text: On paper, twenty-five-year-old Maryama Ahmed had done everything right. The political science major graduated from the University of Toronto in fall 2019, becoming the first person in her immediate family to earn a bachelor's degree. Photos from that day show Ahmed cradling a bouquet of apricot roses, her gaze focused on something in the distance—possibly her future. And by all accounts, her future did look good. Over the next few months Ahmed applied for, and got accepted into, graduate school at Memorial University of Newfoundland to further her study in political science. In the meantime, she decided to get a full-time job to pay off her student loans, save for school, and support herself. In February 2020, she was hired for a front-desk position at a downtown Toronto hotel, not too far from her apartment. Her first day was in early March, and Ahmed was excited: her colleagues seemed great, the job paid well, and she had full-time benefits. She was also proud of herself. After growing up in a low-income household, and working a bevy of part-time and contract jobs throughout school, she had found security. A third feeling mixed in: safety. If the path to successful, stable adulthood came with a to-do list, she was checking off every box.
  
  But in the first week of her new job, warning signs already dotted the hotel. After some early scares, the hotel had put a quarantine process in place. Hand sanitizer stations decorated the lobby, halls, every floor. Ahmed remembered thinking that, outside of a hospital, she'd never seen so many installed in one place. The safety measures she'd learned in training had already changed—become more intense, more detailed, more extensive. Within a few days, employees had their hours slashed. "Honestly," Ahmed told her fellow trainees, "we shouldn't be surprised if we get laid off." She just didn't think it would happen so quickly. On March 18, an email from work detonated her inbox, announcing, "Unfortunately, we are shutting down operations." The email listed a tentative reopening date, but Ahmed had a feeling the pandemic would follow an old adage. That is, things in the city would get significantly worse before they got better. She predicted the hotel wouldn't reopen when it planned, and it didn't. The date kept getting pushed back. Ahmed had bills and rent to pay, food to buy, thirty thousand dollars in student debt, and now no income. She watched every update from Prime Minister Trudeau, following every scrap of news, waiting for a relief program. "When the government announced CERB, I thought, 'Oh wow,'" she said, "'This is going to be for me. I lost my job because of COVID-19.' "
  
  Except, it wasn't. To be eligible for CERB, an applicant had to have earned at least five thousand dollars in the previous twelve months. Ahmed hadn't been at her job long enough to meet the threshold. She'd worked a bit over the summer, and had done some tutoring throughout the school year, but it all put her just shy of five thousand dollars, an amount that felt arbitrary to her. Ahmed was dismayed, but she knew the government was also introducing the Canada Emergency Student Benefit, and so held out hope. That would be where she'd fit. But it excluded her, too. Only those who had finished in December 2019 or later were eligible. It included students who were starting in the fall, but not graduate students, like her. She also hadn't accumulated enough hours to qualify for EI. She felt like she was being punished for graduating too early and finding a job too late. She had always done what everyone tells young adults to do if they want a happy, prosperous life, and somehow it still hadn't worked out. "I went to post-secondary. I got the degree. I've never gotten into any trouble," she said. "And so, here I was a productive member of society. I had gotten the job. I was ready to work the forty hours on that job. Then I lost that job because of circumstances that were completely out of my hands—circumstances that nobody saw coming." And nothing existed to catch her.
  
  Ahmed went into survival mode. It's a place, she noted, that she's been in before. Her parents immigrated to Canada from Somalia, and Ahmed grew up in subsidized housing in the Kitchener, Ontario, area. As she put it, "You don't have the luxury to not think about money. It's always in the back of your mind." Once she moved to Toronto for school, she'd always been adamant about ensuring she could sustain herself. To her, the pandemic felt like old worry: worry about paying her bills, worry about paying rent, worry about spending money on any necessity, worry about spending money on something that she didn't really need, worry about spending any money at all. Sometimes, she felt angry and frustrated. She'd done everything right, followed all the advice, and it still felt like she had done nothing right. To make it through, she had to dip into her savings—money that she'd planned to use to pay off her student debt. She had to remind herself that it wasn't her fault; she'd done her due diligence. Her friends and family helped. She used them as a support system whenever she needed to vent. To help keep her mental health intact, she also turned to advocacy organizations, joining Don't Forget Students. The national campaign has worked to bring awareness to people who were in a similar, if not the exact same, boat as Ahmed. It gave her a sense of connection, eased the gnawing sense of helplessness.
  
  In early August, Ahmed shared her story on the organization's Twitter account. She wasn't quite sure what to expect. Ahmed is a self-described open, talkative person, but she rarely used Twitter. She wanted to be honest, and she was. It was the first time she truly took in the difficulty, and trauma, of the previous few months—really, of the past few years; trying to make it through school in Toronto had put her into survival mode, too, more than once. She hadn't shared the full extent of her hustle with her friends and family, hadn't shared all the times she struggled to eat, hadn't told anybody how close to the line she lived in Toronto, what it took to keep up. Doing so now made her feel exposed. But she wanted people to know how bad it could be; she wanted to make a difference. "I don't come from Bill Morneau's world," she wrote, referencing her local member of Parliament (who, incidentally, she said she'd reached out to earlier for help, with no response). "I'm a Black, Muslim woman, born to first-generation immigrants." She continued: "It's been six months since the beginning of Canada's emergency response to COVID-19. I still haven't received any financial support from the federal government." The reaction to her Twitter thread was immediate and overwhelming. People were outraged. Hundreds of them retweeted the post. Many of them called on their own MPs to help.
  
  The experience helped reiterate what motivated her to pursue politics in the first place: every person's responsibility to fight against injustice. Her own experiences as a Black, Muslim woman had shown her that people can face the grind of injustice every day. At the same time, many feasible, non-radical solutions—like universal basic income—existed and could, arguably, be easily implemented. Those solutions could help so many people. "So, there's no excuses, right?" said Ahmed. When we spoke, she told me that she wasn't sure what her dream job would be. She wanted to try a few things: working in government, working for a non-profit, and, sure, one day running for office. She shared that, after Morneau resigned later that month amid the WE Charity controversy, one of her friends held an intervention. "Look," he told her. "You have to run for Morneau's seat." He wouldn't leave her alone about it. "I'm serious," he said. "You've got to do it." She told him, not yet. She was still figuring things out. But the idea of one day shaking up the status quo? Of doing leadership differently? Of setting a tone of compassion and action, not cynicism and apathy? Well, yes, that all sounded like a future she wanted.