Love It Enough to Leave

You can love where you're from and still know it isn't where you're going

There’s a version of this country I’ll love until the day I die.

First snow before anyone’s touched it.
The cottage road in July.
The bonfire with your family sitting around it.
Saturday mornings at the rink.

That place is real and I’m not writing this to burn it down.

I just did the math the way a lot of us have and the numbers don’t make sense to me anymore.

In 1985, a starter home cost about 3-4 years of a household’s income. Today it’s 7 in much of the country. In the expensive cities it’s 10. At the 2022 peak in Toronto and Vancouver, it hit 16.

The mortgage on a median home now eats 51.6% of the median household income before anyone’s bought a single bag of groceries.

The first-time buyer used to be 29. Now they’re 40 in Toronto and 46 in Vancouver, if they ever get to buy at all. So most people just stay put.

35% of people aged 20-34 are still living with our parents and more than half of everyone aged 20 to 24.

And 64% of Gen Z here report feeling financial stress multiple times a week. For the boomers, it’s 27%.

My parents grew up in a country that made room for them and mine keeps running out of it.

Once I realized that, a bigger concern showed up with it.

Maybe the place that made you isn’t the place meant to hold your future.

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The guilt

Leaving is often seen as betrayal.

You say out loud that you’re thinking of going and you watch it land on the people around you.

Some people hear rejection. Some hear a verdict on the life they chose to stay for.

So people often don’t say it out loud but I keep hearing it more and more from the people around me.

Loving a place and building your life there are two different promises. You can mean every word of the first one and still not owe the second.

You’re allowed to be grateful to where you’re from but still outlast what it can give you.

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We have a word for every goodbye but this one

We know how to leave a job. You give your notice, everyone understands, you thank everyone on the way out.

We know how to leave a city.
We know how to end a relationship that stopped working.
We’ve built whole rituals around those exits.

But it is hard to find words for leaving a country you love. It can feel like walking out on a parent. The place fed you, raised you, taught you about life and then you just leave.

So it carries the weight of abandonment, even when every practical sign is telling you to go.

One of the most important feelings I have had from my travelling is that when returning home hurts more than leaving, you know you were made for somewhere else.

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Loyalty shouldn’t be something you lose money on

I mean this one with love, so stay with me.

We treat staying as a virtue. The real Canadian digs in, works hard, waits their turn, and calls the struggle “character-building”.

I believed that and I think most of us were raised on it.

Loyalty like this has a name everywhere else in life: Sunk cost.

You keep paying into something because you already paid into it, and the more you’ve put in, the harder it gets to admit the return isn’t coming.

We just don’t call it that when there’s a flag that comes with it.

A country is allowed to change and so are you.

The deal it made with your parents doesn’t renew automatically in your name. They married at 25 and bought a house on 3 years of income. You’re looking at 31 and a market asking 10. Same country, different terms.

So is there something better out there?
Honestly, I'm not sure.

I don't have the answer and I won't pretend to. But staying put guarantees I never find out. Here will always be home and nothing changes that but the worst thing would be simply going through life and never finding out.

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Roots keep a tree still. You are not a tree.

We praise people for being grounded. You know… so and so is rooted. They are loyal to the place they came from.

I’m going to be a little cliché here: the roots are a beautiful thing but the ground can also go rotten on you. A tree can’t pull itself up and walk when the soil stops feeding it.

You can move.

What we call being rooted is sometimes just standing still long enough that leaving quietly stopped feeling possible.

You still can. That door hasn’t closed. It only feels like it has.

You can love where you’re from with everything you’ve got and still admit it isn’t where your life is meant to happen right now.

I’m not leaving tomorrow. It’s a plan in pencil. But it’s on the page now and that alone changed how I wake up.

And I’m not saying I’ll go and never come back. Here will always be home with the porch light left on.

If being here isn’t the life you want right now, go find out.

You can love a place all the way to the airport.

Then get on the plane.

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Almost Something is for anyone still standing in the driveway of the place that raised them, loving it, and finally letting themselves picture a life somewhere else.