It’s a beautiful September day and I’m sitting in the kitchen at my uncle’s home which is only where I live for another week. I’ll be on the road by Saturday morning, on route to Ontario once again.

It’s maybe a little strange to be so transient as a person, uprooting every once in a while to switch homes and move across the country, except it started when I was 17 so looking back I think it was naive of anyone to think I would truly pick a spot to stay for a while.

A year ago I thought I was done moving around. The restrictions and lockdowns of the pandemic were being peeled back and I was ready to find a new normal in my hometown in Ontario. It was the end of March when I hopped in a car to roadtrip with my sister and friend (Hayl & Hannah) to drop Hayl off at school in BC. That trip resulted in a whirlwind of events leading me to eventually move back out to BC as well, with loose plans to start school and move into a place with the guy I was dating at the time.

Everything changed once I actually got to BC and little things like furnishing my room or finding a good job were slower processes than I wanted them to be. Winter was hard, money was stressful and I didn’t go home for Christmas for the first time ever. I didn’t land a solid job until the end of January after arriving in BC in the middle of August. It truly was a weird season.

I beat myself up a lot for being incompetent, flaky, unreliable, inconsistent, noncommittal, all the negative visible parts of my own internal frenzy. It feels messy. And I know I’ve disappointed people in the process of figuring out what my next moves are. I find it difficult to make long term plans for myself and I have always been that way. As a kid I could tell you I wanted to be an artist when I grew up but practically speaking I had no idea what that would even entail.

Sometimes I think I’m someone who changes at a relatively rapid rate. Other times I understand how consistent and predictable I am in that I am unpredictable but at least people know this about me now. I think back to seemingly unimportant conversations I had with people at different times in my journey and I wonder how they knew things about me that I only just discovered about myself recently. I remember a conversation with a friend around 10 years ago where we were driving to a sort of small church barbecue with a few families one summer evening. Her partner was driving the car and she looked at me in the back seat and asked, “Have you ever considered dating a woman?” In that moment I felt embarrassed at the question, not because it was something I had thought about but because it was something I knew was definitely off limits for me. I was probably 19 or 20 at the time and I had never considered it.

Fast forward to the present, where I’m moving back to my hometown with my first ever girlfriend. Still definitely an artist with very little understanding of how to actually be an artist. Still feeling as transient as ever, not totally sure when I’ll land anywhere for longer than a year. But if certainty was ever my game I would have given up a long time ago. I’m just a beginner, but I’m in it for the long haul.