the Subject of WHERE I STAY gets candid about her life experience and the importan of telling her story by Suzanne Hanney
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s Angelica was working with Rivet radio’s Jesse Betend on recording her 20-year odyssey of “invisible homelessness,” she realized the reason she wanted to tell her story was because she didn’t look like the typical street homeless image that popped up in a Google search: “the person with torn shirt and blanket living under a viaduct in a blizzard, begging for money. “There are individuals who don’t fit those characteristics,” said Angelica, 40, whose last name is being withheld for privacy. “You do have people in a shelter who are clothed well and have a roof over their heads who are homeless. There are people who work, not necessarily begging for money or anything else but still struggling on a day-to-day basis. I wanted to give people a perspective of what homelessness is. It’s easier to put out [pictures] of individuals that’s cracked out or on drugs or eating out of dumpsters than to say it’s an individual who may have an apartment but is literally living paycheck to paycheck or sleeping on someone else’s sofa because they cannot afford $900 rent and food for their child.” Angelica’s mother kicked her out at age 12 after she read Angelica’s diary entry about wanting to crumble up her pills
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and put them in her food -- which would have been fatal. Angelica spent four years in her state’s child welfare system and then a variety of other situations: from couch surfing with a drug queen to serving time for a forged check she did not intentionally pass. Angelica was invisibly homeless, that is, she was “doubled up” with other people and not on the street. But because she was not in a home of her own, she was at the mercy of her hosts, unable to determine her own destiny. What kept her from breaking down as she hurtled through each situation? “My son was a motivation for me. Thinking one day I would see him again. What keeps me above water now is knowing I have a little girl that looks up to me. I am a role model. Everything I am doing she’s watching me. I don’t want her to see me fail, experience the stuff I experienced. I want her to have that mother-daughter bond that I lacked.” In Angelica’s earliest experiences on her own, what kept her going was the desire to prove people wrong, especially her
