The Promise I Almost Didn't Keep

Okay, I said I’d tell you what it took to keep that promise to myself from Part One of this story… Here’s where it actually starts; not with a decision, but with a conversation I almost didn’t let happen.

In November 2019, one of my hotel clients approached me about expanding into the West Coast market. Someone needed to be there, building it from the ground up.

I said no. Almost immediately.

The honest reason wasn’t the job at all. It was my sister!!! The thought of leaving her again, after we’d only just started living together, felt ridiculous. So I told myself all the practical things instead — that my whole life was in Toronto, that I had my people, my routines, my world. It was easier to say that than to say I was scared.

But when I actually looked at that “whole life” honestly, it didn’t hold up the way I wanted it to. Most of my friends were somewhere else entirely — getting married, having kids, moving out of the city, building lives that looked nothing like mine. I was newly single, with no one to stay for except my sister, and even she’d tell me later she could see it before I could: if I didn’t go now, I might not go at all.

So I spent two months quietly not letting it go anyway.

That January, we ran our annual sales mission meeting in Mexico — clients, partners, the whole thing. Best year yet, everyone kept saying. Sales up. Everything pointing the right direction. I sat there listening to how successful we’d all been, 154 flight segments deep into a life I used to track like a scoreboard, so tired I could feel it in my teeth, thinking: keep this up next year and I am going to burn out completely. Nobody in that room could tell. I’d gotten good at looking thriving while quietly running on empty.

Later that same month, I had an event in Revelstoke, and I invited my dad to come with me, he lives in the Okanagan, and between my flying and his own life, we barely got real time together anymore. We drove up in the middle of winter, and if you’ve never done that drive in the winter, picture the most stunning kind of nowhere — white in every direction, the biggest snowflakes you’ve ever seen. Trees soaring all the way up to space. Nothing but mountain and road. Somewhere in the middle of it, out of nowhere, I said it out loud: “What am I thinking? Of course I should live out here.”

My dad didn’t say much back. I’ve never really been one to be told what to do, I come to my own decisions in my own time. Always have… and I think he’s known that about me since I was a toddler. He just let me get there.

When I got home, I told my sister everything. Not just the meeting, the exhaustion, the thought I couldn’t shake — the feeling. Standing in the middle of the mountains on every side of me, that specific kind of quiet BC has that Toronto never did. She already knew about the sales meeting. She already knew how exhausted I’d been, how unsustainable the whole thing had started to feel. She didn’t need convincing.

She looked at me over her wine glass and said, “I think you should go.”

Not because she wanted me gone. Because she could see something I couldn’t yet.

Apparently everyone could because when I called my client back to say yes, they told me they hadn’t even posted the role. They’d had a feeling I’d come around.

“You’re so made for Vancouver,” they said.

Before I’d packed a single box, I ordered a pair of running shoes. Nikes, picked entirely because I thought they looked cool, delivered to an address I didn’t even live at yet. No real plan for how I’d use them. I just remembered standing on that seawall years earlier, the promise I’d made myself — and I wasn’t going to Vancouver without at least trying to keep it.

Everyone around me thought I was starting over. New city, new chapter, clean slate!!! I let them think that, because it was easier than saying what I actually suspected — that I might just be doing the exact same thing in a different postal code. Same busy calendar, different skyline. I’d left home once already trying to outrun something. Part of me wasn’t sure this was any different.

The plan was March 2020.

Instead, I was poolside in Mexico again. A different trip this time, a fitness retreat I was hosting with my friend Beverley. (Yes — I also co-founded a retreat company. That’s a different story.) She led the workouts, I ran the logistics and community operations, and this was supposed to be just another good week.

Then my phone buzzed.

“Veronica,” she said, “the news is really bad. Everyone wants refunds. This is serious.”

*I was clearly very naïve lol

I looked up from the pool. Everything around me looked fine, totally normal. A few hours later, Trudeau went on national television and told every Canadian abroad to come home immediately.

Two weeks of quarantine in my Toronto apartment, and somewhere in there I had the one thought that actually changed anything: if I’m working from home anyway... why am I not doing it from Vancouver? I hadn’t sat still long enough in thirteen years to hear myself think something that clearly.

May 2020. Three grey Costco suitcases, a flight across the country, a little apartment in Kitsilano, a block from the beach. I had a few friends there already. And — because I am who I am — I’d also matched with a guy named Nate on Hinge before I’d even left Toronto. Someone I was, weirdly so excited to meet, even with everything else completely up in the air.

That part of the story matters more than I can get into today. For now, all I’ll say is he promised me oysters and a cocktail when I settled in, and we were obsessed from that Friday on.

But the first months in Vancouver weren’t about Nate, or Instagram, or any of it. They were about something much smaller, and much harder to admit.

If I’m honest, nothing changed right away. If anything, it got looser. I didn’t have a job keeping me on a schedule anymore — so the structure I used to complain about was gone, and nothing replaced it. Most days were the beach, drinks, MDMA, after-parties that ran until the sun came up. I told myself I was just enjoying my freedom. Really, I think I was doing the exact same thing I’d done in Toronto, minus the one thing that used to keep me in check — the responsibility, the meetings, the flights, the presentations.

Nate, meanwhile, was working harder than I’d ever seen anyone work — building something real in the middle of a pandemic, while everyone around him was getting let go. Watching him grind while I was still floating made me feel, more than once, like a loser. Like he had a plan, and I was just improvising and hoping nobody noticed?

I don’t know exactly when it shifted. I wish I had a clean story for you… a rock bottom, a single morning I woke up and decided. I didn’t. There was just, at some point, a pull. Quiet at first, easy to ignore, and then less easy to ignore. Something in me wanting to actually feel something instead of just filling the hours until I did.

For the first time in thirteen years, I had nowhere to be. Which meant I also had nowhere left to hide.

Without the partying to fill it, my life got quieter than I expected. Not peaceful-quiet. Just quiet. I wasn’t used to being alone with my own thoughts for that long, and it turned out I didn’t entirely like what I found there — but I kept sitting with it anyway.

One day I looked at those Nikes, still sitting in the corner of my apartment, untouched since they arrived. And I thought: okay. It’s time to find out if this is actually different, or if I just packed the same problem into a nicer city.

I had the shoes. I had the seawall a block away. I had nothing left to distract me from the answer.

I was so self-conscious to run anywhere someone might actually see me. Too slow, too out of breath, too sure everyone around me would clock me as a fraud on sight. But fuck it. I wanted to be a runner!

And then one day, I ran for ten minutes straight.

Ten minutes. That was the whole thing.

But something happened in those ten minutes that had nothing to do with running at all.

That’s for the Inner Circle. What those ten minutes actually gave me — and what came after, including the night seven strangers showed up somewhere I almost didn’t have the nerve to be — that’s next.