I was homeless for about 8 months as a teenager (18) after leaving home under contentious conditions with my parents. I ended up hiking up the mountain and finding an off trail and secluded location to pitch a tent and build a fire ring and set up for long term camping. I built a primitive but mostly adequate setup for living. Baths were a nightmare because the river was freezing and rapid, but other than that I got into good routines. Later on I was fortunate enough to have a girlfriend who I could stay with on occasion and get hot showers.

I eventually joined the US military and got out of my hole, and I now have some fond memories of that time thanks to the power of nostalgia. Now it feels like life was a lot simpler then, and it was. I also got in the greatest shape of my life because I had to hike 3 steep miles, often with a heavy backpack, in and out twice a day (sometimes more).

Not yet. I try to remind myself whenever I see a homeless person that I could be in their shoes easily with just a few badly timed unfortunate events.

I was homeless for a few months in my first year of university when I was 18 years old. It was mostly self-inflicted, though I think my life circumstances sort of led up to it.

I had been keen to leave home because I had had a few traumatic things happen in my late teenage years, but also, my mums boyfriend at the time was an islamic dude that was obsessed with virgins and always used to harass me, asking me all the time if I was still a virgin, and some other stuff happened and I just needed to be away from him. So I did my best to get into university, and I managed to get accepted to one and get accepted into a hall of residence. I came from a pretty poor background, my mum, and my grandmother scraped together the money to pay for the first half of the year for my accommodation, and then I was supposed to save my student loan payments that were intended to cover living costs in order to pay the second half of the years accommodation cost for the hall of residence which were due to be paid by August or something. However, as a person who came from a poor background, the concept of saving money was something I hadn't really learned before or ever even tried to do, and also, getting a payment into my bank account was a novelty, i'd never really had money before, so the novelty of having money, combined with my diagnosed but untreated ADHD meant that instead of saving for my accommodation fee's I spent my money on food, alcohol, clothing and other pointless shit. Roll around August, I had no money to pay my accommodation fee's and my family had no money either. So I was evicted. I wasn't really honest with my family about it either, and told them that I had chosen to move out and go flatting with friends, but I actually just had no fixed abode.

As an 18 year old, I was surprisingly unphased by my circumstances, looking back, I was pretty stoic about it, which is surprising given how melodramatic I could be about select things. From about August until December, I basically managed my situation by staying at various friends houses just for a night, sleeping on couches and floors, and also occasionally just staying up late, roaming the city streets through the night, and then sleeping in my university library during the day. Sometimes I'd use the small amount of money I had, to catch a train to the city my family lived to visit, but I didn't want to stay with my mother because I hated her boyfriend. I lost a lot of weight in those months of homelessness due to all the walking and the limited food intake.

After the university term was ended, I went back home just for 6 weeks as most of my friends who i'd try to couch surf at had left town, in that time, I managed to find a flat to actually live in, but it turned out to be a home owned by a dodgy man who was addicted to meth, who was giving quite a few girls cheap rent, for sexual favours, but we didnt all even have our own bedrooms, and I was one that didn't have a bedroom and instead lived in a weird hallway space where people would pass through. I didn't want to go down that road for sex in exchange for rent, so I ended up quickly moving into a "boarding house" which actually turned out to be full of people who had come from either the psychiatric hospital across the road, or they were on probation, having recently been released from prison and their probation office was about a 5 minute walk down the road. Most nights there were violent fights, one of the mental health patients decided to jump off the roof one night feet first, and he broke all the bones in both legs. There was a stabbing one day, and a lot of abuse of drugs, both prescription medications, and other illicit substances. My favourite tenant by far was a man who had been born with hydrocephaly. He was odd, and a bit intellectually impaired but he was endlessly positive and strangely insightful. Another memorable tenant was a man who had schizophrenia, who was non-compliant with his medication, I'd sometimes be just high, from smoking weed, and him and I would have the weirdest, most incomprehensible conversations.. For about a year, I just bounced around different accommodations like that, so not as homeless as I had been when I first got evicted from uni, but I also didn't really have a home. I also failed university, and was unemployed. By the time I was 20 I had an unplanned baby to a guy I met in the first boarding house, who had been there on probation. Eventually when my baby was 1, I was asingle mother with no money to pay rent so the government put me and my baby into social housing. It took 14 years for me to get out of social housing.

Now days, my lifes much different and I think most people would have absolutely no clue of the background I came from as I live a mostly standard life. But then sometimes, when I stop and actually think about where I actually started in life, I sometimes think I shouldn't be so hard on myself. I ended up going back to University, getting multiple degree's, and eventually getting myself onto a six figure salary. I still don't own a home yet, but I'm super close to finally making it. I think my accidental baby will actually be a grown up by the time I actually achieve that goal, but I think that's just sometimes the cards we draw in life. I didn't have a very privileged background to start life at all, and I can definitely see how it is easy for people to fall into poverty, homelessness, unemployment, addiction etc. What people don't really talk much about is how hard it is to break that cycle. It's so hard.