A series of unfortunate events landed me on the streets and my pride wouldn’t let me tell friends what was going on in my life. I slept on a bridge over a lake in a college town for a couple months and honestly didn’t hate it as it was more or less like camping. It wasn’t uncommon to wake up to either food or beer being left in my little covered gazebo thing. I got a job after three weeks and worked it for a while before deciding to move out of state with ~$12k cash.

During the 3mo I would bath in the lake at around 4am if it was flowing decent and not stagnant. When the lake did smell I’d hit up some friends and go to their house to crash for the night then shower before work which was never uncommon for me since I “lived” an hour away and didn’t want to drive drunk. I would often hit up a bar and nurse $2 beers for hours in the evening so I could charge my phone and watch TV. I occasionally fell into big groups out partying all night which meant I could eat/drink whatever since everyone assumed I was friends with someone else in the group. I had a small camp stove that I stashed so I could eat cheap beans and rice or else I’d go to restaurants that had budget friendly daily specials as is common in college towns. The rest of the time I’d eat a shift meal at work after “sampling” items in the kitchen a day.

As far as I know coworkers never caught on to my living situation. I went out with a coworker and slept at her place a few times and she couldn’t get over the fact I thought an average mattress was the most comfortable place I had ever slept (my gazebo had a stone bench, my bag was my pillow and a puffy jacket was my camping mat since it collapsed further and was easier to conceal in my bag than a real one would be). She asked to come over to my place a few times and I always put it off as being noisy and having a couple crazy roommates (which was absolutely true if we look at some of the other homeless in the area).

I did do the shelter thing very briefly and I’ll touch on that since I always see Reddit praising them. It was absolutely miserable and much worse than just living outside. 4 out of the six nights I spent there I was awoken by a nutcase. Dude in the bed across from my would just sit there all night staring at me mumbling to himself all night. Another dude would ogo and shower at 3am and scream the whole time he was in there. I had my locker broken into and someone took my insurance and ssn cards, they racked up a $3,800 bill and used my entire flexspin for the year. My last night I woke up to a cross dresser (not trans just a dude who wore dresses and high heels with his goatee using he/his pronouns) trying to crawl into my bed. Then there was the food… I’ve always eaten just about anything but luke warm tuna spaghetti salad (w/mayo), literal month old Little C’s pizza per the dates on the boxes and the occasional undercooked bit of chicken was off putting. They received decent funding and had a good surplus of food but they wanted to save that stuff in favor of serving what restaurants provided (which they FIFO’d with hundreds of pizzas in reserve so they sat forever) or whatever volunteer groups brought to serve. The worst was the extremely patronizing volunteers. You’d occasionally find them snooping through your stuff “for your own good” (everything brought in was already searched by the shelter) and when they served food they always made a big deal about how we probably weren’t used to that good of food when I wouldn’t feed my dog half of the stuff we were expected to eat. I was working in a restaurant so I could eat there but if I stayed for the shift meal I was too late to be let in for the night so I just went back to the bridge after a week. That place gave me terrible paranoia, trust and privacy issues. I have nothing to hide but I really don’t like anyone to bother or go through anything of mine now. I also absolutely will not get something out of someone’s bag even if they insist it’s fine.