I have been homeless myself and it was an extremely traumatic experience. My wife contracted sudden pneumonia and died while we, our 3 kids, and 2 dogs lived in a motel. Compounding the misery of the physical realities of homelessness was the depression, anxiety, and shame that goes with being an economic failure in modern America.
Year by year, month by month, people are cornered into smaller and smaller boxes with debt, lack of credit, and worse paying jobs that are harder to get, until eventually one slips though the ever-widening gaps in the social safety net. Once one slips through that net, the probability of finding a way back to financial solvency let alone attaining a previous level of living decreases. Once one acquires a label of "homeless", one also acquires the stigma and stereotypes associated with it. One is essentially ostracized from "regular" society. We were right at that point when a few people refused to look at us as stereotypical homeless people and dismiss us as such.
Organizations and government agencies did offer us some assistance, as they commonly do for homeless persons, but their help was generalized, stingy, and dished out with bonus helpings of judgmentalism. This unhelpful state of affairs is an outgrowth of the perspective that believes in vaguely throwing some pittance of money at a problem and calling it "good enough" - while simultaneously complaining that "giving homeless people money" doesn't help, and that we as a society should be cutting back on welfare programs.
Some people buy into this outlook so much that they will refuse any offers of help made to them in daily life on the grounds that "If you help me now, I'll just become dependent on your help." Meanwhile, the people who control information by owning media companies and bribing government officials, bombard the populace with sounds and pictures designed to entrench this outlook in their minds - keeping themselves in power and letting the lower classes destroy each other while telling each other to give the rich people a break.
Given such a situation, what was a newly-made homeless family to do? This wasn't supposed to happen. We had gone to school, worked hard for years doing all kinds of work, paid our taxes, and it wasn't enough anymore. It looked like the end for us, and for my wife, it was. With the help of others, though, there would be a positive outcome.
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