It Doesn't Take Much to Wind Up Homeless

Most people think of homelessness in terms of creepy, potentially crazy people reaping the benefits of a lifetime of bad decisions. a few years ago, I was "lucky" enough to peer through a window at the world of chronic homelessness while experiencing some homelessness of my own. Here's what I hope you never find out ...

Quick question: If you came home from work one day and found that your apartment was gone -- like if it got sucked into a portal to hell- where would you go? If you say you'd stay with family, what if they won’t allow you to as they had ulterior motives? If you say you'd crash at a friend's house, what if EVERYONE was told not to help you and you had NO CHOICES? If your answer is you'd go to a hotel, that might be fine for a night or two but then what?

Well, I didn't have an answer when the above happened to me (minus the portal to hell part). After my theater lease had ended, and my credit cards were maxed, my mom wrote the parents of the camp I was teaching notifying them the camp was OVER and I was a drug addict. I was then lied to to attend an intervention (which I did not, as I figured it out) but attended via phone. I agreed to go for 30 days as I was promised a car, my apartment and pets were cared for. But it wasn’t 30 days it was 90 and I escaped to find eviction papers on my door, many of my belongings gone and my pets. It was as simple as that -- for the first time in my life, just a few weeks later, the sun went down, and I had no idea where I was going to sleep. And it was the same for the next night, and the next week, and the next month ...

There are people with worse stories, of course -- many homeless are mentally ill, or they were kicked out -- the point is, the line between where you are now and sleeping on the street much thinner than you think.

In my case, I could've had a better backup plan in place. But as I pointed out in the opening paragraph, very few of us do. I thought one of my many "friends" would help me, as I have helped so many, but they were all told not to! I've had a home your whole life; I guess I took it for granted.