Finding Myself on the Streets I Never Walked

Image credits: tauisha, sobo, lukacs, and Hafsah Jasat

By: Mackenzie Bennett

Some places change you without asking permission first. They slip into your life quietly, without warning, until one day you realize you are no longer the person you were before. They settle into the spaces you didn’t know needed filling, rearranging you from the inside out. And then, one day, you look back and see it clearly—the place where you stopped being afraid of your own life.

For a long time, I didn’t believe I had a future I actually wanted. That’s the thing no one tells you about uncertainty—it doesn’t arrive like a dramatic moment of existential dread. It’s quiet. It’s standing in the shower, watching water collect in the drain, wondering if this is all there is. It’s sitting in a classroom, writing words that don’t feel like they belong to you. It’s scrolling job postings at midnight, feeling nothing.

I didn’t like the way my future looked. I kept trying to picture it, and every version felt like something I was stepping into because I had to, not because I wanted to. I kept moving forward because that was what I was supposed to do. I told myself that eventually, something would click into place.

….places do not just hold people. They hold versions of us.

In the meantime, I turned to books. I told myself it was just for comfort, just a way to pass the time, just something to hold onto when everything else felt vague and uncertain. I didn’t think of it as building something, as choosing something. I didn’t realize that I was already standing inside the world I wanted to live in.

And then, I found the Danforth. Or at least, I found a version of it—one that existed through my laptop, through words and assignments and discussions about the kind of future I never let myself believe in. I was studying publishing, editing, writing—things I had always loved but had never allowed myself to claim as my own. And for the first time, I wasn’t just moving toward a future—I was choosing it. I wasn’t just consuming stories—I was shaping them, taking them apart and putting them back together. I was stepping into a world that had always been there, waiting for me to realize it was mine.

I have never lived on the Danforth. I have never rented an apartment off the main street, never rushed through the subway station, never ordered the same coffee from the same café so many times that the barista remembers my name. I do not belong to the Danforth in any tangible way, and yet when I visit, it feels like returning to something that has always been waiting for me.

The thing about distance learning is that it makes you feel like you are constantly arriving late to a life that other people are already living. You read about the city, but you do not walk inside of it. You hear the names of restaurants, coffee shops, and bookstores, but they do not belong to you. You are always just slightly outside of everything. There was a time when I thought this meant I was missing something essential. Since I did not live here, because I did not walk these streets every day, what I was building wasn’t real.

I pictured the students who passed through the Danforth every morning, the ones who belonged to this place in a way I never could. They had a routine, a rhythm: a favourite bench, a shortcut through a back alley, a bookstore where they had stood so many times it had begun to feel like a part of them. They could claim the city as their own. And I thought: Maybe that’s what it means to be real. Maybe that’s what it means to belong.

But here is what I know now: places do not just hold people. They hold versions of us.

The Danforth holds the version of myself that stopped waiting for things to happen to her. It holds the version of myself that realized she didn’t have to just turn to books for comfort—she could stay in that world, shape it, and build something real inside of it. It holds the version of myself that does not dread the future, but is hopeful for it—the version of myself that I want to build a life with. The Danforth is the first place that made me feel like I wasn’t just drifting through my own life. Even from a distance, even without physically standing inside of it, it gave me something to hold onto.

Certainty does not come from the streets we walk. It comes from the choices we make—whether standing on them or far away. You do not have to physically exist inside of something for it to change you. Belonging is not about how many times you have set foot in a place. It is about how much of yourself you have left behind.

The Danforth does not just exist in its streets, its storefronts, and its skyline. It exists in the people who pass through it, in the versions of them that remain, in the hopes they leave behind like fingerprints on a glass window.

And even now, it holds the version of me I was always meant to find.