I moved to Indianapolis the first week of August 2001, just a few days after I turned twenty. I packed my entire life into two overstuffed suitcases, shoved them into my ancient van, and pointed myself toward the city with equal parts excitement and ignorance.
There was no backup plan, no carefully mapped-out career path. Just a vague, hopeful belief that adulthood was waiting for me somewhere downtown, and all I had to do was show up.
In my mind, independence had a soundtrack. Something like High Fidelity playing in the background while I walked confidently through my new life, a little messy but undeniably cool.
But the reality felt different almost immediately.
Instead of stepping into a scene, it was like I had wandered onto an abandoned film set, the lights dimmed, the script missing, and no one around to tell me what came next.
I rented a rundown apartment right in the heart of downtown Indianapolis. The kind of place that sounded “historic” in the listing, which really meant good luck with the heat and don’t ask too many questions about the stains.
It had once been a hotel, and I let that detail carry more weight than it deserved. I pictured glamorous travelers passing through, something tinged with old Hollywood magic.
The listing had promised “historic charm.”
In reality, four hundred and nineteen dollars a month got me an apartment the size of a shoe box.
My second-floor unit barely cleared three hundred square feet. The oven door couldn’t open all the way because it jammed into the back wall, like even the appliances were aware of how little space we were working with.
There was no air conditioning.
There were, however, plenty of critters.
The walls were paper-thin, the kind that turned your neighbors’ lives into a constant soundtrack. I could hear arguments, reconciliations, and the occasional burst of police activity as if it were happening right there in my living room.
My parents, however, were horrified.
They helped me move in just days after my 20th birthday, and the reality of my new independence hit them the moment we arrived. We had to step over someone passed out on the front steps just to get inside, and I’m fairly certain my dad nearly blacked out right there beside him.
He tried to coax me back into the car, tears in his eyes, talking about safety and good judgment and asking, “What are we doing here?” like maybe if he said it enough times, I’d come to my senses.
My mom didn’t say much.
She just sat there with this deeply forlorn look on her face, like she had already fast-forwarded to the worst possible outcome and was quietly bracing herself for it.
But I was determined.
It may have been chaotic, and questionable, and objectively a little alarming, but it was mine.
Now, as a parent, I can’t think about that season without also thinking about my poor mom and dad.
I replay it differently now, through their eyes.
What must it have felt like to help your daughter move into a building where drug deals happened out in the open, where neighbors screamed through the walls, where a man lay passed out on the stoop like it was just another Tuesday?
No wonder my dad cried.
No wonder my mom went quiet.
I thought they just didn’t understand what I was trying to do, this brave, scrappy leap into adulthood.
But now, with kids of my own, I understand exactly what they were feeling.
One day, they’ll chase something uncertain, something a little reckless or fragile or unfinished, and I’ll have to stand there and let them go anyway. I’ll have to swallow my fear and trust that they’ll find their footing.
Back then, I thought my parents were overreacting.
Now I know they were just terrified in the way only parents can be.
Because there was no air conditioning, I had no choice but to keep my screenless window open, even in the thick, humid stretch of an Indiana summer. It was less about comfort and more about survival, just trying to coax a little airflow into that shoe box of an apartment.
My window faced the alley, which meant the outside world didn’t stay outside for long.
I could hear deals being made and fights being lost like they were part of the evening programming. Once, a dead body was even discovered out there, as casually as if it were just another item on the nightly agenda.
Most nights, a man would scream into the darkness of the alley for hours, like clockwork, from midnight until four in the morning.
It became its own kind of routine, unsettling and oddly consistent.
Living there felt like streaming The Wire live every night, except there was no pause button and no credits to signal the end.
If you’ve ever lived in a questionable apartment complex, you know the characters become half the story.
Mine was no exception.
One of my neighbors once passed out drunk while cooking and somehow managed to set part of the building on fire. Another seemed to have a deep, unshakable attachment to Filter’s version of “One is the Loneliest Number.”
He played it on repeat.
All night.
Over and over, like some deranged DJ stuck in purgatory with exactly one track and no sense of mercy.
I started to imagine he and the alley-screamer were locked in some kind of twisted duet, each committed to their part.
If that was the case, the rest of us were the unwilling audience in this inner-city opera.
I know it probably sounds like I’m exaggerating.
I wish I were.
Years later, I found an actual Yelp review from someone who had lived in the building during the same era. Their experience included a crack-addicted neighbor, a convicted child molester with a deeply disturbing cage-filled van, rumors of a murder inside an apartment, someone attempting to lure people into a nonexistent cab, and a drunk neighbor nearly burning down the building.
Their recommendation was essentially: avoid like the plague.
See?
I told you I wasn’t making it up.
If the apartment was my castle, then my van was my noble steed, though “noble” might be a generous interpretation.
It was a 1973 Chevy full-sized conversion van, a fifteen-dollar purchase from a woman at church.
Fifteen dollars.
The kind of deal that comes with a backstory and, if you’re paying attention, a very clear expiration date.
Inside, it looked like a low-budget party bus that had given up on itself. Electric blue running lights lined the panels. The captain’s chairs swiveled. There was shag carpet underfoot and up the walls.
The engine roared loudly enough to feel like it was announcing my arrival, whether I wanted it to or not.
The only hint of femininity was a metal Strawberry Shortcake trash can left behind by the previous owner, which felt less like décor and more like an accidental artifact.
Everything else was grease, duct tape, and chaos.
I called it “The Beast,” and somehow that felt both accurate and affectionate.
I kept a case of oil and a spare change of clothes in the back because the console had a tendency to belch thick black sludge onto my legs whenever the engine ran.
I had driving shoes and driving gloves.
Not because I was going anywhere glamorous, but because survival required a certain level of preparation.
It was less Downton Abbey and more downtown Arby’s.
The muffler sagged constantly, and I became very familiar with sliding underneath the van, sometimes in church clothes, to tie it back up with coat hangers.
It was equal parts humiliation and independence, and at twenty, the line between those two things is surprisingly thin.
And yet, I loved it.
As if things weren’t already dramatic enough, my cat Luke escaped.
Luke was the orange cat I had brought with me from home, a barn cat at heart who had been abruptly relocated into caged city living.
He did not adjust quietly.
Luke was possessed.
He batted my eyelashes while I slept, leaving scratches across my face like tiny, personal reminders that he did not consent to this lifestyle change. He was loud, defiant, and endlessly mischievous, the Dennis the Menace of cats.
Feral in every sense of the word, but he was mine.
Because of the heat, I had left the window open, and at some point, Luke made his move.
He launched himself from the second story like a feline Evel Knievel.
To this day, I have no idea how he survived that jump, but survive he did. I was convinced he had nine lives, each one powered by sheer stubbornness.
I went into full search mode. I made posters and taped them all over the apartment complex and in the laundry room.
LOST CAT. PLEASE CALL.
I made a scene.
I cried.
I walked the hallways, knocking on doors, asking anyone who would listen if they had seen him.
Then one night, my phone rang.
A neighbor from the third floor said, “I’ve got your cat.”
Relief hit me all at once, like a tidal wave.
Finally.
Luke was found.
I sprinted up the stairs, already imagining the reunion, picturing myself scooping him into my arms like something out of a heartwarming movie.
I knocked.
The door creaked open.
And there he was.
A man stood in the doorway, his pants pooled around his ankles, grinning like he had just won the lottery.
In his arms, he held Luke high in the air, presenting him like Simba in The Lion King.
I froze.
Luke meowed.
The man giggled.
My brain completely short-circuited.
This was not the reunion I had been rehearsing in my head.
It was part horror film, part comedy sketch, and entirely nightmare fuel.
That was it for me.
Luke was promptly exiled back to my parents’ farm, where he could go back to terrorizing field mice instead of starring in whatever bizarre ritual my neighbor had going on.
Food was its own kind of adventure.
Ramen became a staple.
Hamburger Helper without the hamburger somehow became a thing, though I can confidently say, as a public service announcement, it is not good.
Eating out was as rare as a quiet night without screaming neighbors.
I was lonely sometimes, scared often, and perpetually broke.
But underneath all of that, something steady was happening.
I was growing.
To save gas, I started walking several blocks to the nearest grocery store after work, even at night. This was long before the area was overrun with developers and renovated.
Back then, it was a stretch of abandoned houses and broken sidewalks, the kind of place that felt forgotten more than charming.
I wouldn’t recommend it to my kids now, not for a second.
But at the time, it wasn’t a bold choice; it was the only choice.
When you’re twenty and broke, scrappiness isn’t a personality trait.
It’s survival.
That first year in Indianapolis feels, even now, like a blur of chaos and growth. A string of moments that swung wildly between humiliation and quiet survival.
Most of all, I learned that independence doesn’t arrive all at once.
It isn’t a clean, cinematic break into adulthood.
At twenty, independence wasn’t polished or inspiring.
It was patched together with sheer grit and borrowed courage.
That season wasn’t about thriving.
It was about surviving.
I didn’t have a cell phone, a computer, or cable. My world was smaller and somehow wider at the same time. I filled my time with library books, volunteering, and occasional visits to see my aunt and uncle, piecing together a life one small choice at a time.
Somewhere in the middle of all that, I met my husband, John.
Which, honestly, still feels a little miraculous.
Because looking back, it’s a wonder he ever noticed this grease-covered, ramen-fueled, figuring-it-out-as-I-went version of me at all.
Now, as a parent, it terrifies me to think about my kids one day chasing their own version of independence with as little of a safety net as I had.
I can already feel the tension in it, the instinct to protect wrestling with the reality that I won’t always be able to.
They’ll fail.
They’ll get duped.
They’ll eat questionable dinners and drive junk cars and lie awake at night wondering if they’re doing any of it right.
And I’ll probably lose sleep over it, imagining every worst-case scenario my mind can conjure.
But I also know something now that I didn’t understand then.
Resilience is built in those exact moments.
Grit doesn’t arrive fully formed. It gets stitched together slowly, one misstep at a time, one hard lesson layered on top of another.
And sometimes the only way to truly learn is to live it.
To sit on the floor of your shoe box apartment and cry, then get back up, wipe your face, and keep going anyway.
That’s the strange gift of being twenty in a new city.
You don’t know what you’re doing.
Not really.
But somehow, step by step, you begin to figure it out.
It’s all part of the hard, holy work of growing up.
So when my kids come to me one day, twenty-something and terrified, I hope I remember the panic of an empty cupboard, the sting of getting something wrong, and the quiet ache of being new and unsure in a place that feels too big for you. I hope those memories keep me soft toward their mistakes and remind me not to rush in with easy answers. Because some confidence only comes from stumbling, recovering, and realizing you can handle more than you thought.
Maybe the fumbling is the curriculum.
I hope I let them find their footing in their own time, while staying close enough to catch them if they need me.
A quiet net beneath it all.
Steady, present, and always there, just in case.
Rachel L. Richard is a small-town farm girl turned suburbanite, a delightfully irreverent optimist, Mrs & Mama, floppy dog ear scratcher, lifelong learner, channel surfer, wanderer, believer, occasional creative, out-of-practice musician, cupcake addict, book devourer, and lover of all people.
Leave a Reply