Even now, almost fifteen years later, I still remember the feel of the cheap asphalt beneath us. The coldness, the cracked, pebbly texture of it. The greasy feeling of their jacket, the chill of the night air, the lonely whine of traffic a few streets over. The fear of getting caught—that wild horse bucking in my stomach—and the shame I felt, hot tears cutting down my face like they didn’t care who saw. But most of all I remember the hunger. It was gnawing inside me, driving me inexorably forward. A ceaseless, unending torment, consuming me from within, until all I could think about was getting food, somehow, some way. This wasn’t a stranger, this was a man I hung out with, bought from and sold to; we had moments of connection, where we saw each other as equals, as people. And all I could think of was how the ten bucks I stole from him looked like a hundred dollars did before I found myself there, on my knees in Crack Alley.
Sometimes, it’s less about the choices you made and more about the choices you didn’t have. When it’s do or die time—when it’s survive or starve—morality doesn’t look so clean. It’s not that neat little thing people like to talk about from the safety of their cushy houses. Morality’s simple when you’ve got a fridge full of food, a toilet that flushes, a door that locks, and a bed that doesn’t belong to three other people. It’s easy to be a good person when you’re not staring down hunger, when the world isn’t trying to grind you down, drain you out, and cast you away. From a place of comfort, morality feels black and white. But when your life depends on compromise, it becomes a shade of gray.
It wasn’t just the act of taking from him that stayed with me—not just the memory of rolling him over, or the ten bucks that bought me McDonald’s the next day. It was the questions that followed me, ghosting my every step. Who was I in that moment? A thief? A man trying to survive? Someone who didn’t have a choice, or someone who just didn’t care anymore? Anyone who’s never had to steal just to survive has no idea what that feels like. I do. I know exactly what it’s like.
To roll someone over—unconscious, sprawled out in the dark—and rifle through their pockets, your hands trembling, your stomach rumbling, telling yourself it’s survival. But then, after it’s done, laying on that thin shelter mattress, hearing the muffled coughing of strangers, stomach cramping, body aching, clutching a filthy ten-dollar bill and thinking about what you’re going to buy for lunch tomorrow. And asking yourself the hard questions: Who am I? Who is this person? Am I still the person I thought I was? And if I wasn’t that person now, who was I becoming?
In moments of survival, identity feels slippery—like it’s falling away with every choice you make, every compromise you force yourself to live with. It shifts, moment to moment, with every new memory, every new experience. You wake up every day a different person than you were the day before. But it’s also fragile; hit it with a hard enough shock, and it’ll shatter like glass. Then, somewhere down the line, after clawing your way out of that hole—scraping and stumbling over every jagged edge—you start to piece yourself back together.
Like a shattered mirror, some pieces cut you while others refuse to fit where they once did. You don’t know if you’ll ever see your reflection clearly again—or if you’ll even recognize it when you do. Healing doesn’t come in a single moment of clarity; it’s a slow, painstaking process. You don’t wake up one day and realize you’re whole again. It creeps up on you instead—one small step, then another—until you look back and realize you’re not that person anymore.
But surviving is only the beginning. Once you’ve escaped the worst of it, you find yourself standing on the other side—and you learn that survival alone doesn’t make you whole. The fight doesn’t end then; it intensifies. Because now you’re left to carry the weight of what it took to get there. The choices you made in desperation don’t just disappear—they linger, like cobwebs in the corners of a dark, empty room. You have to reckon with them, piece by jagged piece, and you will cut yourself on the sharp bits.
The hard truth is that survival isn’t the end of the fight; it’s the beginning of a different battle. It’s the battle to reconcile the person you were with the person you are now—and the person you still hope to become. That battle isn’t clean or easy, and it doesn’t come with a road map. But I know what that’s like, too.
That reconciliation is messy, tangled, and far from linear. Homelessness isn’t just about losing a roof over your head; it’s about losing pieces of yourself—pieces you have to fight to reclaim. The trauma of it leaves scars, and those scars don’t fade quickly. The choices I made during that time can’t be ignored, but I’ve learned they don’t have to define me.
Healing isn’t clean. It’s slow, and full of backslides—like learning to walk after years of crawling. Therapy taught me to look at my past self with compassion—not as someone who failed, gave in, or broke under the strain, but as someone who did what they had to do to survive. Whatever else one can say about the choices I made, I’m still here, still alive. Not everybody I met at the shelter can say the same.
What therapy gave me was the ability to let go of the shame and guilt that clung to me like a film of oil on my skin. Most importantly, it taught me that who I am isn’t a fixed point. It’s something I get to define, moment by moment, step by step. Who I want to be didn’t end in Crack Alley. That version of me—the one trembling on the asphalt, clutching ten stolen dollars—isn’t the whole story. It’s just one part of my past. It doesn’t dictate my future.
I remember the silence of those first nights after the shelter, in the tiny duplex shared with two roommates, that I could finally call my home. The space was mine, but it felt unfamiliar, almost foreign—like I didn’t belong there yet. I’d sit alone at my desk, the glow of the computer screen the only light in the room, my breathing the only sound. Those long, solitary nights were consumed by questions that had no easy answers: Was I the thief in the alley, the dealer on the street, the man who did what he had to do to scrape by? Or was I someone else entirely? Someone buried under all of that, waiting to be uncovered? Maybe I was both. Maybe survival isn’t clean-cut, and identity isn’t something you can pin down with certainty. Maybe it’s a blend of the choices we’ve made and the ones we have yet to make.
As I pieced myself back together after, part of the process of healing—of coming to terms with the things I’d done and the person I was—was learning the simple fact that I wasn’t truly alone. The path I’d walked—the desperation, the survival, the struggle to rebuild—isn’t unique. These are experiences that exist in the margins, passed between those of us who’ve scraped by, struggled to survive, and rebuilt ourselves from the ground up. And those are experiences I can speak about. They’re raw, messy, difficult to process, and deeply human. I’ve lived through them. I share them with a small but deeply connected group of others. They’re mine to claim. Mine to hold onto. Mine to discuss.
But here’s where it gets tricky, because I can’t speak for everyone who’s been through this. I can’t pretend my experience is universal, or that I’m qualified to talk about what it’s like for people whose struggles are shaped by things that I’ll never fully understand. My story is mine, shaped by the fact that I’m a straight, cis, white-passing man. The world treated me differently than others, and that’s something I can’t ignore. But it’s not just about the struggles of survival. The system we live in doesn’t just make you fear for your next meal or your next night’s sleep—it makes you invisible. It makes you feel like you don’t even deserve to take up space.
That system makes it hard for everyone on the streets. I saw it in the shelter, in the way people looked at us. There’s a violence all it’s own in how homelessness is treated, but then there’s the deeper violence of a system that crushes certain groups more than others. I don’t have to carry that weight—my skin doesn’t put a target on my back, my gender doesn’t make me fear for my safety. But I’ve fought for survival too, for every breath, for every choice no one can understand.
When I talk about my time in shelters, I don’t pretend it was easy. It wasn’t. But the simple reality is that I’ve never had to worry about the things some people face every day. That doesn’t make my story less real, but it’s also not the whole picture. I know what it’s like to fight just to live another day, but I can’t pretend to know what it’s like to fight with the weight of a system stacked against you for things you cannot change. I only know what it felt like for me, and that’s what I carry.
But what I can do is share my truth. I can’t erase the reality of what I went through, and I won’t pretend it was easier than anyone else’s fight. What I can do is recognize that the system isn’t built to let most of us survive—and for some, it’s even worse. My survival was shaped by my own struggles, but it also came with privileges that others didn’t have. That’s what I carry. And if I have a voice, it’s my responsibility to use it—not just to tell my story, but to make sure others are heard, too.
I’m not going to back off talking about these experiences, and I’m not going to back off talking about how these experiences make me feel. These are the moments that shaped me, that broke me, and that rebuilt me—and no one gets to take that from me. I’ve got more in common with every man who’s had to break into a place at 3 A.M. and steal a bunch of stuff just to pay rent than I do with anyone sitting in a cubicle, complaining about the latest issue with their boss or the cold coffee in their desk drawer. We’re all proletariat, and we all have solidarity in that, but our experiences and perspectives are not the same.
I’ve been at that point of real desperation—where every decision feels like it’s life or death, and where survival is the only thing that matters. I’ve spent my time on the streets, just trying to exist for one more day. Making choices that almost no one else can understand, choices that don’t get a pat on the back or a smile for a job well done. Choices that you can’t list on a resume. Choices dragged out of the dark, from that murky place where survival and morals meet.
At the end of the day, survival is all you’ve got. But survival isn’t the whole story. It’s what you do after—how you deal with what you’ve done, what it does to you, what you make of it—that’s what matters. Every choice, every action, every step you take, it all builds you into who you are. And you can’t pretend that away. You can’t erase it. But there’s something else, too: you have to keep a part of yourself. No matter what, you’ve got to hold onto that core inside of you, the part that’s you—the part that doesn’t get washed away by everything you’ve had to do to survive.
It’s easy to believe that the person you were then is all you’ll ever be. But that’s the fight, isn’t it? The one that really matters: figuring out how to carve out some distance between who you were, who you are, and who you still want to be. All those years ago, lying on that thin shelter mattress, staring at the ten stolen dollars, I wondered who I was. I’ve carried that question with me ever since, and I’ve learned that the answer isn’t simple. I was the person I had to be to survive. But now, I’m the person I choose to be—every moment, every step, every choice. Not everyone makes it out. Some get so buried in the dirt, they never find their way back. But if you’re lucky enough to find a way to stand on your own two feet again—you’re never going to come out clean. Not completely. No one does. But you don’t have to come out filthy, either.
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