by Joelle Steele

Everyone has a chapter in their life that they wish they could forget. I certainly have a few of those, but one stands out above all the others, and it has had the greatest impact on my everyday life. The year was 1980. I was seriously ill and also suffering from the after-effects of an automobile accident. To make this the perfect trifecta of unforgettable life experiences, I had lost my apartment.

I didn’t think I would be in my car more than one night. I was wrong. I lived in my car for eight weeks on the streets of Los Angeles. It was the most frightening experience of my life. Try getting to any job and be presentable when you don’t even have a bathroom. Try doing it when you are severely ill. I was mugged twice at knifepoint, was showering at the open-air showers at the beach in cold water at 6 a.m., and was also once harassed by a gang who pounded and bounced on my car with me in it. When I tried to park my car in a nicer, safer neighborhood for the night, the police came and asked me to move on. I have never forgotten how it felt to be so alone, so vulnerable, and feeling so abandoned by my parents.

But the greater trauma was the aftermath of living in my car, the years of living in Los Angeles, where I felt abandoned, unwanted, thrown away, cast aside by my father – and to some extent my mother since she always went along with whatever he said or did. I was trapped in the medical and legal turmoil of the automobile accident. And I was trapped in a place where I was lost in a giant crowd, overwhelmed by the size of Los Angeles, the noise, the traffic, the crime, and the constant turnover in the population. I no more than made friends with someone before they moved away to another state.

In time, I became hardened to it all. When a homeless man threatened me with a knife in the stairwell of the building I lived in, I didn’t even flinch. I just held my ground until he backed down. But all I wanted to do was go to sleep and never wake up. I was just so, so very tired of trying to put on a happy face and lead something that resembled a normal life. The only things that made me happy were my cats, my only stable base of friends.

Today, when I think too long or too deeply about my daily life in Los Angeles, I remember the reality of where I’ve been and what it felt like. Was it all bad? No. I made a few friends, I worked in my own business, I made a life for myself despite being in the worst place I could even begin to imagine. Today, I’m extremely grateful that I finally found a way to leave Los Angeles and go to Monterey where I could at least partly recover from all the trauma of living for 17 years in that hell hole. And after eight years in Monterey – which was not a bad place at all – I moved to a great life in Lacey, Washington near my brother, my niece, and all my cousins.

But I will never forget where I’ve been. When I see homeless people or hear people talking about them as if they were all worthless people, I remember that I was also homeless too. There are so many reasons why a person – even an entire family – can become homeless. It can happen to anyone, and it happened to me.