Where you live and how you live is not a logistical factor or point on a map. It touches every aspect of your life, from career to mental health to, as I’ve discovered, personal relationships.

I lived at home during my first year of university, but the commute from Oakville to Toronto and my need for independence led me to move for the next two years with two friends into a 3-bedroom bungalow in East York. Unforeseen issues with the house meant our relationship soon became strained. Shortly after we settled in, the landlady’s daughter moved into the basement unit with a wailing newborn and abusive boyfriend. He was ultimately arrested when I woke one morning to the sound of the girl screaming for help and called the police. Another issue was the furnace, which broke in the dead of our second winter at the house. My roommates, afraid of “rocking the boat” by telling the landlady to fix it, instead told her things were fine and not to worry. Finding myself paying $700 a month to sleep in my winter coat, I had enough and called her to demand she fix the furnace immediately. My good relationship with my roommates ended when I found out they had gone behind my back and told the landlady to ignore me. I grew mean, critical, angry, tormenting them in the misguided belief that I could control and change them – I made sure we were all miserable. The moment our lease was up, we scattered and never spoke again.

My final year of university I moved into a room with three other acquaintances I knew from school in a row house on Bathurst Street. We were friendly, but not good friends, which meant I was okay with spending most of my time in my room. They lived their lives and I lived mine, and I came to realize where I had failed with my previous roommates: I had treated them like my family. I wanted my roommates to sweep the way my family did, clean the bathroom the way my family did, wash the dishes the way my family did – I was convinced the way my family did things was the right way. My behaviour led to resentment, which blew up our relationship when housing issues drew them to a head. So in this new apartment, I stopped caring. Grease and food left on the pans and plates that had just been washed? I cleaned the ones I used and didn’t say anything. A roommate who set off the fire alarm every time she cooked? I put on headphones. I went on vacation for 3 weeks to return to a bathroom that hadn’t been cleaned since I left? I cleaned it from top to bottom then went to my room to read. It was liberating. They did their thing, I did mine, and if these two paths crossed I took care of what only concerned me.

I carried this live-and-let-live mentality into my next place. My year at the Bathurst apartment was tainted by party ragers in the basement who would blast music from their surround-sound system like a weapon at all hours. I chose my next space to be closer to the college (with its ungodly 8 a.m. classes) I was attending that year for a post-grad certificate program. I had only one criterion for a home: that it be quiet. I found this in a room in a house I shared with my landlady, a woman who was clean and kind with a peaceful place close to school. I watched her cats while she was away, we chatted in the mornings, she saved my butt when she fished out an important reference letter of mine that had ended up in the recycling bin. Overall, it was a pleasant experience between two women going their own way with their own lives.

My post-grad required an internship to graduate, and when I managed to secure one that was four months long I was certain it would turn into a  full-time job. My family and I decided it would be best for me to move back home in the interim before I moved out for good armed with a salary to pay my rent. Yet instead of the first steps of a career path, the internship turned into an exercise in the life I didn’t want to lead and the person I didn’t want to become. In August I found myself looking for another internship. I found one, also four months long, which this time did turn into a permanent gig. After my internship was extended by two months to navigate the hiring red tape of our newly-acquired company, on March 1 of this year I signed my first-ever full-time salaried contract. My original plan seemed back on track – with my new salary, I could move out on my own. Sticker shock at the truly dire extent of Toronto’s affordable housing crisis soon quashed that dream.

At this time my relationship with my parents was fraying – I was surly and resented my dependence on them for meals, transportation and shelter. I didn’t talk except to lash out and spent most of my time in my room feeling that I was regressing into an angry teenager. One day after I was particularly critical of my father my mother told me to shape up or move out. At that moment my nerves shattered and I realized how long I had been inwardly raging against what felt like my entrapment in Oakville. I came to realize my problem was I didn’t know how to act towards my parents outside of the relationship between child and caregiver. I was an adult now, and this old way of relating to them was stifling me. I had mental shift the moment I watched this gem of a video, which articulated eloquently the struggles I was experiencing:

Ever since, I’ve made the conscious effort to treat my parents as equals rather than, well, parents, and our relationship has considerably improved.

While things have become easier at home, I still don’t want to live here much longer. When I’m on the GO train I think of all the hours of my life I waste commuting, and how much more I could see my boyfriend if I lived closer to him. He and I, while we’ve been together for over a year, recognize it’s still too soon to move in together. I stay over with him on the weekends, or rather, I used to. Recently, we discovered his Parkdale apartment is infested with cockroaches and bedbugs. Until he finds a new place we’ve kept in touch through texting and 3-hour phone calls, but this quasi-long distance solution isn’t ideal for either of us.

Astronomical rent, impossible condo prices, unfathomable home rates, the necessity of roommates and pests – this is what it’s like to live in Toronto (or in my case, not.) A 1-bedroom or studio apartment that’s affordable, clean and close to work no longer exists in this city, and it places a strain on the mostly young people (and their family, friends and significant others) who want to live independently for the first time. Instead, we are told to wait until we make six-figure salaries before this dream – a place of one’s own – can be realized. Until then, the decision most of us face is whether to live our lives for now or save up for later. I don’t know yet which way I’ll land (three to six years without travelling while living with my parents is unbearable to me), but I find small consolation in the reassurance that most people my age are struggling with this decision, too.