Edit
I kinda made this post out of spite for the fact the most previous post in this community, whose title I quoted/copied, was getting so many downvotes… At the time I posted this, the previous post had about a 30% downvote rate, and it really, really made me mad.
I am relieved tho to see people in the comments here who have real, actual empathy for their fellow humans. Thank you for contributing here.
It blows my mind how normalized it is to hate on those who are struggling. Especially in 20fucking23 when so many of us now are on the verge of it ourselves. Let’s be better, everyone - to everyone. I beg you.
You know what’s worse than living near the homeless? Being homeless. You’re only a few paychecks away from homelessness yourself.
Maybe address that problem in a more direct way than letting tent cities be the solution? Here’s a crazy idea: actually provide housing. Treat mental illness and substance abuse. Provide training and job assistance. Create an actual social safety net.
I want both. I want to have housing-first approaches for the homeless, and I want homeless people to stop being harassed by police, government, and other people. If society has failed someone to the point of homelessness, they have a right to public spaces for survival.
A few paychecks?
Look at rockSlayer Moneybags over here
Jokes aside: I was homeless for 8 years, it really fucking sucked but I’d say that the worst part wasn’t trying to stay warm when it was below freezing or trying to stay dry in the rain, it was being treated as less than human simply because I was worse off than other people.
Even after I got a job and started building my life back up, when people realized that I was homeless they would immediately become either cold or hostile
It’s so fucked up how badly homeless people are treated in this country. I do what I can in my community, but it’s about time I find my local mutual aid group to be real help. Glad you managed to get back on your feet! If you don’t mind me asking, what was the situation and how did you build back?
Bit of a long story here so I’ll break it into 3 big parts really.
I won’t be using names because of privacy reasons, and I’ll be scant on some details for the same reason.
For timeframe the events here start basically in 2009. Specifics will also be fuzzy from this point, again due to privacy.
⚠️Trigger warnings will appear for each section but include: Drug and alcohol abuse, miscarriage, death, suicide.⚠️
How I became homeless (short version) (Trigger warning: Drug and physical abuse)
I ended becoming homeless at 16 primarily due to my abusive father’s struggles with addiction (I won’t go into more detail here but there’s a lot there including him cooking meth and violence) and due to him we (him, my mom, my brother, my sister, and I) lost our home and became homeless.
In the lead to when we knew we were going to lose our home I asked around to see if I could stay with anyone until I got back on my feet. All my relatives said no (we’ll come back to this later) and unfortunately none of my friends could let me stay for long.
I had a boyfriend and girlfriend at the time but the boyfriend’s family (who didn’t know we were dating) wouldn’t let me stay for an unknown amount of time due to personal reasons. And the girlfriend’s family wouldn’t let a boy move in with them and their daughter.
When everything went down and we lost everything, all of my friend’s families I had asked no longer would let me stay with them as word got out why we lost everything.
So I surfed benches, slept at my highschool, occasionally people would let me stay for a couple days (after the dust settled), and did a lot of “camping” in local parks. I also struggled to stay sober as at this point I had quit drinking only a couple months before I turned 16 (I started at 12).
Not so fun fact: This time span included my first experiences with police brutality, for sleeping on benchs. Getting woken up by a taser isn’t fun.
My first plan for fixing my homelessness falling through (Trigger warning: Miscarriage, alcohol abuse, suicide, and death)
So this is a few years after everything went down. I was still dating the same boyfriend and girlfriend at this time. We had all come to the conclusion that we loved each other and wanted to spend the rest of our lives together. We just all had to properly get our feet under us due to employment being pretty sparse even then locally and rent being really bloody high.
The boyfriend had eventually gotten a good paying job. But was still living with his parents.
The girlfriend was a full time student so working was really hard as well. She was also living
The girlfriend ended up getting pregnant (like 2013) and having a miscarriage (almost 5 months later) which we all took really poorly. Her especially as her parents were incredibly unsupportive.
She started doing bad enough in school there was talk about loosing her financial support.
Her parents then told her she had 30 days to move out as they had sold the house.
She killed herself 21 days later.
I was working at a bar at the time and I fell off the wagon and started drinking again. The boyfriend did as well.
He died a few days later after getting drunk and driving his car into a tree going way over the speed limit.
I fell apart and started drinking profusely.
The plan of living with them has fallen apart.
Eventually getting on my feet. (Trigger warning: abuse of the emotional kind, though I'm very light on details)
After a few months of being an emotional wreck due to the previous section, a relative of mine (my grandma, long story why I no longer consider her family) saw me holding a sign on the side of the road.
She asked if I had a job, I did.
She asked if I had a place to stay, I had a car by this point.
She asked me if I needed a better place to stay. I said yes.
I think the only reason she stopped was because one of her church friends was in the car with her. She’s not typical nice, which will become more apparent.
After getting to her place is when she laid the ground rules. I was not allowed to come up to the house for anything other than an emergency.
I could not use her bathroom, her shower, her washer and dryer, her dishwasher, or her power.
I was not to be seen by her or her neighbors at all.
I was fine with this if it meant I could have a consistent place to park and an address I could put down on applications for better jobs.
Eventually though one of her neighbors saw me bathing in the creek behind my grandma’s house and they walked over to talk to me.
Turns out grandma was telling everyone I was staying in her spare bedroom and not my car on the back of her property behind the barn.
The next day she, “Felt God’s blessing that I could come up [to her house] to use some of the facilities in her home, if I asked first.”
This continued for a couple years before I got a much better paying job and was able to get an apartment for myself after about 6 months of working the new job.
I also quit drinking a few years after that but that’s a tale for another time.
TLDR: A relative (my grandma) let me eventually (after years of being homeless) stay in the back part of her large property (as long as I wasn’t seen by her) and use her address for applications which allowed me to get a better job and back on my feet.
In case no one in your family has said anything, I’m proud of you for coming back from all of that. Not many people are able to come back from that almost entirely by themselves.
After a bout of homelessness myself as a teenager, and then several years later working for a shelter, this is an all too common and tragic story…