Joseph Willson
Bio
JP Willson is an accomplished chef who's worked in some of Vancouver and Victoria's most prestigious kitchens. Now as an author of two self-help books while living and working in Victoria, British Columbia. Life has become far from ordinary
Stories (19/0)
Ashley
Where do I begin? Ashley, for all intents and purposes is my life line. Ashley is my 'counsellor' both in the typical sense as she is a registered clinical counsellor by trade and for me, even in a sort of spiritual sense. Truthfully, I can think of no other way to describe her. She is an incredibly intelligent, intensely astute, and also a pleasingly beautiful woman that has become for me the one place I can turn when I have a problem that has me baffled or confused. She is a beautiful woman in the conventional sense of the word, yes, yet that is not what I am referring to here. Ashley's beauty, to me- comes from within. From an inner most place that if every living breathing person could share her values, her ideals, as I see her- as people, we would certainly be a much happier bunch on this earth.
By Joseph Willson4 years ago in Psyche
Hell on Earth
The truth of the matter is this is a place where; if you have ever lived here, you could very easily understand where it is I get my self-diagnosis from. Sure, I may have only lived in the area for two years at the time of writing this, and no I have not by any degree seen the very worst of what the Downtown Eastside has to offer. I do thank my lucky stars every day for that little gift. I have seen some extremely disturbing things within those two years mind you; drug use, of course, because it is rampant- overdoses, yes because they are very common, death, another thing that until I came to the downtown Eastside I had a small experience with and absolutely never, this kind of death. This is a form of death that is slow, very slow for the majority. This comes from killing oneself from within. Sure, there is always the drug overdoses that the paramedics (God bless them for the things they do down here) cannot reverse. Sometimes they just cannot get there quick enough or the drug itself was just too damn lethal in the first place. People get shot and stabbed, and they have the living hell beat out of them. There are rapes and murders and the entire gamut of the things you would see in the likes of places such as New York city or South Central Los Angeles. I know this is Vancouver, supposedly a safe and beautiful city where this kind of thing does not occur—wrong, wrong on so many levels.
By Joseph Willson5 years ago in Psyche
Circumstance
Step into my world for a moment will you. Living in a place that for all intents and purposes I do not wish to be, yet because of "circumstance," I remain. I arrived in this godforsaken place two years ago and honestly at that time I had no idea what exactly I was getting myself into, truly I did not. Being of unsound mind upon arriving here in the downtown east-side of Vancouver, still in the depth of a full-blown addiction yet sober, I was certainly in no condition to even fully understand where I was or what I was about to embark upon from any reasonable perspective. Hungover and alone in a city I had not been in for twenty years, no friends, no connections, no home, no money. All I literally had to my name was the suitcase I carried and the clothes therein—most of my other personal belongings in a storage locker, unknowingly at that time, never to be seen again. I was starting over. I was in the downtown east-side.
By Joseph Willson5 years ago in Psyche
Life
Have you ever wondered why things happen the way they do? Have you ever awoken in the morning and asked yourself, "What really is the point of my continued existence on this planet?" I don't mean to the point of ending that existence, no, no, not at all—just, what the hell is the point of it all? Probably not quite to that extent, but you get my meaning, right? Truly what is life all about? Do I specifically have a purpose or direction; do I have any idea where my life is headed or where the hell I will end up 20 years from now, or even tomorrow? Sometimes I think my purpose is the same as it always has been, yet lately I seemed to have embarked on a new and different path that I am really enjoying with my past knowledge of a great many things keeping me in bread and water, to put it bluntly.
By Joseph Willson5 years ago in Psyche
The Simple Life
There are many things that throughout the course of my life I have enjoyed. Many of these things I do still enjoy, yet of late I have come to discover the many things I no longer do. The question I had to ask myself predominantly; why? The essence of this marvel of recollection came from one quite simple occurrence just the other day. That being, seeing and hearing a robin perched in a tree roughly ten feet away from where I was perched myself, singing (the robin, not me). That's it, a simple solitary songbird of no particular luminosity, plain old robin red breast, sort of the colour of a blood orange, with the light greyish-brown colouring of the average robin, in an average tree adorned with simple average green leaves. Not a spectacle to behold no matter how you looked at it really, yet I was reminded of the simplicity of the beauty of nature that I was witnessing.
By Joseph Willson5 years ago in Families
Work-Life Balance
When I first started working; what now seems so very long ago... there was nothing at all in my mind leading me to believe I could work too much. I wanted to work, I had become bored with school, I was not learning anything, and just needed to experience the world as it was. I needed to learn the things of life, I wanted to break free from the tyranny of my parents' regime, and become my own person.
By Joseph Willson5 years ago in Journal