Crying Over a $7 Bag of Chips

I thought moving to Canada would feel like a fresh start. A clean slate. A brand-new life where I could be whoever I wanted to be. No one knew me here—no history, no expectations, no baggage. Just newfound freedom. The ability to do whatever I wanted.

I romanticized it in my head: late-night drives, city lights, new people, new love, new adventures. The kind of life you see in movies, where the main character moves to a big city, finds themselves, and somehow has it all figured out by the end of the montage.

But real life doesn’t come with a montage.

Adulthood hits like a truck. Turns out, you can’t do whatever you want because there’s no safety net. You screw up, you fall—hard. There’s no family to catch you, no childhood best friend to run to, no one to pick up the pieces when things fall apart. It’s just you. In a new country. In a new culture. With a new set of rules you don’t fully understand.

Social norms are different. You say something casually, and suddenly, you’re the rude one. Canadians apologize for breathing the wrong way, and in my culture, you don’t apologize unless you’ve actually done something serious. Small talk feels performative, but apparently, it’s necessary. Everyone says they should “hang out sometime,” but no one actually means it. You’re too foreign for some people, not foreign enough for others.

I thought I’d spend my early 20s partying, finding the love of my life, and building a home all by myself. Instead, I ended up feeling lost in a way I never expected.

The job market is brutal. No one wants to hire you because you don’t have “Canadian experience.” Even minimum-wage jobs hesitate over your resume. Your degrees? The ones you spent years earning? They don’t seem to count as much because they’re not Canadian. And when you finally land a job, you realize that climbing the ladder is a lot harder than you thought.

And then life, as if it wasn’t already pushing you to your limits, decides to twist the knife. Your dad passes away a week after you move. You don’t have enough money to fly back home. So, you mourn alone, in a country that still feels foreign, in a bed that still doesn’t feel like yours, in a life that’s suddenly not as exciting as it once seemed. No family. No lifelong friends. Just you, your grief, and a place that still doesn’t quite feel like home.

Then there’s the winter. Oh my God, the winter. No one tells you how the cold isn’t just cold—it’s a physical attack. A personal vendetta from Mother Nature herself. You slip, you freeze, you question every life choice that led you here. You wonder if you made a mistake. If this was all worth it.

And then one day, you find yourself standing in the middle of a grocery store aisle, staring at a $7 bag of chips, wondering how life turned out like this. You hold the bag in your hands, calculating if it fits into your budget. Back home, you wouldn’t have thought twice. Back home, someone would have laughed and tossed it into the cart for you. But here? Here, you put it back on the shelf, swallow the lump in your throat, and keep walking. Because you don’t have the luxury of breaking down over chips.

But sometimes, you do. Sometimes, it’s not just the chips. It’s the homesickness, the loneliness, the exhaustion of trying so hard just to survive. And suddenly, you’re crying in the middle of a grocery store, surrounded by strangers who don’t even notice. Or worse, they do, and they politely pretend not to.

Maybe it gets better. Maybe it doesn’t. But here you are. And for now, that’s enough.