Empty. That’s what my bank account was after I wired almost everything in it to someone I did not know and had never met. It was the beginning of summer. I was moving to a city I had been familiar with all my life but where I still had nowhere to go but a four-story Edwardian house I had found online. 

I struggled up the stairs of Aldgate East station, pulling three months’ worth of clothes and books behind me. The surrounding streets were scraping off what they could of their immigrant past while simultaneously building themselves into the future—every sidewalk was canopied in scaffolding; the sunset was obscured by cranes suspended in mid-air, tired after a long days’ work. The instructions I had been given were easy enough to follow: “Turn right at the first strip club, left at the second. We’re behind the halal restaurant and beside the firearms unit.” 

Over the course of the summer, I would move from room to room depending on who was away traveling at the time. Each one would come to feel like home in its own way, but that first evening, I closed the door of the second-floor room I had been given, sat on my suitcases and stared at the stripped bed. I was a year away from graduating college and I had no clue what I wanted to do after. The broken dining table that had been pushed against the windows for me to use as a writing desk reminded me that I hadn’t written anything in months. The one thing I had always counted on to get me through doubt and loneliness seemed to have become something I had failed miserably at. 

I had never felt more alone. 

Without bothering to change out of my airport clothes, I wandered through the house. There were dozens of old shampoo bottles on the shower floor, covered with layers of blue fuzz; the patio was jammed with mismatched chairs and a crate over which a collection of skeletons sunned themselves; angry letters from the neighbors were pinned to a bulletin board in the kitchen, curse words scrawled cheerfully over them in ballpoint ink. 

I stumbled into a tiny room decked with fairy lights and sunk into an old leather armchair, where I spent a good twenty minutes struggling to remember everyone’s names over mojitos before following them out the door, onto a bus, and into a bar in Dalston where there was a secret room filled with people leaping to reggae. We did not get home until dawn, stopping for smoked salmon beigels along the way. The cobblestoned streets were empty and the sky was pink. In that moment I learned something crucial: it’s okay to not know what you’re doing. But if you worry too much about it, you’re going to forget to do the only thing that is completely in your power to do: live.

…

I was woken the next afternoon with a knock on the door and a cup of tea. In the last of Sunday’s daylight I got my first proper look at my housemates. We crowded onto the patio for a roast dinner complete with Yorkshire puddings. Slipping into laughter and conversation, they flooded me with details of their varied lives. They were already teaching me how to live, but in the coming months they would each show me, in their own way, something much harder to learn: how to live passionately. 

There was the investment banker who would come home in his cricket clothes and strum his guitar while talking about the nuances of the world’s financial history. There was the bar manager who was never around because he was always at band practice. There were the non-profit directors who were filled with stories of how their work was giving low-income children a chance at intellectual self-confidence. There was the artist who was teaching herself to play the drums. There was the chef who made food seem like the product of a kind of magic only she possessed. And there was the graphic designer who could never stop talking about art and innovation and whose tireless commitment to what he loved renewed my own faith in mine. 

These people studded the background as I struggled through the deadlines that my first proper job entailed, as I calculated how much money I had leftover for food after paying the rent, as I sat at my desk and faced what always seemed to be a blank page in front of me. Watching them power through their lives helped me understand that fulfilling lives are built from a dedication to doing what we love, whether it pays or not, and an equal dedication to continue discovering other things we can also learn to love. Passionate lives come from pursuing the passions we have and discovering more along the way. 

Without trying, these people helped me grow up. I became curious about everything at work and flourished. I started writing again so desperately that I took my laptop on the tube and missed my stops because I was so engrossed in the stories I found myself wanting to tell. And when, every now and again, the going got rough, the way they were always throwing caution to the wind helped remind me why fun exists. 

We filled cafetieres with frozen grapes and spent Saturdays lying in the park. We watched SpongeBob porn while waiting for dinner to cook. We gave each other mummified puppies for birthday presents. We carved windows into old soup tins and used them as candleholders. We grew onion gardens on top of the kitchen cabinets. And when morning came, we all woke up and got back to the grind. 

When I finally left London, I stared at the arrivals and departures board at Heathrow—at the names of cities that blinked on the screen in bold, green lettering. There are so many places you can go where you don’t know anyone at all. And there are so many ways that doing something like that can change you for the better, for ever. 

...

This essay was written for Rent and Ice Cream, a project I collaborated on with designer Oliver Ballon. I wrote, he designed, and back then it felt like we could afford neither our rent nor ice cream.