My story didn’t begin when I became homeless. It began long before that, with a childhood filled with things I didn’t know how to carry.  My mother struggled with alcoholism, and there was abuse in my home. When my parents separated, my father worked incredibly hard to build a home and a life for us. He did everything he could to give us stability.  He was my safe place.  And then, when I was twelve, I lost my best friend after she was hit by a car.

Almost exactly a year later, I lost my father.  Losing him changed something inside of me.  I didn’t know how to grieve. I didn’t know how to process the things I’d already been through, let alone losing the person who had worked so hard to give me a better life.  I started running away. I turned to substances and alcohol. I got into a lot of trouble. By fifteen, I had more criminal charges than I could count, and eventually I spent time in juvenile detention.  When I got out, I couldn’t finish school.  I worked but home continued to be a place of pain and neglect.  Eventually, I saved enough money to leave Florida and came to Indiana to help my sister.

Instead, I ended up homeless.  I remember sitting in that shelter alone and afraid, wondering what had happened to the future my father had once wanted for me.  Then Jessica came into my life.  She told me, “You’re coming to my program.”  I refused.  I had spent so much of my life being hurt that I didn’t trust people anymore. I had built walls around myself because those walls were how I survived.  But Jessica didn’t give up on me.  Slowly, I started letting those walls come down.  And today, I have my own apartment. I have an amazing job. I can take care of myself. I have stability.  But what means the most to me is that I’m finally learning how to live instead of just survive.

For so long, I thought my past had already decided my future.  It hadn’t.  I think about my father often. I wonder what he would think if he could see me now.  I hope that he’d be proud, because I’m still here.

I’m still growing. I’m still healing. I’m still becoming the person I was always supposed to be.  And I want people to understand something about young people experiencing homelessness.  We are not our trauma.  We are not our mistakes.  We are not the worst things that happened to us.  Sometimes all it takes is one person willing to look past the broken parts and believe there’s still something beautiful underneath.  Jessica did that for me.  This program didn’t just give me a roof.  It gave me a chance to build the life my father always wanted me to have.  And today, I can finally say: I survived.