My mom kicked me out a couple of weeks before my 18th birthday. I had a job for about six, seven months at a supermarket, and they fired me for being late.
I can't stay in one place for too long.
I spent more time in a van then in my mom's womb.
I wasn't really living anywhere... I was just kinda hanging out. I would live from week to week in places.
In June 2010, I moved out of my apartment and I have been mostly homeless ever since, off and on. I just live in Airbnb apartments and I check in every week in different homes in San Francisco.
I had a lot of survival jobs. One was for the Witty Ditty singing-telegram company. I was in the red-and-white stripes with the straw boater hat and kazoo. Balloons. Even when you're sleeping on a friend's couch, you have to pay some kind of rent.
The way my life's structured, I don't stay in a place for more than a couple months.
After my father died when I was seven and my mother entered into an abusive relationship, I shuffled between houses - staying with friends, families from church, and relying on the kindness of teachers and people throughout my community to help me grow up essentially without parents.
In a lot of ways, I envy someone like Omar Sharif who lived in a hotel for decades.
Any one of us could fall on hard times. Work and housing have the potential to be unstable, especially for those earning low wages or relying on family and friends. It should not be a criminal offence to sleep on the street.
I realize that if I were stable, prudent and static; I'd live in death. Therefore I accept confusion, uncertainty, fear and emotional ups and downs; because that's the price I'm willing to pay for a fluid, perplexed and exciting life.
A lunatic lifestyle on the road doesn't permit you to get too hip to stuff as you should.
I watched my parents lose everything, from a house to birth certificates. We were homeless for about six months, then we stayed in Baltimore, and my parents got jobs.
This life of being a transient human being has gotten to a point when it's very hard to bear.
The precariat consists of a growing proportion of our total society. It is being habituated to accept a life of unstable labour and unstable living. Often they're unable to say what their occupation is, because what they're doing now might be quite different from what they were doing three months ago.
I actually didn't think there was that many people out there who knew what it's like to not really have a home or have that home in one place.
I grew up homeless, you know, lived in and out of U-Haul trucks and, you know, apartment houses, friends.
I've been so transient, I've been on my own since I was 16. I didn't even have my own place until I was 32 years old. I literally lived out of bags for 16-plus years.
