Written by Paul Fraumeni 

Audrey Godbout is building a 1978 square body Chevy with her dad, Nathan.

They’re not refurbishing an old car—they’re building it from scratch.

Building and fixing things just come naturally to Audrey (well, maybe some of her skill is in the genes—her dad and mom, Anna & Nathan, own a towing company in the Kenora-Keewatin region in northwestern Ontario). She took shop all through her years at St. Thomas Aquinas High School and was recognized for her achievements with a Specialist High Skills Major in Construction certificate. For the past few summers she’s worked for the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources on the forestry and, more recently, the fire base teams. This past summer she and her co-workers have been working on various tasks at the fire base such as construction, plumbing, forestry work, painting and electrical work.

And as adept as she is with her hands, she’s equally talented with her feet—Audrey has built an impressive track record in figure skating since she was two years old. In 2020, her scores were in the top 30 in all of Ontario and qualified for the provincial championships (which, unfortunately, couldn’t be held because of the pandemic).

But as busy and successful as she’s been with building and skating, Audrey sees these as hobbies.
Her career goal is to work in emergency services. She’ll get going on that this fall, when she starts at St. Lawrence College in Kingston majoring in Police Foundations.

“For years, many people around me thought I should go into the trades,” says Audrey, who’s 17 and the Empowered Kids Ontario 2024 Indigenous Scholar. “But I want to do something that feels more creative to me and I think that’s in helping people in times of emergencies.”

Audrey’s in good shape now, ready to tackle that demanding field. But she had many tough years struggling with how she felt inside—and that affected her mental and physical health.

“My whole life I felt like an outsider; different from the kids in my class, from my sister, and friends,” she wrote in an essay submitted to Empowered Kids Ontario.

She wondered why her sister got such good marks at school but she didn’t. And, while she developed a good sense of humour, she took out the fire boiling inside of her by fighting with her parents. “I’d fight over little things to the point that they would have to take away things like my dresses, fancy scarves, toys and eventually even my bedroom door.”

Her life brightened up when she met a guy who had moved to Canada with his family when he was eight. They enjoyed each other’s company, especially as Audrey introduced him to outdoor activities she loved—fishing, sledding, hockey and driving four-wheelers.

But her internal feelings even made her criticize her friend. They stopped seeing each other. They spent some time apart, but slowly got back together, friends again.

And then he was found drowned in a local lake.

“Seeing his coffin at the funeral and knowing his body was in there but he wasn’t was unbelievably hard,” says Audrey. The loss of her friend and the pain that came from grief caused Audrey to sink into a life of too much weed and alcohol. But she also began to get violently ill. “I’m tall, five-foot-eight. I weighed about 150 pounds but I lost 50 pounds. I just couldn’t keep anything down.”

And then things turned around. Her parents had Audrey tested for ADHD and have found successful treatment through various avenues. She was also diagnosed with cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome—an allergy to cannabis.

She got better, with the help of her family and mental health professionals at FIREFLY, a non-profit family service agency based in Kenora.

“I haven’t smoked weed for five months,” she says in mid-July. “And I plan to keep it that way.”

And she’s looking forward to joining her sister, Emma (a Queens University student), in Kingston as Audrey begins her studies at St. Lawrence.

“I want to utilize my ADHD abilities, like fast thoughts, looking at the world and people differently, in a positive way. There is a worldwide drug use epidemic and I want to help people through the system to get the medical attention they need. I want to stop the stigma of mental illness from a young age. Kids should not be ashamed to feel and learn differently.”

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