Chapter 5, Part 4
LIVING IN A HOMELESS SHELTER AFTER GRADUATION
I Graduated. Yay me.
I ended up earning my credits and graduating. I don’t really know how important all the other small stuff is from this whole year, so I won’t waste either of our time talking about consistently hating going to school the rest of the time I was there.
LIVING IN A HOMELESS SHELTER AFTER GRADUATION
My uncle kicked me out for not wanting to follow his rules after high school. I had nowhere to go because I had no other family anywhere near there. I was dropped off at a homeless shelter by my very short relationship ex-girlfriend’s mom’s friend who was actually just trying to get rid of me because the mom didn’t want me talking to her daughter. This was a normal habit for people as you’ll see later.
Back to the story. I didn’t like the shelter, but who really would?
At the time, I was not religious by any means. It was a Christian shelter in Anderson, Indiana. You were forced to attend mass daily and had to be in by 7 PM every night. If you didn’t have a job, you had to help them with their flea market type of business that accepted donations.
I won’t lie, the donated food was delicious. The meals were actually good. I couldn’t handle that for long though. I kept getting into trouble for skipping mass. I wasn’t religious then so what did they expect. And coming in by 7 PM? I was 18…
WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT
One thing that I really learned from experience is that people who actually live in these shelters aren’t lazy people or drug addicts…they are people that life just shit on.
There were talented, intelligent people in there. I got up one night because the lights turned off at 10 PM and I couldn’t sleep. I discovered an upstairs room where all the guys who couldn’t sleep hung out and played cards and just talked about life.
That night and the rest of the following nights I stayed there, I had full conversations with all of the guys that life had just beat up. These guys had no options and honestly didn’t really look like drug addicts or anything. They just chose the wrong path early in life and didn’t correct it in time.
After a few weeks, the guys at the homeless shelter had convinced me from all of the late-night talks how important some things are. Like how being young and not appreciating the things and people you have is one of the things that can slowly but surely bring you down in life.
HARD-HEADED AS I WAS AT 18, AFTER A FEW WEEKS, THE CHRISTIAN SHELTER WAS KICKING ME OUT FOR NOT ATTENDING DAILY MASS AND FOLLOWING THE RULES.
I got ahold of my uncle and told him I’d follow his rules because I literally had nowhere to go and $0 to my name.
They let me move back in and to help me get motivated to get a job, they got me my first car for $500 – a 1994 Pontiac Sunbird with 190,000 miles on it.
Then I got a job at Meijer Grocery Store and got fired the first day. I worked at Taco Bell and got fired from there. Then, I got a job at Menards in shipping and receiving and worked there for like 2 months while I was constantly getting in trouble around Anderson, IN.