I recently turned 45. I may soon become homeless.
I am not the stereotypical candidate for homelessness: I have a BA in English and a small business as a copywriter. And yet, my situation says something about where we live now — somewhere between a real roof and a virtual one. When your work doesn’t demand a physical address and you’ve lost social contacts and the web of connections they provide, it’s all too easy to find yourself hovering more or less nowhere.
Earlier this year, the trailer park in Northern California where I’d been living for nine years went from generally sketchy to frankly unsafe. A rent hike combined with lax maintenance motivated me to take action.
I frantically looked for a place but turned up nothing. My aunt offered to rent me a room, though her lease would be up before long. She’s steadily advancing up a waiting list for a senior apartment. When she moves, I will be out of a room.
Available housing is so scarce that prices are stratospheric. A studio can run you $975 or more. I applied for subsidized housing at two places and was refused a spot on their years-long waiting lists because my income is too low. On the other hand, because I run my own business and make $500 to $700 a month writing full-time, I am not eligible for unemployment.
There has always been a net under the cliff’s edge for people in dire straits; it’s just that cliff is crumbling fast. What little safety net remains might catch you if you fall hard enough to lose both your home and job. But if you work full-time and get paid poorly for it, there’s little to grab on to.
Turning up no new leads, I dug into “The Job Hunter’s Survival Guide” by Richard Bolles. The self-evaluation exercises seemed like they might be helpful. The same advice comes up repeatedly: Compare notes with friends. Ask 10 family members to help you with career path evaluations. This presented a problem.
There’s no comfortable way to admit this: I don’t have 10 friends and family members. Other than my aunt, my relatives are scattered around the globe. I have nobody to call or visit. In practical terms, I have no friends.
I should say I have no friends IRL, or “in real life,” because I have many virtual friends online. It’s satisfying to post something and get an affirming thumbs-up in reply. But even if upturned thumbs were redeemable for shingles, I’d have trouble putting a roof over my head with them. And a roof without friends and neighbors means depending on those clicks for more than they can provide, like warmth, empathy, and two-way exchange that isn’t sterile.
Years back, I lost a job and my work friendships eventually faded. Not long after that in 2004, I ended up homeless. Once I’d found a place to live, I worked overtime to connect with my community, but was rebuffed.
But I had a laptop. So I would scroll through Facebook, hoping to click and be clicked in return enough times to quell my anxiety. When I shifted to writing full-time, my labor connected me to people around the world, though I myself was essentially nowhere.
In this way, my fingertip grip on yet another ledge has given way, but instead of a straight drop downward, I’m afloat. My work is conducted, delivered, and reimbursed online. As a freelancer, I could be anywhere and sending work to anywhere, for a client even farther out in the anywhere-o-sphere. It’s nice to feel a sense of global connectedness. But if I can’t do enough piecework to pay ever-rising rents, I can’t establish myself somewhere concrete. This, in turn, makes it nearly impossible to access public services, including help finding housing.
Policymakers would probably view my situation as a simple need for affordable housing, but what I need is more complex. It demands that I leave the emotional safety of a life spent alone and grow myself back into a human being apart from my USB port.
That real person, who I have yet to become, needs a community to call her own with friends, neighbors, and social access, not access ports. In the years since I was first without a home, the world has changed in ways that have never really let me back inside.
I can’t be the only one. Surely there are enough of us in similar need to take a stand and repair these societal disconnects, but it’s not a world we can engineer by mouse-click. We may need to go outside, to reclaim the commons for conversation instead of Words With Friends.
Heather Seggel is a freelance writer.
To send a letter to the editor about this article, submit or check out our for how to submit by e-mail or mail.
