#Jesus didn’t realize I’d go on this rant at 4:45 in the morning

[propaneandrevelations]

I had a taste of homelessness my senior year of high school, but thanks to the grace of my best friend and his wonderful family I was accepted into the household as one of their own, and while I did sleep on the couch it really did feel like home

For backstory, my folks split when I was 9 and the person my mom got with afterwards (I’m talking we met this guy like a week or two after the split) was and still is a serious douchebag. He was medically kicked out of the marine corps a few weeks into boot camp (catastrophic ankle injury) and is still mad about it.

How does he take that out on us? I’m so glad you asked! He treated us like recruits that he didn’t have to actually keep in good health. He started punishing us with “IT sessions,” basically high-intensity calisthenics for anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour. And oh boy he enjoyed it, or at least did a damn good job making us think so. I’ll link a video underneath, my brother who is an actual Marine said that the boot camp IT sessions were actually nowhere near as bad as the ones we went through, and he only got IT’ed twice throughout his entire stay at MCRD San Diego. It was about every month or two that we’d get IT’ed, so yeah my siblings and i were being treated worse than Marine Corps recruits as children. At a certain point I was forced into doing hundreds of push-ups a week for minor infractions (i.e. being a fucking kid). At a certain point he stopped having the courtesy of giving a set number and just said “start pushing.”

Eventually that stopped after much protest from my siblings and I. He decided that an appropriate replacement was what he called grounding, but is more akin to solitary confinement. No human contact whatsoever, no books, devices, nothing. Sit in your room for weeks at a time without being allowed to speak to anyone at all, with nothing to occupy the time than stare at the wall.

My mom was never very present before the split and became even less so afterwards. She called her parenting style laissez-faire, while I call it neglect. She spent all day, every day in her room and almost never came out. We did all the cooking, all the cleaning, taking care of animals, etc. I was raised by my two older brothers and books.

When I was 17, I had enough. I lost my shit at him when he was screaming at my sisters for something stupid. I yelled that I had been waiting for him to leave or die since I met him, and to my surprise, leave he did! One problem: my mother did not take too kindly to that. She spent days laying into me about how horrible I was, about how I never even gave him a chance, all that happy crappy.

I got fed up, packed a bag and left. No idea where I would go or what would happen to me, but anything was better than living there. She took the SIM card out of my phone and sent me on my merry fucking way. I went to the Dairy Queen in the next town over where my best friend worked, and sat there for the rest of his shift until the place closed, went home with him, and lived there on and off for the rest of my senior year.

Eventually I extended the olive branch and moved back in with my mom, offered my forgiveness to the both of them and mended ties. It hurt too much to live with all of that pain and resentment which I’m still fighting, but bottom line I love my mom and she deserves to be forgiven as much as any other person who did terrible things.

Our relationship has improved drastically since then, and even though my stepdad is still around, his behavior has gotten better. I’m not happy that he’s still in our lives but I’ll take my wins where I can get them. Love wins every time, and the best punishment I can deliver is to live well despite how hard he tried to tear me down.

Me: I guess I was technically homeless for awhile as a kid, but we weren't, like, really homeless? After we got evicted from our rental house, we had to stay in a small industrial warehouse that was being rented for storage by some family friends. Like, it sucked, and I wasn't allowed to go outside, and it was a huge secret I had to keep from everyone at school because my parents were terrified I'd be taken away by CPS, and if the cops or property owner had found us we definitely would have been in trouble, but, like. We had a roof over our heads. Does that count as homeless? I dunno.

My friends who have genuinely never been homeless, ever: ....that is not normal, holy shit!?!?!?!?!

Me: ...okay so I guess I was homeless, then.

Anyway, this is a reminder that homelessness encompasses more than just "lives in a box under an overpass." Like, yes, that is definitely a real experience with homelessness, but it isn't the only one. Homelessness can look like couch surfing, living in your car, living illegally in a rented storage unit, living in a tent at a campground, living in a motel room, or any number of other things.

(Also, impostor syndrome around homelessness is just about the weirdest feeling in the world, tbh. The "was I suffering enough to say I was suffering?" thoughts are eternal.)