I took time off from school and traveled to Italy when I was 19, living with my extended family members. I must have slept in 30 different houses those months, taken in by people who'd never even met me.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
When I was 19 years old, both of my parents died in the same year; my mom of cancer and my dad in a car accident. Through the next two or three years and a series of bad decisions - all my own, I might add - I ended up literally homeless, before that was even a word. I even slept occasionally under a pier on the Gulf Coast.
When I was a teenager, I went on an organised three-day tour of Rome. It was the worst experience ever. I promised myself that I would never travel like that again, with someone telling you what to see and what not to see.
I went to Yugoslavia to make a movie. People saw me there and asked me to do a movie in Germany. And that led to a movie in Italy. Before I knew it, I was in Europe for most of the next 10 years.
I moved to Milan when I was 15. I was always looking for something; I never really felt like I belonged where I was, so I went to live overseas.
I was allowed to meet my family every two weeks for a half hour.
I remember the first time I went to Italy when I was eighteen, I was in Florence and there were all these eighteen, nineteen, twenty-year-olds gliding past on Vespas with crinkly, long, hair, and I thought I was on the set of a movie. I couldn't believe that this was going on and I hadn't known about it before. I was flabbergasted.
I was 13 when I had my first bout of insomnia. My family was in Reykjavik, Iceland, for the summer, and day never really became night.
I'd been living on the streets of New York, and I was sleeping at my friends' houses, sometimes in the subway.
My parents separated soon after I was born, so I left Helsinki when I was a year old. My mother took me to Paris and then other places throughout Western Europe.
I was in a military family, so by the time I was 13 I'd lived in six different places.