June 1, 2025; Fifty-four years old.
Returning to university has been both the best and the worst experience of my life. I have transformed spiritually and mentally, but in almost every other way, I have been on a steady, continuous decline for eight straight years. If I thought my life was a mess before I started university, I could never have imagined what it would look like after nearly a decade of being a student.
My sleep was never great as a student, with all the worries of grades and assignments, but especially during my master’s, I would work on essays or projects until three or four in the morning and then sleep until noon the next day. Being an online writing tutor contributed to the problem because I would have students until nine or ten pm, leaving me wired for the next few hours, scrolling through my feed or watching Prime Video on my computer. Any protocols of healthy living habits slipped through my fingers, one by one, until I forgot they had ever even existed.
Sleeping through the day meant I started losing track of my friends, and my life became increasingly isolated. When major projects were due, I would work around the clock for weeks at a time, barely talking to anyone. Without money to spare, I quit meeting friends for dinner or a drink. I started snacking late at night while working on my studies, and over the years, I gradually gained twenty pounds without even acknowledging to myself that it was happening. I just simply stopped looking in the mirror or stepping on the scale: problem solved.
As I continued to gain weight, I started moving less and feeling more uncomfortable in my body. Eventually, I struggled to climb even a few flights of stairs without breathing heavily, and my knees began to give out completely, prompting me to stop going out for walks altogether. Soon, I stopped doing yoga and Pilates and quit stretching entirely. I was well on my way towards hitting rock bottom.
Only rock bottom never seemed to arrive; I just kept on falling further and further down. It did not seem remotely possible that this decrepit, now practically useless body used to paddle white water rapids along the Kananaskis River, run half marathons through forest trails, and snowboard the backcountry mountains of Whistler, Fernie, and Jackson Hole.
Unfathomably, in my attempts to turn my life around, I had inadvertently flipped it on its head, stomped all over it, poured it over with gas, and lit it up into a million blazing flames, soaring up into a sky I could only dream of.
Before I returned to university, my diet had been mostly vegan, consisting mainly of fruits and vegetables, with occasional additions like yams and black beans. I thrived eating this way and never imagined it would ever change. But as a student, using credit to even buy groceries, I virtually stopped buying fresh foods and focused on the less expensive options, like brown rice, beans, and potatoes: namely, cheap carbs.
Things went from bad to worse when I outgrew my clothes, which could already all be stuffed into one small backpack. Now I was left with nothing, wearing the same oversized t-shirt and shorts every day, no longer leaving the house at all. Ever since I had sold my car in 2010 to start travelling full-time, I had always walked each day to buy my groceries, no matter where I was in the world. I would walk everywhere, racking up thirty and forty thousand steps a day on my little pedometer. Now, for the first time, I started having even my groceries delivered —a whole new level of sedentary that I could barely recognize in myself.
One day, I finally forced myself to step on the scale: I had gained twenty-five pounds. I couldn’t believe it: it was unimaginable. How had I let this happen? My BMI was 24.5.
Of course, we all have different body types: some of us are naturally thin, and others of us are less so. Differences in body shape and size are not the same as gaining 25 pounds over just a few years. I started out at 135 pounds and ended up at nearly 160.
But I’m not alone in my woes. More than one in three Canadians is considered overweight, with a BMI between 25 and 29.9. More startling, nearly another one in three Canadians is considered obese, having a BMI over 30.0. Put together, over sixty-five percent of Canadians are well above a healthy weight, and I was on the precipice of becoming yet another statistic. But worse, I was steadily gaining, without an end in sight.
They call this the Obesity Paradox, where the poorest of the populations often have the highest rates of obesity. We can’t afford meat, fruit, vegetables, or eggs, and we fill up on the cheapest foods we can find. The paradox is further complicated by limited access to transportation, which, for me, led to ordering mainly from Amazon, effectively eliminating the option of fresh food. Eventually, I barely even used my fridge, but my cupboards were stocked full with plastic bags of beans, rice, and cheap nuts and seeds.
The Obesity Paradox is not a clearly delineated equation: sometimes the richest countries have the highest obesity rates. For example, the United States ranks tenth in obesity, and Qatar ranks eleventh: two of the world's richest nations. But it’s the poorest parts of these populations that contribute significantly to the numbers: both countries are characterized by a massive concentration of wealth among the elite. In the USA, the top 1% of its population holds well over 30% of its wealth.
Take the Gini Index, a way of measuring the distribution of wealth developed by Corrado Gini, a famous Italian statistician. The Gini coefficient ranges from 0 to 100, where 0 represents a perfect equality of wealth, and 100 represents the greatest possible inequality between the rich and poor. The United States has one of the highest Gini coefficients at 42, while Russia and Qatar have coefficients of 35, yet all three are among the richest nations in the world.
Incredibly, the USA has minimum wage requirements as low as $7.25 in some states, whereas the Nordic countries, with strong unions and collective bargaining, set requirements as high as $27/hour. Canada’s minimum wage is about $17/hr, with rates varying by province. Other countries with similar minimum wages include the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, France, and the Netherlands, all countries that favour strong social nets, universal healthcare, and subsidized education.
One of the wildest statistics above all others, though, must be that the twenty-six richest people in the world—think Americans like Bezos, Zuckerberg, and Musk—hold as much as half of the world’s wealth, or nearly the wealth of four billion people.
But we’re just scratching the surface of the crux of the world’s inequalities: only about thirteen of the top one hundred richest people in the world are women. Among those few women, their wealth is most often inherited rather than self-made. Take the richest woman in the world: Alice Walton, whose fortune rose by nearly thirty million dollars this past year. Who is Alice Walton? The daughter of Walmart founder Sam Walton, who inherited a nearly twelve percent stake in the retail giant.
Some people claim this wild inequality is due to women being less competitive, vicious, or ruthless about money, but the situation appears way more complex than that. In Canada, women are three times as likely as men to work part-time, and among part-time workers, four times as many women as men cite childcare as the main reason they do not work more hours.
And yes, times are slowly but surely getting better. In 2000, men spent as little as half as much time caring for their children as women did. Now, however, this statistic has diminished to men spending about one-third less time with their children. Still, it’s a significant gender gap, continually leading women to earn much less money than men while spending a much higher percentage of their available hours performing unpaid labour.
As I was forced to use my credit card more frequently for food and expenses, my stress levels began to rise alarmingly. I watched hundreds of dollars in interest alone be added to my credit card balance each month, much less for everything else I had to use it for. I kept telling myself: It's going to be OK. As soon as you get your master’s, you will get a full-time job, and everything will work itself out. I held onto this faith as I worked through my final year of university.
I finally graduated in September 2024, armed with a degree in English, a second major in Spanish, and a multidisciplinary master’s degree with a focus in writing, after nearly eight years of full-time study. I should have felt euphoric, but instead, I had a sick feeling in my stomach.
By this time, I had been searching for full-time work for nearly a year, with the intention to transition immediately upon graduation, knowing I would lose access to my government bursary, which had helped me cover my monthly rent while in school. Without my bursary, I was on my own, and I had no idea how I would survive.
After graduation, I started spending nearly all day looking for work, still hoping, albeit naively, to find a job within a month or two. I only earned around $1,500 a month as a part-time tutor, so I kept racking up more and more debt. Each month that passed brought me closer to the precipice, until eventually, there I was, on the edge, looking down at rock bottom. My credit card and my student line of credit were both at their limits, and I had enough student loans to last me for the rest of my working years. Worse than anything else, I could no longer afford to pay for rent or groceries.
My close friend, Estelle, finally suggested that I stay in her basement suite for a few months while she moved in with her boyfriend, offering me the gift of time to get my life together. I would joke and try to laugh about it, swallowing my pride, saying, I’m one friend away from being homeless, but the truth is that I already was homeless, I just couldn’t see it. And I certainly couldn’t admit it.
One in fifty Canadians will, at some point in their lives, experience absolute homelessness, living somewhere without a solid shelter over their heads at night. But there is another category, much less obvious or clear, where more than one in ten Canadians, like me, will experience hidden homelessness, with lines that are much blurrier and more opaque. We are the luckier of the unlucky ones, with friends or family to help us out, and we couch surf, crash at a friend's, or lean on a family member for as long as they will let us. But the truth is that we have nowhere else to go, nowhere else to turn. And eventually, we all outstay our welcome.
Research tells us that a lack of affordable housing in Canada is the leading cause of homelessness, combined with fewer job opportunities and the wild rise of inflation since the pandemic.
I have literally become the poster child for one of Canada’s most embarrassing statistics.
The U.S., for example, has nineteen people experiencing homelessness per 10,000 people: not a great statistic, but understandable, considering their size and political complications. Japan tops the list with only 0.2 people per 10K, and Mexico, which notoriously prioritizes family first, sits at only one person per 10K, even though it is way, way down the list of the world’s wealthiest countries.
Now, take Canada: we sit at a staggering twenty-seven homeless people per 10K, up near Bolivia and Ghana, way beyond what a wealthy, social country should be experiencing. Worse, when considering overall homelessness, we're up as high as thirty-five people per 10K.
You’d think this would be a national crisis, yet we don’t seem overly concerned as a nation. For instance, last month I dropped all pretense of pride, too embarrassed to ask another friend for help, and finally applied for the federal emergency grocery fund. The process was convoluted, and through it all, I kept on thinking: how would anyone who was homeless, destitute, or in crisis actually be able to accomplish this? I needed a cell phone, a computer, internet access, technological skills, access to online banking statements, government information, employer information, the whole bit.
But the craziest part of all was when, after all of the effort to complete the application, I finally got the email about five days later with my results. I was euphoric as I hit the subject line: I was about to get $700 to buy groceries and give Estelle some rent money.
That is absolutely not what happened.
I was denied because I had earned $960 the month before, exceeding the $840 limit. I had no money, not a cent, but there was no one to help me. Once again, I had to get grocery money from those closest to me. Without my godmother and dearest friend, my hidden homelessness would very quickly have become glaringly unhidden: I would have been on the street.
I stopped sleeping entirely. What used to be unhealthy sleeping patterns quickly morphed into full-blown, rampant insomnia. I started watching shows all through the night because every time I closed my eyes, the fear swept over me, and panic would assail me. Sometimes I would try to talk to a friend about it, but I would start panicking, crying, and losing control. Talking to anybody about what I was going through became impossible. My insides were churning, spiking, and spiralling out of control.
After three weeks of staying at Estelle’s, I still hadn’t found a job, and I was in acute crisis. I was living for free but still hadn’t found a way to pay for my own groceries. Plus, the gift of not paying rent was only for a few months: I needed a solution, and fast. The students I was tutoring were already dwindling for the summer break, leaving me with no income and way too much time to focus on my hell, and soon, they would all be over until the start of the next school year.
And then one day, it just hit me, out of the blue: I was fighting a losing battle. What I was doing was not sustainable. I had to tackle my life crisis in a completely new way. Nothing I was doing was working, and nothing in my life was changing.
I needed to do something radical. There was no one left to help me. Estelle had already bought me groceries one too many times, and there was no one left to ask.
Instead of trying to change my circumstances, I finally understood it was time to change myself. If the current version of Robyn couldn't get a handle on life, much less buy groceries or get a job, maybe a different version of Robyn could.
And so, one grey morning, with the sun hidden behind the clouds, I made my decision. I don’t know how or why it came to me, but suddenly, I was back on that terrasa in Spain, like it was just yesterday. I was twenty-seven again, young and lean and limber, browned by the sun and ready to start a new life. I had a smile on my face and a backpack slung over my shoulders.
I knew what I had to do.
I would start walking.
And I would walk until I was no longer me. I would walk until this current version of Robyn no longer existed. I would walk until I was too tired to remember who or what it all was that had brought me here.
I would walk and write myself into a new story.