Sacrifice is a Heart Tenderizer

I was one of those lucky kids in my childhood, and I know it; the kind who had both parents stay together, and even stay in love; the kind that had grandparents and family that I liked; the kind that grew up almost my whole life long in the same small northern Alberta town. I say lucky, but maybe I should even say special… The friends that I had, and the families that they had, were huge influences on who I became as a person. I babysat, I worked, I volunteered, I traveled, and I was always able to come home and feel loved, welcome, and known by the people I grew up around. That all changed very suddenly for me; I was just seventeen when I graduated high school, and on the August weekend of my high school graduation, my family celebrated, and then my parents moved the whole family except for me from Slave Lake to Yellowknife.

YELLOWKNIFE. The Northwest Territories. As if living in northern Alberta wasn’t far enough into the cold and dark of northern Canada. I moved to Edmonton to go to Est-Elle Academy of Hair Design, and was truly on my own more than I ever had been before. This was exciting, and I loved the feeling of being completely in charge of my own life. But I soon felt that distance between my family and myself, it was not the same to talk to them on the phone instead of just sitting across from them at the kitchen table. My family was far, and busy building and settling in to their new lives. I was too, and I was stressed. I not only had no family close by, but the community of support I had barely noticed in Slave Lake was replaced with the faceless thousands in my new city. I felt like hardly anyone even saw me, much less cared about who I was and how I was doing. It felt like a night and day difference, and it was one of the hardest changes I’ve ever survived in my life.

I did survive, though. I finished my hairdressing program, and even had made some great new friends by the time the year was over. I still felt so young, and still quite unprepared for what I thought of as “being an adult”. I wasn’t ready, so I followed my family up to that crazy city where it’s -52 degrees for months on end, and where you feel like you are on the very edge of civilization. In a sense that’s true – my parents live on the last road north, it stops for good about 40 minutes past their house; a person can only drive so far in this big northern land until hitting the point that roads no longer exist, or can’t be built. When I got there, I realized that it was not coming home. My family lived in this new city, but people had no idea who we were yet.

I started hairdressing, and over the next four years built a solid reputation for myself. People knew me as Liz the hairdresser, an image that stays with me to this day when I visit the city, although I wouldn’t limit or define myself in this way anymore. Yellowknife never felt like Slave Lake to me; I never had or felt the relationship connections in the same way, even after years of history had passed, I never felt known by the people there in the same way I had felt in what I still think of as my hometown. I don’t know if I gave people the chance to see me in another way. I don’t know if I was supposed to have another role there; sometimes I think my time spent there was such an internal experience because that is what I needed it to be. I needed time to realize how important the people that I surrounded myself with are in my life. I needed to figure out what I really wanted my life to be, and I think I was able to recognize that I even had choices about this because I wasn’t as happy as I knew I could be in my life at that time.

Eventually I left; I jumped off another big “cliff” in my life, made a choice, and tried on a new incarnation of myself. I visited, and even moved back for a time, but I knew that Yellowknife was not home, even though some of the people who are home to me are there. For a long time, I was angry about the move. I never have gone back to Slave Lake as a visitor for any great length of time. A few quick weekends would be about it in the 12 years since I left, even though people who feel like home to me still live there. For a long time, I resented the way this shift had felt like my life was being ripped apart, and I even thought I could place that blame on other people: how dare my parents decide to change all the rules like this, how dare everything feel hard and different and strange.

It has taken years for me to figure out who I am as an adult, and who and what it is that makes wherever I’m currently living my life feel like home.

Although I don’t want to forget those feelings of discomfort – even though they made me so angry, even though I wished that I could go back and changed everything, even though it was SO hard for SO long, I see now that it was worth it. The sacrifices each member of my family made were not that different from my own; we all had to figure out how to define ourselves in our new lives. Having the freedom to that is also special, and something that is much harder to do while staying in an old, familiar comfort zone. Change can be painful; sometimes I would think, “if only my heart were stone”, then it wouldn’t be so hard. But now I know, that’s not how my heart is supposed to be. It is a living thing, it can be hurt, but it can also grow every time I connect with new person who becomes part of my family. I wouldn’t choose to be a hard person now, I know that would be missing out. The things that hurt the most about the big changes in my life, and this change in particular, are also the things that have had the deepest and most lasting impact for me in my choices.

It took years to see the value of these changes, years to move past feeling angry, hurt, and ripped apart from the only life I had known. I can see now though that the resentment I felt was part of my mourning process. It was a great childhood, and I’m thankful to have those memories. But what I have gained through the sacrifices of moving on and moving forward has been a better life than I perhaps could have imagined in that tiny comfortable place – I wouldn’t have even known to look for something different, much less discovered how incredible a life that I build and choose myself can be.