The messages had become the root of all of the arguments between he and I and the root turned into fights about lack of trust, poor attitudes or how we spoke to each other during arguments… I was angry with him over things the person said. He was angry at me for being hurt, having questions or feeling anxious about it. The messages created problems and cracks that never existed before and neither of us had the correct tools to navigate something so painfully and violently intrusive.

His career made that fear easier to feed because he also travelled often. My questions made him feel accused, and he would withdraw. His withdrawal, coldness and silence looked like guilt to me. I picked at inconsistencies and asked for reassurance. He wanted me to manage all of my feelings alone, the way he did his. I just wanted him to take my need for reassurance seriously just as I had taken his need for it at the beginning of our relationship seriously.

By then I felt like I had nobody. I had accused my own friends. The one person who could have carried some of this with me didn’t want to hear about it.

I spent hours in therapy trying to make myself strong enough to not need him. Hundreds of dollars trying to fix the part of me that he made feel broken, because I wasn’t strong enough to deal with this on my own while he wanted to ignore it. I sat in those sessions working on my reactions, my attachment, my insecurity. I was paying someone to teach me how to need him less. I was trying not to feel the hurt, fear and anxiety because he seemingly felt nothing.

Eventually, we decided that we needed to take a break. We were apart for a couple of months. We stayed in constant communication. The messages stopped while we were broken up. When we decided to get back together, they started again.

After we reconciled, I learned that he had seen the fling from before me, a few times while we were separated. He had gone to her house, hung her television and spent time playing with her son. It hurt. I lived in another country, and she lived close enough to be part of his ordinary life. It was nothing to him to fill his time with someone else.

She could ask him to come over and hang a television. I had to leave my life behind and get on an international flight.

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We couldn’t seem to get back on track. Every argument became proof of the prediction he had made before we started dating and the fears we had carried since. Each of us made the other person’s fear feel reasonable. He started saying more and more that I was going to destroy his heart, meanwhile he left me standing alone in front of what felt like a firing squad on our relationship.

There were still days when I could put all of it down and remember why I loved him. On one visit, I arrived “home” and found that he had prepared a bath kit for me with bath bombs, treats and things he knew I loved. A bouquet of flowers was delivered while he was at work.

There were so many moments where I felt he was my person in the chaos and pain but the messages always became increasingly worse. More old details surfaced. My friends and co-workers started getting messages. SOMEONE CALLED MY JOB at the federal government of Canada and said, “Did you know you had a whore working there?” and then gave them my full name. More things I considered private appeared in front of me. Every time I let myself relax, the person found another way back in.

This was taking over more and more of my life. I started doing my own investigation. If it wasn’t someone in my world, it has to be someone in his! I knew one of his exes personally and we’d been friendly throughout the years so I looked into her a little. But she lived across the world. I would hope she wasn’t awake what would be all night for her, harassing us. I also knew his most recent fling’s name because he had told me about her, so I started there and I looked her up. There was nothing suspicious on her social media, her life seemed full and happy. But I kept looking. My life was being destroyed.

At the time, Instagram’s password recovery process would show you fragments of the email or phone number attached to an account. A few letters, the domain, an area code, the last digits. I started running the accounts that had been messaging us and saving whatever the system gave me. I took a chance and went back to the fling’s business email from her site because that was all I had…When I compared the fragments to her business email, it lined up with hers! The beginning fit, but what stood out was the ending. It wasn’t a generic Gmail or Yahoo. The domain was her company’s name. I couldn’t see every single letter but to me it was absolute proof! For the first time, I believed I knew who was behind at least one of the accounts. If I know who it is, we can get it to stop…

I sent him everything and expected him to see what I saw. His fling was an obsessed woman scorned. She was not chosen and wanted to destroy what we had because she wasn’t.

I prepared for his gratitude and excitement that we could move on with our lives. Instead he said he didn’t think it could be her. She wasn’t the type, and he said what they had wasn’t this serious. He vouched for her, and he suggested I keep looking. I remember thinking, I am sorry, what? I had spent months questioning friends who had loved me for years, and now I had an account connected to the business email of a woman he had dated, and he still wanted another explanation.

By now we were off and on constantly and the pattern of the harassment continued, there was so much negativity between him and I that we could no longer respond to one incident at a time. Every new message arrived with months of arguments behind it. Every question reopened five old ones. We still loved each other, but love had to move around resentment, suspicion, old accusations and the damage we had done while trying to defend ourselves.

On a visit to his hometown during a time when we were technically “off”, I went through his phone. I had always known his passwords, but even while the messages accused him of cheating, I had never searched his private conversations. Until that day. I was exhausted by it all. I found a text exchange between him and one of his good friends. She asked how things were going during our visit and if we were going to get back together. He replied, “We won’t ever be getting back together. I just need to prove to myself that I can make her happy.”

That message changed me. While I thought he was loving me, he was using me to answer a question about himself. I felt just as betrayed and humiliated as I would have, had he been messaging a romantic connection. My love for him and the trust it took to keep returning to him and the most painful situation I’ve ever experienced meant nothing to him. I was here for his ego.

I am not someone who can pretend everything is fine. He knew for the rest of the time that there was something I was upset about. I guess that’s the risk of entering a man’s phone… I never told him what I saw. When I left, I just knew it was over for me.

We spoke off and on. You know the occasional check ins when it’s over but you both hold on to the hopes from the beginning. It sounds irrational when I tell it now but he one day out of the blue asked me to go on a vacation with him to bring in the new year and I said… yes. He told me he still loved me and that he did not know what would come next only that he wanted to be there with me.

He sent for me. We stayed at a beautiful five-star resort, we did every tourist thing imaginable and we were happy.

EXCEPT, while he was in the bathroom, I looked at his phone… again. I shouldn’t have. I knew that, and I did it anyway because by then I trusted the feeling that something was being kept from me more than I trusted him. And then I saw it, a message from a woman. He had written to tell her, “I arrived. I made it.” She replied that she was glad he was safe, hoped he was having fun and would talk to him when he returned.

It felt like the blood left my body. I could not understand why he was on that trip with me if another woman was waiting for him when he came home. But my mind went right back to his desire to prove to himself that he was enough and that he could make me happy. We were not together, and he had not promised me exclusivity, but I had not travelled to him, yet again on a technicality. I was there because he was my heart. The message made me believe he always had a backup plan, or at least a soft place to land. I never once did because I had never wanted one.

It no longer mattered what the stalker messages were saying. This is what we were left with.

After that final trip, we were no longer speaking. One night, at two or three in the morning, he called me. Seeing his name at that hour made me panic because I assumed something bad had happened. I answered, he asked angrily why I was playing on his phone. I did not know what he meant. He said he had been receiving calls from private numbers all night and wanted me to stop. I told him I had been asleep. I reminded him that I had never repeatedly called him in the middle of the night. That was not something I did. He said he did not believe me so I hung up and let him deal with whatever backup plan he had upset, on his own.

After that call I investigated every claim the stalker ever made, every name they said and everything they knew that they shouldn’t have. I found everything they knew about me through tagged photos, public profiles of my family and friends, googling my full name where my federal government job post and phone number were listed… I looked long and hard and found everything they did, the way they did. None of what I thought was private had ever been private.

I asked him for the last digits of his fling’s phone number. He gave them to me. I went back to the Instagram accounts that had been stalking us and used the password-recovery process again, this time through the phone-number option. The area code matched hers. The last visible digits matched too. More than one of the accounts pointed back to the same number. I sent him the information, all of it from the beginning along with screenshots, believing that this time he would have to see it.

He told me again, “Whoever is doing this, is not Angela.” And then he added, “I honestly think it might have been you this whole time.”

I would never forgive him for that accusation. Not after everything I had been through trying to hold on tightly enough for the both of us. The scars remain years later.

Angela messaged me again several months later.

It was, in fact, her.

After ALL OF THAT and after all of those man hours, Angela STILL has no man.

Readers: Did you know it was her? Did we all see it???

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Part I

I have been in love maybe three times in my life. He was one of them, I was certain I would marry him. We had known each other for several years. He started out as a friend of a friend. I remember the first time I saw him. I always remembered his face. We saw each other only a handful of times over the years. But his presence made me nervous in an exciting kind of way. Eventually we started speaking on social medial and went from occasional DM’s to texts here and there until our conversations and check-ins became daily. In those conversations, he became my best friend. I told him everything and it was jokes non-stop, we laughed a lot. He was the person I most looked forward to hearing from. We built that over years.

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He was quiet and steadfast to the world outside. He was kind and gentle with me. He gave me his softness and I wrapped myself in it. I always thought he was remarkably beautiful. I adored his serious tone, charm and our inside jokes. The more we spoke, the more I trusted him. At some point in those daily conversations, I put him on a pedestal, because why was he so perfect? I wanted to be deeply known by him. There were parts of him I felt I could never quite reach but I was willing to wait until he showed them to me. I was falling in love.

He was very hesitant to let our friendship become anything more. He told me that his feelings for me had grown so big that if we tried to be together and it didn’t work, it would destroy him. He was afraid and said if he let himself love me, he knew that I would break his heart in a way he didn’t think he could recover from. I thought that fear was a terrible reason to not let ourselves love each other and I knew that if we just began, we would be forever... You could not convince me that I wasn’t going to spend my life with him. (Spoiler alert: I am not a psychic and we in fact did not last forever)

When we finally started dating, I felt so excited and nervous but also suddenly afraid. I wanted it to work so badly, I had waited for this for what felt like so long that I got stuck in my head. I became so focused on not hurting him and proving that I wouldn’t.

Because if I didn’t hurt him, he wouldn’t leave and being left has always been my biggest fear in love. I edited myself. I started overthinking about what I should say and how I should say it. I wanted him to feel safe with me. The more I loved him, the more pressure I felt to prove that loving me was not a mistake. I thought those fears were the only fears we would have to manage. I never imagined that someone else would eventually find a way into them.

The beginning was beautiful. He took incredible care of me. He was thoughtful and intentional. We were long distance but we had life and future plans that we were excited about. We talked about kids and our future home and growing old together.

He flew me from Canada to see him and I travelled through several cities because his work moved him around. We spent time together in Texas, Florida and the DMV. We walked through new neighbourhoods, went sightseeing, found new places to explore, eat and make memories. We made a life wherever we happened to be. He provided well for our life together, and in the moments when he could not, I was happy to. He was my safe place, my protector and my person. Every time I got on a plane to see him, I felt like I was going home.

His life was changing. His work required constant travel and very long days. He was moving away from a role he had always known as his entire identity and into a different part of his career. There was uncertainty around his job and his identity was attached to it for so much of his life. I noticed how hard the transition was for him. I felt the distance he put between what he was going through and the smile he put on his face for me. I wanted him to let me love him through it.

As much as I wanted him to know me, I think he got lost in the over the top version of me that people saw on social media. I remember walking with him one night through a Tampa neighbourhood where he was working. He looked at me and said, “I am afraid I’ll never be enough or have enough to make you happy.” I still remember how panicked I felt inside. I tried to joke it off and be silly but inside, I felt defensive. Because why don’t you know me??? Why don’t you feel my love for you???… He didn’t see me. I tried explaining that I only wanted him no matter what this life threw at us. But I wondered if I could ever convince him that he was enough. His doubt in himself somehow started making me doubt myself.

For a while, our love felt strong enough to hold the distance, insecurities and our fears. I knew he loved me. We were happy enough. And then the first messages began.

They came in as message requests. No followers, no posts, no face, no name I recognized. Empty accounts that knew my name. They told me I didn’t know the man I loved. That he had secrets and side chicks. And over and over again that I was with someone I could not trust.

Immediately I was angry, because what the hell is wrong with men? Are they all unfaithful? Did they all cause so much hurt? But also, it couldn’t possibly be true about MY man. How could HE hurt ME? I couldn’t make myself believe that he could.

Still, I started asking him about his dating history in more detail. He told me the last had been a random fling that he met on Tinder. He said it wasn’t serious with her, they had only gone on a few dates and he ended it with her and told her clearly that he wanted to pursue a relationship with me. There were a few other non-serious dates before their fling but nothing serious in a long time. I accepted his answer. But also we had been friends, and he never told me he was dating anyone and so I felt uneasy. I didn’t know who was sending the messages. Whoever it was wanted me to doubt him and a seed was planted.

The accounts messaging me kept changing. The person behind them told me that he was cheating on me over and over in graphic detail. When I didn't respond they started messaging him about me. The more time passed the worse the messages became. They said I was also cheating and that he needed to go to the doctor, and then they told me to do the same about him because he was dirty.

They listed several women he had dated before me, including women whose names I had never heard. They told me those women were more beautiful than I was. They told him he should be embarrassed to date me because I was his least attractive partner. I won't go into full detail but the messages were cruel, very painful, very specific and relentless.

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This obviously began putting pressure on our relationship. He was very dismissive of what was happening. I didn’t understand why he didn’t seem to care or why he became angry because I did. He would accuse me of feeding it and giving it power because I spoke to how much the messages hurt or made me feel insecure. The more I wanted to talk about it and seek reassurance, the more irritated he became with me. He told me to ignore the messages and block the accounts and I did… But another one would pop up and another.

So I started managing it alone. Every time a new one came in I had to decide whether to tell him. I would read it, then I would run the entire conversation in my head before I said a single word. Was this one bad enough to bring up? Would he think I was starting something? Was I giving it power? Most of the time I said nothing. I would read something written to make me hate myself, put my phone face down, and go make dinner.

I would wake up to messages saying that he spent the night with another woman. I would let doubt seep in and call him immediately. When he didn't answer quickly or if he was already busy at work, a job that sometimes required 16 hour days, I started feeling nervous throughout my entire body. The blind trust I had in him had eroded almost completely, and all I felt I had left was hope. Hope that he loved me enough to not hurt me.

I once got a message that he was with another woman while he was laying right next to me. Finally… I was able to concretely prove this person was lying at least about this thing, so logically it was plausible that nothing was true, right? But the part that kept me doubting was how did they know things about my past? Why did they know enough truth to make what I had hoped were lies feel possible? Had he shared intimate details about our lives with someone else? What the hell was happening???

The amount of information they collected about me made me spiral. They knew my sisters’ names. They named friends I hadn’t thought of in years. They referenced old events that only a few people in my life would have known. They spoke about my city with enough familiarity that I wondered whether they were nearby. They mentioned restaurants I had visited and places in my city that I would frequent. I already had a large following on Instagram. Strangers could see a lot of my life. But this, it felt intimate.

I cut back posting online. I was constantly looking over my shoulder. It did not stop the messages. I did not feel safe. I felt so exposed and I started having panic attacks. I started thinking that the person had to be in his circle because they knew so much about him. Because why would someone close to me know the names of all his exes, his full legal name, and things about his hometown when I did not? But why would someone close to HIM know MY sister, MY friends and stories from years before he and I became a couple? I felt paranoid. I didn’t know who I could trust and talk to. My mental health was declining. There were days that I wasn’t eating or sleeping.

I literally started questioning people I loved. I called a friend I had not spoken to in years because a message referenced something old that I believed only she knew. I told her what was happening and asked if it was her. She said no, and she was deeply hurt that I would even ask. I also accused a male friend I had known since I was 18. He literally asked me, “Are you fucking stupid?” Our relationship never fully returned to what it had been before that call.

I questioned more people than I should have. I once looked at one of my closest friends and told her directly, “It is you. I know it is you.” In hindsight, I was destroying relationships while trying to save one… Had someone entered my life without permission, collected enough information to imitate intimacy? How was I supposed to decide which person I loved was secretly trying to hurt me?

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At some point, I will have seventeen tabs open and absolutely no idea which one is playing music. I am having the best time. This is how travelling begins for me now. Long before I pack anything, part of me is already there.

The trip that started all of this was different. I was fifteen years old and travelling internationally for the first time, from Saskatchewan to South Carolina. I was a single mother with my baby on my lap, crossing the continent on a Greyhound bus to meet my older sister. It was not a vacation. I was not chasing an adventure. I was trying to reach family.

But somewhere along that long bus route, the trip became more than the reason I had taken it. The world kept changing outside the window. We stopped near one of the Great Lakes, and I remember looking at all that water and thinking it had to be the ocean. I knew it was a lake, technically, but my eyes were telling me an entirely different story.

Then we kept going. The landscape changed. The voices around me changed. The air became so humid that breathing suddenly felt like an activity requiring concentration. Everything was unfamiliar.

At every stop, I was surrounded by people who knew nothing about the life I had come from.By the time I reached South Carolina, the world was no longer something happening far away from me. It was enormous, alive and full of people I had not met yet. I wanted to see all of it. That part has never changed.

Travel still makes the world feel both bigger and more intimate to me. A place that once existed only on a map becomes voices, food, music, streets and ordinary people living lives I might never have imagined from home. The world stops being something I read about and becomes something I am standing inside.

There are people laughing, working, falling in love, raising children, making dinner and becoming irritated because someone is standing in the middle of the sidewalk staring at Google Maps. Usually me.

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I want to be in it. I want to know what is around the next corner. I want to hear people’s stories and experience the ways we are different and the many more ways we are exactly the same. In my best Little Mermaid voice, I want to be where the people are.

And once I decide I want to go somewhere, the planning becomes part of the experience. Every flight I compare and neighbourhood I investigate makes the place more real. Eventually, the daydream starts acquiring dates, numbers and confirmation emails. That is the moment when possibility becomes a trip.

I also know this is where many people get stuck. The place is exciting. The logistics are not. A beautiful destination becomes flight prices, accommodation, transportation, spending money, entry requirements and twelve confirmation numbers living in twelve different places. You start wondering what to book first, whether you can afford it and how other people seem to know what they are doing.

Nobody taught me how to travel. I learned by going, making mistakes, paying attention and getting better at it. Eventually, I built a system.

The original The World Doesn’t Have to Wait shared what I have learned about making travel possible. Now I have created the practical companion to it.

The World Doesn't Have to Wait

The Trip Planning Toolkit gives the trip somewhere to live outside your head. The printable planner helps you map it out, while the spreadsheet handles the budget, savings goals, comparisons, bookings and details that are considerably less delightful when they are scattered across screenshots and emails. You choose where you want to go. The toolkit helps you understand what it will actually take to get there.

I cannot give you my travel bug. But if there is already a place tugging at you, I can make the space between wanting to go and knowing how to go feel much smaller.

I know what it is like when a place exists only in photographs, letters or your imagination. I also know the feeling of finally standing there. I made this for the distance between those two moments.

Let’s go somewhere.

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Paid subscribers can download the Printable Trip Planner PDF below for FREE. The complete Trip Planning Toolkit, including the Excel workbook, is available through the link above.

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Names have been changed, along with the athletic activity through which we met, to protect the identities of those involved. Everything else really happened, babes.

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Chapter 1: The Cheerocracy

I was delusional enough to believe I could do almost anything if I saw someone else do it once. I had been an athlete throughout my youth, so when a friend asked me to tag along to tryouts for a cheer team, I thought, let’s gooo. I knew almost nothing about the team and went in with no expectations. Getting my snatched body back after having my baby was high on the list of acceptable outcomes, but beyond that, it was vibes. I was not the person

with the plan. I was just tagging along.

I was in my late twenties and had recently-ish moved back to my hometown because my grandmother was sick. She eventually passed away. I had also just gone through a difficult breakup, and there I was, stuck in my hometown again. I didn’t have a great job, I had a fourteen-year-old and a two-year-old, I was still carrying some of the baby weight, and I was also looking for friends.

When I arrived, the women were warm, beautiful and in astonishing shape. I was nervous. They were literal athletes, and my body was definitely a misfit at the time. I was also still delusional enough to believe that I was still young enough to skip eating for a day and wake up skinny whenever I felt like it. Anyway, I had been athletic for most of my life. Surely my body would remember what to do. My friend did not end up joining the team, but I did.

As I got to know everyone, I realized the women on the team were all pretty great, but the little clique forming within it was giving elevated. There were the pretty jock types, and then there were the long-nailed, extension-wearing, fake-lashed, spray-tanned women with full baddie energy. As a girly girl myself, I naturally gravitated toward them. Everyone had major ass, which should probably be expected from a group of athletes, but they were all white girls and I was impressed. This is not important to the story, but it was the Prairies and not what I was accustomed to seeing, so it is worth noting.

We trained together, worked out together and quickly started seeing one another outside of team activities. We went to concerts, clubs, parties and game nights. We attended corporate events, did photo shoots and made promotional appearances here and there. The team had enough of a profile that people occasionally recognized us. We were not famous by any definition, but in a city of around 250,000 people, it was easy to feel important doing almost anything promoted locally, let alone something that was promoted across North America.

There were six or seven of us who became close, and within that group, four of us became even closer. I was excited. I was in my late twenties, but in a lot of ways, I was still that kid who had moved around for most of my life and attended twenty-one schools by university. You would think that would have made me good at making friends. Nope. It made me good at feeling out of place and performing an extroverted personality in hopes of being adopted by friend groups that were already formed. I had a deep desire for a safe place to land, and this time, I thought I had finally found my people.

I am just going to say it now. I was the only Black woman in the close group of girls. I was also the only single woman. All of the other women had Black husbands and children. I did not feel out of place with them. At first. Being from where I was from, being the only Black person in spaces was common so here, felt like a win and comfort that I lacked in other social settings.

Erika became my best friend. She was soft-spoken, funny and feminine, with long hair, a striking unconventional beauty and a wardrobe that always looked planned with precision. If you put a Disney princess in perfectly tailored clothes, she would have looked like Erika. Think Sleeping Beauty in designer. She came from privilege and a genuinely lovely family, with a beautiful home, a full social calendar and what appeared to be a wonderful marriage. Her life had the ease and beauty of a movie to me. I was genuinely happy for her, and I loved being close enough to enjoy some of it with her.

We travelled together, took ski trips, went to concerts and did things with our children. My oldest daughter and her stepdaughter became close. My younger daughter was completely obsessed with Erika because, again, she looked like a fucking Disney princess. I understood the fascination.

Erika was genuinely kind. She was not perfect, but she was the closest thing to it I had come across in a long time. She loved me, or at least I believed she did, and I loved her. She was not simply the last person standing at the end of this story. She was my best friend for years before we ever got there.

Kyle was completely different from Erika and just as much fun. She was American, sarcastic, blunt and a complete tomboy who lived in gym clothes most days, but she was also incredibly pretty. She had long black hair, light blue eyes, a sly smile and an enormous personality. She could sit quietly for half a conversation and then land a wild joke that caught everyone off guard.

Kyle and I became very good friends. My daughters and I spent a lot of time with her and her family, and her life contained a level of chaos I understood. We spent hours talking and getting to know one another. We trauma bonded the way survivors sometimes do, offering up the worst things that had happened to us over snacks and wine. But mostly, we laughed. I loved being around her.

Kyle and her husband, Mauricio, owned a gym that became another gathering place for the group. Mauricio was a former professional athlete whose career had ended before he was ready, and he also helped coach our team. We trained there, joined boot camps and spent enough time in the building that the gym became woven into the friendship rather than feeling like a separate business. I loved their gym and promoted it constantly. I brought my hairstylist, my nail tech, my family and friends from entirely different parts of my life.

Dorit was blonde, cute and a star athlete in multiple sports. She was built like her mother was half reindeer. She was generally reserved, but when she was not, she was a true Prairie girl: loud, blunt and swore like a sailor. We were Pisces sisters and more alike than I think she thought. We always noticed the same things, caught each other’s eye and cackled. Her face naturally rested in bitch mode, which made her all the more striking when she smiled. She was bold and had a slick mouth, although there was always something slightly standoffish in the way she interacted with me. I liked her.

Jennifer was single, girl-next-door cute and seemingly unaware of it. She was also a stoner. Jennifer stayed high. She was warm-hearted and unintentionally hilarious, especially when she re-entered a conversation after missing half of it with her head in the clouds. She was younger than the rest of us and the person I spent the least time with, only because she was so chill and doing her own thing. But she was always good vibes.

Our friendships were girly and didn’t feel hard. We traded beauty tips, and I became the resident therapist. Spray tans were part of cheer, which meant even I had to get one. Our nails had never been longer, more jeweled or more structurally ambitious. Someone was always planning a birthday, dinner, party or night out. Our children had sleep overs. Partners became part of the wider circle. Everyone brought something, and loving on and elevating one another became the core of the friendship itself.

Chapter 2: Micro-Shifts and Whispers

There were moments when I felt slightly outside of things. I am wildly observant, and I notice small changes in people. I noticed when someone’s eyes shifted toward another friend while I was talking. I noticed when a conversation seemed to have started before I entered the room and suddenly changed direction. Sometimes the temperature of the group changed around me so subtly that I could feel it but that was ever provable. There was never enough to say anything, only enough to register.

For my 29th birthday, Erika planned a surprise party. She booked a professional photo shoot and told me to arrive feeling as beautiful as I had ever felt in my life. At the studio, she had brought pieces from her own wardrobe for us: dresses, fur coats and nearly anything else a woman could put on to feel glamorous.

She had tried to arrange a surprise party with all of our friends. They all wanted to attend the photo shoot, but none of them could make time for the rest of the celebration. Erika told them absolutely not. If they could not come to celebrate me, they were not coming long enough to collect free professional photographs and leave. Erika was a neutral girly, but she had a way of saying that something was off without words. So I knew there was something under the surface. She said enough to let me know.

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My birthday ended up being Erika and I. After the photo shoot, we went to a comedy show. I had the best time with her and was genuinely grateful that she had cared enough to do any of it. I was also disappointed. I had shown up for the other women’s birthdays, Christmas parties, children’s parties and whatever else they invited me to. I expected those that I considered close friends to make time for mine.

I did not look at their absence and immediately decide they were not really my friends. And because I was not yet healed, I made it evidence of something lacking in me. Erika had still given me a beautiful night, and I loved her for it. The following week, life inside the group continued as though nothing unusual had happened. So, so did I. But little things became more noticeable over time

For instance, I remember noticing that Erika’s husband blocked me on Instagram. This was odd because I was always with Erika at her house and I’ve traveled with them. When I asked Erika about it, she just kept it short. “He’s really private, you know how guys are”. I pushed slightly and said, he hasn’t blocked anyone else. She responded, “He’s weird sometimes. I can’t speak for him.” I dropped it but I was hurt and confused. He was an older Black man. Very respectfully, I didn’t find him attractive at all. I add this caveat now in hindsight but at the time, I just wondered what was wrong with me and kept trying to figure out if I did something wrong or if I was unintentionally rude.

Dorit’s boyfriend was also a professional athlete and one of our coaches. A couple of times I noticed Dorit noticing him looking at me. I was not interested in him, she was my friend. But also he was young, silly and not my type even if I didn’t love her. I never assumed a few glances during group interactions meant anything at all. I noticed only because Dorit and I noticed everything, and then immediately noticed each other noticing it. That was our thing. After one night out in particular, she seemed more watchful around me, as though his glances meant I had invited them. I over thought and wondered had I been too loud, funny or taken up too much space, so I became more aware of my joy. I registered it all, intentionally kept my distance from him for her comfort and moved on.

Kyle and Mauricio fought constantly. Their marriage could be loving and fun, and then become chaotic very quickly. They drank and occasionally used drugs, called each other awful names and said things designed to cause maximum damage. Because I was friends with both of them, afterwards, they would call me separately to explain what had happened and request advice. Kyle gave me her version. Mauricio gave me his. Sometimes the calls lasted for hours, and then I meditated.

I studied psychology and have been in therapy for much of my own life, so I guess this was a good enough use of my skills. I was not married and did not pretend to be an expert on marriage. But I know about people and I know about pain. I listened to both of them, tried to help them stop hurting each other long enough to have a useful conversation. I genuinely wanted them to succeed.

I remember Kyle calling her two children her little niglets in front of me, one day. I gasped, “Kyle, what the fuck” just before Mauricio corrected her much less politely. It wasn’t my marriage and those weren’t my children but I did create some space from Kyle after that.

Chapter 3: The Photo

Soon after Kyle and Mauricio had another really big fight. Mauricio messaged me, upset. Kyle had been saying he looked out of shape and she wasn’t happy. He told me he felt unattractive and insecure. We had talked about his depression and weight gain before, so the conversation did not initially seem unusual.

UNTIL… hours later, he sent me a text. It was a mirror selfie and he was NUDE, full frontal! Underneath it, he wrote, “I don’t look that bad, do I?”

It felt like the blood drained from my body. I called Erika immediately and told her exactly what had happened: the fight Mauricio described, the conversation that followed and the photograph. My heart was racing, my hands were shaking and then I started crying. I told her I could never be his friend again. And then I asked how I was supposed to tell Kyle.

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Erika went quiet. She thought about it and told me I absolutely could not tell Kyle. Kyle was not going to leave her husband over this especially since she hadn’t already, she said, and she was never going to choose friendship over her marriage. I would become an outcast, and the entire group would fall apart. I would be blamed for everything in order for her to protect her marriage. Erika told me to do what I had already suggested: tell Mauricio he had crossed a line and that I could no longer be his friend.

So that is what I did. I waited hours and finally text Mauricio that the photograph had made me extremely uncomfortable and hurt my feelings. Kyle had been one of my closest friends and he was my coach. I cared about him as a friend, but this had crossed a boundary, and he and I could no longer communicate privately or continue our friendship. He apologized, again said that he was just looking for feedback and said he understood.

I stopped going to their gym immediately. I could not continue training with him. I was not going to return to a room where my friend’s husband would correct my form, position my legs or spot me in ways that would now feel inappropriate, all while she had no idea what he had sent me. I was not afraid of Mauricio. I was uncomfortable. Staying would have felt disrespectful to Kyle and more dishonest than I already felt. I carried so much guilt. The added problem was that I had a contract with the gym, and I could not tell Kyle why I needed to leave.

Kyle and Mauricio needed their business to succeed financially, but they also needed to demonstrate that it was viable so they could remain in Canada after Mauricio’s career had ended. From Kyle’s perspective, I had promoted their gym to everyone I knew, signed a contract and suddenly stopped showing up and paying when they desperately needed its success. I stopped paying my contract because continuing to fund his business felt like paying for my own harassment, but to Kyle, without the truth, it just looked like financial betrayal.

She became angry. We had increasingly firm conversations about the contract, and I kept giving explanations and eventually that I couldn’t afford it. I knew how it looked. I also believed that telling her the truth would destroy her marriage, destroy our friend group and make me responsible for everything that followed, exactly as Erika had warned. Under stress, some people fight or flee, and some freeze or fawn. Historically, I have been among the latter. I froze, remained as agreeable as possible and hoped for the best. It was not the best decision. I have realized that 100 times over since then.

Chapter 4: The Mob Verdict

Eventually Kyle began telling people I had broken my contract and was ripping them off. The same network of people I had brought into the gym carried the story back to me. Friends I had encouraged to train there were told that I wasn’t trustworthy. People began looking at me as though my unpaid gym contract with my close friend was my character.

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Mauricio joined those conversations. He told people that he and Kyle would never treat me that way and that I was taking advantage of them. He knew exactly why I had stopped coming, but he encouraged his wife and the people around them to believe I was simply dishonest.

I called Mauricio and told him that his behaviour was both wild and bold. I reminded him that I had left because of what he had done. If he continued allowing people to attack my character when he knew the truth, I would tell them why I was no longer at the gym. He agreed to stop and de-escalate the conversations, but then I heard he had done it again.

I finally got angry and texted him, “If you keep lying about me, I’m going to start telling the truth about you.” He did not respond. Three or four hours later, Kyle called me screaming.

Mauricio had decided to “confess”. HOWEVER, the story he told Kyle was that he had confided in me about feeling insecure and unattractive. According to him, I responded to that by sending him a nude photo of myself. I assume the context was to show him my body in support? Ummm. I still do not fully understand what he claimed. He said he sent one back to me which is why I may have one of him but, only because he did not want me to feel embarrassed or rejected. Mmmm okayyy?

I could barely understand Kyle through the screams. My heart was racing. I kept telling her it wasn’t true. I had never sent Mauricio anything of the sort. I told her to ask him to produce the photograph he claimed I had sent. I was very prepared to defend myself for not telling Kyle about him, but this? I had no clue how to navigate this. I was in shock.

“You think my husband is keeping nudes of you?” she said. “Do you think he’s that desperate?” I told her that if he could not produce the photograph, she should question why she believed it existed given our history as friends. She said her husband would never lie to her about something like that. This was a husband with a history that is not mine to tell. But she believed him nonetheless.

Within minutes, the story was in the group chat. Everyone seemed to know the same untrue version almost immediately. There was no conversation where everyone came together and allowed me to explain. The women contacted me individually, one after another, after the verdict had already been reached.

Dorit called me and hung up quickly once I started crying citing that I was being fake. She continued by text and said she had always known this was exactly who I was. She said I was desperate for attention and should never have been trusted around any of their men. She accused me of wanting attention from her boyfriend too.

That was the first time she said plainly what had been sitting underneath our friendship. Her boyfriend had looked at me, and she had converted that into a judgment about my character. Now Mauricio’s lie gave her evidence for something she had already decided about me.

I kept saying the same thing: it never happened. I did not send him anything. He sent the picture to me, and I ended the friendship immediately afterward. But even leaving the gym became evidence that Mauricio had rejected me and that my character was shit.

Before any of this happened, I had not been sitting around analyzing everyone’s relationships. We were all beautiful, athletic women connected to attractive, successful people, and nobody was lacking options. Being single did not make me available to every man in the room, and it definitely did not make my friends’ husbands or boyfriends available to me. I have always had a strong sense of right and wrong. These were my friends. I loved them and trying to “take” my friend’s husband was not even within the range of things I could imagine doing.

Erika remained confident that it was going to be okay. She said it would blow over and we would figure it out. It did not blow over. The accusation moved through the city along the same social web I had helped build for Kyle’s business. People who had nothing to do with the team heard that I had sent nudes to my friend’s husband and assumed that I tried to sleep with him. Everybody I had ever introduced to Kyle now had a story about me that I could not correct without making the situation even bigger.

Chapter 5: Compounding Storms

Some of the single girls in our friend circle told me they believed me but would not get involved. Jennifer was one of the people who showed up for me after the fallout. I will always be grateful to her. On a side note, I wish I had been in a better place to handle our friendship differently. I wasn’t able to return the love she gave me after everything I was going through. I was wrong in how I later navigated our relationship and if I ever had the chance to make things right with her, I would take it a hundred times over. Not as an act of friendship, but love. Because if I ever loved you, I will always love you.

In a city of 250,000 people on it’s best day, anonymity is not really available. You cannot go to the mall without seeing someone from high school and three former teachers. I experienced this shame deeply as someone who has always been fiercely loyal, and I did not know how to walk around the city carrying a version of myself that was not me.

I tried to save the friendships. I called. I sent messages. I explained myself repeatedly. I had spent most of my childhood losing people whenever the adults around me decided we were moving again. I had finally built what seemed like a stable group of women in my own city, and I was not ready to accept that one man could tell one lie and remove me from all of it. My biggest fears and pains were exposed and I admittedly handled the situation incorrectly. I should have told Kyle. I should have accepted what came from that. Both options felt terrible and I chose the one that felt most logical at the time.

Eventually I became deeply depressed and stayed in my house. I had already been thinking about moving, and this became the final push. The move across Canada was much harder than I expected. I struggled to find work, and on top of everything that happened before the move, there were painful things happening in my family at the same time. My mental health declined further because of everything compounding at once.

Jennifer and Erika remained my friends. Erika visited me after the move, we made a quick trip to Montreal and saw a concert. It felt like old times. Our daughters remained close as teenagers. Erika was still someone I considered my best friend, though she also made it clear that she was not taking sides. At the time, I accepted that. I had lost nearly everyone else in the group, and I was grateful she was still speaking to me.

Over the next months my depression worsened. I stopped responding consistently to calls and text messages. I scrolled Facebook and Instagram because it did not ask anything of me. It made me feel less alone without requiring me to explain my life. A message from someone I loved required a response, a conversation or an explanation for why I was not okay. I did not have the capacity for any of it. I kept telling Erika I was bad at texting because at the time that’s what it felt like. She could see that I was online and could not understand why I could scroll but not answer her.

Eventually she got angry at me and finally said, “I can’t believe you’re doing this to me. I was the only one who stood by you when everyone else turned their back on you.” Something clicked when she said that… Because, I’m sorry, what???

Chapter 6: Cropped Out

Erika knew the truth before anyone else knew there was a story. I had called her the moment I received the photograph. She knew I had panicked, wanted to tell Kyle and that I followed her advice not to. She knew I ended my friendship with Mauricio because of it. She knew all of this weeks before he claimed that I had sent him a nude at all.

When everyone turned against me, Erika did not have to weigh my word against Mauricio’s. She could have said, “I know she is telling the truth because she told me when it happened.” She didn’t even have to admit that she had advised me to keep it secret. She could simply have confirmed that Mauricio’s story was not something I invented after being accused.

I could have told everyone Erika knew and that she could confirm my side of the story. That might have saved some part of my reputation, but it also would have exposed her role in helping me keep the photo from Kyle. She could have lost the group too. So I was silent. I hated conflict. I hated being left. It was just easier to be quiet.

When Erika said she was the only person who had stood by me, she took the most painful thing I had accepted from her and used it as proof that I owed her something. Staying in my life semi-privately was not the same as standing up for me when it mattered.

I never confronted her. There was no final fight. I did not explain all the ways she could have helped me or demand that she become the friend I had needed years earlier. I was exhausted from trying to explain why I could not text her back and did not have the capacity to begin another argument about something deep down, she already knew. I simply stopped responding.. We haven’t spoken since.

Over the years, I have seen birthday and group posts made from old team photographs. I have of course been cropped out. People have commented asking who was cropped out, and the answer becomes part of their joke… It was me.

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The first time I travelled, I was fifteen years old. I was in unsafe foster care, I had a baby, and I needed somewhere safe for us to go. It was not a vacation. I have taken a lot of those since, and this is the trip that started it all.

My birth father has twenty-three children, yup… 23 and one of my older sisters lived in Greenville, South Carolina. We had talked on the phone, gotten really close, exchanged letters and seen pictures of each other, but we had never met in person. When she heard of my living situation she invited me to stay with her family for the summer. I told social services that I had found somewhere my daughter and I could go. It just happened to be in another country.

They bought us bus tickets and gave me a small amount of money for food and sent me on my way. There did not appear to be much concern about sending a fifteen-year-old and her baby across two countries on a Greyhound bus. Whatever I came up with must have been a compelling tale.

Before I left, I told my tenth-grade teacher, Tabitha, that I was going to South Carolina. Tabitha has these big, beautiful, Bambi eyes, and I can still remember the concern on her face when I told her. I had always felt that she cared for me, but in that moment, I could see it in her eyes. I believed her. I can’t remember exactly what she said, but her face, plastered with a mothers worry, said everything it needed to. She knew I had nowhere safe to go. She wished me safety and made me promise that I was coming back. At fifteen, I didn’t yet understand how important Tabitha would become in my life.

The bus ride from Saskatchewan to Greenville took at least five days. Greyhound was a means of transportation not especially concerned with getting anyone anywhere quickly. There was a wild number of transfers. I changed buses in massive depots, in the tiniest towns and at times in the middle of the night. I don’t know how it all worked so seamlessly. I travelled over 3500 kilometers (2000 miles) on this route. Every time we stopped, I had to gather my daughter, our bags and everything I needed to feed and care for her, and figure out which bus we were supposed to get on next. Somehow, I didn’t miss a single transfer and wait times didn’t feel excessive.

This is still impressive to me. Now, at 41 I have managed to miss many flights. At fifteen, I had a paper ticket, a baby and whatever information had been printed on the wall of the bus station… Greyhound deserves its flowers! Air Canada, British Air and Delta, take notes.

The bus stopped exclusively at fast-food restaurants. At one Burger King, I looked at the menu and did not see poutine. Instead of concluding that poutine might not be available in the United States, I ordered it anyway. First of all, I was feeling a little rich because I could afford to upgrade my fries. (Thank you to my social worker Darleen, you’re a real one) When you’re really poor and you get fast food, you eat the fries that come with the meal. You do not start adding gravy and cheese for pleasure. On that particular day, apparently I had poutine money. (“Poutine money”, sounds like it belongs printed on a t-shirt, no?)

“Can I get a poutine?”

The woman behind the counter stared at me.

“A what?”

“A poutine.”

I repeated myself four or five times before I finally gave up and told her I would just get fries.

“You’re not from here,” she said.

“No, I’m from Canada.”

“What the heck is a pooo teeen?”

I explained that it was fries with gravy and cheese. Her face changed. She looked disgusted, as if Canadians had come together as a nation and committed a crime against potatoes. I was amused and felt cool in the way a 15-year-old shows off something unique.

Until then, I had never considered being Canadian even mildly interesting. In Saskatchewan, everybody was “Canadian”. On my journey, people noticed my accent. They asked me to repeat words. They wanted to know where I was from. For a moment, I was not the girl from foster care or the fifteen-year-old with a baby. I was the girl who was interesting.

The farther we travelled, the more everything changed. The weight of the air outside noticeably changed and became heavier. Humidity, where I was from, wasn’t a regular occurrence. Because, excuse me America… Why can’t I breathe?

Along the way, the bus stopped near one of the Great Lakes. I remember looking at the water and thinking it had to be the ocean. I had never seen a body of water that large. I knew, technically, that it was a lake, but it stretched so far beyond what I could see that my brain refused to accept it.

I watched everything through the window and genuinely tried to remember it all. Getting there was not the boring part that happened before the trip. Getting there was part of the trip. It was an exciting adventure.

Crossing the border was slightly more complicated.

The officers pulled me aside and questioned me. I was a minor travelling with a baby, and they needed to know if I was running away. (Looking back, why wasn’t I??? Seriously.) They made a few calls, one of them being to social services, before they let me enter their country. Even though it has created a trauma response of my holding my breath every time I cross a border. I am grateful they made sure I was okay.

One very early morning, we drove through Pennsylvania while the sun was rising. It was foggy and wet outside, and the sky was a deep red. The fog seemed to pick up the colour as it floated between the trees, making everything look dark and spooky. In my untraveled child mind, this was Transylvania (Ummm okay). The names were so similar I didn’t consider anything else. I promise you, I was actually terrified that there might be vampires outside. This place looked like a movie set to me. I logically understood that vampires were fictional, buuut the red sky and fog were making a very convincing argument otherwise. I was not about to abandon everything I had learned from Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Interview with the Vampire because who really knows if vampires are real? I surely can’t make any guarantees even now.

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Pennsylvania has never sat well with me since. It has done nothing wrong, but the vibes were very off.

By the time we reached South Carolina, I was nervous about meeting my sister. She was a couple of years older than me, strikingly beautiful and also had a baby. We had built a relationship through phone calls, pictures and letters, but meeting her in person was different, especially when you arrive with a child and plenty of family trauma and enough luggage to stay for an undetermined amount of time.

Her mother welcomed us into their home. I can only imagine what it was like for her to have another teenage girl and another baby arrive, but she made space for us. My sister’s sisters helped with our children, babysat for us and allowed me to experience something I had rarely had: the freedom to go somewhere without worrying if I packed enough diapers and snacks.

The Prairies are open, and you can look out across the land and see almost forever. South Carolina felt completely different. The air was heavy, and there were walls of trees everywhere. It was giving the Queen of Hearts’ hedge maze in Alice in Wonderland. Beautiful, but slightly claustrophobic at first. It was unfamiliar, but that was also exactly why I loved it.

I was seeing things I had never seen, hearing people speak in accents I had only heard on television and eating food that was completely new to me. People asked where I was from, why I spoke the way I do and at times explain that Canada is not overseas.

I was also surrounded by Black people in a way I had never experienced before. Everywhere I looked, there were people who looked like me. I fell so in love with my new surroundings. I met my sister’s friends and immediately bought a Von Dutch hat (to this day, I don’t know who that is. But, apparently we are buying those hats again) Fashion starts in America what feels like ten years before it reaches where I am from. To me, everything was new and awe-worthy.

It all felt freeing, comfortable but exciting.

Nobody knew my history. Nobody had already formed an opinion about who I was. I was not the sad girl in foster care. I was not somebody’s tragedy. I was my sister’s little Canadian sister, and I got to decide what people knew about me.

My sister was tiny, maybe five foot two on a good day, while I was already around five foot seven. She was petite and very beautiful and somehow still my big sister despite being half my size. I was so impressed by her and how she saw and moved through her world.

We would sit on the front steps while our babies played in the yard, smoking cigarettes or Black & Milds (eww I know) and talking like we were grown women. We were little girls who had children and therefore believed we were grown, which is not quite the same thing. I just know we thought we knew everything.

Her boyfriend had a Lexus that looked very good on the outside. However, one of the doors did not open, so my sister had to climb out through the driver’s-side window to get out. We parked in the furthest corner of the mall parking lot to avoid being seen while making our stealthy exit. It was still a Lexus. We focused on the facts that supported the life we believed we were living.

Behind her house, I saw fireflies for the first time. They flickered in the distance, appearing and disappearing against the dark. I had never seen anything like them. They looked like tiny dancing fairies, and from fifteen or twenty feet away, there was no reason they could not have been little Tinker Bells floating around the backyard.

I was old enough to travel across two countries with a baby, manage bus transfers in the middle of the night and explain myself to border officers. I was also young enough to remain open to the possibility of vampires in Pennsylvania and fairies in South Carolina.

Buy Me A Coffee

Armed with my fake ID and my super cool sister who had her tongue pierced, I had decided that I absolutely needed mine done too. We drove from Greenville to Charlotte, North Carolina. The person at the shop examined my identification for longer than I appreciated.

“This ID looks weird.”

“It’s Canadian,” I said. “That’s how our IDs look.”

I said it confidently while praying they did not know a single other Canadian person and had never seen a Canadian ID in their life because I was absolutely not 18 and that ID had absolutely been altered.

They looked at the ID again.

I kept my face completely serious, as if I was prepared to defend the honour of Canadian driver’s licences.

“It’s fine. I’m Canadian… Trust me, we are nice.”

They pierced my tongue, and boom… I was living the life that I didn’t know was of my dreams until that moment. Crossing state lines and breaking international laws. (To my assigned RCMP officer reading this from his office with no windows, this is all jokes.)

This was and is how I approach most things in my life. If I want something or want to go somewhere I immediately start working on the plan of how to make it happen. Money mattered, obviously. It determined how I travelled, where I stayed and what I could do when I arrived. It did not decide whether I would go. Wanting was all I ever needed. I am a doer, second to a dreamer. I rode that bus to South Carolina many times!

I did not grow up wealthy… obviously. I did not have parents planning family vacations or teaching me how to book flights. I did not have a travel fund waiting for me or an adult taking responsibility for the details. I learned by going.

I also learned that travelling gave me room to become more of myself.

At home, people knew the worst things that had happened to me. In another place, I could simply be funny. I could be curious. Everywhere I went gave another version of myself to meet. Once I understood that, I always found a way to travel. The conditions were rarely perfect, but perfection had never been one of my travel requirements.

I made it home, I have always, eventually come back home... And in the twenty six years since, I have still never broken a promise to Tabitha.

She still has those eyes, the eyes that love and protect the little girl in me. And I know this still because she teaches my youngest child now and has become her person too… When she retires, my daughter will graduate. My life is full of perfect little stories. But that’s another one for another time.

Over the years, the buses became planes. South Carolina became other parts of the United States, and then the Caribbean, Europe, Asia, Africa, and places across the Americas.

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It all began on a Greyhound bus with a paper ticket, a baby on my lap. It began with the Great Lakes looking like oceans, washing with baby wipes in public restrooms and learning quickly how to figure it out.

I was fifteen, and the world was already much bigger than anything I had known.

I wanted to see all of it.

That part has never changed.

So much of what I figured out on that bus, and in the twenty six years since, is in my travel guide, The World Doesn’t Have to Wait.

How I find the cheapest flights using the exact strategies I use to book my own trips. What is actually worth paying more for, and what is just an expensive way to stand in the same line as everyone else. How to save within your budget and still end up somewhere incredible. It is the guide I wish I had when all I knew was that I wanted to see the world and didn’t know where to start.

If you have ever started a sentence with “I would love to travel, but,” this one is for you. Stop waiting for the perfect time. Turn “maybe someday” into your next passport stamp.

Get Travel Guide I

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When I was thirteen, I was living in foster care. My mother had placed me there after I told her I was abused, and I carried that everywhere I went, quietly, the way children carry things they don’t have words for yet. I had just been through my first heartbreak with my first boyfriend. I was lonely in a way that felt bottomless. I didn’t want anything complicated from the world. I just wanted to be loved.

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I Knew Him

There was a boy I had known my whole life. By the time this story happens, he wasn’t a boy anymore. He was around our family constantly growing up, at gatherings, at my aunt’s house, part of the furniture of my childhood. When I was thirteen, he was twenty. I remember being nine and ten and having a crush on him, not in any way that was real, because he was so much older than me, but in the way that he looked like Joey from New Kids on the Block, like he’d stepped out of one of the pages in my BOP magazines. It was the same type of crush I had on the posters taped to my wall. Nothing about it was real.

I remember being ten or eleven years old and my parents catching him looking at me. I remember them telling him to stay away from their daughter. Those conversations happened over my head while I stood right there, I was too young to understand what the adults around me could already see. He would have been in his late teens then. I thought they were being embarrassing or implying that I was pretty in the inappropriate way some of our parents used to compliment us. But they had noticed something I never did.

By the time I was thirteen, everything in my life had changed. I was in care. I was heartbroken. I was lonely. And none of it was a secret.

The night it happened, I was sleeping over at my aunt’s house. We played cards and games all evening, the whole group of us, and then everybody went to sleep. He told me to come hang out with him in one of the back bedrooms. I just wanted to feel less alone. I didn’t realize what I would be exchanging in that moment. I was getting attention, and that was enough.

I’m not going to describe what happened in that room. And the truth is I couldn’t have described it even then. I wasn’t forced into anything, I just didn’t fully understand what was happening to me while it was happening. I just remained still and quiet until it was over. I was raised deeply Catholic. I had been taught abstinence and nothing else. In my mind, babies came only to married people. I didn’t know what birth control was. Quickly, he said I should stop, but it was too late. He couldn’t take it back. I don’t remember saying much. He told me to go to the bathroom. I think I just said okay and I left.

I was scared, I didn’t of what but I went back to my regular life. It felt as if nothing had happened. I existed in numbness for so much of my childhood. I had already lived a life where things happened to me that were scary, painful and uncomfortable, things I learned to quietly push away, and this was no exception.

Finding Out

That February, I was at my 8th grade basketball game when my chest started hurting badly. I bent over and couldn’t catch my breath, and I ended up in the nurse’s office, and eventually at the hospital. My mom and my aunt met me there while I went through what felt like every test they had.

A doctor came into the room with a social worker and introduced her. I still remember the terrified look on my mom’s face as she turned to me. My first thought was that I had AIDS, because to a child in that era, that was the most terrifying thing that could happen to you if you’d had sex. The doctor explained my chest first. It was a lung condition, something they said I would grow out of. He told me one of my tests had come back positive, one they weren’t expecting, and I watched the social worker take a small step forward, and I just knew he was going to say, you have AIDS… Instead he said, you’re pregnant.

I didn’t hear any words after that. I started ripping at my hospital gown. I was slapping at my stomach, waving my hands frantically, saying oh my God, get it out, get it out, get it out. It wasn’t a decision about anything. It was the appropriate reaction of a child who had just been told there was something inside her thirteen-year-old body that wasn’t supposed to be there. The social worker stepped closer, put her hand on my bed, and told me it was going to be okay, that I had options. I heard that. I froze. I understood enough to know what options meant.

I was a baby. I should have been playing with Barbies and taping posters to my bedroom wall, had I had a stable home. Instead I was sitting in a hospital gown being asked to make a decision most grown women would struggle with, using the only map I had, which was a child’s Catholic understanding of heaven and hell. Abortion was never on the table in my mind, it meant eternal damnation and it’s hard to explain what a terrible place that was for a thirteen-year-old to stand in. The way I understood God at that age, I was going to hell either way, and so there was never a doubt that I was keeping my baby.

Five Days

I found out I was pregnant in February. I turned fourteen in March. My due date was October 18th.

On September 30, I was admitted to the hospital because my blood pressure had become dangerous. What followed was five days of labour. Not hours. Days. They induced me over and over, and my body went in and out of labour for days, the pain immense, building and fading and building again, and in between I lay in that bed getting weaker and more terrified, with no way to imagine an end to it. Over and over, the doctors told me I needed a C-section, and over and over I refused. When I was little, I had watched my mom recover from C-sections. I remembered her scars, the infections, the one that turned green, how much pain she lived in. My fourteen-year-old brain could not survive the thought of it, so I kept saying no. You’re not cutting me.

During those five days, I was told over and over that this was a teaching hospital and that people would be coming in to learn. That would be okay with you, right? That was not a question. It was a sentence with a question mark placed politely at the end of it, said to a fourteen-year-old girl lying in a hospital bed. Nobody waited for an answer, and I didn’t know I was allowed to have one. So they came. Strangers watched me labour. They looked at me under the sheet and felt their way inside my body, one after the other. It was scary and uncomfortable, and like so much of what had already happened to me, I pushed it away.

I went into active labour on October 4, just hours after the doctors said, “You will have a C-section tomorrow. It’s no longer safe for you and your baby.” The pain didn’t feel survivable, and after five days of it, the panic that it might never end was the only thought I had left. My daughter was born on October 5 at 3:18 in the morning.

I lost so much blood. The doctors pushed on my stomach and I could hear it gushing onto the floor. When my dad came into the room he slid in it, planting one foot and gliding like a curler on ice, and traumatically that detail has stayed with me all these years. They wanted to give me a blood transfusion and I said no, that’s disgusting, because I was fourteen and the thought of someone else’s blood in my body horrified me. It’s strange, looking back, which refusals they accepted. I could turn down a transfusion and C-section. That was acceptable. Nobody ever asked me about the room full of people.

They said I tore badly. I believed that for a long time. Given what I know now about the medical system, I’m convinced I was cut, intentionally, so that the learning doctors standing at the end of my bed would have something to practice stitching. I can’t prove it. What I know is that I had an epidural, that they were down there for what felt like hours, and that doctors were learning how to repair a torn body on me. I was so weak I kept drifting toward sleep, and my legs would slowly start to close, and irritated voices would tell me to keep them open. Not one person asked me if I was okay. I was their lesson.

My daughter came before her time in every way that mattered, and she had jaundice, so she spent her first days under the lamps. The nurses told me I had to breastfeed. Nobody asked about that either. I was fourteen and I was a survivor, and I don’t know if I’ll ever fully have the words for what that meant in those moments. My body had already been used, and now it was being asked to do something so intimate with a child, and something about that dynamic felt unbearable in a way I couldn’t explain. Somewhere in me, it felt like I was the one doing something wrong because the things that happened to me as a child felt so wrong. Like I had somehow become the abuser. I know now that a fourteen-year-old feeding her baby was never that, but nobody in that hospital knew what my body had been through, and nobody asked. I quietly did everything they told me to do, because somewhere deep down I believed that being good and compliant was how I got to keep her. That if I proved that I was a good mother, no one would take my baby from me.

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When I Saw Her

She was the most beautiful little being on earth. She had striking almond eyes, a little button nose, and tiny grabby hands. I fell in love with her. When I saw her, I saw my family. When I saw her, I saw my future. When I saw her, I was no longer alone in this world. If nobody else on earth loved me, she would.

She made me a mother before I was finished being a child, and because of that, I do not know this life without her in it. We learned the world at the same time, side by side, and for all of these years she has been something bigger than the word daughter, a part of me I’ve never fully found words for, something more than saying I created her, I carried her, I raised her could ever hold. When she was twenty-four and finally lived in a home of her own, I started missing a part of myself, and I haven’t stopped missing it since. Even now, the thought of her laugh settles something in me the way only the oldest, most safe and familiar things can. She is the longest love of my life.

As for the man who got me pregnant, my big brother met up with him, and so did my dad. And then the law did. He was charged criminally with what happened that night when I was just thirteen.

She was always mine. In all my years, we were always together. I raised her completely on my own, with no parents to fall back on, because I was a foster child. From foster care I moved into room and board at fourteen. At fifteen, I moved into an apartment of our own because I wanted to protect her from the system the only way I knew how. It was just the two of us.

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After high school, life took us in completely different directions.

Dayton went off to study architecture. I went to university for psychology, moved to Alberta and then eventually moved to the East Coast, and stayed there for the next eleven years. I built a consulting career that I loved, had another daughter, had new loves, experienced heart breaks, and discovered that travelling the world made me feel more at home than staying in one place ever had.

During that time, Dayton lived only on my Facebook.

Like everyone else, we added every person we’d ever known. He and I became one of those Facebook friends who quietly existed on each other’s friends lists without existing in each other’s lives. Every now and then he’d like a post about my dad or my family. I’d see the odd update about his life. That was it.

And then June 2022 happened.

I was back home visiting family, and by complete coincidence it was his twenty-year high school reunion. My Facebook feed was suddenly full of old classmates posting pictures I’d completely forgotten existed. I came across one of Dayton and I from his graduation and sent it to him. And said,“We should recreate these. It’s the update Facebook never knew it needed lol.”

To my surprise, because I was half joking, he said yes. He and one of his buddies were on their way out to the lake and offered to swing by my sister’s house. My flight home left in about five hours, so it had to be quick.

When they pulled up, I didn’t recognize him. My immediate thought was, Jesus Christ... he’s huge. The skinny teenager I remembered was gone. Standing in my sister’s doorway was a grown man with huge arms, an unnecessarily giant moustache, and a face I didn’t know anymore.

And then I looked down at his hands. I knew those hands immediately. The freckles. The little scars. I never forgot his hands. They were my first home.

We hugged, we snapped a few photos, and talked for a few awkward minutes while I pretended I didn’t see him checking out my ass, before they headed to the lake.

Immediately after he left, we exchanged a few messages. He told me I should come out to the lake. I told him if he wanted me to stay, he could change my flight. He replied, “Lol... next time.” One thing I wasn’t about to do was pay to change my flight to hang out with a man, even if he was my long-lost, now very buff, first love. So I got on the plane and went home.

For the next week or two we messaged here and there.

“What have you been up to?”

“Why aren’t you married?”

Just twenty years worth of catching up squeezed into a handful of conversations. Eventually he said, “Next time you’re in town, hit me up.” I replied with a generic, “Sure.” Then we both went right back to our own lives.

Eight months passed. Life just kept moving.

In February of 2023, I was in Calgary for work when I got hit with this overwhelming feeling that I wanted to go home. I called my sister, Paige. Without hesitation, she drove eight hours to come get me. The drive to Calgary had been fine. The drive back to Regina was through a brutal blizzard. At times we were driving 40 km/h on the highway because we could barely see in front of us.

At one point my sister looked over at me and yelled, “Bitch, if we die, you owe me!”

I said, “If we wake up dead tomorrow, I’ll give you whatever you want.”

As we got closer to Regina and our chances of survival increased, I texted Dayton. It wasn’t romantic. I’d been single for over a year, I hadn’t had sex in a very long time, and Dayton was single and had looked at my ass eight months earlier. And that was the extent of my thought process. By the end of the conversation he’d asked if I wanted to grab lunch the next day, which happened to be Wednesday.

Lunch was unbelievably awkward. To this day he swears it wasn’t. He’s wrong. It felt like a job interview. We spent most of it making small talk without ever really getting comfortable. I couldn’t tell if we liked each other, if we were just being polite. I did mention that my sister was having a Game Night on Friday and that he should stop by if he wasn’t busy. He agreed.

When lunch was over, I walked back to my sister’s car. She’d waited in the parking lot because she wasn’t, “driving all the way home just to turn around and come back fifteen minutes later.” The second I got in she looked at me and said, “Well?” I said, “It was awkward as hell.” Then I sat there for a second before adding, “Good news though... you’re having a party on Friday.” She looked at me completely confused. “Why?” “Because I want to have sex.” She yelled, “You fucking bitch!” and we cackled. Within an hour she’d texted all of her friends, Friday’s party was officially happening.

Honestly, everyone deserves a sister like mine.

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A few hours later Dayton texted and asked if I wanted to go to a movie. I credit my ass for this invite. I wore the hell out of my jeans to lunch. I accepted. On the drive to the theatre he casually said, “Yeah, so I got this free gift card from work, so I figured I’d ask you.” I remember thinking, Sir. Be serious. Why would you say that? He brought it up a couple more times, possibly trying to sound cool and casual. This man had no idea I was a whole princess girly trying not to let my face say exactly what I was thinking, but I remained polite because I had an end goal. 😉

We went to see Avatar 2. For three hours this man sat perfectly upright with his hands flat on his lap. He didn’t touch me once or interact with me once, even on the parts that I cried. I remember sitting there thinking, This guy is strange.

Friday finally rolled around, and Dayton showed up looking cute in nice jeans and a shacket (that’s basically a shirt that’s too thick to be a shirt but not quite a jacket, for my non-Canadian readers). He looked really good. Unfortunately, every time I got anywhere near him, he’d somehow end up on the other side of the room. If I sat down, he’d stand up. If I walked over to where he was, he’d suddenly find a reason to be somewhere else. More strange guy behaviour.

A few tequilas later, Dayton found me in the hallway. I decided I was done with whatever weird dance this was, so I looked at him and said, “Are you going to kiss me or what?” He looked at me for about half a second and said, “Well... yeah. I was just waiting.” Then he kissed me. Immediately we heard, “Fucking finally!” followed by laughter from my sister and her friends. At that point there wasn’t much point pretending anyone cared about board games anymore, so we all headed to the neighbourhood pub.

Dayton had grown up with our family, so to my sister he wasn’t some random guy I’d just met. She spent the night ordering rounds of shots and yelling, “Put it on the white guy’s tab!”

And they did.

She was absolutely thriving.

Eventually Dayton and I left together, and he got us a hotel room. I remember thinking it was a little strange, but again, I had an end goal, so we carried on. (Insert fireworks here)... maybe. Honestly, I don’t remember much after that besides the room spinning. I’m not a drinker at all and I paid the price.

The next morning I woke up with exactly the kind of hangover you’d expect after a night of that much tequila. It honestly may have been less of a hangover and instead, being still intoxicated.

Despite feeling like absolute death, Dayton took me out for breakfast. Somewhere between the eggs and coffee, I started asking him about his politics. I figured now was probably a good time to find out how he voted.

During the twenty years we’d been apart, Dayton had become an architect, worked in senior management at a large corporation, and spent thirteen years in the military. I’d spent those same years building a consulting career, travelling the world, starting nonprofits, and becoming an activist. Looking across the table at this very corporate white man, I had a few questions. I honestly don’t remember most of his answers, but I assume that had something to do with my blood alcohol level.

When I got back to my sister’s house, I started feeling even more awful. After living on the East Coast for more than a decade, Saskatchewan winters, forced-air heat and way too much drinking, absolutely destroyed me. Between that, all the kids running around and my sister’s pets, I came down with a brutal flu.

Dayton offered to get me an Airbnb so I could actually rest. It sounded like a great idea. He, of course, stayed with me. After the random hotel room the night before and now an Airbnb, I finally looked at him and asked, “Sir, are you married?” He looked completely shocked. “No! Why would you ask me that?” I said, “First a hotel room, and now an Airbnb... you clearly have a wife.” He laughed and promised me he absolutely did not have a wife. It turned out he’d been renovating his house down to the studs while working full-time and building houses on the side. It wasn’t exactly somewhere you brought a guest.

For the next several days I was an absolute disaster. I had a fever, I could barely breathe through my nose, and I felt disgusting. Every night I’d tell him he was going to get sick if he kept lying beside me. He didn’t care. Every night he’d wrap me up in this giant bear hug and fall asleep anyway, breathing my feverish snot air all night.

It was strange seeing him like this. Every morning he’d head off to work in nice slacks and a crisp collared shirt. My brain still remembered the lanky teenager in oversized jerseys and backwards hats. This man looked completely different.

Once I started feeling better, we spent the rest of the week doing normal things. We had dinner with my family. We went for sushi with my sister and her kids. One night I made him chicken Alfredo, the same meal I’d made him over and over again when we were teenagers.

He remembered.

By the end of the week I had to leave and get ready for my thirty-eighth birthday trip through the UK, France, Amsterdam, and Morocco. As much as I’d enjoyed reconnecting with him, I honestly didn’t know what to make of any of it. We’d built completely different lives over twenty years, and I figured we’d probably go right back to living them.

I had absolutely no idea he was already planning to invite me back for a birthday surprise for when I got home.

And if you’d told me, while I was in that Airbnb cooking fettuccine, that I’d be married to him the following year...

I would have never believed you… Because, WHAT???

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I used to think first love was about butterflies. Looking back now, I think it was about belonging.

When I was in sixth grade, I begged my mom to let me transfer schools. I was attending a Catholic school, but I wanted to go to the same public school as one of my friends. It would be school number eighteen for me. We moved constantly, mostly because we were poor and my mother was highly unstable. I came armed with every argument an eleven-year-old could think of, convinced I could sell her on all of the practical benefits. Eventually, she said yes.

It wasn’t long after I started at my new school that I noticed a boy. His name was Dayton. He was impossibly tall, especially to a girl in the 6th grade, and looked exactly like every cool kid did in the late nineties. Oversized jerseys. Baggy jeans. A backwards baseball hat. His brown hair hung out from beneath it in a long undercut. He was usually so serious looking, but when he smiled, he somehow looked completely relaxed and impossibly shy all at once.

I remember telling my new best friend, Amy, how cute I thought he was. She encouraged me to talk to him, but there was no way, I was always too nervous. Eventually, we had our first conversation by the boot rack. I honestly can’t remember who walked over to who anymore. But I remember talking to him. I remember hoping we’d talk again.

We did.

And soon we started dating, as much as twelve-year-olds can. Like most middle school relationships, it was awkward and innocent. His best friend also dated my best friend, so the four of us were together all the time. Everyone always spent hours at Dayton’s house because it was only a block from the school and we always seemed to end up there. He was one of five boys, right in the middle, so there was always noise, people coming and going. Looking back now, those chaotic afternoons and weekends are some of the happiest memories of my childhood.

Our earliest dates usually meant emptying our pockets, counting our change, and hoping we had enough for fries at Juliana’s Pizza. To this day, almost thirty years later, I swear they still make the best fries. They will forever taste like my childhood.

He spent a lot of time at my house too. He would walk over. I lived in what everyone called “the hood.” One day he showed up carrying this tiny little pocketknife. He was absentmindedly playing with it when my dad walked into the room, looked at the knife, looked at Dayton, laughed hysterically, and absolutely roasted him and said, “What the hell is that going to do?” All these years later, Dayton still tells that story.

He was a year older than me, so while I was still in eighth grade, he headed off to high school. Life carried us in different directions for a while. I remember all too well the pain of my very first heartbreak and how life happened so quickly for both of us.

I started at a different high school. Eventually, I transferred to the same high school he went to, and seeing him again felt strangely familiar, like finding a perfectly fitting hoodie you thought you had lost. The one you loved more than anything. Before long we were back together, only this time life looked very different.

I had been in foster care permanently since I was twelve. By the time we reconnected, I was fifteen and raising my one-year-old daughter completely alone. I had fought so hard to leave the foster care system. I moved into my own apartment that my dad put into his name for me, and Dayton was right there with me from the very start.

Because I wasn’t really raised myself, I didn’t actually know how to do life. I used to watch 7th Heaven like it was an instruction manual. I saw a family and parents on the television screen, and because of them, I learned how to raise myself. The oldest daughter played basketball, so I played basketball. She went to university, so I knew I had to go to university. They discussed morals, kindness, and how to treat others, so I became those things. Those fictional TV parents raised parts of me that nobody else did. I figured out how to be a mother, partner, and child through admiration of what I wished I had and hoped to have.

My grandma was my world. She did what she always did. She took care of me the best that she could. She didn’t have much money, but she took us to second hand stores to help furnish our apartment. She bought us a brown velvet living room set from the 80’s. I’m sure it came with one of those oversized swivel rocking chairs. There were buttons sewn into the back cushions and armrests. Dayton hated those couches. I loved them. They were mine. To me, they weren’t old furniture. They were proof that someone believed I deserved a home.

We decorated my daughter’s room in Winnie the Pooh. I wanted to give her everything that I didn’t have. She had matching bedding, a border around the walls, and a little pillow she still has today.

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We were lucky that the grocery store was directly behind our apartment. We’d buy whatever we could afford, because I had become an expert at stretching a dollar. We pushed the cart home together through the parking lot. I always found it embarrassing because the cart was so loud.

I cooked every night. My favourite thing to make was chicken Alfredo with mushrooms, broccoli, tomatoes and green onions because everyone loved it. We also had frozen juice, which as someone who grew up on Kraft Dinner and the foodbank, this all felt so rich to me. After dinner, I would always wash the dishes and Dayton would dry them. I kept our little apartment clean. I did our budgets, the cooking, and the laundry. I was the one keeping us organized, running the household, and trying so hard to build a life, even though neither of us really knew how. I just loved taking care of my little family.

After my waitressing shifts, I’d come home and dump my tips out on the table. Dayton would sit there with me, proud of me while I counted every single dollar. He always made me feel like I could keep going. Every good tip felt like an accomplishment we had achieved together, proof that my hard work was keeping our heads above water.

We existed together. We did life together.

We would walk my daughter to daycare before school. She had the shortest little legs and Dayton had the longest. She’d practically run beside him, talking the entire way while he listened to every story she had to tell. On mornings after I’d worked late, he’d take her by himself so I could get ready for school or finish homework. He was still just a teenager.

We worked constantly, pizza delivery, call centres, waitressing. Whatever job paid a little better than the last one. His jobs were more laborious than mine, and I remember feeling callouses on the palms of his hands. I knew Dayton’s hands by heart. The freckles scattered across his skin. The tiny scars from an accident when he was little. His neatly trimmed nails. Sometimes I’d look at them feel so much gratitude and quietly say to myself, “I want to remember this forever.” Some how, it always worked. I never forgot his hands.

We were children carrying responsibilities that belonged to adults. It wasn’t perfect. We fought. We were exhausted. We were overwhelmed. But through all of it, he was the first and only person who ever made me feel completely chosen. There was nothing I wouldn’t do for him. Most teenagers fell in love at school dances. We fell in love building a life. For the first time in my life, I felt like I belonged somewhere.

Dayton worked hard and eventually drove a candy apple red Mustang. He worked so hard to buy that car. I remember once when his license was suspended, I became his chauffeur and I never complained. I felt like the coolest girl in the world behind the wheel, but more than that, I loved being able to take care of him. It was a quiet reminder that we were equal partners in this world, and that he needed me just as much as I needed him.

For one of our anniversaries he took me to The Diplomat. It was the fanciest restaurant I had ever been to. We were just kids pretending to be grown ups, but I remember sitting there looking at him and feeling entirely loved.

When I was sixteen, he gave me a promise ring. White gold. A small diamond in a princess cut setting. I was so proud to be his. It wasn’t extravagant, but I wore it like it was the most precious thing I’d ever owned because, to me, it was.

Eventually, life became heavier than love could carry. We fought more. The pressure grew. And one day it was over.

I still remember standing in the hallway of our apartment, watching him walk across the parking lot behind our building. I wanted to run after him. Instead, I stood there and watched until he disappeared. I felt the pain physically. It hurt more than anything I had ever experienced.

I knew this time he wasn’t coming back. I wasn’t just losing my first love. I was losing my first safe space. I was losing my first home.

I knew, somehow, that this chapter of our lives was over. I just never imagined another one was waiting twenty years down the road.

Part two is on it’s way!

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If this one landed somewhere real for you, you can buy me a coffee.

Buy me a coffee

Content Warning: This post discusses sensitive topics, including childhood trauma and sexual violence. Reader discretion is advised.

I’ve always believed in the power of connection and the comfort of knowing you are not alone.

Life is full of highs and lows, yet we spend so much of our time celebrating the moments when everything falls into place while quietly carrying the moments when it doesn’t. We celebrate success, but we often hide the struggle that made it possible. We admire resilience without talking about what it cost to build it.

In my darkest moments, I survived by searching for people who had walked a similar path before me. Their stories, shared in blog posts, books, and online forums, became my lifeline. I clung to their words because they reminded me that healing was possible, even if I couldn’t see it for myself yet. They gave me hope on days when I couldn’t find any of my own.

That is what I hope this space becomes for someone else.

Living Whole is my place to share hope. Sometimes hope comes from within. Other times, we borrow it from someone else’s story until we’re strong enough to carry our own. This space is about both.

It isn’t just about surviving, although I will write honestly about what it took for me to survive. It is also about learning how to truly live. About becoming the kind of person who embraces joy without waiting for permission, who continues growing long after the hardest chapters have ended, and who believes healing isn’t a destination but something we practice over and over again.

I don’t have everything figured out. I never will. But I have learned that some of life’s greatest lessons are found in our willingness to be honest about where we’ve been, who we are, and who we’re still becoming.

What “Living Whole” Means to Me.

For me, living whole doesn’t mean having a perfect life. It doesn’t mean being healed from every wound or never struggling again.

It means showing up fully.

It means allowing myself to experience joy without guilt, grief without shame, and hope without fear. It means moving through life’s seasons instead of becoming trapped in them. It means choosing curiosity over certainty, growth over perfection, and presence over simply getting through another day.

Most of all, it means remembering that this life is the only one I get.

I want to experience it deeply. I want to laugh harder, love better, travel farther, ask bigger questions, and remain open to being changed by the people and places I encounter along the way. This blog is my commitment to doing exactly that.

My Journey

My path has been anything but easy.

I experienced sexual violence for the first time when I was four years old. Looking back, I believe I had my first panic attack at five. By eleven, I was in foster care. At fourteen, I became a mother, a path I neither chose nor was prepared for. By fifteen, I was raising my daughter alone in my own apartment while still trying to figure out how to be a teenager myself.

Those years shaped me in ways I’m still discovering. They taught me resilience long before I knew the word. They taught me responsibility before I had the chance to experience childhood the way many people do. They also planted questions that would stay with me for decades about identity, safety, belonging, and what it truly means to heal.

Despite those beginnings, I graduated high school on time and went straight to university when my daughter was four years old. I have always believed education could open doors that my circumstances never could.

Life continued to test me.

When I was twenty-one, my stepfather, the man who had raised me since I was a baby, was killed in a workplace accident. Four years later, I lost my grandmother, my heart and soul, to lung cancer just two months before my second daughter was born.

At thirty, after years of unexplained pain and countless medical tests, I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia. Before that diagnosis, doctors investigated conditions like multiple sclerosis and ALS because no one could explain what was happening to my body.

My life has been marked by loss, trauma, chronic illness, anxiety, depression, panic attacks, and now, at forty-one, I find myself navigating the unpredictable reality of perimenopause and everything that comes with it.

It has also been marked by so much perseverance.

Every chapter has shaped the woman I am still becoming.

Who I Am Today

Today, I am someone who believes people are far more than the worst thing that has happened to them.

I am a proud mother to two incredible daughters who continue to inspire me every day. I waited thirty-nine years to get married after reconnecting with my grade school and high school sweetheart, and our story reminded me that life rarely follows the timelines we imagine for ourselves. Some of the most beautiful things arrive long after we’ve stopped expecting them.

I am endlessly curious about people and the world around me. I love asking difficult questions, challenging my own assumptions, and trying to understand why people do what they do. That curiosity has shaped every part of my life, from the work I’ve chosen to the places I’ve travelled, the conversations I have, and the way I move through the world.

Travel has become one of the greatest gifts I’ve given myself. Every place I’ve visited has expanded the way I think, challenged my perspective, and reminded me how much there is still to learn. It has shown me that the world is both far bigger and far more connected than we often realize. It has also reminded me that no matter how far we travel, we are always finding our way back to ourselves.

I have been incredibly fortunate to build a career that aligns with my values. I have dedicated much of my life to community service, advocacy, and activism because I believe change begins with ordinary people deciding they can no longer look away. Whether I have been working alongside governments, First Nations, nonprofits, grassroots organizations, or communities, the work has always been driven by the same belief: that people deserve to be seen, heard, and treated with dignity.

I am also deeply committed to creating a more just and compassionate world. My work, my writing, and the conversations I choose to have are rooted in a belief that we can challenge harmful systems while still believing in the goodness and potential of people. I care deeply about equity, belonging, and leaving every space a little better than I found it.

More recently, I was diagnosed with OCD and Complex PTSD. Those diagnoses did not change who I am, but they changed the way I understand myself. They gave language to patterns I have spent a lifetime trying to explain, connected experiences that have always felt scattered, and brought a clarity that is equal parts validating and heartbreaking. There is grief in realizing how long you have carried something without a name. There is also a quiet kind of freedom in finally having one.

Above all else, I am someone who refuses to stop growing. I believe healing is lifelong, that people are capable of extraordinary change, and that every season of our lives has something to teach us if we are willing to listen.

What You Can Expect from Living Whole

This space will evolve because I am still evolving.

You’ll find personal essays, reflections on healing, honest conversations about marriage and motherhood, thoughts on race and identity, chronic illness, travel, beauty, purpose, boundaries, friendship, and the complicated work of becoming ourselves.

Some posts will be deeply personal.

Others will challenge the way we think about the world around us.

Some will simply celebrate the beauty of being alive.

I won’t always have answers, but I promise I’ll bring honesty, curiosity, and a willingness to ask difficult questions.

More than anything, I hope this becomes a place where meaningful conversations happen. A place where we can wrestle with life’s complexities together, celebrate each other’s victories, sit with each other’s pain, and remind one another that growth rarely happens in isolation.

A Message of Hope

If there’s one thing I hope you take away from this space, it’s this.

No matter where you’ve been or what you’ve survived, your story is still being written.

Healing is rarely linear.

Growth is rarely comfortable.

Hope doesn’t always arrive loudly.

Sometimes it appears quietly, in the form of a conversation, a stranger’s words, a new perspective, or the simple realization that someone else understands exactly how you feel.

If you’ve found your way here, I hope you’ll stay awhile.

I hope you’ll laugh with me, question things with me, travel with me, and grow alongside me.

Most of all, I hope this space reminds you that you were never meant to do life alone.

Welcome to Living Whole.

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