Couch Surfing for the Uninitiated

My brief time experiencing homelessness and its effect on my perspective.

Privilege is something that is on most of our minds right now, some of us because we’re realizing just how much we had/have, but many who know from everyday experience how little they have.

When my world started falling apart:

What seemed like random awful occurrences began to coalesce into a pattern in my life and my husband’s as well. I had never seen the pattern quite so closely before, although I remember a time living with my mom when we didn’t have a refrigerator so we used a large ice chest. One of my tasks was constantly keeping the ice filled.

But back then we lived in a house with central heat and air, as long as we could pay the bill. That house had beautiful Mexican tile floors, and a verdant backyard full of pines and sweet gum. We had food. Mom loved to cook. While it felt inauthentic to live in this beautiful house yet not be able to afford a refrigerator that worked, it was as it was.

The terrible awful no good very bad situation:

Fifteen months unemployed for one of us, a career ended abruptly for the other led to a financial catastrophe for my own nuclear family. It coincided with the dissolution of said family, including the loss of both my mother and my daughter, along with the loss of my work community as well as my faith community.