It Happened To Me: I Was A Glamorous Fashion Magazine Editor-In-Chief — And Nobody Knew I Was Homeless
In between fancy dinners, hotel parties, and snorting cocaine with $100 bills, I slept in Central Park and washed in public bathrooms. I kept my double life a secret until now.
By: Jasmine Glass
2015. (I still can’t believe this was real life.)
I didn’t have a single fucking dollar. Standing in a bathroom stall with the guy I was crushing on, he asked me for a bill to snort lines with. I froze. Was this it—the moment my dirty little secret slipped out and everything unraveled?
“Where’s your money, girl?!” he shouted playfully over the music blasting through the bar’s speakers. My gut flipped. When I didn’t answer right away, he reached into his pocket, pulled out a thick wad of cash, and peeled off a crisp hundred.
His tone was light, but I knew better. Those kinds of jokes always carried some truth. He’d surely noticed I hadn’t paid for a damn thing since we met weeks earlier at another bar. Not a coffee, not a cab, not the Gatorade the morning after a fabulous night out on his dime.
Where’s your money, girl? A simple enough question. But there was no simple answer.
I shrugged and forced a laugh, took the rolled-up hundy he passed me, and literally bowed out of the conversation toward my chemical escape route. Then (to make sure the topic was dead) I grabbed him by the back of the neck and pulled his lips to mine.
The next morning, I woke up in his bed. I reached over to grab my phone, only to find it lifeless in my hand. Shit!
I’d forgotten to plug it in before passing out. Again.
He’d be up any minute, in and out of the shower in five, then out the door headed to the celebrity-hot-spot restaurant he managed. Crisp button-down, clean shave, effortless swagger trailing behind him like cologne.
When we said our goodbyes, he thought I was headed home to wash up and start my own work day in publishing.
In reality, I didn’t have a home—I didn’t even have a charger.
I was left with a dead phone and no money. Not even a damn metro card. So I walked—platform leather boots and all—toward Central Park. Just me and the hangover starting to claw its way up the back of my skull. Fifty city blocks later, I found a patch of shade under a tree, curled up in the grass, and crashed.
So much for my glamorous editor life.
Starting my own magazine was supposed to be my ticket out of fifteen years of nonstop trauma, now book-ended by bouts of homelessness. I’d poured everything into it, draining the last of my savings (lawsuit settlement money after being hit by a car) to get Glassbook onto international newsstands.
From the outside, the brand was thriving. Esteemed collaborators were coming on board—creatives with portfolios filled with editorial tear sheets from Vogue, i-D, and Harper’s Bazaar. The aesthetic was strong. But behind the glossy cover, I was barely holding it together. The print industry was dying, making it impossible for new titles to find advertisers. Plus, I’d gotten bad advice from more than one immigration lawyer, which left me without a clear path to legally live and work in the United States.
Oh, and I was also navigating a multitude of complex PTSD symptoms. Really earning my Friday the 13th birthdate.
Still, I didn’t want to burden anyone. I smiled, nodded, and tried to fit in with people, even though they seemed to be living in an entirely different reality. I couldn’t go “home” to Canada, because that would mean I had failed, and I couldn’t stomach that, either. My biggest fear was that my mother would turn out to be right when she’d said I’d never amount to anything.
I woke up from my Central Park nap in the grass, neck kinked, tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth, sun way too aggressive. Everything ached. No clue how long I’d been out. An hour? Three? Time didn’t matter. What mattered was figuring out my next move.