Just Survive Somehow

When I ran away from home, I knew nothing about how to make my way, homeless or sheltered. I had a few skills, but very few that could easily be converted to money. I didn't know what challenges I would face, and I had no idea how much danger I was in. The future was theoretical but I was forced to live in reality.

I was bullied in grade school, and I quit high school when I was sixteen, a year before I ran. The alienation I'd learned from this fueled my decision to leave home, but did not teach me how to do it. I ran naked, no money, no work, no future, no plans, no rights. I survived by luck. Had my environment been even a little bit more hostile, I should have died. But day after day I found the resolve to forge forward; and even though I never knew where I would lay down to sleep, I understood not waking up was never an option.

My early bouts with homelessness tossed me head first into a chaotic life. I initially escaped my homelessness by relying upon friends to take me in. Bit this was not a permanent solution. It offered a brief respite in the middle of a hurricane. It took years before I found my own way, and in the process I became every kind of victim.

Homelessness, while it falls frequently upon the weak, is not for the weak or the unprepared. There is no manual or guide to prepare a person for what is around every turn. As children, we are taught to look forward to the future because it offers a way out. It offers expectations for a better life if we just work hard enough and make it happen. But my future was anything but utopian. It was bleak and uncertain and nothing I had dreamed of as a child.

I look back on this time with a detached horror. I can hardly relate to that earlier self. When people ask me what it felt like, I never know how to respond. How can I verbalized or communicate emotions and feelings that others only read about. I would pause and search for appropriate words to convey a narrative no one could relate to unless they had walked in my shoes.

By running away from domestic violence and embracing homelessness, I chose the best of an array of nightmarish options. No one should run without a plan. You have to know where you are going, and how you expect to earn money. Where you will live. Who you will trust. How you will cope and draw support. Without that plan, survival will be a roll of dice.

No one excels in homelessness; people just survive.