I've been to objectively more beautiful places, but none of them saved my life...

I seem to have told this story a few times in the last couple days, but I became homeless just after Christmas in 2020. Middle of winter in Chicago. I don't have a car so sleeping in that wasn't an option.

There was a homeless shelter of sorts that didn't have a permanent location, but was rather hosted by a different church every night of the week all across the western suburbs.

Well, covid hit and all the churches started to close their doors one by one.

This mean a lot of sleeping rough for me. I'm from Phoenix and barely had passable winter gear so I'd be wearing every stitch of clothing I owned at once. Standing up every 20/30 minutes to do jumping jacks to try and ward off frostbite.

There was a shed in a Home Depot parking lot that I could close the door on and I'd sleep in there sometimes. Wasn't any warmer but it was a lot more dry.

I'd sleep on the low, slanted roof of this one medical plaza on weekends.

And under way too many pine trees behind businesses.

Then on the last day that the last church was open, and they shut their doors after we all left from sleeping there the night before, I was walking around, with no idea where I was going to go. How I was going to eat. How I was not going to die out here.

I was walking back north towards the part of town I was most familiar with and happened across this building.

That's just a small selection of photos I have from there. At a time when the entire world shut down, it's still below freezing outside, all social services are closed-up or at capacity, and I have nowhere to go and no one to call on, finding a door on that building that I could break-in through was a godsend!

Saved my life.

Little weird living in a liminal space, but got me through the winter alive.

HUGE building! I explored every square inch of it. I had heat, power, water, a shower (cold water only, but gift horses.), microwave, mini fridge, hotplate, TV, I even had fucking WiFi! It was awesome.

Then it wasn't and I became so ravaged by morbid depression, addiction, and hopelessness that I had decided to hang myself in there.

That clearly didn't happen and life is going really well, now! I've been clean for over a year, I'm the house manager for the recovery home I went to after completing the program at the halfway house I went to after rehab -- so things are good.