There is a difference between growing up and being cut loose.
I didn't step into adulthood—I was pushed into it.
By seventeen, I no longer belonged anywhere.
No room that was mine.
No place that felt safe.
No adult stepping in to soften the landing.
Just winter.
When There Is No One Left to Call
People often imagine homelessness as loud—sirens, chaos, desperation.
What I remember most is how quiet it was.
Quiet decisions.
Quiet fear.
Quiet nights wondering how cold a body can get before it stops waking up.
I learned quickly that survival requires awareness.
Where to sleep.
How to stay unseen.
How to conserve energy.
How to endure discomfort without panic.
No one teaches you these things.
You either learn them, or you don't make it.
Four Months That Changed My Nervous System Forever
A Michigan winter doesn't negotiate.
It doesn't care how old you are or how much you've already endured.
There were nights the cold felt alive—creeping into bones, into breath, into thought. Nights where I wondered if this was how it would end: quietly, unnoticed, frozen into stillness.
I didn't nearly freeze to death because I was reckless.
I nearly froze to death because I was alone.
Those months taught my body lessons it never forgot:
- how to stay alert
- how to sleep lightly
- how to endure discomfort without complaint
- how to keep moving even when hope feels thin
Even now, warmth sometimes feels unfamiliar.
Rest sometimes feels unsafe.
The body remembers what the mind wishes it could forget.
Independence Born From Absence
There was no heroic moment where everything clicked into place.
No sudden strength.
Just a slow realization:
If I wanted to live, I had to rely on myself.
That kind of independence doesn't feel empowering at first.
It feels heavy.
Lonely.
Relentless.
But it changes you.
I stopped expecting rescue.
Stopped waiting for fairness.
Stopped believing someone would step in.
Insted, I learned how to carry myself through impossible situations—one quiet decision at a time.
Why I Still Struggle to Ask for Help
Even now, years later, asking for help feels unnatural.
Dangerous.
Exposing.
That instinct was built here—
in the months where needing help and receiving none became my normal.
Self-reliance kept me alive.
But it also taught me to hide my needs, to downplay my pain, to believe I must earn every ounce of support.
Healing, I've learned, is slowly unlearning that lesson.
What Homelessness Took—and What It Gave
Those months took things from me:
- any illusion of security
- trust in systems meant to protect
- belief that hard work is always met with help
But they also gave me something I still carry:
- grit
- perspective
- compassion for the unseen
- gratitude for small mercies
- a refusal to look away from suffering
I don't romanticize that time.
I survived it.
And survival, when it comes too early, becomes part of who you are.
Standing on the Edge of What Came Next
By the time winter loosened its grip, I was no longer a child in any sense of the word.
I had learned:
- how to endure
- how to move forward without assurance
- how to stand on my own feet, even when they were numb
This wasn't the end of my story.
But it was the end of my childhood.
What came next would be about building something out of nothing—
a life, a future, a man who would one day give his children what he never had.
But that belongs to the chapters ahead.
"Though my father and mother forsake me, the Lord will receive me." — Psalm 27:10