Breanna Martel

I met Breanna (Bre, to her friends) when we were both working part-time at the Hudson’s Bay on Rideau Street. The job itself was a laid-back, low-stress university gig but back then, Bre was anything but. She was a sharp, no nonsense, good natured, straight shooting, “what you see is what you get” type, brimming to the hilt with a tense restless energy.

She had the air of a person determined to reach her destination, if only she could figure out where it was.

After a year and a half of working together, Bre applied for a work visa and jetted off to Australia with her then-partner. Over the next years, I heard bits and pieces of her escapades and I knew whatever version of Bre returned would be entirely different than the Bre who had left to go live on the other side of the world. It wasn’t until she came back to visit in 2018 that I was struck by how much she had changed in just a few short years. Still restless but no longer carrying the tension that was radiating off of her when we had first met.

If you were to meet Bre now, you might take her for just another yoga practicing, no shoes wearing, one love, “I don't eat meat, I grow my own produce, I am one with the universe” nomad hippie type. Which, to be fair, is totally who she is.

But beyond the hippie archetype, Bre really is a rare kind of person. Unorthodox without being obnoxious, irreverent without being unkind and self-aware without being conceited. She’s someone ferociously committed to living her life as authentically as possible, free of the “shoulds” and “shouldn’ts” we’re told to heed lest we wind up on the other side of our best years disappointed and unhappy.

When Bre came to visit again during the summer of 2020, a few of her friends planned a socially distanced picnic, a welcome relief to the pandemic cabin fever we were beginning to feel after months spent in lockdown. With our blankets laid out beneath us on the grass, we sat down and reflected on how the never-ending nature of our current reality had forced a level of introspection none of us had been prepared for.

Your twenties are a messy, chaotic, fun but sometimes not-so-fun rollercoaster ride. Up is down, down is up, wrong is right, right is wrong. You know yourself but you don’t quite know yourself. Nothing and everything is certain, all at once. You unravel truths you had previously taken for granted, weaving back together the ones fundamental to who you are and discarding the ones no longer serving your purpose.

This “in-between” is an odd place to be. It’s a decade long fact-finding mission where you slowly but surely begin extracting yourself from commitments you had half-consciously made to a way of life you had blindly accepted. If you’re lucky enough, you’ll meet a couple of girlfriends along the way who are on that same journey.

With every conversation with Bre, I’m reminded that the things we experience and the place we come from do not dictate our path. They shape us, inform us, arm us, and fuel us but ultimately nothing is predetermined or guaranteed.

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Part I: All roads lead to...mom and dad?

Let’s start with your upbringing and your childhood. I know you had a contentious relationship with your father — how did it shape you?

I think on the whole we’ve all been shaped by our parents, it all depends on our perceptions and feelings of how bad or how traumatized or how manipulated we were. I see it with my nieces and nephews, how their parents will speak to them in certain ways and the feeling that it evokes internally within them. Feelings of frustration, of not being heard, of not being seen, of not being valued as a sovereign being. Just generally feeling as though you are considered nothing more than another person’s property. 

I definitely felt like property in pretty much every aspect of my childhood. I was always fierce and independent and I just wanted to be let loose. I wanted to shake free and be my own thing and do my own weird stuff. I don’t think we allow parents to discover their truest selves in their truest form so they in turn don't allow their children to be their truest selves in their truest form.

What did your parents do that made you feel like their property?

I have really strong memories of stupid little things but it’s these stupid little things that shape you. When I was younger, my bedroom was right beside the living room. I remember going to bed and constantly being woken up by the sound of the television. My dad would be watching golf or Family Guy or something else that an eight year old really doesn’t give a shit about. I would always get out of bed and go into the living room and ask him to turn the tv down because I was trying to fall asleep. His answer was always, “No. Go to bed.” 

That’s such a small example but it’s representative of how my thoughts and opinions were constantly pushed to the side throughout my childhood.

So you had a tense relationship with your father but how about your mother?

It was the other way around with my mom. I wanted to be my mom. I valued her and had her up on a pedestal for so long and I think it’s because, similar to me, my mom is kind of a black sheep. We’re both very quirky in our perceptions of the world. My mother was best-friends with her own mom but when my grandmother died, she was kind of shaken out of her childhood.

She was only thirteen but since she was the only woman in the family, she was expected to do all the cooking, cleaning, and laundry for her dad and brothers. When she was twenty-three, she decided to leave the small town where she was born and raised, which was a huge deal in those days. It was almost like moving across the world. I recognize a lot of my mom’s traits in myself. 

Watching you grow and step into yourself over the last several years, it seems like the choices you’ve made are consciously in direct opposition to that of your parents? 

I refuse to be a human that lives to work. When I look at my parents, I see that and I refuse to be that. I want work to be a supporting pillar, but I don’t want it to consume my entire life. I think about how people can go from calm to anxious to fearful, at the drop of a dime. Always worried about not having enough money, not having enough of this or enough of that. 

It’s this gripping sense of lack. This sense of constantly looking outward and fixating on things beyond our own bodies. For myself, it’s been a process of de-externalizing everything. Whether it’s money, job, food, happiness or shelter. All of that can be figured out internally.

That’s the first thing I noticed that changed from when I first knew you in university. You’re a lot more calm and centered in yourself. Does this growth stem from rejecting the life choices you feel robbed your parents of happiness?

To say that my parents had all the external push would be a lie but my dad was definitely a huge part of it. He always hated the nine-to-five world but it was only in his sixties that he all of a sudden went, “Fuck that, I want to be a truck driver.” Just like that, he shifted gears and went into a totally different career path. 

When I was a little kid, I was just taking mental notes of every single person around me. Hating university but doing it anyways. Getting a 9-5 job, finding a partner that they kinda know they’re settling for but who knows, maybe they could be happy one day. I’ve had so many people in my life do that and you know what? I don’t necessarily see pure happiness in their eyes. There weren’t many people around who made me feel like, “Yeah, that’s what I want,” but there was a copious amounts of, “Absolutely, fuck no, with my whole body, fuck no.”  

We can get into an intellectualized happiness, that kind of shallow “happiness” that helps people feel nice about themselves but that pure bliss and joy and life force spewing out of them? That excitement for life? None of them had it. 

Part II: Wanderlust & Sensemaking Years

I remember there was a point in time you were going to study to be a real estate agent but instead you jetted off to Australia. It was supposed to be this one year thing and you were going to come back but you didn’t. Why didn’t you come back?

I was falling into the trap of graduating highschool, going to university or college, getting a job – I never wanted that but my parents pushed what they thought was best for me. When I left for Australia, I opened my perception to people I would have never been introduced to and ways of living I would have never known otherwise. That really changed me. Human connection is real, I just never had it before. Being heard and valued and understood exists, I just never experienced it before. Realizing that I’m an artist, I just never actually accepted that before. 

Being around a community of artists opened my eyes to the different ways you can live a life. I’ve lived in vans, in garages, I’ve been homeless, I’ve hitchhiked, I’ve slept in shelters. There’s so many ways of experiencing the world beyond the daily routine that was so not nourishing for me.

I remember seeing you after you came back and thinking, “Wow,” because there was a calm around you. There was this new spiritual side that I hadn’t seen before. Did going overseas help this side of you flourish or were you always a spiritual person? 

I've always been highly intuitive and ferociously aware of what I needed. Intuition whispers to you, even when your brain tells you, “That doesn't make sense”. I always had that as a kid, my body was always telling me something that didn't make sense to the mind. I think I was born with some kind of innate high potency but didn't have the environment to nourish it. Going away really just nourished that side and helped me explore it more. Living in retreat centers and teaching yoga and meditation definitely provoked and heightened something internally. 

Being a death doula and a birth doula is a huge part of who you are. What drew you to that world?

I have five nieces and nephews and twenty-four cousins — babies are everywhere but I've only been fed this one narrative. If you are pregnant, you go to the doctor, they give you these vitamins, you go into labour, you get this injection, you sit numb for however many hours in the hospital, and then a baby comes out. 

I have a couple of friends that had babies and they told me their journeys of trauma, of doctors inducing them and lying to them just to speed up the process. Diving into the birth doula world was really just looking into my own options. If I were to have children, how would I do that in a way that still fulfills and nourishes me, that feels good and doesn't involve random men poking and prodding my body?

And being a death doula?

The death doula side came about in a very different way. I've always been highly fascinated by death, even as a kid. What happens once we are dead? Where do we go? What is “I”? Who am I? Where do I go? What is God? What is heaven? All of those big questions. 

And I think that the root cause of fear is death. Even the most minute moments of fear are linked to death, to some degree. Whether it's fear of missing out and not fulfilling something in your life, fear of making a mistake, fear of being rejected — all of these things have a link to death. There are things we need to fulfill before we die. There are certain expectations that we want to meet and if we don't meet them, there’s fear. 

Part III : Trauma, Womanhood and Healing

I remember one of the last times we met up, we spoke about how we spend our adult lives unpacking childhood trauma. What’s one event in your childhood that impacts you to this day and you know that if you don’t work through it, it will have a negative impact on the coming years?

Sexual abuse. I was sexually abused as a kid. I erased the memory. The entire time of living under my parent’s roof does not exist in my mind. When I left for Australia, I was in such a dark space. I was working a job I hated, I was living in a house I hated. Everything in my life was highly toxic. In the depth of all that darkness, this buried memory of being sexually abused as a four-year-old came up and hit me like a bag of bricks. 

I don’t ever really speak on my sexual abuse because trauma is such an individual, personal experience. I’m not saying that it needs to be hidden, shunned, kept in the shadows and shoved under the carpet but it is something you need to figure out in your own time. You need to figure out how to step through it, feel through it and move through it because it’s a lot easier to just get stuck in the trauma.  

I remember the last conversation we had on this, you were still struggling with calling what happened sexual abuse. 

I mean, I’ve been sitting with this for five or six years. I would love to get to a state where it is completely healed but I also understand that trauma is like an onion, you peel it off layer by layer. I’ve already unpacked several layers just around my own sexuality, my own body, and my own desires. I’ve confronted those feelings of feeling like I am an inanimate object and that my body is not even mine to have an opinion about. I’ve stepped through so much change and I have a whole other wave of healing about to hit me. I can feel it coming. It’s very loud within my body.

Hermona, I’m about to go full hippie on you...

Go ahead. Give me Hippie Bre.

The womb space is the most sacred body part, period. Take someone who grew up in poverty or grew up being physically abused. That person holds so much tension and doesn’t know how to open their heart. They have so many walls and barriers up that they don’t know how to trust. When somebody like that gives birth to a child, that child was literally grown in a womb space defined by hurt. They’re born with a certain degree of trauma embedded into their DNA. There’s so much ancestral healing that needs to happen. 

The womb space holds so much trauma and not only from our own lifetime but from many lifetimes that have already passed. Just look at femininity and how much it’s been suppressed. A lot of the trauma I’m feeling is partly my own but some of it comes from a history of mistreating vaginas around the world for hundreds of years. Before I have children and for my own sake, I don’t want that in my body. I want to be clear of all that. 

What triggered the memory of the sexual abuse?

I was in a field picking broccoli. I was living in this farm town in Australia. The job itself was highly toxic and I didn't want to be there. I had actually quit several times but I stayed in town because my partner was still working. I had thought about leaving but I loved him. It’s easier to accept the discomfort rather than make the uncomfortable change. That was a huge lesson for me.

All the women working on the farm were highly mistreated. We were making a quarter of minimum wage, like five dollars an hour. The men were getting paid a good twenty-one, twenty-five dollars an hour. At one point, Taylor and I broke-up. One day, I was working in the field and we had just had a fight and I was in a “fuck you” headspace. I was picking away at this broccoli until I just dropped to my knees and started crying. This vision came to my head of me being a four-year-old and my body being used. 

I know you spoke about this to your mom but have you ever confronted that person?

I’ve never confronted that person and maybe one day I’ll need to but right now I have no anger towards them. I understand that the religion they were embedded with led to a repression which then led them to do what they did to me. I just have a deep sadness for my body and for the world that caused that person to take advantage of a four-year-old. All my anger goes towards society and the cultural norms that allowed that to happen. I think there should be some sense of responsibility in that person but I wonder, how much responsibility can a fourteen-year-old really take? 

Whatever anger I felt was never a harsh sort of anger. It was more of a, “Aw fuck. That did happen. I do need to admit that it did happen and I do need to stop pushing it down so here we go into the journey of unpacking it.” It was a really interesting space to be in. In this random broccoli field, feeling all these emotions at the same time and wondering what do I actually do with this? Why is this coming up right now? It feels far easier to just not remember it.

Part IV: Heart Matters

You went off to Australia with one love, Taylor, and then you discovered another love, Caben. What was the difference between these two loves?

I never had partners growing up. Taylor was really my first relationship. He’ll always have such a special place in my heart because we really needed each other at that time. But there was a mutual understanding that if we were to continue our relationship, we were just going to be holding each other back. We needed to explore individually and live and grow and learn individually. Caben validated me in ways that I needed but we weren’t in a relationship. I think I was fearful of speaking my truth to him, let alone to myself. I have been good in the past at putting people on a pedestal and I had this figure of him in my head. It was very different from who he actually is, how his moral compass guides him and what he wants from life. 

I'm just trying to take self-responsibility for how I enable things in my world. I did not speak my truth in the hopes that he would want me. It actually did the opposite, it actually just created more space between us.

What’s one relationship that you knew was probably not going to turn out well but you went ahead with it anyways? The first time you felt heartbreak and realized that you should probably think twice before playing fast and loose with your heart? 

I was twenty-one and I was seeing a thirty-two-year-old. He was exotic and badass, played the guitar and lived in a van. He was everything my twenty-one-year-old soul really needed. And I knew there was an eleven year age difference and that it was not going to turn out great but I did it anyway. There wasn't necessarily a huge moment of, “Oh, my God he doesn't love me”. It was just a sense of like, cool, I learned a lot from that and I had a lot of fun learning.

I think it taught me that I need to know my own self-worth.  I need to know my own desires. I need to know what I want in a partner and how I'm choosing to show up in a partnership. Rather than just expect people to be infatuated with me. They're not going to be interested in me if I'm not interested in me.

Looking back on your past relationships, what does love need to feel like for you to know that it’s real and something you can build on?

They need to have an ability to accept me where I'm at because I know I'm not a very emotional person. It takes me a long time and a lot of trust to open emotionally. Financial independence in a man is extremely important. I need you to make a certain amount of money every year. I want you to have a certain amount of drive to continuously make that much money every year and I'm not accepting less than that. This offends a lot of people because they think it's very materialistic but I've been with enough men who have such an unhealthy money mindset that I ended up becoming the the driven, focused provider.

Be articulate and educated. Not even formally educated, they just need to read books and be able to have a conversation and have awareness of the world. They need to have some life to them and not just a dead happiness, because I see a lot of that. They need to have an inner truth, a reason and a desire that wakes them up every morning. They need to have a purpose. Morals, they need to have morals. They need to be directed by an internal compass and have a really good personal navigation system.

Part VI: Pandemic Blues and Next Steps

Last time you and I chatted you were entering this period of healing. Do you feel like that healing has happened or do you think you're still in the midst of it? 

I've come to accept that we are always going to be in a healing stage. How you move, your awareness of your past, your desire for the future – I think that in itself is accomplishing healing. I hope I continuously grow, I think that's the point of life.

When we last talked, I was just entering the deepest depression of my life. I would spend days on the couch just debilitated, genuinely the most darkness I've ever felt. To the point where I couldn't even fucking walk to the kitchen to cut fruit. I couldn't work out. I tried really hard and the energy was not there. I would try and read but when your energy is not there, it's just not there.

I had a list of non-negotiables like reading everyday, moving everyday, drinking a lot of water, eating a lot of fruit, and being really creative. I forced those things and made them the pinnacle of my existence. Waking up in the morning and telling myself, “I just have to do these five things, everything else is extra but I have to do these five things.”

Good habits and depression are a good combination. If ever there's something changing those good habits, it needs to go because I know this is what will get me out, or at least get me through. 

What triggered the depression?

Disappointment in where I was in life. I think eighteen-year-old me had really big dreams and aspirations. Being twenty-five is a weird age because you're an adult but you're also very much a child. You have no fucking idea how harsh the world is, how hard reality is, how essentially insane our existence is. You’re battling with all of that while trying to pay rent and feed yourself and hold a job and navigate emotions and unpack childhood traumas.

When the reality of that didn't align, I was like, I'm a failure. I had to implement steps that I need to go through to get to where I want to be. Dropping relationships and friendships that I knew weren't conducive, that I knew were actually holding me back and draining me. Getting really honest about what I actually wanted. It was a lot of detangling from community, detangling from past relationships and lingering emotional ties. Getting really quiet and really isolated and really in myself. 

How much do you think you’ve changed over the course of this pandemic?

I became the most discerning person I've ever known. I've always been very cautious and it takes a lot for me to open up to someone. I'm very cautious of what energies I'm allowing into my space and into my being. I come from a hippie, one love community, where everyone loves everyone and everyone gets along with everyone. Even if there's disagreements there's still an underlying love and an underlying acceptance of people. 

But for me, it's accepting people and unconditionally loving them while having conditional friendships and saying, “This is what I need, this is what I want,” and doing everything I can in my power to create that reality. 

What's going on inside your soul right now that you're still working on? 

Femininity and vulnerability. Fiercely receiving and fiercely knowing that I am worthy, that I deserve, that I am valuable enough and not having an ounce of my being think any different. Doing so while being an independent woman who can provide for myself and who is financially free while still being graceful and soft and nurturing and mothering. It’s a whole fucking journey. It’s a balance that I've never really been able to hold.

I know you very much live in the here and now but what’s your five year plan? 

I see myself having a piece of land here in Ottawa with a beautiful community, a beautiful garden, a space to spend my summers. I have a community who truly loves me, truly welcomes me and I feel in alignment with my life's values. I have that exact same space somewhere warm, like South America. I definitely do see myself being a grounded nomad. I would love to have a beautiful sustainable fashion line. I'd love to make clothes made of natural materials that will disintegrate back into the earth and makes people feel beautiful and powerful and sexy and confident and radiant and powerful. 

I see myself happy. I see myself around a lot of trees and greenery. I see myself in water. Whether that be an ocean or river. I see kids, maybe they’re mine, maybe they're not.

If you could go back in time and advise your past self what would you say to twenty-year-old Bre? Something your twenty-year-old self needed to hear that nobody around you at the time told you?

Absolutely nothing. I would not change anything I've done. Twenty-year-old me was so fucking stupid but she had a fucking ball. She had the time of her life. Sometimes not knowing shit is actually far more beneficial because it brings you to spaces where you learn things so much stronger. 

I think that twenty-year-old Bre was so naive. And that was perfect because if I was any less naive, there's so many things I wouldn't have done and wouldn't have experienced and a lot of that shaped me. I would just observe her and look at her and centre a lot of compassion.