Good evening ma'am from New York City. Interesting post. Very interesting. Been homeless twice. First after hitting bottom from drugs and alcohol. The second, after
the emergence of the schizophrenia whose massive symptoms I had been attempting to medicate with drugs and alcohol...for decades.

I get pseudo flashbacks...low moments from those days. Waking just in time to avoid five teens with their dicks out about to rain on my parade and having to negotiate the minefield that was their rage as it seems I deprived them of their right to subjugate. My mother calling the shelter I was in to chew me out as to my dragging the family name in the mud by being homeless and not suffering without having to air the family's dirty laundry which I guess...was me. Picking through the dumpster to find the bread that had the least bleach for the restaurateur didn't want those bums going through the garbage so he soaked each garbage load in bleach to deter us.
Despite the four years I spent in homeless shelters after time dodging all manner of harm on the streets...the true horror came not from the strangers I encountered...but from the family I was born into. After all betrayal, by its very nature, cannot be delivered to my front door by strangers.
What freaks me out though as I read your post is that I still dream of some of the shelters I 'visited'....and have done so every year, sometimes every month since I left in 1997. Almost always when I find myself lollygagging around some step I need to take but will not. And as I find myself resisting the urge to write about those times...my resistance to the idea makes it clear I need to revisit that time again. Kinda like lancing the space a boil may want to grow in to make said space inhospitable for its growth. Thank you for taking me back to a place I have been to. Many life lessons learned from that place. Maybe... there are a couple left there for me to excavate too.Thank you. And Cheers!

all pics courtesy of pixabay as usual...