I Used to Think Meaningful Work Had to Be Big

When I was younger, I think I imagined meaningful work had to be big.

I wanted to do something that mattered. Something useful. Something that left things a little better than I found them.

That instinct led me to study International Development and Globalization in Ottawa. I was fascinated by people and communities, but also by the enormous forces that shape our lives: poverty, inequality, conflict, access to resources and the systems that determine who gets opportunities and who doesn't.

I wanted to understand those problems because I wanted to help solve them.

The more you understand them, the more complicated they become.

Poverty doesn't have a single cause. Neither does inequality, conflict or poor health. Everything touches something else — history, economics, politics, geography, culture, education, policy.

There was rarely one problem you could point to and say, There. If we fix that, everything will be better.

I found the work fascinating. But I also found myself wondering where, exactly, I fit into it.

I wanted something I could put my hands on.

There wasn't one dramatic moment when I decided international development wasn't for me. My life just started moving in another direction.

And looking back, I think I was searching for a way of helping that felt closer to the person being helped.

I wanted to develop an actual skill — something I could become really good at and use in a tangible way.

I wanted to be able to sit across from another human being, understand what was happening in front of me and have something useful to offer.

Something I could, quite literally, put my hands on.

I didn't know yet that this would lead me to osteopathy. First, it led me to movement.

Movement taught me to get curious.

For more than a decade, yoga and movement education were a big part of my life. I taught yoga and movement, and eventually corporate wellness education on things like breathing mechanics, stress, nervous-system regulation and the effects our increasingly sedentary lifestyles can have on the way our bodies function.

But what interested me most wasn't really the poses. It was the people doing them.

Why could two people attempt exactly the same movement and experience it completely differently? Why did an old injury still seem to influence the way someone moved years later? What happens when you sit in the same position eight hours a day, five days a week, for twenty years?

How does a body adapt to stress, injury, pregnancy, work, repetitive movement — or simply life?

The more I taught, the more questions I had. Eventually, movement education stopped feeling like enough to answer them.

I wanted to understand the anatomy underneath what I was seeing. That curiosity brought me to osteopathy.

Then, unexpectedly, things started fitting together.

I went on to study at the Canadian Academy of Osteopathy, earning my M.OMSc in Osteopathic Manipulative Sciences.

And somewhere in that process, I realized I had found the kind of work I'd been looking for.

Movement. Anatomy. Curiosity. Problem-solving. Human connection. Hands-on work.

Someone comes into my treatment room with a problem. I get to listen. I get to ask questions. I get to look at how their body is moving and use my hands to understand what I'm feeling.

Then I can do something. Treat. Reassess. Change course. Pay attention to how the person and their body respond.

There is something deeply satisfying to me about that immediacy.

Not because I always have the answer. I don't. And not because I think my job is to “fix” people. It isn't.

It's satisfying because the work is right there in front of me. There is a person, a problem we're trying to understand, and something practical I can contribute.

After spending so much time thinking about problems at the scale of entire societies, there was something surprisingly meaningful about helping one person at a time.

And then I became a mother.

These days, I'm a mother of two young children. And I think motherhood has quietly changed my definition of what matters, too.

Before having children, “families” and “communities” were concepts I could talk about academically. Now they're much less theoretical.

A family is a tiny interconnected system of its own.

When one person is struggling, everybody feels it. When a parent is exhausted, hurting or overwhelmed, it affects how they move through their home. When a child needs more support, the entire family adapts around them. When someone has more capacity, that ripples outward too.

I don't say that because I think osteopathy is the answer to all of those things. It absolutely isn't.

But becoming a mother has made me appreciate how valuable it is for families to have good people around them — healthcare practitioners, teachers, caregivers, neighbours, friends — each contributing something within their own area of expertise.

It's also shaped what I hope my practice becomes.

I want to continue developing the skills to care for people through many different stages of life — including children and families. I've pursued continuing education in pediatric osteopathic care, and that learning will continue.

There is a lot I still want to know. I hope there always will be.

Maybe helping was never supposed to look the way I imagined.

Sometimes I think about the person who chose to study international development all those years ago.

I don't think she would have predicted this. But I also don't think we've ended up as far apart as it might appear.

I still care about the same things. I care about people being well. I care about families having the resources and support they need. I care about healthy communities. I care about leaving something better than I found it.

What's changed is my understanding of scale.

I used to think that if I wanted to make a meaningful difference, I needed to work on meaningful problems. And meaningful problems were big problems.

Poverty. War. Inequality. Broken systems.

I've had to accept that I am probably not going to solve any of them.

Strangely, that realization doesn't feel as discouraging as it once might have.

Because somewhere along the way, I realized there is another kind of meaningful work available to me.

I can become really good at something useful. I can listen carefully to the person sitting across from me. I can keep studying. I can take the responsibility of caring for someone's body seriously. I can tell someone when I don't think I'm the right person to help them.

I can support a parent through a demanding season. I can work with a child as they grow. I can help someone understand their body a little better.

And I can build a practice where people feel cared for rather than processed.

None of those things will change the world on their own. But perhaps that's not really the point.

My corner of the world

Communities aren't actually abstract things. They're made up of individual people.

Parents. Children. Partners. Friends. Neighbours. The person down the street. The person sitting beside you at school pickup. The person trying to get through a workday with a body that hurts.

And all of those people affect one another.

When people have more capacity, families have more capacity. When families are better supported, communities are stronger.

My contribution to that is small. I'm okay with that now.

I want to practise thoughtfully. I want to keep becoming better at what I do. I want to take good care of the people who trust me enough to walk through my door.

And I want to build something useful for the community my own family is part of.

I used to think making a difference meant figuring out how to change the world.

These days, I'm much more interested in taking good care of my corner of it.

It turns out that feels pretty big, too.