“The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.” – Maya Angelou
There’s nothing like being homeless to help you re-examine what home means to you.
At the end of 2021, I abandoned my bachelor apartment in Toronto to go crash with a friend in the suburbs. I felt like I had no choice but to leave the city: I’d left my full-time job a few months before, due to a COVID-inspired mental health decline, and didn’t have enough money for rent. I was grateful that my friend could offer me a place to stay for free.
I told her I would only stay with her for a week or two. Six months later, however, I found myself still living there. Truthfully, I didn’t have anywhere else to go. No money for rent didn’t leave me many options. I felt like I would be stuck in the suburbs forever. My depression deepened as the weeks went by.
As luck would have it, I finally found my way back to Toronto by apartment-sitting and cat-sitting for some of my friends. From June to September 2022, I couch-surfed my way through the city.
In September, I was lucky enough to be offered the pull-out couch of a co-worker and her husband. It’s January 2023, and I’m still here. I can’t believe it’s been almost four months. I’ve stayed this long because, like in the suburbs, I don’t have anywhere else to go. My luck seems to have run out with cat-sitting and apartment-sitting for friends. After a year of homelessness, I think the time has finally come to find a home of my own.
Learning the meaning of “home”
Over the past year, it’s become clear to me that I feel more at home with friends than with family. If feeling at home can be defined as the place where you belong, I’ve been most at home with creative folks like me: fellow art school graduates; fellow members of a non-profit, multidisciplinary arts and mental health organization I’ve been involved with for more than a decade; and fellow employees of the art supply store where I’ve been working since August.
I’ve learned that when I’m living and working with artists and writers, I’m among my kind. I don’t have to pretend to be something I’m not. I have conversations about things I care about with people of like mind. I feel free to express myself as the quirky, passionate person I am.
Ultimately, anywhere I feel like I can be myself is home to me. I’m lucky that I’ve crossed paths with friends who not only accept and like me for who I am, but who’ve been generous enough to open their doors to me in my time of need.
It’s interesting: Not only have I learned a lot about myself while being homeless, but I’ve learned a lot about my friends by staying in their homes, too. I wonder what they’ll learn about me if they see my home someday.
A home for me in 2023
Of course, it hasn’t been easy being homeless for a year. I’m grateful to be able to crash on my friends’ pull-out couch in their apartment downtown, but I miss the privacy of having my own place and living out of a suitcase is starting to get old.
Despite my desire to have my own place, I know it’s going to feel lonely to live by myself again. Prior to the end of 2021, I’d lived alone for a decade. How am I going to cope with the loneliness when I’ve gotten so accustomed to living with my two friends (and their two cute cats) these past few months?
It won’t be easy to adjust to living alone again, but I know it’ll be easier than having to move from place to place as I have been. Having said that, I think homelessness has been good for me. I’ve learned to ask for and accept the help I need. For too long, I believed I had to do everything on my own (with some much-appreciated financial support from my parents, from time to time). Now, I’ve learned that more help is available than I thought. I hope one day, I can pay it forward and offer the same amount of support to my friends that they’ve provided me.
I’m so excited about the prospect of having my own place again. I’m grateful that my job at the art supply store is giving me enough income to make paying rent possible. I’m not making a lot, but it’s enough to buy myself some independence. I’m ready to take the next step in getting my life back on track.
There’s no going back to the life I had in 2021, but I wouldn’t want to go back to that life if I could. I have less money now, but I’m much happier. I’m glad I left my stressful day job and returned to spending time with the kind of people I hung out with in art school.
The home I find for myself in 2023 will be humble because I can’t afford much. I’ll likely just be renting a room and living with roommates. But for the first time in a year, I’ll be able to stay in the same place for longer than a few months. Plus, it’ll be a space I can call mine.
Still, my home won’t be limited to the four walls I’ll be living in. My fellow writers and artists will continue to provide me with the spaces where I truly belong. They’ve shown me what it means to feel at home—in their company and within my soul—and I’ll carry this knowledge with me for the rest of my life.
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image 1: valenaammon; image 2: Oleksandr Pidvalnyi
