Memoir: Part 1

When I'm not writing about this cancer bardo I now occupy, I'll be writing about the before times of my existence. This is mostly just me talking to myself. Nobody has to read any of this stuff unless they really want to. 
I'll start with just the bare bones and fill things out later. 

I was born to my Catholic mother of French and Polish ancestry in the old hospital at the top of Signal Hill in Weyburn, Sask, in 1950, in that dead zone between Christmas and New Years, a crappy time to have a birthday in my opinion, but I didn't get to pick it. I'm pretty sure she wanted a boy, and to give birth on Christmas, just like the Virgin Mary whose framed picture hung over her parents' bed. She missed on both counts and ended up with me. I've always imagined she must have been very disappointed with how that turned out. More about our misfit relationship in future blogposts. 

I grew up on a farm. I went to school in a one-room schoolhouse a mile away, 8 grades and only 13 kids. We all played softball together. It took 8 years, but I slowly migrated from the south side of the room in Grade One to the north side in Grade 8. After that I took a school bus to a neighbouring town that had a high school, that was also quite small, about 80 kids altogether, four grades, four classrooms, but seemed huge to me. I was a decent student with decent grades. 

After that I went straight into a physiotherapy program in Saskatoon, 1968, at age 17. A small school, mostly off campus in makeshift quarters by the airport. Twenty young women. Lifelong friendships. It was hard but I learned how to live in a city, deal with lights and traffic and huge buildings, take a bus, ride escalators. There was stress, and I had my first experience with depression. But I graduated. 

I started my first job in hospital, in Yorkton, Sask.
It was exciting. 
Yay, I was a baby adult now, earning my way in life, adapting. 

One of the main realizations I came to early on was that I was never going to be anyone's wife or mother. I dipped my toe into conventional heterosexuality by living with a boyfriend, but after a few years realized I just could not go there and do that for real, could not imagine anything more unlike whatever it was that I was. No matter, I could make my own way. I had a physio diploma and it could take me anywhere, pretty much. Awesome profession. 

I spent many years working, saving up money then taking time out for my main interest at the time, which was attending university and learning about stuff. I studied premed, and nearly was accepted. (Thank goodness I wasn't.) I studied sociology, loved it. Geography, loved it. Philosophy, did not love it. Ended up in Fine Arts. Loved it. 
None of it captured me though. I was a physio and that was my first love, and these were all just explorations of various subjects, rabbit holes. I did not have any craving to be part of that kind of environment. I was just a tourist, checking out scholarly psychosphere precipitate because I was curious and thought, why not educate myself a bit more broadly? 

In my early thirties, 1983, I moved to BC and worked there until I moved back to Weyburn in 2009.
BC was sort of a mecca for manual therapy, and I wanted to be part of that. I was finally brave enough to open my own practice in 1994 in Vancouver. It was a perfect fit. 
The thing is, nothing stays perfect forever. 
My adult life has been about always trying to stay one step ahead of financial stress on the one hand and depression on the other, by keeping ambitions manageable and changing my environment, job, town, province, whatever, whenever I felt moved to. Single and nimble and able to avoid personal disaster by keeping personal ties to a minimum, by moving away. By staying unentangled. By staying firmly attached to an autonomous existence. 

I got sick of living in Rain-couver under huge shaggy light-blocking cedar trees, and longed for more sunshine. I moved back to Weyburn, age 58 by that time.
I had enough money from selling my condo in Vancouver to buy a new little condo, where I still live, and to afford two years off work to gather myself for another round of extroversion. After I settled in and settled down, I started a new practice in town, wrote a book, traveled around teaching. Covid came along 6 years ago, whereupon I took the exit ramp and retired completely after receiving my 50-year physio certification in the mail that spring.  

This little condo, on the fourth floor, faces west. I remember being so pleased that I could watch the moon and sky and sunsets and thunderstorms unimpeded from my balcony window, because none of the buildings in town are any taller, and I can even see countryside from here.
This is the last place I will ever live freely, because I'm now 75, plus I have this incurable cancer business going on these days. I'd kind of like to stretch life out as long as it lasts.