Thing is, my face didn’t get like this from sitting in a warm office all my life. I’ve had winters where the only thing between me and the cold was a damp sleeping bag and the cardboard I nicked from behind a supermarket. I’ve had mornings where I woke up not to an alarm, but to someone’s boot nudging me because they wanted me gone before the shop opened.
It wasn’t always like that. I had a job once — a good one, steady work. Factory shifts, hands rough but pockets with a bit of weight in them. I had a flat, a partner, a life that looked, from the outside, like I’d figured it out. Then one thing went wrong. Then another. Lost the job. Fell behind on the rent. Argued more than we talked. She left. And when the letters started piling up — red ones, the kind you don’t open because you already know what they say — I just… let it all slide. One day I had a set of keys. The next I didn’t.
You learn things on the street you can’t explain to someone who’s never been there. Like how the concrete holds the cold right through your bones. How a hot cup of tea from a stranger can feel like a handshake from an old friend. How quickly you stop feeling visible — people’s eyes slide right over you like you’re part of the pavement.
I don’t tell you this for pity. I tell you because it happened, and because surviving it changed me. Made me harder in some ways, softer in others. I stopped caring about things like clean trainers or the right haircut. But I started noticing the small kindnesses, the rare moments when someone actually saw me, not just the shape of me.
These lines on my face? They’re not just from age. They’re from nights under bridges, rain dripping through the gaps. They’re from holding onto everything I owned in a battered rucksack and sleeping with one eye open. They’re from learning that you can lose it all and still somehow get up the next day.
I’ve got a place now. Four walls, a bed, a kettle that works on the first try. I don’t take any of it for granted. I don’t smile much for photos — not because I’m miserable, but because a smile, for me, is something you earn.
If you asked me what I’m most proud of, it wouldn’t be surviving homelessness. It would be that I didn’t disappear when I could have. I’m still here. Still standing. And that, as far as I’m concerned, is enough.
