From communes to cult to helping kids cope
WILD LIFE: Sonja Larsen uses experiences from her new memoir to aid at-risk youth on the DTES
For 16 years now Sonja Larsen has been working with at-risk kids and youth at Ray-Cam Community Centre on Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.
The kids know her as the go-to computer person who helps them navigate technology.
They also know her as a support worker who helps them navigate day-to-day life.
But what they don’t know is Larsen’s backstory, a story she has told in her new memoir Red Star Tattoo — My Life as a Girl Revolutionary (Penguin Random House).
At age eight, the Milwaukee-born Larsen left a commune in Quebec and hitchhiked to a commune in California.
Don’t worry: She had her favourite teddy bear and was with Dale, a guy in his early 20s she hardly knew. You see, according to Larsen, “everyone knew a kid was better than a dog or a woman for hitchhiking.”
That early road trip would soon become part of a much larger road map of a life that went from hippie, freewheeling communes to neglect, abuse, mental health issues and violent deaths.
The story moves from grassroots workers’ organizations to a fullon cult/underground Communist group run by a pill-popping, abusive sexual predator, a nutty ideologue called the Old Man.
But now the memoir is out and Larsen’s life is, well, an open book.
“I feel the kids I am talking to carry around a lot of weight themselves, so I am very mindful that my job in their life is to be someone they don’t have to worry about,” said Larsen.
She spent the years 1981-84, until she was 18, in Brooklyn with the Communists.
“They don’t need another grownup that has sad stories.”
So far, she said, no kid has asked her too much about her past — but if that happens, it happens.
While her amazing story is one she has not advertised until now, Larsen says that it stays with her every day.
“I think in lots of ways I am pretty fortunate to have that frame of reference,” said Larsen, who has worked on the DTES for more than 20 years in total.
“A person could go through something like that and feel so alone in the world, but actually because of all my work on the Downtown Eastside I have really been able to have perspective and not just, ‘Oh, my goodness, I am so much luckier than that person.’
“My experience, as bizarre as it was, is not that different from the experience of kids that have to parent themselves because their parents are junkies or because parents are immigrants who have PTSD and who are not navigating their new life very well.”
By writing the book Larsen was able to make some sense of a life that is pretty hard to understand from the outside.
“I think it helped me to look at myself as not being damaged,” said Larsen.
“I had no context for a big part of my life, and also when I did talk about it, (I would) get sort of that look of pity or sadness in people’s eyes.
“This really gives me a chance to talk about my life and to talk about it from a place of ownership.”
Now she’s glad to be helping others build better lives.
“I don’t know who said this, but be the person you needed as a kid,” said Larsen.
“That’s been such an easy mantra for me to pursue. I don’t know if I have accomplished it, but it’s really been an easy thing for me to try and do.”