I was never supposed to be homeless.  I went to a small, yet incredibly self-important, liberal arts college.  When you begin this way, you feel insulated from the world.  Life is about learning, the ideas and images that you craft, and the eventual social good that you'll do.  I played at being poor: I walked around without shoes, wore thrifted clothes that never matched, and biked everywhere.  At 19, I was diagnosed with the Superfun Chronic and Possibly Life Shortening Illness that would rear its head from time to time, but even that just seemed more like an annoying addendum to my life than specific reality.  I was young.  I had my middle class parents' middle class health insurance.  It sucked, but was survivable, when they wouldn't come to see me when the SCPLSI got cranky and I had to hang out in the local hospital.

After undergrad, I worked, and was very successful at, a job in arts administration.  I was there for a few years.  Things were always a bit nutty -- staff was constantly turning over, our job duties were incessantly increasing while our salaries were perpetually frozen.  I would receive cryptic notes from one boss scribbled in flowery handwriting and e-mails from another that seemingly countermanded what I had intuited to be the meaning of the initial communiques.  I was constantly urged to do more with less.  As it turns out, one of my bosses was embezzling.  This was, um, not so good for my health, physical or mental.   I decided to move on to grad school.

Grad school rocked.  Finding a job after grad school did not. 

I took an administrative assistant position in the hedge fund industry, which was all I could find, and suprisingly fell in love.  Five years later, after working my ass off, and my way up, I had a pretty sweet deal.  This is when I experienced the full wrath of the SCPLSI.   Hey, nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.

After three hospitalizations and two surgeries, my company was over me.  I wasn't making money for them anymore.  I went into hardcore survivor mode and found another job, even though this is right about the time that IB was beginning to collapse.  I remember interviewing for that job with pneumonia.  The experience was, in a word, awesome.  The job didn't exactly last.

As the cherry on a singular year, my health insurance cancelled me retroactive to the day before my last surgery.   I sold everything I could: clothes, jewelry, books, electronics.  The funny thing is, when I went to DHS for food stamps, you would have never guessed that I hadn't eaten in a day or two.  My clothes were all pristine, and my hair was perfect.  I guess that it's only a big deal to look poor if there's no chance of true poverty touching you.  When, a month and a half later, I had to move into a homeless shelter, none of my friends knew.  The dignity of maintaining appeareances was all that mattered, and it's what eventually got me through.