Integrating Anger & Appreciation

My conundrum

Photo by Patrick Perkins on Unsplash

In the days coming up to becoming homeless, I launched myself fully into this new chapter with an intentional attitude of appreciation. It was inspired by the semantics of the word. To “appreciate” is for value to increase. To “depreciate” is for value to decrease. The idea is, appreciate what you want more of, and it will grow.

So every day in the week or so coming up to losing my housing, I made it a point to say out loud (or online) what I appreciated. I believe it helped me manifest shelter as well as significant growth on my TikTok, where I was sharing this journey of appreciation and alchemy. People love to see someone making something out of nothing.

But since becoming homeless, my perspective has shifted. Reality hit, as I knew it would. And what I feel now is so much anger. I don’t deserve to be homeless. No one does. I feel anger seeing broken systems and a broken society. I feel failed, and betrayed, and I feel grieved on behalf of those failed even more severely. I can only imagine being out on the streets right now.

I felt so much appreciation when I was texting friends and family asking for support and receiving more than I had asked for. Half of me genuinely expected to end up in a shelter or on the streets by the end of January, so raising several hundred dollars in the face of crisis felt like a windfall by comparison. Even though that’s nothing close to what I would need to get an apartment or anything stable.

I had to ask myself, why have I been told to ask for so little? I mean, I felt overwhelmed with gratitude when my family sent me collectively a couple hundred bucks. Looking back, it wasn’t gratitude. It was a fawn response partnered with the shame and humiliation I felt begging family for crumbs, receiving a meal, yet knowing they could’ve easily given me a kitchen to cook it in.

Why did we (white people) create a society where a family member can become homeless, and instead of intentionally rallying around them to ensure they will make a smooth transition to safe, stable housing, our response is to send money?

When did money become all we have to offer one another?

I’ve needed so much more than money in this transition.

I needed and I still do need so much support in so many ways.

I refer to myself so often as a homeless disabled transgender woman in these posts not because I want to play the victim card, but because it feels like people either forget, or they don’t understand, how much of an impact these parts of my reality have on my day to day experience.

My disability is “invisible”, meaning most people can’t tell it’s there unless they see the 8-inch scar on my side and the vertebrae pressing out of my spine in my lower back. Even then, it’s not immediately evident that I live with significant chronic pain and physical limitations. I can’t work most jobs, and even the $600 I received from family and friends only goes so far without means to provide for myself.

I am homeless, and there is currently an ongoing genocide against trans people across the world. I need emotional support. I need mental health support. I had to stop seeing my therapist last month. I’m lucky to have as much of a stockpile of my meds as I do.

Just as much as my material needs, I need presence, care, and love. I need softness. I need touch. We all need these things.

For me, these needs have gone unmet for so long that they have sublimated into sexual desire so intense it’s almost a distraction from meeting my needs in more direct ways. Specifically, I want to be kissed, slowly, softly, and repeatedly, down the full length of my spine. Not only does my spine hold more trauma than any other part of my body, but I want to be treated by a lover with the amount of care and intention an act like that would take. I have no idea if I would cry, orgasm, or both. Probably both, but what do I know? I’ve always been the one to provide that level of care during sex, not receive it. I digress.

Of course, sex doesn’t fix a lack of connection. That’s not the point here. I learned that the hard way in past relationships. What I truly do need is support—emotional, mental, physical, material, and spiritual. Support in the places where I feel most vulnerable and exposed to the harsh realities of a violent empire in decline, which are namely: my body, mind, and spirit; my financial situation (and therefore my housing situation); and my transition, which, beyond HRT, feels so deeply on hold right now.

I don’t know who to go to for those needs. Self-help culture says I need to take care of myself and love myself. And I do. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t be alive. I have honestly felt ready to die for awhile, so to me, the fact that I choose to live despite my conditions is evidence of my love for myself. Beyond that, not only do I not know who to go to for help, but I am so burnt out (have been since 2020) that looking for help is yet another activity for which I must allocate limited energy and ability.

I need help to come to me. That’s why my spirituality is such a big part of my life—it’s predicated on a faith that the universe will send me what I need, when I need it.

I need help to be ubiquitous to my way of life. That’s why community needs to be such a big part of my life. I can’t do this alone. I’m so, so grateful for the handful of friends who truly have rallied around me and supported me through this experience. I mean the friends who took me grocery shopping when I was stuck in that fuck-ass house with those fuck-ass cunts, who brought me to the train station when I moved out, who offered to let me stay in their homes, who took me out for drinks when I arrived in a new city with everything I own in a suitcase, backpack, and duffel, who were available to talk for hours on end when I had no one else, who stored a box of books I couldn’t bring with me. Those actions mean so much more to me than a ping from Venmo.

I feel as though I am a relic of our society’s not-so-ancient past, an embodied demonstration that we never evolved to live alone. Because I can’t. I need support. Every aspect of my being withers in the absence of community. I have felt withered for years.

We’re taught that community is a feature we can pay to opt out of. That being able to afford isolation is somehow a premium human experience. But I can’t afford to opt out. I don’t have the resources or the ability or the privilege to live a good life on my own.

And attempting to form community with people who can afford to opt out is fraught with risk for someone who can’t afford that. For them, it’s an optional experience more like a hobby. A weekend event. For me, it’s daily survival. For all of us, community could be the reason we thrive, but not if half of us devalue it from the start.

This is why I partially why blocked my family on here. Despite being family, they chose to treat me like a charity case, and not… well, flesh and blood. Made a one-time donation with the equivalent of a “get well soon” note attached, subscribed to my Substack, and then sat back with their popcorn to watch the show. Hello?

I suppose we all have a life, and we can all only give so much. But at that point, I’d rather not call someone family. Because I do appreciate the acquaintances who helped me out. There’s a different level of expectation there, I guess. It feels more acceptable and appreciable to receive one-time support and a kind note from someone I rarely speak to.

Maybe that’s the crux of what has really stung for me through all this. The realization that the family members I was still in contact with (as well as several people I called friends) were, in practice, acquaintances.

This experience has shown me who my real friends are, if nothing else. I don’t think I have any family left anymore, and that hurts. But I guess this is a good time to start over. I have better standards for who I call a friend, let alone family. I have better standards, period.

I just hope that one day soon I will wake up in a life where I am connected. Where I have friends I know I can call at 3am for the silliest or most serious conversation. Where I have people I can call family not out of desperation for familial support (me all of summer 2025), but because that’s how they actually behave. Because more than anything right now, I need connection with people who also acknowledge their need for connection. With people who see connection not as a hobby, not as an option, but as a way of life.

Until then, I will continue to appreciate what I have and the people who do show up for me. And until connection becomes a way of life for us all, I will continue to be angry about the conditions, and the conditioning, that have fractured us apart in the face of oppression.