Gregory Baranski

Ever since I lived in the family’s home I was complaining. They live around 5 kilometres from a bigger city, which takes on foot around 1 hour, and 15 minutes on bike, and 10 with a car. Buses arrive every hour until 5pm and in school-days only. Not only that - the first one starts at 7am, and almost every day in my high school I had to be 7:45 in school in a city that’s 25km away, so the only working solution was to either use bike, or ask parents every day to drive me to the train station. In most cases it was the latter, weather in Poland makes it almost impossible to ride a bike during the winter or autumn.

To get to the classes at 7:45am I had to take a train at 6:22am. Add 10 minutes additional car drive to the train station and we have to leave 6:10am - that’s a 95 minutes commute time. Also having to wake up at 5am was a huge problem to me, I was getting between little to no sleep, I prefer going to sleep rather late, and only then I could code in the late evenings.

For me I think the worst part was about asking my parents every time if they’ll drive me to this bigger city, because only there I could have any decent friends. And it was putting this pressure, if you go for a shorter time than let’s say 4 hours it doesn’t even make sense to drive you there. So I haven’t had opportunity for those casual spontaneous meetings.

So since I started the 11th grade I was looking for solutions for my problem. I was 17yo at that time, but I still was considering options like renting a room or living in a dorm, which wasn’t possible because the distance is not big enough, even though I have to commute 3-4 hours every day.

In November I started living during the week with my grandmother, she’s located in a very good place. But I didn’t feel it, the conditions there were just horrible - you have to shower at gyms because no hot water, and the smell in the air, it was lasting on my clothes.

On a random day in March - me and my brother Stanisław have decided to move out together, before he said that he doesn’t want to move out with me, but with some girl, maybe he came to an realisation that he won’t find anyone in the near future.

I spent a loot of time looking for an apartment, as it paired with war in Ukraine, we had a lot of immigrants.

I moved out of my parents home at the age of 17. My parents lived on the countryside, therefore I was very limited in terms of social meetings and activities. And moving out also taught me responsibility and independence.