Gabriel_Sanford

Finding Myself on the Prairie: The Education of Gabriel Sanford I'm Gabriel. Born in Tulsa, ’78. Lived a few lives since then. Now I call Regina home, where I research, write, and consult on the messy, beautiful intersection of intimacy and identity. Spent two decades as a sexologist and relationship coach. These days, I'm writing about this city for the CamoWallet project. Trying to understand the place that finally taught me to stop running. March 26th, 1978. Tulsa, Oklahoma. St. Francis Hospital, just off 61st Street. I came into the world during a ice storm that snapped power lines and shut down the city for a week. My dad, a roughneck who worked the oil rigs, was stuck in the house with my mom and me. He spent those seven days chain-smoking Winstons and staring out the window at the frozen Catalpa trees, like he was waiting for permission to go back to work. Mom always said the silence of that week was the first sound I ever knew. She'd play Dolly Parton on a crackling transistor radio, the only warmth in the house besides the space heater. Tulsa then was all about the oil bust, a city holding its breath. You could feel it in the dry air, see it in the empty storefronts on Admiral Boulevard. I think some part of me has been waiting for that other shoe to drop ever since. We moved to Regina when I was fifteen. Dad chased a job with a drilling company that had operations up here. Imagine going from the sticky heat of Oklahoma to a Saskatchewan winter. It was disorienting. Suddenly, I was at Luther College High School on Royal Street, surrounded by kids whose families had been here for generations. My first real Regina memory? Getting lost walking home from the YMCA on 11th Avenue. I turned down a side street, and the wind off the prairie just hit me. It didn't just blow, it scoured. But it was also... clarifying. My twenties were a blur of bad decisions and good intentions. I studied psychology at the University of Regina, in the Education Building overlooking Wascana Lake. I'd sit on the grass there, watching the geese, trying to figure out why people—why I—did the things we did in the name of love. I volunteered at the Sexual Health Centre on 4th Avenue, answering a hotline in a cramped back office. That's where theory met reality. You learn more in one night on that hotline than in four years of textbooks. I remember driving down Albert Street after a particularly heavy call, the streetlights blurring, thinking, This is it. This is the work. Honestly? I still don't have it figured out. That's the first thing you need to know. Anyone who tells you they have a perfect map to human relationships is selling something. I've been married. I've been divorced. I've been the dumper and the dumpee. I've sat in dingy apartments in Cathedral, near 13th Avenue, listening to couples tear each other apart, and then, an hour later, watched them hold hands like nothing happened. The resilience of the human heart is... baffling. Competence isn't about having the answers. It's about being willing to sit in the dark with someone while they find their own. It's about knowing that the fear of intimacy can look exactly like the fear of being alone. It's about understanding that the way you handle money with a partner often reveals more about your relationship than how you handle sex. I've learned more from my failures—the relationships that crashed and burned on the rocky shores of good intentions—than from any success. Those scars are my real credentials. For the better part of two decades, I ran a private practice out of a small office on Albert Street, near the legislative building. I also consulted for a few of those early dating apps, the ones that tried to use algorithms to find you the one. What a joke that turned out to be. We were trying to quantify chemistry, to map desire with code. You can't. You just can't. I wrote papers on transactional dynamics in modern dating, how Tinder and its ilk turned courtship into a marketplace. It’s a subject that still fascinates me—the psychology of the swipe, the economics of attention. Now, my work is different. Slower. For the CamoWallet project, I write about Regina. Not just the landmarks, but the feeling of the place. I write about the best bench in Wascana Park to watch a sunset and contemplate a bad text message. I write about the quiet hum of the city in January, when everyone's bundled up and secrets feel safer. It’s still about human connection, just... told through the lens of a city. It's about finding intimacy with a place, I guess. Regina isn't a city that tries to impress you. It’s not Vancouver or Toronto. It’s a city you have to learn, like a person. You have to spend time here. You have to walk the cracked sidewalks of the Crescents, past the old houses with their wide porches, and imagine the stories inside. You have to sit in a booth at the original Bushwakker's on Dewdney Avenue, drinking a pale ale, and listen to the city talk. My life is here now. I live in the Cathedral area, close to 13th. I walk my dog past the Artesian, grab coffee at the little shop on Garnet Street. I know which parts of the trail around Wascana Lake flood in the spring, and which coffee shops on Scarth Street Mall are best for writing. This city, with its brutal winters and its defiant spirit, it got under my skin. It’s where I stopped being a sexologist from somewhere else and just became... Gabriel. A guy who’s still learning, still curious, still walking down Albert Street, watching the streetlights blur.