Clara Matthews

I used to think anger was strength. Back then, I wore steel-toe boots and shaved my head, thinking I was invincible. I grew up in Toronto, Canada, in a quiet suburb, the kind with trimmed hedges and backyard pools. My father was the anchor of our family—kind, stable, funny. When he died suddenly of a heart attack, I was fifteen and completely lost. My mother tried, but we never spoke the same language emotionally. I needed connection; she offered rules.

By sixteen, I had vanished into the streets, drifting through skinhead circles downtown. I found community, or at least the illusion of it. We were angry, loud, always drunk, always ready to fight. I slept under bridges, in abandoned buildings, clinging to ideology like it was a life raft. But all it took was one argument—something small, stupid—and they turned on me. The beating left me in the hospital for days. A nurse called my mother. I still remember the way she cried when she walked into the room. She thought I was dead.

I’m 42 now. That part of my life feels like a past life, though the scars are still visible if you know where to look. I work in social services in Toronto, helping at-risk youth navigate the kind of chaos I once embraced. I also run a small emergency network—an unofficial support line for people who want to leave extremist groups. It’s usually a burner phone and a long drive in the night, but I know exactly what’s at stake. You don’t get second chances easily. When they come, you don’t waste them.

I speak at schools sometimes, not to shock kids but to show them how easily you can fall. How healing isn’t fast, and forgiveness isn’t automatic. My mother and I are close now. We bake together on Sundays. She says she got her daughter back. Maybe she did. Maybe I found her too.