Letter from the Editor-in-Chief: The Freedom Not to Think

by Gillian Smith-Clark, ​for The 44 North, Editor-in-Chief

"Spring Greening Along The River" by Pat Katz

As I ran alongside the riverbank on a clear, crisp fall afternoon in my new city, following a dirt path through a canopy of trees just beginning to turn colour, I should have felt relaxed. Instead, the moment when I normally let go, letting the music from my headphones seep into my consciousness and my mind drift and clear, didn’t come.

My thoughts were jumbled and scattered—moving between the beauty of my surroundings, whether I was alone on the trail, the warmth of the sun, and: How safe is it to run alone here?

That particular section of the trail was a paradox. Covered in foliage and sheltered from view of the nearby road, what made it so lovely was also what made it potentially dangerous. An acquaintance had recently reminded me of a murder that occurred decades ago, somewhere along this riverbank. How safe is it now? Should I have an alarm or pepper spray? Should I not be wearing a ponytail, because someone could jump out of the bushes and grab it? How long would it take for someone to get to me if I were attacked and screamed?

Am I overreacting, overthinking? Maybe.

Images of the men in my life, past and present, filled my head. Some were rolling their eyes. I wanted to let my mind drift. I wanted to turn up the volume on my music and daydream, but I couldn’t.

The memory of Alyssa Lokits surfaces—a horrific story that happened on a trail not unlike this one. With a shiver, I wonder how far I am from the paved trail and more people.

What lingered after that run was not whether I was overthinking the situation, but the fact that the calculations had to happen at all. Alongside that was another uncomfortable realization: How many years of my life have contained a similar mental calculus—the times when I got it right, and the moments when I realized I’d made a costly error.

Some of us move through the world carrying questions daily that others rarely have to ask; still others inherit forms of watchfulness so embedded in our psyches that we barely notice the effort they require.

That idea—of attention, and of who is required to pay it—runs quietly through many of the pieces in this issue. What do we learn to notice? What are we afforded the freedom not to think about? And once something enters our awareness, what responsibility follows?

"The Meewasin Trail" by Pat Katz

“Braiding a Ladder” is a pivotal piece, bringing together three different but equally powerful perspectives on modern-day misogyny. At its heart is a question about what happens when the burden of noticing misogyny is disproportionately carried by the people most likely to experience its consequences. Women are often asked to remain alert to risk, to recognize warning signs, to modify our behaviour, to protect ourselves, to explain what happened afterward. But what changes when the work of paying attention is more widely shared? When men look more closely at the language, assumptions, jokes, behaviours and systems around them, and begin to ask what responsibility follows from what they see?

The same movement from attention to awareness to responsibility appears elsewhere in this issue, although in very different forms.

Our Artist Spotlight takes an unexpected turn this issue, placing Earth itself at the centre. In “Earth is the Artist,” memory, land, family history, displacement, grief and environmental harm become tangled together. The piece asks us to look differently at something we so often relegate to the background: The ground beneath us. What changes when the Earth is not scenery, property, or resource, but witness and maker; something that carries memory, bears wounds, and responds to what we ask it to absorb?

Wardah Malik’s essay on tradwife and girlboss culture turns that same act of attention inward. Her question—are our desires truly our own?—is deceptively simple. The lifestyles we imagine we’ve freely chosen do not emerge in a vacuum; they’re shaped by economics, gender expectations, cultural narratives, algorithms, and the particular forms of security or escape available to us at a given moment. What feels entirely personal may also carry the fingerprints of forces we have stopped noticing.

Elsewhere in the issue, attention becomes an act of care. “The Wake of the Nepal Flash Floods: Keeping Each Other Alive” looks at what remains when catastrophe strips away the illusion of self-sufficiency. Our conversation with Rohit Doel asks us to distinguish between grief, loneliness, and isolation within disabled friendships rather than flattening different experiences into one. And Fernn Eastman’s “From Feeding Tube to Paramedic: Your Body Is Not Your Enemy” turns toward the intimate work of learning to inhabit the body differently.

These pieces are not making the same argument, nor are the experiences they explore equivalent. But together, they ask us to look beneath the surface of what’s immediately visible—at the assumptions, histories, systems, desires, memories, and burdens that sit just underneath ordinary life. 

At its core, this is an issue about freedom and what that means: The freedom not to think, the cost of constant attention, and the responsibility that begins when we finally notice.

Thank you, as always, for reading.

Warmly,

Gillian Smith-Clark

Editor-in-Chief, The 44 North Media

Writers Room | The Wake of the Nepal Flash Floods: Keeping Each Other Alive

by Mikaela Brewer ​for The 44 North, Senior Editor

Artwork by Logan Brewer

Please note: this short story discusses cancer, climate catastrophe, mass death, and sexual assault. It may activate folks with similar lived experiences, beyond what feels safe to spend time with. Please engage with this story how/whenever it feels safe for you.

"Where did all the horses go? In Tamang mouth, ghost, and blossom come from the same root. In Tamang Tongue—there is no way to say this / in English."

—Samyak Shertok, “Mother Tongue: A Haunting”

***

Not many can say they’ve survived three flash floods, let alone in the same day. 

At 8:37 a.m. local time, as my mother slept just minutes away from her alarm, she drowned in the Gorkha district of Nepal, along the Nepal-Tibet border. As ice and rock collapsed from a glacier high in the Himalayas, water surged downstream via the Lhende Khola, Bhotekoshi, and Trishuli rivers, sweeping her home away with chunks of bridge, building, and road. Here in Canada, around 6:30 p.m. local time, a second flash flood rushed, unwanted, between my legs, in a dark supply closet at the end of my residency shift in the pediatric ward. The third poured as blood, minutes later, from a mouth a few floors down where my best friend was dying from cancer. 

That amount of water pressure should have powdered my bones. 

I limped out of the closet into the washroom across the hall, fell to the floor in the stall, and wept so there would be room for oxygen in my body. I must have fallen asleep because when I opened my eyes, my friend was sitting across from me, bare ass on the floor under her hospital gown, wiping crystallized tears off my face with her thin thumbs. The ceiling fan swished the stale air; the sound of waves coming again and again. My mouth tasted like salt.

“I’m going to bloody kill him,” Gelly said, her Irish accent thicker, it seemed, to compensate for her body’s withering. 

“I can’t take any more death today, Gelly.” Dr. Williams, the lead physician on the floor, had been making comments to me for months. This time, after the news broke from Nepal, he told me he wanted to comfort me—that he wanted to make me feel better. Still in shock, I vaguely remember giving in to him touching me. Soon, his want took over, and he was too strong to stop. I hadn’t told Gelly this yet. 

“I know, love, I’m sorry.” She paused and, maintaining a serious face, said, “We should’ve shaved my hair tomorrow instead.”

I couldn’t help but smile, yet it felt wrong. And I still didn’t know what to do—I was waiting for more news, more information. My mother was dead. My childhood home was erased.

“How did you get up here?” Gelly snuck out often to see me, as long as she was physically able. More and more often, she wasn’t.

Gelly looked at me long and hard. “I told the receptionist the truth.”

I nodded, but didn’t say much in reply. The homesickness washed nausea over me, and I quickly spun around to throw up in the toilet. I could feel Gelly’s hands on my back as a brace. When I’d finished, she said: “Well, maybe you have room for my plan now?” 

“Your plan?” 

“Aye, my plan. I made a new friend downstairs. She’s a cook.”

I looked at my watch: 2:13 a.m. “Gelly, I need to go home and sleep.”

“No, no, no. Well, yes. But not quite yet. Right now, you need yam curry.”

“Yam curry? How do you figure on making yam curry?”

Gelly pulled me to my feet, tidied my thick black hair, took my hand, and led me down the hall. The hospital lights were still on, but many were sporadically dimmed. It was an eerie place to be on a quiet night, especially after such a violent day. Everything was still functioning, but not quite fully, as if run by ghosts. It seemed there was less colour in the already drab labyrinth of hallways, diluting and draining away like my tethers to Nepal. The burn of disinfectant from whoever had mopped the floors made my eyes water as we rounded the corner to the staff kitchen.

A nurse, maybe a few years older than me with long black braids and warm brown skin, stood with her back to us. She was organizing ingredients on the table with a tender touch: Purple yam, ginger and garlic paste, asafoetida, ground turmeric, salt, cumin, and coriander, Kashmiri chilli powder, chopped tomatoes, bhat, Greek yogurt, Tama Ko Achar, and Hariyo Khursani Ko Achar. How she found these ingredients, I had no idea, let alone how she snuck them into the hospital. There was a Nepalese grocer in the city, but I’d always figured I was the only one in the building who knew where it was.

The woman turned around and smiled kindly, just enough to see her dimples propping up a spray of freckles.

“Seti, this is Niimi, my nurse downstairs.”

Niimi placed her hands on her hips. “Seti, would you help me?”

Exhausted, delirious, and still gripping Gelly’s hand, I nodded. Gelly let go, stepping shakily off to the side to sit in one of the kitchen’s chairs. I made eye contact, aware of her exertion, but she nodded toward the table and smiled. She was so thin that her entire face wrinkled, though she was only 23. It was her wisdom, laughter, and kindness made visible; I wanted to believe. 

I walked slowly toward the table, guided by my hands as if they were a puppet’s. I started peeling the yams, cut them into one-inch chunks, and covered them with water to preserve the colour and texture. I heated the oil, slowly folding in the ginger and garlic pastes until they softened. Into the pan I dusted the turmeric, yam, and salt until shimmering golden brown. My fingers slid in the chilli powder, cumin, and ground coriander to cook for a few minutes, then the tomatoes to cook for a few more under the lid. As I removed it and sprinkled in the fresh coriander, I became aware of my mouth. It watered not only because I was hungry, but because I’d been speaking of my mother the whole time. 

Gelly and Niimi had been asking me questions about Nepal—about my parents, about their horses, and about my mom’s recipes and flower garden. How she loved the chef Santosh Shah, but thought he didn’t quite make yam curry right. Niimi handed me ingredients as Gelly asked their names and origins in Tamang. I scooped the steaming curry onto 3 paper plates, complete with bhat, Tama Ko Achar, Hariyo Khursani Ko Achar, and Greek yogurt.

When I finally sat down, deeply sore in body, mind, and spirit, I looked into Gelly and Niimi’s faces. Gelly was dying far from a home scarred with war and oft-forgotten colonial violence. Niimi’s tribe’s lands were being sold for military and economic development. We had known such loss, and yet, we each remembered something that very early morning: Curiosity about life in the face of death; offering an able body as Earth, the largest we know, cries for help; and making from ancestral memories while devastation and violation threaten to unmake them. My hands had become my mother’s in this small kitchen across the world.

There’s a poem I adore from Nepalese poet Samyak Shertok, called “Mother Tongue: A Haunting.” One line has settled uncomfortably in my heart for a long time: “If to speak one’s mother tongue is to keep one’s mother alive, / I kill my mother daily.” Earlier in the poem, he also writes: “In Tamang mouth, ghost, and blossom come from the same root.”

There is formal support, I know, for sexual violence, grief, and palliative care. The way Gelly and Niimi are looking at me now, eating our makeshift yam curry, I know I won’t have to find or approach help alone.

I can’t speak Tamang fluently, but the best nourishment that evening was the grief and love cooked into the meal—ingredients as containers. Right now is all we have sometimes. Right now, maybe, is all we need to keep each other, and by extension my family, alive in the way we know how.

Resources:

• Red Cross

• Tear Fund

• Canada Helps

From Feeding Tube to Paramedic: Your Body Is Not Your Enemy

by Fernn Eastman for The 44 North, Guest Writer

Artwork by Logan Brewer

To every young person who feels like your body is failing you—no matter how hard your mind fights:

I see you. I was you.

I aged out of foster care with no parents to call, no safety net, and a body that had stopped telling me when I was hungry, thirsty, or even where I was in space. For a decade, I lived with trauma and an eating disorder. I was good at surviving through my intellect. I could think my way through almost any problem—I didn’t realize how steeply my body was failing. Trauma and my eating disorder stripped away basic sensations I didn’t know were missing: Hunger, thirst, the urge to pee, and where my body was.

Soon after, in Vancouver for paramedic training, I failed my CPR exam. Not because I didn’t know the material—I knew it cold—but because my body couldn’t save a mannequin. I was terrified: How could I call myself a paramedic if doing compressions put me at risk of cardiac arrest? I took a medical leave with no one to call. This felt like my last chance.

My doctors hesitated to recommend physical movement, but no other treatment options remained. As a last resort, I turned to exercise. I called gym after gym. Most saw only a liability. No gyms were willing to work with me while I had a feeding tube. 

A single yes saved me.

Courtesy of Fernn Eastman

BPM Fitness was the only place willing to work with me while I had an NG feeding tube. Brady Alexov met me where I was, seeing a person, not a liability. Equipped with a degree in kinesiology, he helped me rebuild my body and my trust—one session, one movement, one small victory at a time. He worked with my care team. He taught me that food is fuel, not punishment. He helped me feel my body again. He explained why certain movements target specific muscle groups, how my nervous system responds to different stimuli, and what hunger and fatigue signals actually mean. He taught me to recognize the early warning signs of a neurological episode—the subtle tremors or weakness—and how to breathe through them. I no longer feel like my body is a foreign, hostile place. I am learning to listen to it, trust it, and care for it.

Through that training, my body started waking up. Proprioception returned: I can now feel tightness before pain and know when a movement is safe. Interoception returned: I feel real hunger, thirst, and the need to pee.

For the first time in my adult life, I can say “I’m hungry” and eat with pride, knowing the food builds my muscles for the work I trained to do.

I went from atrophy to muscle, from starvation to pride in my meals, from an NG tube in a hospital bed to standing on my own feet. My ability to focus, regulate emotions, and trust my body all came back through physical movement. That journey cured a part of me I didn’t know was such a root cause of my distress.

Now, I’m a paramedic—pushing the stretcher instead of lying on it, holding patients’ hands the way I once needed mine held.

That’s the part people miss.

Addiction, mental illness, and physical health aren’t separate. They’re often the same wound wearing different masks. Trauma silences the body. It steals interoception—the ability to feel hunger, thirst, safety, exhaustion. It steals proprioception—the sense of where you end and the world begins. When you cannot feel your own signals, you reach for something outside yourself to feel okay. Food. Restriction. Substances. Numbing. Control. Anything to survive feelings too big for words.

That’s not weakness. That’s a nervous system fighting to stay alive.

Courtesy of Fernn Eastman

And you cannot talk your way out of a body that has forgotten how to feel safe. You cannot medicate away a disconnection that lives in the muscles, the breath, the gut. Healing has to include the body. That’s why movement, when it’s safe and trauma-informed, is not just exercise. It’s mental health care. It’s addiction prevention. It’s physical health care. It’s rebuilding the bridge between brain and body.

Research confirms what I lived. Eating disorders have the second-highest mortality rate of all psychiatric illnesses, surpassed only by opioid use disorder. Approximately 50 percent of individuals with eating disorders also struggle with substance abuse, compared to roughly 9 percent of the general population. Both conditions are driven by similar mechanisms: The desperate attempt to regulate overwhelming emotions, to numb unbearable feelings, to exert control when everything else feels lost. Both are, at their core, disorders of coping—and both are fueled by untreated trauma.

This matters because Canada’s drug crisis cannot be solved without also addressing eating disorders. The person restricting food and the person using substances are often the same person, trying different methods to survive the same pain. A system that treats these crises separately will continue to fail people who live at their intersection.

Healing the body through trauma-informed movement addresses both. When I rebuilt my interoception and proprioception at BPM Fitness, I wasn’t just recovering from an eating disorder. I was rebuilding the foundational brain-body signalling that addiction disrupts. The same pathways that had been silenced by trauma began to wake up—for hunger, for thirst, for safety, for self-trust, for life.

The evidence is overwhelming. A 2026 umbrella review of 63 meta-analyses involving 79,551 participants found that exercise significantly reduces depression and anxiety, with the greatest benefits for emerging adults in supervised settings. A 2025 meta-analysis of 26 randomized controlled trials found a large effect on depression and a moderate effect on anxiety. A 2023 grounded theory study of 46 trauma survivors found that weightlifting healed trauma through the felt sense of the mind-body connection, creating a healthier, more empowered survivor. For eating disorders specifically, research confirms that interoceptive disruption is a core feature, and that safe, intentional movement can directly address this in ways talk therapy cannot. Personal training delivered by qualified, trauma-informed professionals is increasingly recognized as a legitimate mental health support. In Germany, physiotherapists have an active working group for psychiatry, trauma, and mental health. In Canada, organizations like the Centre for Trauma Informed Fitness are professionalizing trauma-related competencies for personal trainers.

Courtesy of Fernn Eastman

British Columbia already has precedent for recognizing unconventional services as mental health supports. The Canadian Mental Health Association’s EDGE program in BC explicitly covers personal training for youth with psychosis—not as exercise, but as targeted mental health rehabilitation. The BC Ministry of Mental Health and Addictions also funds mental health continuing education for certified personal trainers. Extending similar recognition to trauma-informed fitness providers is the logical next step—Canada-wide.

I almost didn’t survive to write this. But I did.

So if you’re in care, aging out, or just fighting to stay here—please hear me:

Your body is not your enemy. It’s trying to survive trauma the only way it knows how. Healing doesn’t always come through words. Sometimes it comes through movement. Through a coach who sees your worth. Through one person who says, “Let’s do this.”

You deserve care before you’re dying—not only once you are. You deserve a system that treats the whole you: Mind, body, and spirit. You deserve a resounding ‘yes.’

Don’t give up. Recovery exists in forms you may not have tried yet. Keep reaching out. Keep fighting. Your body can become a home again.

From patient to paramedic—if I can, you can. And you shouldn’t have to walk the ledge of death to get there.

To policymakers across Canada:

Please help make physical movement and personal training available sooner. Here in BC, as a vital example for the country, the Federation of BC Children and Youth have the power to enact this under the MHC benefit. I believe it directly falls under the definition. The MHC benefit currently covers services provided by “unregulated mental health service providers.” The barrier is not regulatory; it’s cultural. BPM Fitness, while not a traditional counselling service, delivered trauma-informed mental health care of a kind that directly addresses the conditions the MHC benefit was designed to treat.

The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration identifies six key principles of a trauma-informed approach: safety; trustworthiness and transparency; peer support; collaboration and mutuality; empowerment, voice, and choice; and cultural, historical, and gender issues. BPM Fitness embodied every one of these principles when I was most vulnerable. They didn’t hand me a medical intake form only to decline me as soon as I checked a box. They sat down with me for a long, honest consultation—learning about my needs, my goals, my health concerns, and how to build a plan that worked around them. They recognized that behavioural patterns can be symptoms or coping strategies, not compliance issues. They allowed me to move at my own pace, listen to my body, and stop when needed. They asked permission before physical contact. For a trauma survivor who had experienced profound bodily disconnection, this restored a sense of agency that no medication could reach.

BPM Fitness isn’t offering exercise—they’re offering evidence-based, trauma-informed mental health care. Please, from policymakers to loved ones, help make that ‘yes’ available sooner for youth who cannot wait.

—A former youth in care, now a paramedic

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References

• BC Coroners Service. “Another 150 Lives Lost to Toxic Drugs in B.C. in January 2026.” BC Government News, Jan. 2026.

• Canadian Institutes of Health Research. “More than 1.4 Million Canadian Youth Have an Eating Disorder—But Better Data and Early Interventions Are Fighting Back.” CIHR, 2025.

• Canadian Mental Health Association, BC Division. “EDGE Program: Early Intervention for Psychosis.” CMHA BC, 2022.

• Centre for Trauma Informed Fitness. About CTIF. traumainformedfitness.ca.

• Government of British Columbia. “2024/25–2026/27 Service Plan Report.” Province of British Columbia, 2025.

• Kenkhuis MF, et al. “Exercise effects on symptoms of depression and anxiety vary by patient, clinical, and intervention characteristics in cancer survivors: Results from pooled analyses of individual participant data of 26 RCTs.” Supportive Care in Cancer, vol. 33, no. 7, 2025, p. 647.

• Munro NR, Teague S, Somoray K, Simpson A, Budden T, Jackson B, et al. “Effect of exercise on depression and anxiety symptoms: systematic umbrella review with meta-meta-analysis.” British Journal of Sports Medicine, vol. 60, no. 8, 2026, p. 590.

• National Eating Disorder Information Centre. “Eating Disorders and Substance Use.” NEDIC, 2024.

• Nowakowski-Sims E, Rooney M, Vigue D, Woods S. “A grounded theory of weight lifting as a healing strategy for trauma.” Mental Health and Physical Activity, vol. 24, 2023, p. 100521.

• Physio Deutschland. Arbeitsgemeinschaft Physiotherapie in Mental Health (AG PTMH).

• Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. SAMHSA’s Concept of Trauma and Guidance for a Trauma-Informed Approach. HHS Publication No. (SMA) 14-4884, 2014.

• Wood L, Stanton R. “Weight Lifting as a Trauma-Informed Intervention: A Grounded Theory Study of 46 Survivors.” Journal of Trauma & Dissociation, vol. 24, no. 3, 2023, pp. 312–29.

• Zucker N, et al. “Interoception and Eating Disorders: A Systematic Review.” Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, vol. 125, 2021, pp. 501–15.

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About Fernn Eastman

At 27 years old, I am a proud survivor and a dedicated paramedic. My journey has been anything but conventional. Entering the foster care system at age seven and moving out on my own at sixteen, I learned early on that survival requires grit, adaptability, and a fierce determination to write my own story.

While navigating the world as a young person was far from easy, I refused to let my circumstances define my future. I focused on my education, graduated, and found my calling in emergency medicine. Today, I am proud to serve my community as a paramedic—a role that allows me to turn my hardship into healing for others.

When I am not on shift, I reconnect with the world that keeps me grounded. I am an avid hiker and a lover of nature, music, and animals. I also have a passion for the unique and the intricate; I breed dart frogs and specialize in creating bioactive terrariums, building tiny, thriving ecosystems that mirror the resilience I see in the natural world.

Above all, I am an advocate. My passion lies in fighting for justice and speaking up for those who feel voiceless. I can proudly say that I am not just surviving—I am thriving, and I am incredibly proud to be alive.

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