It was 3am in the summer of 2017, and I was lying in a triple bunk bed in a hostel in London, listening to the sounds of the 14 other people in my dormitory snoring. I had been working unpaid internships in the fashion industry in London for the past 18 months and living in £12-a-night hostels. When I couldn’t sleep, I would watch TV on my beaten-up phone to drown out the snores. I was watching Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, an absurdist comedy about a woman who moves to New York after 15 years imprisoned in a doomsday cult’s underground bunker.
Her relentless positivity often inspired me to keep going, but on that particular night, the opposite happened: Kimmy gave me the courage to give up.
