AisKara's Thoughts

I’ve been struggling a lot these past few weeks trying to find the point of continuing to engage with life outside of my immediate household. The world just seems to have gotten so cold and so heartless these past few years, and I think I’m struggling to accept that as I become more and more isolated.

This most recent bout with pointlessness comes in the wake of not one, but two failed GoFundMe’s. The first was for me to get more gender affirming care, the second was an attempt to set up a memorial for my grandad. I didn’t expect much from the first. I know that I only have a few friends who both care enough and are able to financially help me out. I know that I have no family willing to help me out. I know that insurance won’t cover any of my costs. I kind of accepted the failure of my personal GoFundMe before I had even launched it, but I did launch it anyway because I guess I held some sliver of hope that maybe I was wrong. Unfortunately, I wasn’t.

The GoFundMe for grandad I had a lot more hope for. After his murder, there was an outpouring of love and a deep sense of loss from the community. There was this profound sense that someone who was important to the community, who dedicated his life to helping out whoever needed help, had been lost. There was an outpouring of love from family who had heard the news. There were people stopping by his house everyday asking if there was anything they could do to help us out. Yet, when I finally found a way to honour grandad’s memory, when I finally found something that would have been meaningful to him, something that would have made him proud, all of those voices fell silent. As of writing this, the fundraiser has been up for just over a week, and I have a single donation from a close friend of mine who didn’t even know grandad. I’ve shared the fundraiser to my personal page, to the community page, and to the community Legion page, and all told I have a total of two shares.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I know that money is tight these days, but I figured some people would donate at least a few dollars here and there. I didn’t expect any miracles, but I expected better from a community that my grandad had spent almost 30 years helping.

Add to that my family seemingly trying to erase my grandad, and we have a whole host of mixed negative feelings.

I never expected much from my family when grandad passed. For years they had “joked” that they were looking forward to inheriting his money. But I never expected it to be this bad. Within two weeks of his murder, his house was pretty much already empty. Garbage bags of his life littered the front porch waiting to be picked up. Things that I would have kept were thrown away like they were trash. The reason I got was that they needed to sell his house by the end of March. A house that’s fully paid off, that could be kept and rented out, that could be renovated and sold to someone else in the family. A house with 30 years of memory, reduced to a “for sale” sign that would have to be a “sold” sign two months after grandad was murdered.

My heart has broken three times since I lost grandad. The first was when I got the news. I was driving home from Quebec with my girlfriend, and I had to pull over, I started wailing in the car. The second was the first time I walked into his house after he was murdered, seeing it just as I remembered, just as he had left it, as if he was going to walk around the corner to greet me at any moment. The third was visiting his house last weekend to pick up some things and seeing it almost empty, seeing the house that once had so much life now reduced to echoey rooms that feel out of place.

I went with my girlfriend and our newborn son. I was already dreading going, but I wanted to show her the house that I had spent so many years visiting. I wanted to give her a glimpse into grandad’s life, since she had only ever met him when he came to visit us. When I walked through the doors, saw the empty house, it took all of my strength to not crumple to my knees and start sobbing again.

2026 has not been the year that I had hoped it would be. These past few years, really since COVID broke out, have been filled with hardship and pain and loss. When we found out last year that my girlfriend was pregnant, found out that our baby would be born at the beginning of 2026, we thought that it marked a sign that things would start to turn around. Oh, how wrong we were.

Work has been hard, getting into the swing of a new position while wishing I had better compensation, but that’s par for the course these days. Home life has been difficult, but things have been getting better. I never expected that I would lose my grandad within the first few days of 2026, that I’d be fighting with family about him, that I’d be feeling more isolated from my family and friends and community than I have in years, that I’d then have to put down my 16 year old cat on top of all of that, but here we are.

I’m really struggling to see the point in anything these days. Why go do stuff in the community, when the community doesn’t help you back? Why force relationships with friends when you never see them outside of online chats where you’re the one initiating? Why stress about a job that would replace you in a day if ever you disappeared? Why try and transition and be happy when society just sees my happiness as some sort of evil?

I think that the only point I see now is my son. The only reason I still try so hard is for him, because he needs me. There’s certainly no one else that needs me, that cares about me. When I look into his little eyes, though, I know that I have to keep on doing at least the bare minimum to give him a better life than I’ve had. To give him better opportunities than I’ve had. To make sure that he grows up to be the happy, confident person that I wish I was.

I wish there was more of a point. I wish I could say that I could see more of a point. I don’t know that I can. I don’t have friends that I hang out with in real life. I don’t have access to the care that I need to be happy in my body. I have a job that I love, but that also stresses me out more and more every day. I truly don’t know what the point is outside of my baby boy. Maybe one day that will change, I hold onto the fading hope that it will, but I’m less and less sure each day.