The question came to the group. The one a lot of us hold quietly. The one we feel a little ashamed to ask, as if it is some kind of failure, or a feeling we are not allowed to have after making such a big leap.

Has anyone moved here and now wants to go back to Ontario?

Close to two hundred replies came in.

When I go back to Ontario, I don't recognize it. I miss the familiarity of old friendships and places. I miss where I grew up. I also know it is not the same place I grew up anymore and that I am sometimes romanticizing something that has already moved on, without me.

Maybe you caught yourself looking up house prices back home. Maybe you have imagined what life would look like if you never left. Maybe you miss a person more than a place. Maybe you love Nova Scotia deeply and still find yourself homesick for something you can no longer return to.

Those feelings showed up all through this thread. I want to tell you about a woman named Pascale, who landed in Nova Scotia in 2005 and has spent twenty years answering the question for herself.

THE ARRIVAL

Her mother was French. Her father was English. She spent her adolescence in the Netherlands, then a few years on the Isle of Mull in Scotland, then six months in Ireland. By the time she arrived in Nova Scotia, she had been not-from-here so many times that the role was familiar.

She landed on the island, where she married into a community that didn’t leave very much. The fit was not easy. She had grown up in places that prized openness and exposure, and now she was inside a community that worked differently. She didn’t feel understood. She wasn’t sure they were trying to understand her either. After a stretch of trying, she and her husband left for BC. They came back when BC turned out to be too expensive and her husband took a fishing job on Brier. They settled on the neck near Digby. By then it was almost ten years since she had first arrived in Nova Scotia, and she was pregnant.

The arrival chapter can stretch much longer than most people expect. The boxes are unpacked but the belonging has not started. There is too much else to figure out.

Enkeli Linder is in this chapter.

She loves Nova Scotia. Ontario will always be home. She works two weeks away and two weeks home, which means she has been in this province for years without ever quite getting the runway to build a life inside it. The friendships she would need have not had time to start. When she does have time, she goes back to Ontario, where she spends it with the people she grew up with. Old work friends, some family. The people who already know her without having to be told who she is. She misses just being able to pop over for a visit, chat and coffee.

“We sure wouldn’t have the property and the peacefulness we have here, if we still lived in Ontario. So I think I just need to put more effort into meeting people when I am home from work.”

That last sentence is the part most newcomers do not see coming. Building friendships from nothing, in a place where everyone else’s life is already arranged, is the quiet weight of the first few years. Nobody is waiting for you to arrive in their life. Nobody calls and pulls you into theirs. The work is yours and the days you do not have the energy for it are the days you feel the move the most.

Pascale was here, settled on the neck, with a baby coming and a few acquaintances she would see maybe once a month.

THE WAIT

Her first child was born in 2015. She was still lonely. Her second in 2017. Still lonely.

The literal distance from her previous life was part of it. The mental distance was the bigger part. She had a husband and small children and a roof and the necessary parts of a life, and underneath all of it she was alone. This is the chapter that is hardest to talk about, because nothing visible is going wrong. To anyone watching, the move worked.

Connie King is in this chapter. She has been in Nova Scotia for five years. She came here to learn about her lost family.

She grew up in foster care. When she aged out at eighteen, she joined the Army. It gave her a roof, a paycheque, a place to be. She was posted to Ontario, then Labrador, then Alberta. Her whole life, until recently, has been spent inside systems that decided where she would live and who would be around her. Both ended. What is left is the part of life that she never had to do before. Find your own people. Ask first. Follow up. Build from scratch.

“I am more lonely than is healthy.”

She wrote one more line near the end of her comment.

“I would give it up in a heartbeat if I had just one friend.”

Not the house. Not the view. The province itself. For one friend.

Pascale was where Connie is now, for a long time. Her children were already three, four, five years old, and the loneliness had not lifted. From the outside everything looked fine. From the inside she was waiting for something she could not name to begin.

THE SHIFT

Around the time her younger child turned two or three, Pascale found kundalini yoga.

She does not describe it as a religious turn. She describes it as a self-belief turn. The practice gave her something she had not had before. Confidence in her own being. The sense that she could be okay without needing other people to validate her in order to be okay. It loosened the grip of the loneliness, not by giving her people but by changing how she needed them.

Becoming a parent had already started the work. She had been asking herself, slowly, who she was and what mattered to her. She was tired of not fully owning herself anymore.

Then 2020 happened. She started homeschooling her older child during the pandemic. A friend of a friend on Facebook, someone in BC who homeschooled, pointed her toward the right groups. Local meet-ups followed when they could. During a pandemic, of all times, when everyone was supposed to be apart, she found her people. From-away-ers who got her. People whose minds had been formed by movement and exposure the way hers had.

The shift did not arrive because Nova Scotia changed. Nova Scotia is the same place it was when she landed on the island in 2005. The shift arrived because she did. She had spent fifteen years here without a tribe, and what unlocked the tribe was not finding the right group. It was becoming the version of herself who could find one.

This is the chapter most people do not believe is coming, when they are inside The Wait.

THE WIDENING

After the homeschool tribe, the rest of her community started widening too. Maritimers whose lifestyles didn’t match hers but who held values she rarely saw in Europe anymore. Family. Neighbourliness. Wearing your heart on your sleeve. Standing your ground.

Standing your ground is the thing. Nova Scotia stands its ground. The province does not bend itself to make newcomers comfortable. It does not soften its weather or its wages or its long, slow social rhythms because someone from somewhere else thinks it should. It is sturdy in its footing, the way the people here are sturdy in theirs.

That sturdiness is what changes you, if you let it. You stop waiting for the place to meet you halfway. You start meeting it where it is. You become someone who can stand in the frozen food aisle at Superstore and talk to a stranger for thirty minutes because the cashier knows your name and the person behind you is someone you went to a homeschool meet-up with last spring. The community is no longer a thing you are looking for. It is a thing you have built into your daily walking-around life.

THE LEAVING

Some people in the thread have already left, or are about to.

It would be easy to read those stories as cautionary tales. As proof that someone got the math wrong, or did not try hard enough. That reading is not honest. Most of those people tried as hard as anyone else in this community. What they found out is that the life they needed was somewhere their people already were, and that knowing this clearly is its own kind of arrival. They are not failures. They are mirrors. Pascale’s view from year twenty is not that everyone should stay. It is that very few of us actually try the move long enough to know whether it would have worked.

“Life is literally a journey, a wave. Ya gotta ride sometimes instead of jumping on the next plane out.”

That is what twenty years has taught her. The question keeps coming back because it is supposed to. Not because the move was wrong. Because leaving somewhere that mattered never completely stops mattering. And the place you have moved to, is not going to bend itself around your grief.

Nova Scotia stands its ground. You change to meet it. That is the move.

You are allowed to ride the wave.

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