On being homeless
Unless you have been homeless, you probably have an incomplete idea of what homelessness is. At the moment, I am the couchsurfing sort of homelessness: I have a few friends I'm staying with for about a week at a time, and I am not worried about having a place to sleep. I do not own or rent my residence, though, and for some social services, that is what it takes to meet the criteria for being homeless. Being able to sleep indoors is not the same thing as having a home. This week, for example, I am sharing a bedroom with a cat and his litter box, sleeping on a foam pad on the floor. The plan for next week is to sleep in a tent in my boyfriend's back yard.
The way I ended up in this position is that several months ago, a friend was looking for possible roommates. Including myself, three of the four people on this house hunt were transgender and autistic, which means that finding compatible roommates is challenging for all of us. Of course, being trans and autistic makes a lot of other things challenging as well: between our executive dysfunction and Portland's lack of affordable housing, none of us was able to follow through completely on anything. We would find something affordable that was too far away, then find something closer that was too far out of our price range. Time kept passing until the lease ran out on my former apartment and someone else needed to move in.
I was also homeless throughout high school, though. In 8th grade, my family got evicted from our house for being behind on the rent, and my dad asked each of my brothers and I to pack a week's worth of clothes into a cardboard box.
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There is a part in the movie Airplane! where the air traffic controller first says, "I picked the wrong week to quit drinking." He works his way up to, "I picked the wrong week to quit amphetamines."
I have picked the wrong week to quit smoking weed. Memories from years ago bubble up through my mind. They come in fragments, full-blown flashbacks, and everything in between. As I pack a suitcase full of whatever clothes I think I might want in the coming weeks, I am simultaneously in 1997, packing clothes into a cardboard box. I hear my dad yelling at me for various different things. One might think that starting to smoke more weed could help, but I am past a point of no return. At one level, the memories become more of a distraction, as I try to re-process them and integrate them using what I know now that I didn't 20 years ago. If I smoke enough to make it stop altogether, I'm too incapacitated to do anything productive--like my job, or packing up my shit.
This is all necessary and relevant work. It's just unfortunate that it is happening all at once, at an inconvenient time.
I have secured places to stay for the month of September, at least. I am not at all insecure about having a roof over my head, but the thought of how and when I am going to have a permanent home is enough to make me panic. I thought I had it figured out, but I don't. I was getting good at handling adult life, but in this critical way, I am failing.
I have no routines anymore. Every day has to be planned out in advance. I don't have any space that is quite definitely "mine." I am depending on the kindness of my friends for a lot of things, and asking for it is really uncomfortable for me. I always worry that the answer will be "no," because it could make my life really suck if I have to live with "no."
The last time I looked for housing on my own was 2012, on Craigslist. The first place I found was a disaster. I have no idea if I will be walking into another one. I've had enough disasters, thank you.