A Case Study: Homelessness

Of all my dreams as a child being homeless and destitute had never entered my mind. During those years and even as I grew into adulthood I had no true concept of what it means and the resources of lack of them that it entails to be homeless. I had seen news documentaries and news reports that mentioned or had the homeless as its primary subject matter but there was no way that I could really personalize a subject matter that was so completely alien and foreign to me.

If I even thought of homelessness, which I basically did not, I always associated that lifestyle to external circumstances that overwhelmed an individual forcing them unwillingly into that position never thinking or even imagining that that particular lifestyle could be a conscious choice taken by anyone. I never really looked down on the homeless basically because I never really gave much thought of them and for that reason ignorance is bliss when one has no personal contact or experience with a particular matter.

On a day that will live in infamy, or at least until my time here on the planet earth has expired, my concept and my understanding of homelessness and the homeless drastically changed when I viewed my current status and surroundings and came to the very unsettling conclusion that I had now formally entered into a new way of life. Using my VA benefits I had build a nice home in a new housing development that is unlike today's standards of housing communities that are very cramped and packed, where there is plenty of yard space and no sense of being hemmed in by allot of housing clutter.

I actively thought of making additions to my home, two key ones being in the purchase of the vacant lot to the right of my home as you faced it and the one directly behind it, both of which joined my property, but before I could put my goals into creative animations I lost my job that was going to be the primary resource that I were to use to fulfill my expansion ambitions. The lost of this job was an untimely blow but not a total throat cutter in and of itself because I still had my dreams and my desires and the willingness to pull myself up out of what should have been a temporal rut, unfortunately I made a critically bad decision when I rented out one of my spare bedrooms to a couple who were in a housing transition.

That which I had conceived of as being a little financial aid in the renting of this room to that couple turned out to be an unwanted and unnecessary added burden to my already stressed chain of thoughts and I even compounded blunder upon blunder when I willfully accepted the encouragements of my male renter to experiment with the use of crack cocaine and this unwitting decision on my part turned out to be the real neck chocker that eventually strangled me out of my house and into the streets of emotional depletion and physical homelessness.

During the early stages of my new lifestyle I felt an odd sense of relief because the financial pressure was off feeling this relief even in the unfamiliar and uncomfortable environment of living in the streets. Somewhere along the way my thoughts became completely consumed with the getting and the using of crack cocaine and even though my hopes and dreams of upward mobility were still intact they had receded to the very submerged state of a flickering candle stubbornly holding on to vital signs under the crushing weigh of my new desire.

For ten years and for one decade I willfully and consciously became one of the homeless placing my desire above and beyond all elements of personal fulfillment and common-sense. I lived lower than the beasts of the fields because even they have enough sense to provide for themselves a place of shelter. I became very well acquainted with the different mindsets and the resources of the homeless. I slept under bridges, in railcars, in cardboard box houses and beside fire barrels beneath the sparkling stars and when hunger came to thrust I eat what I fancifully convinced myself to be unsoiled food taken out of dumpsters. I now had a full understanding and an active personal awareness on the topic of homelessness. I had a credible knowledgebase on a particular lifestyle that I never imagined my personally experiencing much the less daily living.

Even now to this very day I have not gained my acceptable accomplishments and though I am technically not homeless any-longer my shelter has been acquired by first becoming drug free and then by meeting a homeowner whom I have taken to wife. Never in the dreams of my life's pathway had I remotely conceived of being homeless but this I became of a decade and for ten years by my own whims and uncontrolled desires and as I am constantly growing older the outlook for a total recovery seems to be growing dimmer and dimmer as the life span of my time above the soil of the earth is burning grave-long to a lifeless candle which is to say, be very careful of the decisions and the choices that you make because time is very fleeting and a moment goes by very fast.