I Abandoned Myself A Lot

Tracy Moore on survival, the selves she buried, and the ones she refused to let go.

Tracy Moore is telling me about her mother when she stops.

“Just give me a sec.”

She’d been describing an MRI appointment. Taking her mother to the hospital. Helping her undress in the little room. Watching this woman—who raised her, who held her up through sixteen years of national television—lift her arms like a toddler so Tracy could slip on the gown.

“I’m always looking at where they’ve fallen through the cracks,” she says when she comes back. “And I take responsibility for that.”

Tracy Moore is 51. She hosted CityLine for sixteen years—the first Black woman to anchor a national daytime show in Canada. She is a mother of two. A wife. A daughter now parenting her parents.

And she is trying, after a lifetime of calculating exactly how much of herself to show, to stop calculating.

But before we get to the letting go, we need to talk about what she held onto.

• • •

At 51, Tracy Moore still shakes her ass in clubs.

She says this like it’s obvious. She was a club kid at 15, knew Toronto by where the parties were. Oh, the passport office? That’s close to Party Centre. Her whole map was clubs. Basements in Scarborough. Back against the wall, grinding. Bashment. Reggae nights at Oakwood and Vaughan.

Even while hosting CityLine—the picture of daytime polish—she had girlfriends in dingy basements who’d warn her: Tray, don’t come to this one.

She’d go anyway. People would see her smoking a joint, on her seventh drink. Nobody called her out.

“It was almost like, we protect her. She’s doing the work out there.”

Two versions of her, moving through the same city. The one in the studio. The one in the basement. Both real.

“I’m a pro at being a minority. That’s why I’m always going back to Black spaces in my free time. I need that affirmation, that comfort, that shorthand where I don’t have to explain things. I can start a sentence and they’re already there.”

This was the version of herself she refused to trade. Everything else was negotiable.

• • •

When Tracy got the CityLine job in 2008, people she’d never met started reaching out. Brown people. Black people. Asian people. All saying the same thing: Thank goodness you got the job.

Her aunts. Her cousins. People from the East Coast, the West Coast. Strangers who saw themselves in her face and needed her to make it.

“I took that shit seriously. Number one, be beyond reproach. Number two, figure out a way to diversify this place. A lot of people were counting on seeing themselves reflected.”

She was replacing a beloved white host. She was younger. Black. Lower-middle-class. She didn’t even watch lifestyle television.

“I wasn’t good when I started. I didn’t know what the hell I was doing.”

Tens of thousands of viewers were watching her figure it out in real time. And not all of them were patient.

Hate mail came in. Letters. Emails. Phone calls. I’m never gonna watch again. I don’t know who this person is.

So Tracy did something that still startles me: she picked up the phone and called them.

Found their numbers in the complaint letters. Called up Edith—you know Edith’s demographic because she’s writing in cursive—and said: Hi, this is Tracy Moore from CityLine.

Long pause.

Then: I’m learning. I’m new. I appreciate you hanging in there. Want tickets to the show?

Calling Edith was charm. What came next was survival.

It was 2008. Tracy had just had her first baby. She was battling postpartum depression and watching the Obamas navigate what she calls “the trash dumpster fire of a system” with impossible elegance.

She started calling it Obama-ing it. Rising above. Eating the hits. Choosing which battles to lose so she could win the war.

“I took a lot of hits. And I ate them.”

When things got hostile in the control room—things being said about her while she was on air, conversations she could hear through her earpiece—she calculated.

“How do I handle this without making the environment toxic for myself in the weeks to come?”

Disputes with producers: she’d make her concerns known, then back down before it escalated.

She tells me this plainly. No spin. No performance.

“I feel like I abandoned myself a lot.”

“I was doing it to hang on to this title and this job. Because I always felt like there will be a lot of battles I’m going to lose. But I’ll lose them in order to win the war.”

She won battles. She lost others. And then there were the ones where winning and losing looked exactly the same.

People kept telling Tracy to find her “bitch pants.” Show up like a host of a big show was supposed to show up. Call the shots. Bang your fists on the table. Let people know who’s in charge.

“That’s not how I lead. I’m not that two-fists-banging-on-a-table person. And it was very confusing, because I felt like that’s what people wanted. They didn’t have another style for leadership.”

But she knew what would have happened if she’d given them that version. Campaigns to get her out. Her name buried in rooms she wasn’t in. She thinks about Tyra Banks—all those years later, still being dragged for how she ran America’s Next Top Model. Women who led the way they were told to lead, paying for it decades later.

“There was no right answer. If I had done the bitch pants thing, I would have been the angry Black woman, and they would have found a way to get rid of me. 100%.”

If her voice was policed, her body was public property.

Someone once sent Tracy a message telling her to “smarten up or get off TV” because of her weight. She still has it saved.

“If you pull it apart, you can find all the ways people attach moral value to bodies that have nothing to do with the body.”

She kept it as a case study. The man equated thinness with purity. He talked about her “wasting” an opportunity—as if the job should be transferred to someone who weighed less. He mansplained diet advice. And underneath it all: the suggestion that she should be grateful for the position she’d been given.

Given. Not earned.

Every time Tracy Googles herself looking for photos, “Tracy Moore Weight Gain” is in the top three results.

“People are obsessed with my body. More obsessed than my husband.” She pauses. “And my husband is obsessed with my body because he wants to be attached to it at all times.”

In 2020, George Floyd was murdered. And the doors that had been bolted shut suddenly swung open.

Tracy had been talking about race and gender since grade 10. Her non-Black friends knew nothing of that side of her. At work, she’d touched on equality when she could, but carefully. Always carefully.

Now her bosses were telling her to step into the space. Be vocal. Say what she’d been holding back.

She did. And the pushback was immediate.

The same year, Chatelaine—a Canadian women’s magazine under the same Rogers umbrella—finally put her on the cover. For years, her bosses had asked. For years, the answer was: We don’t do people on covers. We do pies.

But they’d done people before. White women.

After George Floyd, they found a spot.

“They could have,” Tracy says. “They just didn’t have the courage.”

I ask how she carries gratitude and anger in the same body.

“I’ve gotten really good at holding two things at once. That’s always been my reality.”

The permission to speak came with a price.

That same summer, a public dispute erupted between Sasha Exeter, a Black Canadian influencer, and Jessica Mulroney, a white celebrity stylist and friend of Meghan Markle. Exeter accused Mulroney of racial insensitivity and of leveraging her privilege to threaten Exeter’s livelihood. The story went international.

Tracy got dragged into it. Not because she started anything. Because she’d been vocal about race, and Mulroney was her friend.

Silence wasn’t an option.

“It’s never gonna be me staying quiet because one of these women is a friend. I’m always gonna move with principle and integrity, even when I get strays.”

She tried to be nuanced. Jessica is a good person. She also should not have done this. But there was a private threat behind a public apology, and Tracy couldn’t sleep on the inconsistency.

So she spoke.

The hate mail came in waves. She stopped looking at DMs. Couldn’t open her comments.

“That whole dispute, which had nothing to do with me, ruined my year.”

She pauses. “Looking back, though? I’d do the same thing.”

These days, Tracy is practicing something she’s never known how to do: slow down.

“I don’t move quickly anymore. And that’s monumental. I’ve never known how to not move quickly.”

She makes puzzles. Writes poetry. Reads underneath trees. Most of the past year was spent asking a question she’d never had time to ask: who is she when she’s not performing?

Mom. Wife. Daughter. TV host. Fitness fanatic. Book lover. Ass-shaker-in-clubs.

“Take all of that away. Who am I?”

She thinks the unburdened version might be a dancer. Contemporary. Movement-based. Or something to do with the sky—she’s obsessed with stars lately. Tomorrow there’s a lunar eclipse, and she’s leaving the gym early to catch it at the beach.

“That’s what drives me now.”

I ask if she feels free from proving herself.

“I’m working on it. This whole idea of proving that I have nothing to prove—I’ve done so much work to deconstruct that. I’m not all the way out. But I’m working on getting out.”

Before we hang up, I ask about her poetry.

She’s been writing since the MRI.

“This whole idea of getting to the point where we’re in charge of our parents. It’s confusing. There’s a lot of gratitude. But there’s a lot of pain. And I didn’t know what to do with the pain.”

So she wrote.

The poems about her parents are too raw to share. But there’s another piece—about her body, about living in it while the world treats it like something to be managed.

She calls it “This Body.”

I think about her mother lifting her arms.

Sixteen years of calibration. Sixteen years of eating the hits. Sixteen years of knowing exactly how much of herself to leave outside the room.

Now she’s trying to find those pieces. Some of them are waiting. Some of them aren’t coming back.

“I’m working on it,” she’d said.

That’s the thing about survival. You find out what it cost after you’re done paying.

In June, Tracy Moore will be invested into the Order of Ontario — a recognition of a public life that rarely looked easy from the inside.