I think I’ve officially entered my “back in the day” phase.
Yesterday it was reminiscing about bumping into Catherine O’Hara. Today, this photo of a U-Haul hauling U-Hauls shows up in my Facebook feed.
It made me laugh.
And then it made me pause.
Back in the day, (there it is!) when I lived in Calgary, I drove one of those trucks. Well, a bigger version of it. Mine was a Ford F-650, the kind of rig that looked like a hydro service truck crossed with a car carrier.
I was young. Twenty-two, twenty-three. I didn’t know much about myself yet, and I certainly wasn’t thinking in big, reflective terms about work, identity, or values.
My official title was Area Field Manager for Southern Alberta. My territory ran from the BC border in the west to Saskatchewan in the east, Red Deer in the north, and all the way down to the Montana border.
My job was to set up and service U-Haul dealers across that region. On paper, it was just a job. In practice, it gave me something I didn’t yet have language for.
Freedom.
I could wake up in the morning and decide where I was going.
Lethbridge for a couple of days? Sure.
Medicine Hat? Absolutely.
I saw a lot of our beautiful country from behind the wheel of that truck. Cresting a hill in the badlands and suddenly being met with a landscape straight out of a western. Driving into the mountains, sometimes just for the joy of it, sometimes to rescue a stuck truck. Long stretches of highway, prairie sky, weather rolling in without asking permission.
There were too many moments to count. I could probably write an entire book about my adventures, and mis-adventures, as an AFM.
Here’s the part that surprised me as I was writing this.
I think this might be where my desire for freedom in work was first planted.
Not consciously. Not wisely. Not because I had things figured out. I didn’t. I was just living my life and doing the job in front of me.
The seed got planted quietly.
Like a lot of things in my life, it stayed dormant for years. Buried under responsibility, expectation, and the idea that work was supposed to feel constraining. That freedom was something you earned later, or maybe not at all.
But my nervous system remembered.
It remembered what it felt like to have space. To move. To decide. To be trusted with a map and a responsibility and left to get on with it.
That knowing didn’t disappear. It just waited until I was ready to recognize it.
That’s something I’ve come to understand about healing. We don’t always discover new truths about ourselves. Sometimes we recover old ones. Things we lived before we could name them.
And for the record, in case you’re still wondering how many U-Hauls a U-Haul can haul?
Four 4x8s up top.
Another four 4x8s on the flatbed.
