Broomstick Is Paradise

Hopes and Dreams

It’s 2018. You’re a bright-eyed 14-year-old, with a freshly buzzed haircut, and you make a silent promise to yourself: you will make it. You step onto your high school campus; Canada’s premier all-boys institution. Latin mottos hang in marble halls, the smell of Axe body spray fills the change rooms, and destiny, your destiny, feels close enough to touch.

Your parents dropped you off in a leased BMW, smiling proudly, fully convinced they were releasing their son into an incubator for Canada’s future leaders. You even believed that too, thinking you were going to sharpen your mind, build character, and surround yourself with positive influences.

The Beginning of the End

By November, that all changes.

It started as tradition. “Every institution has its rituals, right?” you think to yourself. Hazing was nothing out of the ordinary—legacy stuff. You don’t question it when you’re in it. You just do what the older guys tell you, especially when you're desperate to be accepted. So when they passed you the broomstick, you took it like a rite of passage.

“You’re one of us now,” they said. You wanted to be.

You weren’t the ringleader. You weren’t the cameraman. But you were there. In the room. Watching. Cheering. Holding the damn broomstick at one point.

The school found out. Then the police found out. Then the media found out.

Your school was front-page news. CBC, CTV, every three-letter network you can think of. A hazing scandal that shocked the country. You weren’t named—thank God—but you knew. You knew you were complicit. And that was enough. Despite your prayers, your deleted messages, and your insistence that you “didn’t know what was happening”—you were expelled.

You spend the next few months in hiding. Deleted all socials. Transferred schools. Scrubbed your digital footprint like it was an M&A leak. Every time someone mentioned the incident in the halls, you flinched.

But pain sharpens the blade. You’re undeterred. “Legends aren't forged in comfort” you tell yourself. The next four years are silent. Cold showers. Late-night study grinds. Every extracurricular meticulously crafted to rinse the past.

Rise from the Ashes

Flash forward to 2022 and all your hard work has paid off. You managed to get accepted into the country’s top business university (think Ivey, Queen’s, Brock). You tell yourself that this is where you turn your life around. No more funny business. Your frosh shirts tucked in. LinkedIn headshot locked and loaded. You walk on campus with one thing on your mind: redemption through high finance.

First semester? Dean’s list. Second semester? You’re handed the golden ticket—Analyst, Deep Investment Counsel Knowledge. DICK. The real deal. Weekly pitch decks. DCFs with six tabs. LBOs built on energy drinks and anxiety.

You trade in your youth like a distressed asset. Friends? Optional. Relationships? Deadweight. Your calendar is color-coded with coffee chats and mock interviews. Your personality slowly erodes into a robotic sequence of behavioral interview answers. “Tell me about a time you made a mistake.” Oh boy, do you have one.

But eventually, the grind pays off.

After six superdays, a dozen networking calls, and 400 versions of “hope all is well,” you landed it. A summer analyst position at an NYC-based credit shop. Small. Elite. The kind of place that recruits five kids a year and expects them to model distressed debt scenarios with zero training and no margin for error. You celebrated by updating your LinkedIn header.

And then… silence.

It’s Lonely at the Top

The people you sacrificed? Gone. The connections you ghosted? Moved on. The girl who once said “you’re kind of intense”? She was right. All the sacrifices, all the lost time, all the lonely nights—they hit you at once. The internship was real. But so was the emptiness.

You walked around campus like a ghost. The halls, full of chatter and caffeine, felt cold. No one asked how you were. No one cared.

Then, one night, you find yourself pacing through the building at 2 a.m. Just you and your thoughts. The floorboards creaked. Your dress shoes echoed in the halls like a warning.

And that’s when you saw it.

A closet. Unlocked. Dusty. Forgotten.

You opened it, and there, leaning quietly in the corner, was a broomstick.

Wooden. Simple. Familiar.

You picked it up, and suddenly, everything made sense. The full circle. The symbol of your fall, and maybe, just maybe, your rebirth.

Wooden. Weathered. Wiser than you’ll ever be. You pick it up, and for the first time in months, you feel seen. Understood. Whole.

Broomstick is paradise.