For as long as I can remember, my life has foreshadowed just how nomadic I would become. Until the age of 7 years old, I was raised by my mother and stepfather; who shouldered me aside in favour of their 2 daughters, in Edmonton, Alberta. While there, I was put in a Chinese day-home as a babe and then shuttled into a Chinese immersion school in grade one. There was never a time I wasn’t surrounded by a culture that was not my own. That is until my family moved to Sylvan lake. To any outsider, Sylvan lake looks like a serene place with a gorgeous dark blue lake that stretches out towards the horizon, but living there felt like being stuck in a sinkhole. It didn’t matter how hard you fought to get out, you would eventually be sucked back in.
The first time I ever really travelled was my 8th birthday. My Grandparents brought me down to stay with them at their place in San Diego, California. It was there that I spent the best week of my childhood. One of the last nights there, I was sitting on the beach with my grandmother (my grandfather’s second wife), our toes buried in the sand, as the sun began to dip below the horizon lighting the ocean on fire with shades of orange, pink and red.
In the dying light of day, she turned to me and said, “I want you to know that things don’t need to be this way forever. As long as you keep moving forward and never go back, you can create a better life for yourself. You don’t have to be stuck. Where and who you’re from can be just that.”
That trip, and conversation, lit a fire and passion within me that, until years later, I never even realised was there. I went back to my “home” in Sylvan lake, back to my less than loving family, and spent the next 5 years hating it. Always looking forward to the short amount of time I would get to visit my grandparents in whichever state they were living in at the time. Until I was 13, my stepfather was working in the oilfield and with him gone all the time my mother took out her woes on myself. When our fighting reached a climax, my mother told me I was going to live with my grandparents in the states. Over the next two and a half to three years I learned what it meant to be a family from them as we traveled frequently across the states and even to Bermuda.
From them I learned to always be curious, to never stop learning new things or asking “Why?”, and that life’s too short not to see everything. It was with them that I started to find myself and truly discover my love for music and body art. I designed my first tattoo, that I wasn’t allowed to get until I turned 18. A reiteration of an album art from one of my favourite Canadian musicians that had helped me get through some of the worst moments of my life and connected me to where I was from.
Then at 16, I made one of the worst decisions of my life. I moved back to Alberta, back in with my parents. That lasted all of 2 weeks before a fight caused me to move out. I moved around between Red Deer and Sylvan lake until I graduated Highschool when I decided to move to Calgary and try to start my life. After living in my car until I found a job and a place, I moved around a bit and did a fast track Audio Engineering Certificate at The Academy of Production and Recording arts out of The Beach Recording studio. I started playing my music in bars when I turned 18. Eventually, my unknown passion started to roar it’s head at me. I was unsatisfied staying in one place and my feet were itching to get out of there.
So, I packed up my things and started driving towards the states to help my grandparents move from Tennessee to South Carolina. After 2 days of driving southeast and seeing endless miles of plains unfold in front of me, I finally hit the border with a terrible head cold. Doped up on cold meds, I spent hours being questioned about why I was going to the states before being turned away. I was lost and had no idea where to go and what to do.
I ended up bouncing around Alberta until right after I turned 20 when my grandmother came to visit and ended up taking me back to the states with her, as they were finishing up a move from South Carolina to Texas. I spent the next 6 months there trying to figure out what exactly I wanted to do with my life. As my visa was running out, I found a job in a hotel back in Jasper, Alberta. Living in the mountains was enjoyable for a time, but I still wanted more. So after about 4 or 5 months, I applied to a job for teaching English in China, and set off to start my life. Coming across that job posted made me realise what it was I wanted to do with my life. I wanted to travel; to keep moving forward and never look back. I discovered that what I really wanted was to visit every country in the world and get tattoos from the culture and about the culture in at least half of them. That’s how this journey really started…and also why it continues.
