moment, a commitment to overcoming the present, immediate challenge, instead of a long-term strategy. I loved his stories, and their out-of-step-with-society perspective, even if I had heard most of them a thousand times.

So it wasn’t an unhappy relationship with my dad, just a very complicated one, just a very adult one, in a house that was falling apart with mice and moths infesting many rooms, and far too many conversations about the tragic pathos of pedophiles.

The White Knight, who Alice meets towards the end of the book, is clearly based on Dodgson himself, a bumbling, incompetent eccentric who so wants Alice to be okay and ultimately helps her to find the final square of the chess game, where she will turn from a pawn into a Queen, thus abandoning him. In these scenes, with Tom Wood playing the White Knight, I played a peculiar concoction of love and scorn. These dynamics were familiar to me. I had spent a life on film sets, my puberty unfolding in front of dozens of men with no sense (or care) of what was appropriate to say or not say in front of children or of the boundaries between adulthood and childhood. The size of my breasts had been commented on, often, through the years. I had experienced unhidden yearning from people three times my age. I had heard explicit conversations about sex or had had them directed straight at me. I dealt with all this by wielding the only power I had, which at the time felt very real and potent: I could mock these men to their faces, I could say whatever I wanted, I could be as mean and bad and hurtful as I pleased. Because we both knew that, as a child who had felt their desire, I had something on them.

On my days off, I took the train to Toronto to see Corey. We had a place together in the Gay Village, a sixth-floor boxy apartment with little light in a 1960s high-rise. It had no furniture. We would sleep on the floor together, our possessions limited to two little candle holders with cut-outs in them that cast stars on the ceiling as we lay together in sleeping bags. We also had a goblet with grasshoppers carved into it, given to me by the legendary actor Bill Needles, who had told me he thought Corey was “adorable.” He told me that he had had this grasshopper glass in every house he had lived in as an adult and it had brought him good luck. “It’s time to pass it along to someone who needs it,” he had said.

Now, when I said goodbye to the White Knight in that penultimate scene, I could not stop the tears from flooding down my face as I said “I hope it encouraged him.” I watched him, losing his things out of the hole in his sack, as he trotted on alone, unawares. I wished there was something I could do for him. I hated Alice Liddell for abandoning Charles Dodgson by fleeing her childhood into womanhood. I hated that my dad left chicken pot pies on the stovetop for a week, insisting they didn’t need to be refrigerated, or that he made the red cabbage three weeks before Christmas dinner, and that the cards he played solitaire with no longer had images on them. I tried to block out the mornings I had woken up to find him, still sleepless, staring at reams of papers on the dining room table, full of tiny, neatly written mathematical equations, numbers doubling and quadrupling until he ran out of space in the millions. (I later discovered he was trying to ascertain how many humans had had to copulate in order to produce him, and how many of those couplings were likely rapes. “How much violence was I the product of?” he said, looking helpless and childlike.) I wonder, in retrospect, if these moments were signs of a typical eccentric Englishman who’d never had to do a single domestic duty until his wife died, or of mental illness, or early signs of the dementia that would be diagnosed many years later. I suppose I’ll never know, and there is something I can’t help but find funny about how closely these states might resemble each other.

Recently, when I described this moment in the play to my therapist and the scenes of Dodgson’s rejection by Alice in Dreamchild, I tried hard to talk about my anger at being made to feel sad for the grown man instead of for the child, but all that came out of me was the sadness itself, a sadness so fierce I couldn’t speak for my sobbing. My therapist said, quietly, “There is something tremendously sad about being a pedophile. To love a creature you can’t have. To know that that love is bad. To know that you are bad for having these feelings, even if you don’t act on them. It’s tremendously sad.”

On a visit home one weekend shortly after I had moved out, I found a half-written letter to his sister Janet in England. He wrote that a mammal’s purpose in life was to bear and raise their young. Now that I was gone, his life had no purpose. He’d thought he would have a few more years left of purpose. But I had left so young. He wrote this in a detached, intellectual way that implied it was a subject of some interest but not heartbreak. I later found a reply from his sister in which she attempted to comfort him, saying, “I’m sure your Sarah will change her mind and come back to you soon.” But I never did.

Around this time, my dad, when I would see him occasionally, would sing to himself, with a little side grin, “How ya gonna keep ’em down on the farm, after they’ve seen Paree?”

In my stocking was a mechanical claw, placed there by Mark, so I could reach things from my lying-down position on the couch, which I remained in for most of the holiday. At the bottom of my stocking I found, wrapped in tissue paper, three miniature figures of Alice, the White Knight, and Humpty Dumpty. I thanked my dad without looking at him and placed them on the mantelpiece, where they remained, collecting dust, for years. My dad also gave me a short black dress. He said, awkwardly, as I held it up, “I thought . . . when you get better. It would look really sexy.” Everyone looked away.

The plan was to go back to school when I got better. The plan was to try to get into Oxford. The plan was derailed by the Conservatives in Ontario winning the provincial election in 1995. When I could finally walk and resume a life, the one I walked into looked nothing like the one I had been heading towards before my surgery. One of the first places I went on my own after months of convalescence was a meeting of the International Socialists. I’d seen a poster on a lamppost. As everything in the outside world had taken on a new shine after I’d been cooped up in our dark apartment for months, I now noticed things like posters on lampposts. This led me through quite a few meetings with various Marxist organizations before I ended up at the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty and found a community of activists who took me in, embraced me, and educated me. So many of the conversations in my life now revolved around justice, labour, and fighting the exploitation of the vulnerable, and my own difficult experiences as a young child began to seem small and inconsequential compared with the suffering I was learning about and now saw first-hand. After a year or so, at a dinner at John Clarke’s house (John is the charismatic, brilliant founder of OCAP), someone asked me about being an actor as a child, and I reluctantly recounted some of the early experiences that had haunted me from the productions The Adventures of Baron Munchausen and Road to Avonlea. Where I thought I would find eye-rolls in the face of my undeniable privilege, I found empathy, understanding, a weaving of important political context, and a generous holding of my more troubling experiences.

I dove into a life of activism, helping to organize protests against cuts to welfare and healthcare and the attacks on the poor that the Conservatives presided over. Seeing first-hand the decimation of the already impossible lives of the most vulnerable people I had ever encountered made the idea of going off to university to think when there was so much to be done seem frivolous at best, and at worst offensive and selfish. My life became a series of meetings, protests, and conferences, imbued with the camaraderie of people who had dedicated their lives to justice. I had a community I was proud to be a part of, a place in the real world, and a purpose after many months of not even being able to move. This was so much more than my fantasy of being mobile and strong enough to go to the hardware store to buy the imagined nail for the unnamed project. In those activist years, full of conviction and purpose, I lost Corey, I lost school, and I gained a wild and practical education in direct activism.

Why do we write things about ourselves? To absolve ourselves of guilt? To confess? To right a wrong? To be heard? To apologize? To clarify things for ourselves or others? I’ve wondered all these things as I sit down to write this.

I’ve been writing and unwriting this essay for years now. It’s difficult, when you’ve resisted telling a story for so long, to know where to start. Especially when it has haunted you to not tell it. When it has knocked around inside your brain, loudly in the middle of the night, asking why it didn’t deserve to be told, asking you who you might have hurt by not telling it, who you might truly be, deep down, because of your decision not to.