Throughout my life, I have moved from house to house around Regina living in a total of eleven houses before I was eight years old. When I went into third grade we moved into the house I live in currently and that I consider my childhood home. I quickly became a part of my neighborhood community, being involved in Girl Guides, Boy Scouts, and various school activities. I built long-lasting relationships and explored the area and in a way being a north-end kid or from the Uplands community is part of my identity.

My home growing up was chaotic, loud, busy, and at times overwhelming, living in a house alongside seven other people with only one shower is definitely not an envied situation. As I got older and my family continued to grow I would try to distance myself, as any typical teenager I would hide in my bedroom or go out with friends searching for any excuse to get away. I found myself thinking about how unfair my life was, how inconvenient it could be to have to help my youngest brother Thane bathe, or how irritating it was when my baby sister Meghan would wake me up in the night by crawling into bed with me because she couldn’t sleep. I longed for a more peaceful and independent living situation where I could find some quiet once in a while and I dreamt of when I could move away from home.

In my second semester of university, my family decided to move to a very small town that is 830 km North of Regina and quite suddenly I found myself alone and independent. At first, I was so excited to finally not have to share a space with so many other people, to be free to do new and exciting things such as shower whenever I wanted, and not have five people knocking on the door to use the restroom. But instead of peace, I found a sudden loneliness that I had never experienced in my home, the quiet that I had once craved was now deafening. The uninterrupted sleep I longed for turned into searching for that small warm girl curled to my side in my bed, and the home that we had built together turned back into just a house.