How Six Months of Homelessness Can Change Your Perception of Reality

A friend of mine embarked on a social experiment that altered the trajectory of his life

Grady looked haggard as he stepped off the plane. His shirt clung to his body in a way that put his muscles in stark relief — but not in a good way. He resembled a street animal that had grown accustomed to fighting for its daily survival. I got the sense that he’d resigned himself to the inevitability of death, but he still intended to battle to the very last.

Young men can hit an intersection point where they discover that all the vitality of youth isn’t enough to fend off frustration and misery. Seeing Grady startled me. At first I felt concern and pity for him. Then I looked down and realized I might as well be looking at a mirror.

At age 26, I was as strong as I’d ever been. I spent most days in the same set of clothes, often going to bed in them to fend off the cold. I’d settled into a habit that was an extension of how I’d grown up. It would be 10 more years before I left that life behind.

I’d been trapped in a prison of my own design.

For most of my adolescence, I slept on a foam mattress on the floor. I used a sleeping bag to fend off the chill of the Wisconsin winter. As a child I crawled into bed in my underwear, and through chattering teeth I’d repeat, “It will warm up soon, it will warm up soon.”

It did warm up, but none too soon.

When Grady saw me, his face broke into a grin and we embraced. We stood in the Jorge Chavez international airport in Lima, Peru. Grady had come for a visit.

“I just started a new job with the air force,” he said.

“What were you doing before that?”

Grady grimaced, “I spent the last six months homeless on the streets of Houston.”

I didn’t know how to respond to this, so I said nothing.

“It was an experiment,” Grady clarified. He shrugged. “I wanted to see…” his voice trailed off.

I nodded as if I understood. At the time, I took him at his word, but over the years I’ve begun to wonder if his tale was rooted in pride rather than fact.

Or maybe neither Grady nor myself could discern reality from fantasy. Quite a bit of my life has passed by while I endured a displaced state of mind. Sometimes I think only death is real.

We gathered up Grady’s things and went about our trip. During stops at bars and at restaurants and in taxis, Grady brought me up to date. I got bits and pieces all out of order, and my mind has put them together like a jigsaw puzzle in the intervening years.

“I used to gather up cigarette butts from ash trays,” Grady said as he added pepper to his eggs. He looked at me and smiled. “There’s always a little bit of tobacco pushed up against the filter. I’d cut it out with a razor blade, and once I’d gathered up enough, I’d roll my own cigarette.”

He laughed at this.

“They tasted really weird, like when you take a shot of every flavor from a counter top soda dispenser at a fast food restaurant. Also, the last bit of tobacco is supercharged with the nicotine that’s been drawn through. I’ve never had a cigarette as potent as the hand-rolled ones I harvested from ashtrays.”

For a moment, the look on his face made me think he wanted one.

Grady’s words gave me pause. Harvesting butts from an ashtray is an activity for when you have more time than money. There’s relief to be found in keeping yourself occupied.

That’s a hard habit to break.

My wife sometimes semi-seriously refers to me as a “hoarder.” It’s true, everywhere I’ve ever lived always becomes overrun with clutter. I don’t see it as clutter though, I see it as projects. My mind overflows with tasks that I would sit down and finish if only I had a moment.

“Don’t throw that cigarette butt away. I can roll a good one from what remains. That has value to me.”

These days, I’m fortunate that I can be paid well for my work. But it’s hard to break the habits of the past. You see a few pennies on the ground and you’re right back in the era of desperation when you’d pause to gather them up.

You become reluctant to discard anything that’s hard won.

Later, we were walking through the city and Grady caught sight of an independent gardener wheeling along a barrow filled with warn and misshapen tools. Men like that are common in Lima. They go from house to house and offer service for change.

There are levels of homelessness. People like that live all around us, but we’ve trained ourselves not to see. We focus on pretty things instead, even if they’re not real.

Homelessness is brutal for children. Even the other homeless have blinded themselves to that level of suffering.

Grady nodded at the man with his chin. “I used to do that too,” he said. “I didn’t panhandle. I never begged for money. But if I saw somebody raking their yard or mowing the lawn, I’d offer to finish the job for a couple bucks. A lot of times I’d get done and they’d want to pay me more than we agreed. But I wouldn’t let them,” he smiled at the memory. He took comfort in the evidence of human decency.

“Many of them said they wanted to help me,” he continued. “But I told them I was only involved in an experiment. My homelessness was only temporary.”

His eyes glittered. Maybe he believed his words. Maybe they were true at the moment he spoke them.

“I found the soup kitchens and safe places to sleep. A piece of cardboard will keep the wet of the Earth off you. I started with $20 in my pocket, and finished with $135. A person can live like that.”

I assessed Grady again, and I assessed myself. We were young men, tall and thin. Our bodies were strong. Our clothing was well used, threadbare in places, and hanging.

My friend Chris said that I always dressed in “rags.” That was his word for my wardrobe, rags.

I remembered the wool shirts that had kept me comfortable on cold winter nights. I felt reluctant to throw them away even when they became riddled with holes. They retained value like discarded cigarette butts.

Whenever I went to visit Chris, he had a bag of clothes for me. “I was going to give these away, but I thought you might want to paw through them.”

I still have some of those shirts hanging in my closet decades later.

Neither Grady, nor I, had ever really been homeless. We had options. We had an escape. Today, Grady is a Lieutenant Colonel. At one point he was in charge of the missile defense for our whole Eastern coast.

Both of us had the means to climb on an airplane and visit friends in foreign countries. On the way, we’d save a few bucks by spending a night or two on a bench or beneath one.

Grady let those nights slide into months. That’s the story he told.

“It’s good to know,” Grady said, “that you can survive if everything goes wrong. Knowing that changes how you approach your life. It takes much of the fear away. That fear can compel you into making poor choices.”

I wonder if it really was an experiment, or if Grady had fallen on hard times and bounced back and didn’t want me to know.

Whatever the case, Grady had managed to excise much of his fear. He took the time to examine the foundations of his life. Thereafter, he did not hesitate to rise.

The strong foundations would hold him. He had fortified his faith in the base.

There is wisdom in working to transform your terror into strength. You can deny your pain and claim that it is pleasure. You can hoard your agony. Then, when you find yourself adrift, you might process the rejected refuse of your life and yet harvest something good.

“Don’t throw that away, it has value to me.”

It’s a strategy that will allow you to survive.

But years later, you might realize that there are only trace amounts of truth in the narratives that once brought comfort. The hardships of others become invisible when we’re occupied in hiding our own hardships from ourselves.

The answers you seek are often hidden in the pain you refuse to see. Sometimes there simply isn’t any value there.

Truth is as fluid as time.

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