Creating a Future for Yourself from the Street

My last post here inspired me to update my writing site with a post with information pertinent to someone trying to write for money while homeless. Making money writing for an online service was a great a fit for me while homeless and I still make money that way, among other things.

But it was a great fit for me for reasons beyond the fact that I happened to be homeless at the time. It was, and is, a great fit for me due to a personal issue that was a root cause of my homelessness: My chronic health issues.

Long before I became homeless, I completed the online college class Homelessness and Public Policy through SFSU in San Francisco. So, I have not only firsthand experience with homelessness, I also have pertinent education.

Most people who are on the street have intractable personal problems, such as health issues, mental health issues or addiction. These difficult or impossible to resolve issues are always a major contributing factor to the fact that their lives have come unraveled.

My personal opinion is this: If you can treat it with medication and get results, it is a physical health issue. Mental health issues can have social and experiential components, but to the degree that they can be managed with medication, I believe they are at least partly physical health issues.

I also believe that most cases of addiction likely involve undiagnosed underlying health issues. Addiction is often term "self medicating," but the term is an ugly term. It does not get used to mean that people are proactively taking care of themselves via some means other than prescription drugs. Instead, it gets used to mean they are using drugs or alcohol as a crutch and it is viewed in very negative terms.

Making money online works well for me because it means I don't have to be exposed to so many people and their germs, cigarette smoke, etc. It has allowed me to gradually get healthier by allowing me to avoid those factors.

Although I do not have a mental health diagnosis, when I am extremely ill, there are substantial somatopsychic side effects. This is a fancy word for mental health side effects caused by a physical ailment. It is a nice way of saying you are kind of crazy from being sick.

Making my money allowed me to grow gradually physically healthier. This helped make me more mentally and emotionally stable.

This is what allowed me to raise my income and get back into housing. I kind of suspect it has potential to be similarly constructive for people with other physical ailments, including (to my mind) both addiction and any mental health issue that can be treated with medication.

My condition is genetic. There is no cure. But I have grown healthier and more functional. This has helped me create a better life for myself.

Whatever personal issues you have, I hope you also find ways to accommodate them such that you can begin creating a future for yourself, in spite of being imperfect. No one is perfect. Some people just seem to fall more readily into answers that work for them. Just because you have to work to arrange it does not mean it is necessarily "special accommodation" to the degree that the world may want to make you think.

My two sons are both kind of Aspie. Their father is too, though he has never been labeled nor gotten special accommodation.

But he had white male privilege out in the world and he had primary breadwinner privilege in our family and he had "I'm an adult and can do things the way I happen to prefer" as his means for accommodation. So, his life worked and people didn't view him as "special needs" (the new polite way to call some a retard or crip).

People who are Aspie are often bad with faces and don't deal well with changing their clothes constantly. My ex was career army. He wore a uniform, as did all his coworkers. So, he wore the same thing to work everyday because he was required to, not as "special accommodation" for his issues. But it worked for him.

All the uniforms had last names sewn onto them. So, he didn't need to be good with faces to function at work. It wasn't required and he didn't particularly stand out.

So, figure out what kind of work situation will work for you and try to arrange it. Don't let people tell you that personal preferences such as not working around other people is somehow bad or something you should get over. In some jobs, that is just how it works. No big. It is only a big deal if you want something that runs counter to the needs of the job (or you work in a big organization that is inflexible).