From ages 20-24, I was living in a basement apartment in Toronto. After my parents divorced and we sold our family home, it just felt like it was time to leave and start over on my own. I lived with my mom and sister for a few months after the house sold, in a two bedroom apartment where we fought a lot. Almost as soon as we moved in there I started to make plans to leave and be on my own, for the first time.

My first apartment was a small bachelor in the basement of a three-storey house.  It cost me less than $400 a month, plus countless sleepless nights of lying awake listening to the booming of my landlady’s Polish TV shows just above me. A year earlier, I had been living as one fourth of a family, waking up to bacon and eggs on Saturday mornings and listening to my parents argue with deafening silences that lasted for days. Looking back, I really should have seen their divorce coming; but you never do- somehow you think that kind of thing only happens to ‘other families’ and you dismiss it as a possibility… until it does, finally, happen. But even then you’re still sort of in disbelief. Then at some point it becomes the norm and you stop remembering how it was any other way. You start to forget how bacon and eggs smell on Saturday mornings.

I worked four jobs and attended university full-time while I lived in that basement apartment. That tiny space housed some of the worst and best experiences of my young life- I learned how to cook, clean and pay bills. I learned that I loved to write. I discovered that stress really can affect your health and that I hate Polish TV shows. I learned that when things sound too good to be true, they usually are, and I learned that I’m prone to having high cholesterol. That first year of living on my own, I ate more eggs than a bodybuilder and, as a result, earned a cholesterol rating that rivaled my dad’s. Eggs were cheap and, in many ways, nostalgic. I poached, scrambled, flipped and fried at least two dozen a week.

My last year of university my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer and given six months to live if she didn’t undergo chemo. Because she was so sad- about the divorce, about the way her life had turned out- she actually considered not taking the treatment. At the prospect of losing another parent, I started to cry one day in her lap. I hadn’t cried in front of her since we lived together back in the house where I was a content one-fourth. I’m not sure if it was because she couldn’t watch me cry anymore or if she felt like I still needed her around, but she decided to take the chemo, which ended up being very bittersweet. Watching a parent go through the pins and pricks and sickness that comes along with chemotherapy is horrible, but we don’t regret it. It helped shape the strength of our family today. Maybe I’ll share that story with you, some day.

While I lived in that basement apartment, my dad hardly called, my mom was diagnosed with cancer, my cholesterol shot through the roof and I bathed in stress. Yet it was a time when I knew it was all so necessary. I was changing, morphing and shaping. For entirely different reasons now that change is happening again, which is why, instead of writing the post I intended for tonight (a little more humorous, with a picture), I’m posting this bit of personal history for you. I felt like it was important to put this comparison somewhere, and I’m glad I can put it here, on this blog. Everyday I grow a little more thankful for that.

I wish I had a blog while I lived in that basement apartment. I really could have used a space for rant.

I’d love to hear from you, dear readers, about anything… cancer, divorce, your first place, even how you like your eggs.