B.C. author offers rare insight into life of homelessness, drug addiction in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside

Jeremy Cross details his experience with addiction and homelessness in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside in Finding My Lost Life, published in November.

Jeremy Cross once made a promise to himself, a vow taken during one of a number of “rock bottoms,” that if he ever got out of his situation alive, he would write about it.

Around 70 percent of Finding My Lost Life: The Fall to Addiction & Rise to Recovery was written with a pen and paper, while Cross was incarcerated in Port Coquitlam’s North Fraser Pretrial Centre. The remaining pages were written in May last year, when Cross was released and recovered, and the book, available to purchase at Indigo, Barnes & Noble and Amazon, was published in November.

Finding My Lost Life details Cross’ gruelling seven-year journey battling addiction and homelessness in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. Gritty and unflinchingly honest, the book details the “unimaginable things” witnessed daily within Vancouver’s dark underbelly.

“There’s a lot of incredibly shocking things going on, things that people only see in movies, that people don’t realize is happening here in Vancouver,” he says.

Within the book, Cross describes a life filled with crime and corruption, touching on his own seven overdoses, and 11 arrests. He talks of an incident when he was kidnapped, and held at gunpoint. He recounts sexual abuse, and talks about the death, “so much death,” that is witnessed on the streets of the Downtown Eastside each day.

“My life was in danger all the time. I was freezing most of the time. I had to sleep on SkyTrains and buses, and go around and around the city, just to wake up and find all my things had been stolen,” he said.

“It was constant. Non-stop. I would be up for days, walking around trying to make money, some way, somehow.”

Cross’ journey into addiction began when he moved from Langley to Vancouver, aged 24. He had fallen in love with a man who, unbeknownst to Cross, was a recovering crystal meth addict. When his partner relapsed, Cross wound up barrelling down the trail of self-destruction alongside him.

“I would have done anything for his attention and his affection,” Cross says. Smoking methamphetamine became a daily occurrence, and the two struggled to keep a grasp on their lives outside of the drug use. After losing their jobs, both turned to escorting.

“I was doing things that I never thought I would do,” says Cross.

A second relationship with a “notorious fraudster” led Cross into the world of crime, and his eventual, final arrest in 2023, for dealing with fraudulent identity documents and stolen property.

Cross, who had been a “normal kid” with a “good family system,” had worked diligently in respectable full-time jobs and had had stints living in Mexico and Australia prior to his addictions, says homelessness can happen to anybody, and the misconceptions and stigma surrounding it needs to change.

“I’ve met people that had successful marriages and businesses and houses and then, whether via medical situations or just some bad stroke of luck, they end up here. That’s why I try to tell people not to judge,” he said.

“Addiction doesn’t discriminate, this could happen to anybody. This isn’t a life that anybody chooses.”

Three months on from the book’s publish date, and Cross is reflecting on that final jail sentence that plunged him into a forced sobriety and enabled him to finally battle his addiction for good.

Cross is now a certified peer worker, helping others who are in the position he was once in. He says he feels it’s his way of giving back, and, given his own life experience, he can assist in a way that few other registered therapists and advisors can.

“The people that have been through all these things that sit in front of me, we share mutual trauma, I understand them,” he says.

During a recent book signing at an Indigo store in Langley, where Cross now lives with his mom, crowds had gathered to share their own personal stories with the author. Many of them were mothers, he says, who told him of their own sons they had lost to addiction.

“They said that, by reading my book and being given a front row seat to what that dark side of the world is like, how corrupt, dangerous it is, and the death and the crime, it gave them clarity and an understanding and awareness that they didn’t have before,” he says.

Cross says his book is a cautionary tale, and if he is able to save just one person from enduring the life that he once had, it will prove to be a success.

“My catchphrase is ‘I will recover loudly, so others don’t die quietly.’ For those that are going down that rabbit hole that are stuck, I’m hoping that I can be a guideline for them, help them to be aware of what they are really capable of,” he says.

“Recovery is possible, no matter how far down the rabbit hole you are, no matter how helpless and hopeless and scared you are, it is possible.”