A Star look at significant life changes,
In this new series, the Star looks at how one change can have big consequences — for the better
For some, self-improvement is a way of life and a constant process. Others may encounter a situation in which they are forced to choose: will the new me or the old me rise to meet the challenge?
This summer, in a new series we’re calling Project Me, Star reporters will face a fear or make a personal change — from becoming a mature driver’s-ed student to growing a beard — and document the effect on their lives.
We’re launching with the stories of six Torontonians who have the benefit of hindsight.
The impetus to change comes in many forms, such as a new job, a chance meeting, an earthquake, a new love, a university course or even a snap decision to go for it.
Walking to a new life
Ben Pobjoy once thought he was living the dream, shuttling between Montreal and Manhattan, flying around the world, eating whatever was delivered to the office late at night. He never had to walk. He just hailed a cab. When Pobjoy, 34, took a job as creative director at a Toronto ad agency in 2013, he was the 260-pound guy complaining of aching joints while his “radically fit” co-workers discussed after-work barre classes. He needed to make a change. He swapped a 20-minute streetcar commute for a 28-minute walk. Pobjoy soon fell in love with walking. It rewired his life. He lost 100 pounds in 2015, walking more than 100 kilometres per week all around Toronto. He once walked to Hamilton for fun, and started swimming and boxing. All that time at street level helped Pobjoy dream up ideas for work, but also opened his eyes to urban inequality and homelessness. He now fills a backpack with homemade sandwiches for those in need. Friends and acquaintances have told him they’ve been inspired to hand out bottled water, hand-knitted scarves and their own sandwiches. “Making these tiny adjustments was as if I was an ocean liner changing my co-ordinates one degree,” Pobjoy says. “Over months, the ship ends up in a completely different place.”
Inspiration from an elder
In his early 20s, Michael Etherington moved to Toronto on a whim, but was torn between the city and the North. Visiting family on Nunavut’s Rankin Inlet, he was told Inuit elder Mariano Aupilardjuk wanted to meet the young Cree man from Moosonee, Ont. Aupilardjuk, a fierce promoter and defender of traditional language and culture, displayed three stones and told Etherington in Inuktitut the meaning behind them: one for the old ways, one for modern life and one for the way forward. (Aupilardjuk died in 2012 at 89.) The elder predicted Etherington, now 30, would become a great educator. At the time, he was stocking shelves and dreaming of being a famous musician. But he was moved by the elder’s wisdom and patient countenance. Something clicked. Etherington got serious. He went on to become an aboriginal youth worker, speaker and cultural program manager of the Native Canadian Centre of Toronto. He promotes “principle-based thinking,” drawing on indigenous values and identity to address contemporary issues in an urban place. He has collected his own trio of symbolic items: an eagle feather, representing the struggle facing his people; a hand drum with no skin, for the gap between traditional values and modern life; a tamarack goose decoy, for the importance of land teachings. “As indigenous people, we are still vibrant,” he says. “Still resilient, still here and still contributing.”
Facing fears together
Larry Konyu and Michael Tudor have been fortunate. They know that. But despite 36 happy years together, the old fear can return in new situations. Should they dance together at family weddings? Should they tell new clients they recently married? Can they retire to Tudor’s native Barbados, where homosexuality remains illegal? They both came out during an era when the rights of gay people were not protected. Konyu, 68, was afraid to tell his Hungarian-Ukrainian family, ex-wife and children in 1980 he had met the love of his life, a man, at the gym adjacent to a Toronto bathhouse that was later raided. (He and Tudor remain friends with his ex and close to his daughters and grandchildren.) Tudor, now 64, was unsure how his Anglican minister father and English headmistress mother would react when he told them in 1977. (Upon meeting Konyu, they welcomed their “new Canadian son” immediately.) Over the years, Tudor refused to stay closeted, insisting on small but significant things: approaching customs together at airports, attending parent-teacher nights. Konyu was more hesitant but buoyed by Tudor’s courage. Both men became teachers — Tudor at high schools and U of T’s Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, Konyu as a college IT instructor — and in their semi-retirement, run a communication skills and team-building business. Even now, there’s still anxiety. “How do you get over the fear? Love, trust, acceptance, and honesty,” Konyu says. “There’s hope you can be in a relationship for 36 years.”
Dancing to confidence
As a child, Simone Samuels dreaded showing her bare arms. Always the last kid picked for sports teams, always the tallest or heaviest girl in class, Samuels has struggled with confidence. Samuels, now 28 and articling at the federal Department of Justice, discovered Zumba dancing during law school. Somehow, she found she felt at ease when instructors chose her to dance at the front. Samuels wanted to start teaching, so she could “show that fitness comes in a variety of sizes, and also to inspire people to get moving and stop caring about what you look like when you’re dancing.” Memories of body-shaming made her apprehensive. But just as one day she decided to go sleeveless, she gave Zumba a shot and sought her teaching certificate. After teaching her first class, the response was positive all around. Participants loved her enthusiasm. Confidence, Samuels says, is cumulative. “When you face one small fear, it gives you more encouragement to face other fears,” she says. “Becoming more of myself gives other people permission to do the same.”
From art director to artist
Nadine Prada was sleeping 20 storeys up in a glamorous hotel in Santiago, Chile, when the walls turned to Jell-O. As the bedside lamp smashed to the floor, Prada, now in her 40s, believed she might die that night in 2010: either from the 8.8 earthquake or from a heart attack. She remembered little earthquakes from childhood in Trinidad — this was huge. “If this is it for me,” she thought, “I really, really screwed up. There are so many things I left unfinished. “I never became a full-time artist. I never had a great love of my life. There are so many things I never got to make or do.” At the time, Prada was working 80 hours a week as an art director at a global ad firm. But she had no one to meet her at the airport when she arrived home safe in Toronto. The experience was overwhelming. “I knew I’d been given a second chance,” says Prada. Within months she held a packed solo art exhibit and resigned from her job. Prada had always been afraid she’d starve, not thrive, as an artist. Now her main job is painting abstract landscapes. After the earthquake, “I felt very awake and very aware,” she says. “I just had to go for it. I can’t die with my music still in me.”
A vague title leads to specific goals
Wendi Sun found herself miserable. She was plodding along in her studies at the University of Toronto, but pressure, not passion, had led her there. She grew up loving piano, but not the classical music she was practising. She was drifting. “I felt like I had no way out,” she says. Escape was unexpected and painful: three concussions in 2014 and 2015 — from figure skating, lifeguarding and an accident while travelling — led her to drop most of her courses after winding up on academic probation. The future was murky. “Everything became a question mark,” she says. When she finally returned to finish her degree, Sun, now 25, selected a course with a vague name: “Maps of Meaning.” The course, designed by psychology professor Jordan Peterson, delves into religion, myth, science and ideology. The course also involved rigorous goal-setting. For the first time, Sun had to envision an ideal future, which includes finishing her novel, postgrad studies in social work and travelling solo. It was a revelation. “I went from not thinking very far in the future to being grateful for having a life to live,” says Sun, who has finished her program. “I am in control of my future now.”