Darren Kennedy

It’s the summer of 2000 and it’ll be the first time that I leave home to live alone with my friends and experience life — in Toronto!

Myself and a group of about 20 friends travelled to Toronto that summer for what would be a fairly raucous experience of liberation. For me, it was a last-minute decision to go, as opposed to working for the summer in Aer Lingus check-in at Dublin Airport, as I had done the previous summer. It turned out to be one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.

I was 19 and had just completed my second year at university and, like most 19-year-olds, thought I knew everything there was to know about life. I was in for a massive learning curve. Arriving in Toronto with no job, no place to live and not knowing anyone, it was a challenge to even find an apartment to rent. We settled on a two-bed place between seven of us. Morning times were an experience, as was the queue for the shower!

It was to be a summer of self-exploration, leaving Ireland with the idea that I was going to meet my dream man in Toronto, fall in love and live happily ever after together.

In fact, I ended up having seven jobs that summer, one of them painting a ferry (aptly named the Jubilee Queen), another as a barman, another a waiter, and so on.

It was the first time in my life having the very real and complete realisation that I have everything within me to make life work, and that my parents had equipped me with the skills, education and ability to laugh at myself, which would allow me not only survive but to thrive.