Oh, it was between September of last year and February of this one. I didn’t talk about it at all, because I didn’t really know how to… But basically, my mother (who is physically disabled and has crazy health issues) and I lived in a tiny dilapidated travel trailer for five months. It was about the size of most people’s bathrooms, with zero privacy or amenities, just a small metal box. It leaked and didn’t have a lock on the door, and one of the windows got busted out a few months into the whole ordeal. We didn’t have anywhere to park it, so we would sneak into rundown campgrounds after hours, and occasionally parked on the side of the road, until we’d get chased off by cops.  There were times one of us didn’t eat anything so the other one could, and times we didn’t have the gas money to get to the food bank, so we just split a peanut butter sandwich every day for a week.

It all happened because we were moving, and figured we’d find an apartment once we got to our destination. The weather was decent then, we had a little money put aside, and my mom originally got the trailer to fix up, so we were like, “Hey, we can hack this for a few weeks, no problem.”  We put our things in storage and went for it.  But unbeknownst to us, in recent years there’s been a huge surge of discrimination against people who get government housing assistance (which we have because my mom and I are disabled, and therefore poor).  No landlord would even consider renting to us. Like, NONE. They didn’t care that we had good references – they would just have a policy of refusing to rent to anyone on government programs, which in the state of California is not technically discrimination. (The more you know!)  So we started looking at other towns and other counties, until we were searching in a hundred mile radius of our original destination. It was the same everywhere, week after week. Our car broke down numerous times, which quickly ate up all the money we had put aside. By Halloween, there was no other word for it but “homeless.”

Throughout the whole ordeal, we were scouring craigslist and local newspapers, going to rental agencies and literally begging people to even consider our applications. We’re competent women; we would always clean up and present ourselves well. We had one good outfit each that we only wore when we met with landlords.  And as soon as the words “housing voucher” passed our lips, it was like lightning flashed outside and the room went cold. I had people yell at me to get out of their offices. I had people laugh directly into my face while shaking their heads and going, “No, sorry, goodness, no.” One of them told me I would never find an available rental, because the people who get into “Section 8 apartments” are like rats, and live there till they die. I vividly remember sitting in the car after that meeting and bawling my eyes out, wondering how so many people could look me in the eye and treat me like I wasn’t even human. That guy had just got done showing us a dank, miserable little one-bedroom that I would never have chosen to live in, given any options, but it was too good for me!  Meanwhile, my mom was going without her vitally needed medications. Mine are pretty important, too, but they’re psychological in nature, and hers aren’t.  She lost over ten pounds.  We went to an urgent care at one point to try and get her prescriptions, and a nurse practitioner accused her of being a drug addict and said she might sell her thyroid and pain medications.  You really have no dignity left when you hit that point.  Like, you can’t even argue anymore, you just go limp and walk away.

Shortly before Christmas, I was looking at online rental listings that were posted directly to the local housing assistance office – there hadn’t been any available in months, but it was a desperate, automatic daily ritual – and saw a new one right as it went up. We called about it and went to see it, and it was a fucking beautiful, spacious three bedroom apartment in a Victorian house. There were hundreds of other applicants (because we were BY NO MEANS the only people suffering because of these crazy policies), but since we were the first and this landlord primarily dealt with housing vouchers, we were his top choice. But our housing voucher is only good for a two bedroom! So then I had to petition the federal government to extend our housing voucher to cover a three bedroom rental.  I kid you not.  There was a whole chain of command involved through the Housing and Urban Development department – first I had to make my case to the head of the local office; then I had to make it to the head of the regional office for Northern California in San Francisco.  Then I had to write a letter explaining the nature of my mother’s disabilities and how no other apartment on God’s green earth could accommodate them quite like this one could (because they didn’t give a fuck about the homelessness thing, either – they would only consider playing ball if I was vaguely insinuating that anything else was violating her rights as an American with disabilities), which was submitted to a committee in Washington D.C. and voted on. Granting my request required waiving the federal guidelines for HUD funding allocations. So… not really great odds, but I had literally no choices in front of me.

I called the local office every single day for a month and a half, looking for news about what they had decided. This was when food was particularly short. My computer died right around Christmas. The entire month of January was the worst of my entire life. I haven’t been a Muslim since I was about twelve, but I was praying at least five times a day. I was hungry most of the time and getting no sleep, and my entire existence was riding on this long shot. Towards the end of January, the landlord of this apartment told us we had one week left to get this straightened out or he was going to give the place to the next applicant in line. And a few days later, out of the misty fucking blue, we got a call from the local housing office saying our request had been approved.  I now live in that beautiful three bedroom apartment. 

But I have nightmares all the time and my PTSD, which I already had from numerous traumas, has basically become an inflexible part of my personality. We lived here for three months with no furniture, just sleeping on air mattresses, because we couldn’t afford to go get our things out of storage.  We just got our stuff at the beginning of May, and I basically had to sell my soul to payday loan places (against my disability checks) to get the money to do that. I’m legitimately scared about how that’s going to pan out.  A lot of my stuff is still in boxes, because I’m afraid to unpack the things that are precious to me. Some part of me can’t believe I’m not going to wake up to someone telling me to get out of here. This is technically a happy ending, in that I do have a roof over my head, but I don’t really have… me, anymore, and I think it’s going to be a long time before I do.

But yes, I was homeless for about five months.