December 15th, 2010. In the space of four hours, every facet of my life comes flying apart in a brilliant spray of shrapnel. My life is divided into two parts: before that day, and after. It precipitated a full scale meltdown which, in some ways, I have yet to recover from. There were a lot of firsts that came out of this. The first time I had a panic attack. The first time I skipped town with less than 72 hours notice. And so on. For most of the following year, I was homeless. Not living under a bridge, no, but you have to understand that homelessness is a complicated phenomenon, with a lot more gradation and nuance than people who haven’t personally encountered it tend to understand.
Homelessness is a traumatic experience, but also an enlightening one. Before 2011, I had vague, fuzzy fears. What if I never make it? What if I don’t succeed? What will life look like if I fail to actualize myself up Mazlow’s pyramid? Existential fears, without much in the way of concrete details and consequences. Just a formless anxiety about the trajectory of my life. But now, now I know exactly what I’m scared of. The most terrifying words in the English language are it’s happening again. When I got fired last year, I walked home in a foggy daze, absolutely convinced I would be dead by the end of the month. My biggest fear in life is going back to the way I lived in 2011.
In 2011 I encountered real violence for the first time in my life. I encountered food scarcity for the first time in my life. I lived among a culture that totally abdicates any sense of risk management or preparatory foresight. It was an absolutely terrifying way to live. And it could happen again. It could always happen again. When my apartment lease ended before I was able to find a new apartment, and I was forced to put my stuff in storage and couch surf for most of April, I still had not gotten another steady job. The combination of being on a temp contract and sleeping in a borrowed bed started pushing my buttons hard, very hard.
The day I moved in to my new apartment, I was grinning ear to ear almost the entire afternoon. A few hours after we’d finished moving my stuff into the place, when I was alone under a roof I had a legal claim to again, I broke down sobbing. I gave prayers of thanks to my Goddess, and I hugged myself, and I sobbed because it hadn’t happened again. It looked like it was going to, but it didn’t.
In a weird way, it’s a relief to have my fears crystallized in such a specific form. I know exactly what the stakes are when things get rough for me. I know I have survived it before, but I also know it was a close run thing. I have a realistic assessment of my ability to endure and adapt, and that’s a good thing to have. There is no easy way to come by such knowledge. I hope that I will not have to re-up on the experience any time soon.