Living with your parents in your twenties is like being in a carnival fun house without the fun. It feels like you’re constantly trapped or living in a phase of your life that you seem to have outgrown.
For me, living with my parents in my twenties is honestly exhausting. Constantly being monitored while abiding by house rules is so draining. Even though I’m a fully-fledged adult, it still feels like I’m 14.
Honestly, if I had enough money to move out I would have long ago. For me, money has always been holding me back from venturing out into the world on my own. Even though I work two jobs and go to school full-time, I never seem to have enough money to move out, nevermind the fact that I can hardly afford gas to put into my car.
For a lot of students, the reality is that you don’t have enough money to move away for school to go to a university you want to go to out of province, because you can’t afford it, like me. I am now having the problem of not being able to afford the high cost of living, without including rent and utilities.
Living in Winnipeg is on the lower end of the spectrum for the cost of living in Canada, which is still ultimately unmanageable and very costly. The cost of living in Canada, when specifically talking about being a student in Winnipeg, while trying to move out without roommates, is not feasible in the slightest.
Being able to afford rent is key to moving out. On top of that, maintaining a healthy diet and keeping up with internet bills to do schoolwork as well as covering recreational activities can be incredibly difficult. Juggling these things while you’re going to school full-time is almost mission impossible.
Overall, for Canadian students, rent comes between $500 and $4,000. I have lived in Winnipeg all my life, and I can tell you that you are not finding a good apartment for anything less than $1,000.
This doesn’t even include groceries, utilities, tuition, books and recreational activities. There is simply no feasible way for a student who works a minimum wage job and without parental help to be expected to move out, (without eight million roommates) to be able to afford the cost of living.
The reality is that being a student is hard, add the cost of living on top of the student experience, and things get infinitely more stressful and time-consuming when you need two jobs to afford the bare necessities.
Although the cost of living for students is astronomically high, the reality is most students cannot move out for a magnitude of reasons. Whether it’s family obligations, medical issues, transportation problems, there is a list of reasons why students who want to move out can’t.
Moving out or trying to move out is a tiring experience and family might not make it any easier. While some people might have a great at-home life, that’s not the reality for many students trying to move away from their home or specifically their parent(s).
Moving away might be a solution to a bigger problem in my experience, since family members can become overbearing, invasive and toxic sometimes. Although this might have been going on throughout your life, you might just realize you’ve outgrown dealing with this behaviour and are no longer a child who has to put up with this behaviour, but must, due to financial strain.
More and more often people are cutting off their toxic parent after leaving home.
This is often referred to as “estrangement.” In the BBC article titled “Family estrangement: Why adults are cutting off their parents,” Maddy Savage, explains that, “the term is broadly used for situations in which someone cuts off all communication with one or more relatives, a situation that continues for the long-term, even if those they’ve sought to split from try to re-establish a connection.”
There are a multitude of reasons why someone wants to leave home, or maybe can’t, either financial strain or a hard home life or perhaps you’ve outgrown this stage of your life. Everyone has their reasons for wanting to leave. I think any reasons for wanting to leave home or not leave home are valid reasons. I think you know when you’re ready to leave, but there’s a financial strain to moving out that makes it difficult for students to thrive in a system that’s set up for us to fail.
