Before I became homeless, I never thought about writing this column. First, I was a full-time caregiver, and any free time was precious for self-care; second, writing a column about the homeless while not being one seemed insulting and patronizing. Seven months ago, life as I knew it underwent a massive tectonic shift from which aftershocks are still registering. So here I am, your own correspondent, writing this under the protection of an old oak tree which has been my shelter, friend, and savior. Let me clarify: this tree has spared me from storm and stress. It has been a silent companion to my erstwhile days and restless nights. Its presence in my life is, quite simply, helping to maintain my sanity.

(As to the events under which I became ‘unhoused,’ it need only be said for now that I was partially, perhaps wholly, responsible for setting them in motion. Mental illness can be a harsh taskmaster.)

Another sanity savior has been the public library, with its reassuringly solid stacks of classic and contemporary literature and readily available computers. Without these tools, my ability to navigate consensus reality would be severely restricted. Their bathrooms are first-rate as well–take heed, ye purveyors of fast food. And in such dire straits, sanctuary of this caliber, with the world’s literature at one’s fingertips, is positively anodyne.

The nights are the worst. Until sleep arrives, to be fractured by bladders and whining engines, one’s isolation from the community is thrown under a klieg light for remorseless, relentless examination. Even those strong in body and mind can find malicious and toxic remembrances of things past overwhelming. This may explain why the longer one is homeless, the more likely one remains so. The Slough of Despond, once entered, is much, much harder to exit, as Bunyan’s Pilgrim witnessed.

So, what do you do when you’re homeless? You work if you have or can get it. You read. You look at your phone, as far too many people do to an obsessive degree. You make dozens of calls to social service agencies to either sign up for, resume or renew service. You eat–free if you can, cheap if you must. You strategize so that your meal times and the need to urinate and defecate can be synchronized with the availability of public bathrooms. (Midnight to 8 am is the worst possible time to have full bladders and bowels.) You drink or use it as affordable and as needed. You walk or ride the bus to appointments with doctors, social workers, therapists, and the intermittent temporary shelters that open and close at a moment’s notice. You drag around your life in backpacks, knapsacks, suitcases, grocery bags, and carts. And you pray: pray for uninterrupted sleep, that the cops will leave you alone tonight, that the Christian won’t become contemptuous of your familiarity, that your EBT and Medi-Cal will be renewed without interruption or need for inter- vention, that you can get to the toilet before you piss or shit your pants. You pray that you won’t get hit crossing the street or have your sole Earthly possessions thrown away by pissed-off citizens or stolen by those even more desperate.