Category: Life Up North

I didn’t go North expecting it to change me. Most people don’t. You go because there’s work, or because someone you love is already there, or because the ordinary landscape you’ve always known stops being enough. You go because you’re looking for something, even if you can’t name what it is. And then the Arctic…

For most of your life, you probably thought you were lazy. Or careless. Or “just not trying hard enough.” You lost things constantly. Forgot appointments. Started projects with enormous enthusiasm and abandoned them three days later. You worked twice as hard as everyone around you to produce the same result — and then wondered why…

Filing a disability claim with Veterans Affairs Canada (VAC) should be straightforward. You served. You were injured or became ill. You deserve support. But the reality is that the process is complex, paper-heavy, and easy to get wrong — and mistakes can mean months of delays or an unnecessary denial. After working with veterans navigating…

Almost 100 days. I’ve been sitting with this one for a while. There’s a difference between having experiences and understanding them, and after three months I think I’m crossing from one into the other. I didn’t have language for a lot of things when I moved up here. I didn’t know then what I know…

Getting anywhere from here requires patience, flexibility, and a complete willingness to be bumped. Monday: airport. Delayed, then cancelled. Weather. Tuesday: airport again. Twenty-minute delay, then airborne — Iqaluit bound. Made it. Rushed to confirm my connection. Bumped to the next day. Rushed to the other airline, transferred my reservation, rechecked my bags, was told…

Still grounded by weather. Another cancelled flight to the conference I was supposed to attend. I’ve made my peace with it. Up here, you don’t argue with weather. You adjust, you wait, and you find something to do with your hands. While I’ve been waiting, the community celebrated a birthday — and the way it’s…

Absence makes the internet bill come due — I did not plan for that particular lesson. Our internet up here is prepaid monthly. You pay at the office, when the office is open, which you determine by watching for the light in the window. There is no posted schedule. Last week we miscalculated. We literally…

We didn’t do a full Christmas this year, and that was fine. We’d had our gatherings before we left — the important ones. What we didn’t expect was the strange quiet of not going through the familiar steps for the first time. No shopping frenzy, no schedule, no last-minute anything. A mix of lonely and…

The weeks are moving faster than I expected. I think it’s the dark — when there’s almost no daylight, your brain loses its grip on what time it is, let alone what day of the week. I check my phone more often than I used to, just to confirm Tuesday is still Tuesday. I’ve since…

Two weeks in. Time for the Q&A, because I keep getting the same questions from different people. Are there gardens? Not really — not yet. The community next door attempted a small greenhouse with modest success. Everything needed to build and run one has to be shipped in: soil, seeds, supplies. The fresh produce subsidy…