When I was 22 I decided to move to Halifax.

I had returned from 9 months of starvation and homelessness in Europe, to find my mother and step-dad had moved out of the house and town I left to what is called an ‘acerage’ (or an unfarmed waste of good land) near Didsbury, Alberta. Although I did still have a car, A ‘90s Dodge Colt I bought for $7k from the dealership I detailed trade-ins at, my already ingrained habit of accidents and drunk driving in the wee hours post rave, rarely got me back to their place, which I quickly realized was the point of the move… Instead, I followed my mothers footsteps and got a job as a nanny in Calgary for a few months while i hung out with my soccer teammates ( 3 of whom were now engineering students) I applied to study something called ‘political science’ at the University there. I didn’t get in because of my low math scores, but my younger brother got into our hometown college and I moved down to Lethbridge with him and took both Anthropology and Political Science at that university while chairing the Amnesty International and volunteering with resettling Afghan refugees. I still didn’t feel like I was in the world, a global citizen, as it were. I met with the university career counselor and expressed my frustration and lack of interest in human security, keep in mind that this was September 2001 and EVERYTHING changed. the counsellor told me I was in the wrong school and the wrong province for any of that and gave me a list of schools to apply to - I had only heard of UBC on the list and knew that Van City was WAY out of my price range. After narrowing down the selections by language, cost of living, availability of part-time jobs, opportunities to study abroad and coolness - Dalhousie was my perfect match and they were into me too with their rolling admission dates and generous transfer credit policy. More Irish weather was definitely a perk, I still love rain after growing up in a frozen desert.

I moved to Halifax with a suitcase and a paper map. I stayed with a former coworker of my moms who had moved back to Dartmouth when her husband retired and the Balcolm’s, in true maritime fashion, helped me get set up with a shared apartment in Clayton Park, only an hour long bus ride to Dal. My roommate was a gerontologist named Ellen from Truro. I would study on the bus on the way to class, stay and work in the ancient, dripping library, go to rugby practice and then head back to Clayton Park to work at either of my part-time jobs - one was as a caterer at a Lebanese restaurant and the other one was as a receptionist in a hair salon within the same plaza. By the time summer came around, I was still a full-time student, trying to get my language credit done and I was well positioned to find a room in a 7 bedroom house share I found out about from one of my classmates right on Robie St, around a 15 min walk to campus! I did manage to get back to visit Alberta for a couple weeks but that was the only time. The second fall I showed up to that house in business mode - I would only allow myself to party once per semester and made a vow not to make any friends. I kept to a super strict budget, eating only vegetarian meals and planning them a month in advance to stay on track since rent in this new place wasn’t cheap either, the money I saved on transportation just went to more rent. I wore used clothes and started volunteering with World University Service of Canada, sponsoring refugee students who I became friends with, and then a cute girl in my Classics class who has held onto a piece of my heart ever since that day. My roommates were built-in friends (well more like siblings or cousins really) and then I got a job downtown as a prep cook at a vegan restaurant and started going out more. I got to invent my adult life.

That summer my brother came out to stay with me since we had a couple of rooms vacant, he started dating one of my roommates, a med school student from Newfoundland who only ate canned moose meat or Vienna sausages and already had a boyfriend back home who looked like Justin, this did not bother him in the slightest. He even went to Stephenville with her to get screeched in. Like most of his jobs, I also got him a job as a cook at the vegan restaurant where he thrived. We would meet up after work for cheap Oland beers on the deck, since I got to stay in the BIG (with a private deck) room in the summers while my friend/roommate Kate was back in PEI, where our mother had also moved after her very messy divorce. That was the last time Justin and I lived together.

The next year, winter semester I was offered an even closer place free of charge and jumped at the opportunity. one of my ‘mature’ classmates and her banker husband had bought a heritage house to flip, right near King’s College campus, but to save money on insurance they needed it to be occupied. there would be no heat or electricity, they’d be working n the plumbing too. i had gotten accepted to a semester abroad program in Uganda that started in May and still had no idea how I was going to pay for the tuition or the flights, let alone the rest of it and the opportunity to not pay rent truly eclipsed everything else. I moved in in February with one of my roommates, who was saving up to volunteer in an orphanage in Nepal. I would wake up freezing every morning in all my winter gear (mitts included) inside a sleeping bag inside a comforter on a mattress on the floor as the roofers started their day. Aside from Mondays, when I would wake up at 4am to walk down to the Superstore on Barrington (usually in the rain), passing by the family homes smelling like burning wood or coal, where I would start my 6 hour shift packing and stocking meat. At 11am I would get off work and head to the gym on campus to shower, since we didn’t have plumbing or heat, and then head to class. when I got home Kelly and I would use the same over-burdened octopus cord to power a kettle for our oatmeal while we watched the same tape of Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels or Snatch over and over. Sometimes the owners of the house would bring sledgehammers for us to destroy the kitchen or the bathroom. I left for London and then Mbarara in May, with about $300 in spending cash once I had met all the payment deadlines.

As much as I saved it didn’t cover my tuition for the summer semester and I couldn’t register for the last year until i paid off the outstanding debt. I moved back to Calgary and got a Call centre job at Telus so I could go back to school. my stepdad had just bought a condo but it wasn’t ready yet, so I ended up moving in with my co-worker boyfriend (a St FX grad who had done a semester abroad in Kenya) and his bartender mom after I got kicked out of a high school friends house when she got booed up. I’d go down to Lethbridge to visit my brother and my old rugby crew but knew I couldn’t move back.

My last year in Halifax was big. Kate and I got a top floor apartment in an historic converted house on Morris Street owned by a walking corpse of a landlord. I was working at Peet’s Fruitique on Spring Garden in addition to my waitressing job at Curry Original, about 2 blocks away. i would do my laundry on the corner while I wrote papers and campus was a 15 min walk away. Sometimes my mom would show up with her new friends to party in the city and crash in my room while I was at work. I started imagining a life in Halifax and wanted to stay past graduation. I started dating, I joined an anarchist burlesque collective, I even bought some furniture, I applied for any job I came across but nothing was on offer. Graduation was coming quick and I still wasn’t sure what I was going to do beyond my new job at catering (again) at Pier 21.

Then everything changed. Now when I come back here the city looks cleaner and more naïve than I remember. Maybe that is because I am no longer that way. I bought a $9 piece of cheesecake from a new shop - something I would have never been able to do when I fell in love with this city 20 years ago. but the people are gone too, like the youth and optimism for a just world I once had.

Even in the safest of spaces, barriers REMAIN…

In order to attend a work event where the keynote, Cynthia Enloe, spoke about the transactional dominations that define patriarchy within the military, I find myself, a university educated professional had to myself engage in transactional sex labour for childcare to be here. This event fell on a long weekend, meaning all my female friends were occupied with tier own families. My boss also made plans for a ski trip with his family, and so the task fell to me.

Although I am keenly interested in the topic, the logistics of attendance are always forefront of my mind. this includes using grocery money to pay in advance for flights and hotel (+ the security deposit hold), as well as for food as research grants do not accommodate staff advances. My best option to execute the task in front of me was to send my ex porn pics and videos of myself to get his (free) buy-in for a visit, pulling out all the stops to ensure he will adequately cos-play as a parent to my child while I am working.

It gets complicated because my ex, is also my ex-boss from a previous job in South Sudan. The circumstances of our relationship have always orbited around transactional sex because he was the Director of the US organization I was consulting with when his Head of Security ( a former US Army Ranger working for a third party security contractor) violently raped me on that same US compound, while we were both at work. The only person I could tell, who had any power to advocate for justice was my boss, who instead capitalized on the vulnerability of the situation to coerce me into a romantic relationship in order to provide the protecting of an ‘alpha male’ he knew I needed for myself and my toddler back home in Canada.

Here I am 13 years after the rape and 2 years after a lengthy and impoverishing divorce, asking the man in charge who gaslit me into believing I invited the attack, to again provide protection so that i can attend work, listening to discussion about how society will never value me or my lived experiences when it comes to security.