We all have stories we’ll never tell.

Every Wednesday in my second year of university, K and I, like whiskey sours and gin and tonics were our religion, would blow off 8pm Computer Design Something-or-other class and drink ourselves silly. I never really knew if she felt obligated to compete with my inebriation, if she was actually just a secret hot mess or if she was just being a really, really good friend. Either way, the only thing that mattered was that she was there to hold my hair back when I threw up on my duvet cover and all over the carpet beside my bed. 

That’s true friendship right there. 

We’d come home around 2am, watch the only season of Friends I owned at the time in my bed and pass out from leading lives that no stable person would envy. We were like Ke$ha before Ke$ha was Ke$ha and for almost a year, we were really good at it. 

My bank account, liver and self-esteem all took a beating that year. I certainly didn’t set out to be the girl who walked into lecture the next morning with only vague inclinations of whether or not she confessed undying lust to her Teaching Assistant the night before. I didn’t set out to almost fail a class because I couldn’t draw a strong enough argument out of Brokeback Mountain. And I didn’t set out to wear heels at least 3 nights a week.

But when in Rome, right?

Except, yeah, it wasn’t Rome. It was wine country in Canada.

But being in close proximity to wine all day, every day did make that year of my life a little more understandable to the naked eye.

Regardless of the fact that I didn’t drink wine until last year.

When K and I moved to Toronto, we hadn’t really made a game plan for life. It took us close to 3 months to find an apartment that wasn’t the size of a cardboard box, a basement, $1,000,000 a month or so far away from the downtown core that it made living in Stratford look like a short commute. I had a job I managed to keep for one whole day (I was one of those sad people asking people to give up their salaries to save children or whales or the earth) and knew approximately one person I thought maybe might be friends with us.

Trust me when I say that moving to downtown Toronto was an amazing idea in theory. In execution, I’ve always wondered if I could have gotten to where I am now if I’d gone home, saved up some money and didn’t move to Toronto jobless and in debt.

I mean, it really was a wake-up call to go from having OSAP covering my ass, to being jobless in a booming metropolis with a degree in Popular Culture and having less than no idea about what I wanted to with my life.

So instead of stressing about it - a mind-set I wish I could get back but fear it ran away with my early twenties - K and I dressed up, took thousands of pictures of ourselves and danced wildly to salsa music in our living room alone.

And of course, played fake murder mystery. Just us two.

It’s hard to make a real point when I know that even though some of the decisions I made were seriously miscalculated, my mama called me the other day to tell me she’s proud of me.

I never win scratch tickets or the lottery. I never find money on the street. I always get the red lights or the yellow lights or get stuck behind the infuriating kid doing his first in-car session of Driver’s Ed. But as far as the really important things in life working out, well.. we all know I stood up to a Purolator truck and won.

So say what you want about me but speaks worlds of what tough little cookie I’ve turned out to be.

Maybe my dad taught me something after all.

Bye, bye, bye