10 Life Lessons I Learned from a Year Being Homeless.
A handful of years ago, I turned 19. A year prior I’d moved to the biggest city in the country in search of something bigger than myself, full of aspirations (and delusions) looking to make the perfect life for myself.
And there I stood, with 5 different strangers in my studio apartment, watching them disassemble my furniture and sift through my clothes, leaving money on the table when they found something they wanted. I had a hard time believing my eyes.
The story of what happened is really quite simple, and I’ll sum it up in one sentence: I paid my college tuition, and then a job offer I’d been promised got canceled, and then I had a breakup. There you have it: $4.00CAD in my bank account, January in Toronto, single, -10 degrees outside, and an eviction notice.
Least to say, the intense and eventful year that followed changed my life and set me up for success in ways I couldn’t have ever imagined.
I know it’s cliché, but stuff is really not that important.
As I stood in my empty apartment, all of its contents summed up to just under $800 in cash, I would have expected to feel sad. I didn’t. I actually felt perfectly okay. It was empowering to feel perfectly okay, despite having lost almost everything I’d worked for over the past year. The truly important things stayed with me — the memories, friendships, and life lessons.
The perspective you have of yourself and your life is the most important thing.
I studied marketing. I know the power of perspective, and I used my skills on myself. I refused to think of myself as ‘broke and without a home’ and instead told people I was a transient minimalist artist, experiencing life without chains. This shift in perspective made the whole experience more a lot more bearable and I was able to find beauty in odd places.
People you love will let you down, and people you barely know will amaze you.
At the time, I wasn’t in close communication with my family (it’s complicated), and my best friend and I were in a fight. These things happen at some point to just about all of us, but due to the strenuous circumstances, it felt like a major betrayal. Out of the blue, someone I’d barely known offered me their basement and a mattress to sleep on. It felt like a small miracle, and this person became a good friend for the years to follow.
You must feel gratitude for the small things in order to feel gratitude for the big things.
Early on in the year, I really learned what it meant to feel grateful. I’d inwardly rolled my eyes anyone said ‘just feel grateful’ as if they were accusing me of not feeling grateful. My brain would always focus on the problems, on the things I had to get done. It wasn’t until I was sitting in a coffee shop, drinking their cheapest filter coffee, thinking to myself ‘wow this is the best thing ever, I feel so at peace right now’ that I experienced the true feeling of gratitude.
If you have a handful of real true friends, you have everyone you need.
Years ago I heard a quote, something along the lines of ‘if you have a handful of real friends, you have everything’. In other words, most people you meet will be acquaintances, and a small fraction will develop into true friendships. Have gratitude for the friendships instead of an insecurity about the numbers.
You are stronger than you think at adapting to difficult circumstances.
I’d tried out a lot of messy living situations that year, nothing which stuck for more than a few weeks. I was young and making money freelancing, so finding a permanent rental was a challenge — it was nearly impossible to find a place for less than $1.2K a month, and most apartments required me to have a guarantor. So, I was left to scale the independent housing market. The first place had a toxic mold infestation and the kitchen was broken, and the last place had no running water — I was commuting to my gym so that I could shower. In between these two places were a series of psychotic roommates, stalkers, an assault, hospitalizations and sleeping on friends couches. If I had known the difficulties that were coming my way, I would probably have freaked right out. I got through each day, and the year is just a culmination of many days strung together. It turned out I was a lot stronger than I knew myself to be, and this gave me a lot of confidence in myself.
Creativity strikes out of nowhere.
Before I got evicted, I was working in a store making minimum wage. I was pulling myself through life with limited funds, and saving everything I could so that I could go back to school. Once I was evicted, and freed from my financial commitments, I tried my hand at freelancing — and I’ve never looked back. I had a knack for entrepreneurship, and it gave me a thirst to succeed. I became way more creative, driven and passionate. I really didn’t have anything to lose, and in hindsight, this experience was exactly what I needed. It’s been four years of building businesses, watching them fail, and succeed — and reinventing myself along the way.
You are in full control of your own fate.
The day I took ownership of my life was the first day I really felt like an adult. Okay, the job didn’t come through. Okay, I didn’t know how to budget my finances. Okay, people had disappointed me. I knew I needed to shift my mindset if I wanted to build the life I dreamed of, and blaming people or circumstances was no way to do this. So I took full ownership of myself, my mistakes, and my life. I believed that I was capable of achieving anything I put my mind to, and I refused to let anything get in the way. This is still my mindset today, and my life has completely transformed because of it.
The biggest success is to not get jaded because life is truly incredible.
If I had to choose one accomplishment for the entire year, it would be that I never got jaded. I still trusted people. I fell in love again, a few times. I created my own job offers. I started mending the relationships within my family. I learned what it meant to really love and value myself, too. My life today is a parallel universe to what it was four years ago; I have a loving partner, my dream apartment and work that inspires me on a daily basis.
Lastly, ALWAYS have a nest egg in case of emergency.
In hindsight, this entire ordeal could probably have been avoided if I’d waited an extra six months to begin school, and have had a considerable amount of savings built up. However, I don’t regret this mistake because it brought me to who I am today. Although going forward, I always have a chunk of cash in my savings account in case things don’t go the way I anticipate.
