Over the past two weeks, my life has changed in ways that are both profound and strangely quiet.

On March 16, my mother died.

For the past twelve years, I had been living in Thunder Bay as a caregiver—first for both of my parents, and then for my mother after my father died in 2018. When I moved here from Toronto in 2014, it was with a clear sense of purpose: I was here to help. To support. To be present for what I knew would be the final chapter of their lives.

That chapter has now come to a close.

There is something surreal about the aftermath. The house is the same, but it isn’t. The routines are gone. The small, constant signals of another person’s presence—footsteps, doors opening, a voice from another room—have simply… stopped.

And in their place, there is space.

Not just physical space, but something much larger: the space of an unwritten future.

In just under a month, I will be leaving Thunder Bay and moving to Victoria, British Columbia. This is not a move I would have made while my mother was alive. My life here was structured around caregiving—around being needed. Now, for the first time in over a decade, I am stepping into a life that is my own again.

That realization is both liberating and disorienting.

Grief is not a single emotion. It’s a shifting landscape. There are moments of sadness, of course—but also moments of relief, of lightness, even of quiet excitement about what comes next. These feelings coexist, sometimes uneasily, but they are all part of the same transition.

I find myself asking: who am I now, without that role?

For years, my work and my daily rhythms have been shaped by responsibility. Now, I have the opportunity to reshape them around something else—something creative.

This is where the next chapter begins to take form.

I’ve spent much of my professional life as a writer—but in a very structured, functional sense. I write psychological and medico-legal reports, translating complex information into clear, usable documents. It’s precise work. Useful work. But it’s not the same as the kind of writing I’ve always felt drawn toward.

What I want now is to move toward creative work—playwriting, screenwriting, and fiction. Work that explores character, voice, and story. Work that doesn’t just document reality, but reimagines it.

I already have seeds of this in motion. A play that has been workshopped and shortlisted. A novel published, a sequel in concept development, and a number of projects that have been quietly waiting for my attention. Ideas that have been circling for years, now with somewhere to land.

For a long time, these creative pursuits existed at the edges of my life—something I fit in when I could. What’s changing now is not just the amount of time available, but my willingness to take them seriously.

To treat them not as hobbies, but as a direction.

Victoria feels like the right place to begin that shift. It offers something I haven’t had in a long time: calm, beauty, and the mental space to think. Ocean air, long walks, a slower rhythm. It’s also where my family is, which matters more than ever right now.

At the same time, I’m very aware that I’m not stepping away from a larger creative world—I’m stepping closer to it.

Vancouver, with its film, theatre, and writing communities, is right there. Close enough to access, far enough that I can choose when and how to engage. That balance—between quiet creative work and connection to a larger artistic scene—feels exactly right for where I am.

There’s also another thread emerging alongside this: an interest in how artificial intelligence is going to reshape the kind of document-based work I’ve been doing for years. I don’t yet know exactly what role I’ll play in that shift, but I can feel that it’s significant. There may be a way to bridge my existing expertise with new tools and new possibilities.

So this next phase of life isn’t just about leaving something behind.

It’s about integrating what I’ve done with what I want to do next.

Right now, I’m in an in-between space. The past is very present, and the future is just beginning to take shape. There’s a kind of openness to this moment that is unfamiliar to me—but also quietly hopeful.

If there’s a theme to this transition, it’s this: after years of being defined by what I needed to do, I’m beginning to explore what I want to do.

And that’s a question worth taking seriously.

I don’t have all the answers yet. But for the first time in a long time, I have the space to find them.