My mother was born on an island that no longer exists

It was called Flat Islands when my family first settled there, in Placentia Bay. In the early 1950s it was renamed Port Elizabeth, for the young Queen. My mother was born in a place whose name changed while she was a child.

Generations of my family lived on that water. Fishing wasn't a job there. It was the whole arrangement — what you ate, when you travelled, who you relied on, what you taught your children.

Then came resettlement.

Through the 1950s and 1960s, families left in waves — to Winterland, to Burin, to Grand Bank, to Marystown. By 1969 only a handful of households were left on the island, and the government wanted them dispersed to designated growth centres.

They refused.

About 150 people — mostly men between forty-five and sixty-five, with more than half a million dollars of fishing gear between them — negotiated to move together instead. Five kilometres across the bay to Red Harbour, close enough to keep their fishing grounds. The government resisted. They did it anyway. That autumn, the last of them left Port Elizabeth for good.

My grandfather had already gone. He took his family to Toronto in the early 1950s, looking for work that was steadier and less likely to kill him. He became a carpenter. He spent the rest of his working life building a city he wasn't born in.

My family built their lives on the ocean. My grandfather helped build Toronto. I grew up in Ontario and never entirely lost the feeling that part of me belonged somewhere further east.

I think about those hundred and fifty people more than you'd expect.

They were being told, by people with more education and better maps, exactly where their lives should go. And they said no — not because they were stubborn, but because they knew something about their own circumstances that nobody in an office could know. They didn't refuse to move. They refused to be moved somewhere that wouldn't work for them.

That's close to the centre of how I coach.

I'm not going to hand you my recovery and ask you to live in it. What worked for me was mine, and it took me a long time to find. My job is to help you work out what's yours — and then to help you protect it, because the recovery that lasts is the one that belongs to you.