Homelessness is a traumatic event. Anyone who’s gone through it knows this is true.

The trauma of being homeless doesn’t magically disappear once you move into a place, either. I’m approaching my tenth month in my apartment and still dealing with the effects of three years of homelessness.

In the past ten months, I’ve experienced the following:

Nightmares

I’ve had awful dreams of being back in the shelter where I stayed for five months when I first arrived in the city. The shelter environment reminded me of being incarcerated, so it’s a miracle I lasted five months there.

The other dreams are about being in the RV again. Sometimes in the dream, I have no memory of getting an apartment. In others, I know we’ve returned to the streets and have to go through the experience all over again. I wake from those in a panic.

Anxiety

Non-stop financial worries are what I’ve lived with every day since we moved into our place. Because Irish hasn’t been able to work while in treatment, the weight of supporting us has been on my shoulders.

I obsess over bank statements and cost-of-living spreadsheets. Any purchases for personal items (makeup or hair products) result in self-inflicted guilt trips that last for days, even though I try to get as many products as possible at Dollar Tree.

Problems Sleeping

I’ve rarely slept through the night because of stress-induced insomnia that usually strikes during the 3 am hour. Once I’m awake, it’s nearly impossible to stop my mind from pulling up every fear and worry I have.

Lately, I’ve been browsing lots of job postings at 4 am.

Inability to Focus

Worrying about losing our housing makes it hard to focus on anything else. My job as a writer and an editor requires me to be able to focus and think clearly.

Focusing has been a huge struggle for weeks. The feedback on the last blog post I wrote for a client clearly showed how distracted I’ve been — I haven’t seen markups like that in my work for a very long time.

Guilt

Just because we got off the street doesn’t mean that those who are still on the street are invisible. Quite the opposite.

Whenever we walk the dog or take public transportation to run our errands, my eye is always drawn to signs of homelessness around the city. The person covering themselves and their belongings under a bright blue tarp. The tent pitched in a public space. The dilapidated RV on a street near an industrial area or close to the train tracks. The person on the bus or MAX carrying every belonging they own in bags or luggage.

When I see the face of the person who’s in those circumstances, I see the shame, hopelessness, anger, numbness, and defeat. I’ve felt those same emotions. When I see them on the faces of others, they wash over me as if I was going through it again.

My gratitude and thankfulness for having a warm, dry home to get out of the elements is always tinged with guilt. Everyone has the right to housing. What the fuck is wrong with this country that it allows people to be sleeping on cold, wet concrete night after night?

Explosive Outbursts

Metaphorically speaking, Irish and I have had some knock-down-drag-out fights since moving into our apartment. Irish is the loser in these fights 95% of the time. It’s like my anger at all the bullshit his addiction has put me through erupts at the most unpredictable times.

Our relationship has taken a serious beating as the responsibility for providing fell onto my shoulders, where it’s been for more than two years now. I resent Irish for being a mess, but then the anger gets turned back on me. I was the one who chose to stay with Irish after I discovered the addiction he’d been hiding from me when we first met.

I beat myself up constantly because I know the nature of freelancing is mercurial, at best. Even though things were going well with my big client up until the Google update happened, I should have planned ahead. Found other clients.

I also should have known what the conditions of the job market were before I found myself in it with everyone else who needs a job and can’t find one. There’s nothing I could have done about that, but at least I would have known what to expect.

Depression

No surprise that I’m depressed. Unlike people who can only imagine what homelessness must be like, I know how bad it is. I also know I can’t go through it again. Being homeless for a second time will end me.

For a while, I managed to find joy in apartment life. This year I checked a bunch of recipes off my Food Bucket List like Mongolian beef, fish tacos, squash casserole, mole sauce, strawberry shortcake, lime chiffon pie, and fudge. I fixed up our home with free or gifted items. I was prudent about the things I did buy (like our bed that I got for an amazing price online and the big TV that we scored at Goodwill).

But it doesn’t take much for depression to show up and cover my world with a grayness that mutes everything good and intensifies everything bad. I feel stupid for ever having been happy about anything because it all seems so meaningless now.

Fighting off the depression blanket is exhausting. You can only do it for so long because it completely wears you out. Eventually, you just say, “I give up. I’m done.”

I reached that point last night.

I know in my head that I need to keep going and fighting the fight. But I honestly don’t feel like doing it anymore. It feels pointless to hope a job will come through in time to keep us from losing our place. Whenever I’ve needed a miracle, I’ve been sorely disappointed.

Instead, I wish I was just gone. Then I wouldn’t have to go through this anymore.

Homelessness Hurts for a Long Time

Even if things had gone well and I’d found a stable job this year, I still would have suffered from many of these symptoms. Maybe my depression wouldn’t have been as bad and perhaps my sleep would have been a little better, but I’d still be dealing with the rest.

Going through homelessness has left me with long-term damage, just as incarceration left its marks on me, too. I have regular Zoom counseling sessions with a counselor I’ve built a good rapport with. But things like this don’t get fixed quickly.

It’s also hard to heal from a traumatic event if you’re afraid you’re going to experience it again.