Colleen Taffe—Letting light shine out of darkness

BY: DELLIA RISMAY

Colleen Taffe is a woman who uses her multiple talents and titles to uplift those around her. By day, she’s a mental health and addiction specialist, and by night, she’s involved in theatre in a variety of ways: directing, writing plays, acting, and producing. In each of these roles, Colleen encourages people to be honest with themselves about their struggles and helps lighten their spirits.

Colleen credits her appreciation of honesty and integrity to her upbringing. Her mother, who raised her and her older sister as a single parent, instilled the importance of these traits in them while they were growing up. “I grew up with a mom who had very little patience if we weren’t being honest,” Colleen says. When Colleen was three years old, her family moved from her birthplace of Kingston, Jamaica, and arrived in Canada.

After attending university, Colleen wanted to go to Hollywood to pursue her dream of “making it big”. She had always been drawn to theatre and wanted to chase her dream. “Theatre chose me,” she says. “For so long, growing up, I had been the one who’s always been the creative, the funny, not scared of the stage.”  However, she decided to stay in Toronto and discover what opportunities awaited her here. As it turns out, there weren’t many.

“What I was finding was I wasn’t seeing a lot of roles for people who looked like me. I was plus-sized, I was a dark-skinned black girl, and people just didn’t know where to place me. I remember going on several auditions, and the feedback was ‘if you were a little thinner, we could give you this starring role, if you were maybe a little lighter, we could give you this role’. And so, I got very discouraged, and decided I was going to stop,” Colleen says.

However, instead of turning her back on theatre altogether, Colleen decided to create her own opportunities. Tired of waiting for the perfect role to come her way, she began to write roles for herself. When she started to get more involved in her church, she took the opportunity to write plays that not only enabled her to create more inclusive roles but to put the spotlight on mental health issues.

Colleen has written several pieces that deal with heavier issues. Her most recent play, Piece of Mind, tells the story of a man who has everything going for him in his life until a devastating tragedy happens, and he begins to struggle with his mental health. Colleen says that creating a play like this helps people talk about mental health in a less invasive atmosphere because they can identify with a character who is going through the same things that they or a loved one may be going through.

“There’s a difficulty with understanding it [mental illness] from a Christian perspective, difficulty understanding it from a cultural perspective, and I thought, ‘how can we get this conversation going?’” Colleen realized that theatre would be the perfect avenue to do it, citing the community’s love of humor and entertainment. “It would open the eyes and open the conversation and continue the dialogue of mental health,” she explains.

Though Colleen has formed a complementary relationship between theatre and mental health, her involvement in the two fields wasn’t necessarily planned. She’s transitioned through different fields and is educated in a variety of areas, including general arts and science, and African studies. A job at Habitat for Humanity steered her towards a career in the non-profit sector, and now, she works at the Canadian Mental Health Association. She says that all her life experiences, the positive, negative, and everything in between got her where she is today. “I’ve had my fair share of dabbling in addictions, in drugs and alcohol. Years later, as I look back now, I see that my course to where I’m at was laid by the experiences in life that I lived.”

Colleen spends a great deal of time and energy giving back to her community at her job at CMHA as well as the time she spends involved in theatre. As much as she’s done, she hopes that others in the community will step up and speak out about mental illness to help get rid of the stigma.

“Within the black community, people always say ‘should we take medication? Should I not take medication? Is it demonic? Is it a spiritual attack? Black people, we don’t have them kind of struggles.’ There’s so many varying conversations that are happening. I just think we need some real, good advocacy and education around the topic to begin having conversations.”