Reflection and introspection at the five month mark

I've recently become aware of the fact that I have been homeless for five months now. It's hard to believe, but at the same time, it feels as though those five months have lasted forever.

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Numerous thoughts and emotions have engulfed me lately; it's difficult to tease them apart and put them into words. There are so many things I wish I could convey in a comprehensible manner.

The laughter and the tears, the sorrow and the sublime, the solitude and the solidarity, have all amalgamated into a palpable, tangible being unto itself that I carry around on my shoulders, and which weighs heavily upon my soul.

From the sheer sleep-starved misery of coming down with a fever with nowhere to rest, to the stinging humiliation of being kicked out of public places for hanging out too much, to the fleeting camaraderie of commiserating with fellow street-dwellers, to the sweet respite delivered by a stranger's cigarette, my life now seems like a daytime drama that I am merely observing from afar.

It's nearly impossible to grasp the reality that this is my life now. Every experience I've had is like a cell in a new body; a being that I would not have recognized six months ago.

I worry that I have no idea who I am. I never thought I could be someone who survived the street life this long. After all, my life prior to homelessness consisted of me locking myself away from the outside world as much as was humanly possible. I've never enjoyed being outdoors. I never even learned how to ride a bike, for Christ's sake. Surely someone like me would never make it without privacy, control over my surroundings, or a place to sleep.

Yet here I am, still drawing breath, though my muscles ache, my mind disintegrates, and I am currently feverish and coughing my innards out.
I continue to trudge forlornly over the ever-saturated earth, in the unrelenting wind and rain, wondering why I still insist on being alive.

Around me, life rolls on.
I try to fit in as well as possible to avoid any additional adversity. I strive to avoid negative attention from the impatient businessmen, the bearded hipsters, the shiny suburban parents with shiny young children, and the Subarus inching closer and closer to the crosswalk, upset at being made to wait for me to lumber across the road. I consciously try to wipe the expression of abject misery from my face. Luckily, no one around me seems to care. No one seems to notice my presence at all. Perhaps that is a good thing in my situation, but it sure is devastatingly lonely.

Sometimes I run into random, kind folks who are willing to chat. Many of them are also homeless, and we typically exchange practical information, words of encouragement, or food and goods. Being able to share something with someone else is a much-needed ray of sunlight in the darkness. Those moments are pure in their simple sincerity, and I cherish them.

Five months in, the fact that I am forgetting what it's like to have a home, and have grown so accustomed to and knowledgeable about the streets is greatly disturbing me.

Have I been feral my whole life and just not known it? Was I meant to be a jobless bum all along?

What was formerly an unimaginable lifestyle now almost seems second nature to me. "Street smarts," as they're called, have certainly kept me alive this long.

Ultimately, I wonder:

Will I ever have a "normal" life? Am I meant to?

I find the idea of spending my life slaving away at a job I don't enjoy for a paycheck equally as disturbing as spending my nights surrounded by people fighting and injecting heroin in public.

I recently landed in a mental hospital due to the acute stress of my current situation piled on top of over a decade of unresolved mental health issues. Constant suicidal ideation and anxiety had finally boiled over. My experience with that particular hospital was its own tragedy, but I'll have to explore that another time.

However, in the several days I was in the mental hospital, I learned that I was able to relate quite well to the other patients there; much better than I ever relate to those in the general public. I'm not sure what that says about me, but it's the truth. A bunch of mental patients --plus buckets of pharmaceutical drugs and card games-- turned out to be the most fun I've had in forever.

Unfortunately, nothing else about that stint in the hospital had any real effect on my state of mind.