The Hidden Dimensions of Homelessness: A Personal Account
I am feeling lost inside right now. I believe one of the hardest parts of homelessness is the havoc it wreaks on your internal compass, your sense of direction. It totally alters your experience of time and space itself.
Time Becomes Fluid
When you don't have a stable place to call home, days blend together in weird ways. Sometimes a single afternoon feels like it stretches on forever while you're trying to figure out where to go next, and other times whole weeks just disappear like they never happened. It's like being stuck in this foggy loop where nothing feels solid or real anymore, and your mind starts playing tricks on you about what's actually going on.
Survival Mode Never Sleeps
Your window for making sometimes life-critical decisions goes from being a matter of weeks and days to minutes and hours, and in some cases even just seconds. Despite knowing that no one will be helped if the panic sets in, it's as if panic and anxiety are riffing off each other like a new-age fusion techno jazz band, building up to this crescendo of overwhelming thoughts that just won't quit. The constant state of hypervigilance becomes your new normal, like you're perpetually waiting for the other shoe to drop. Every shadow feels like a potential threat, every stranger's glance carries hidden meaning, and the simple act of finding a safe place to rest becomes this complex strategic operation that exhausts not just your body, but your very soul.
Straddling Two Realities
It would be decidedly easier to adjust and adapt, except that you still have responsibilities, expectations, and obligations that don't simply vanish because your living situation has imploded. The world keeps spinning, bills keep coming due, and people still expect you to function like everything's normal. You're trying to maintain this facade of stability while juggling the raw survival mode that's become your daily reality.
It's like being caught between two worlds—one where you're supposed to meet deadlines and answer emails, and another where you're calculating how many hours you can stay in a coffee shop before someone notices you haven't ordered anything in a while. The cognitive dissonance of it all is enough to make your head spin, and the longer you are submerged in this multidimensional vortex of intersecting worlds, the quicker you start to lose track of which version of reality you're supposed to be operating in at any given moment.
The Impossible Balance
The mental gymnastics required to maintain these parallel existences drain whatever energy reserves you might have had left. You find yourself making mistakes in both worlds—missing important emails because you were focused on finding a safe place to sleep, or missing out on crucial survival opportunities because you were trying to maintain the illusion of normalcy. It's an impossible balancing act that nobody could sustain indefinitely, yet somehow you're expected to keep juggling these contradictory realities without dropping either ball, and when those balls drop, it becomes a crazy cascading avalanche of ballistic chaos.
The Path Forward Isn't Linear
The very fabric of your being and your understandings of existence begin to fray just a little bit here, and a little bit there, then a tear, and a rip. Just like your experience of life has become multi-dimensional, so has the damage experienced. The attempts and desire to find a fix, a solution, and to begin healing the damage incurred and find a way to the world of normality that lingers in your memories is still strong, but even as you begin to take the steps to journey back you discover that the path isn't linear—it's a maze of false starts and dead ends, each promising salvation but leading instead to another layer of complexity.
The very tools and systems designed to help become yet another dimension to navigate: forms to fill out when you can barely remember your own name, appointments to keep when time has become a fluid concept, requirements to meet when meeting basic needs consumes every ounce of your capacity. And still, that world of normalcy beckons like a mirage, tantalizingly close yet perpetually out of reach, as if the universe itself is playing a cruel game of keep-away with your former life.
Published using
