Running Away

When I was in the hospital for a couple of months after my suicidal attempt, all I could think about was becoming homeless.

I hated being where I was, and I felt like there was no hope for me.

I thought life was over, and I felt like the best option would have been homelessness and being forgotten.

Homelessness represented an escape, punishment, and freedom all at the same time.

I felt like I deserved the punishment of homelessness. But it also gave me the fantasy of freedom because I wouldn’t be held accountable for anything.

Nobody would care about and I would just struggle.

I’ve never been homeless, but there was a moment when I could have been.

And then a few weeks ago, I decided to walk away from the safety of my mom’s apartment and try to become homeless.

It didn’t work; instead, I went for a long walk.

I turned back because I didn’t have a place to sleep or anything to eat.

When I got back to my mom’s apartment, it was frustration, defeat, and relief all at the same time.

I was in a lot of pain, especially after the suicide attempt when I was 30. I felt ashamed and like an outcast with my mental health disorder.

I wanted to hide my face and not face reality.

My experience with being homeless is that nobody cares for you, and you have to survive on your own.

What’s remarkable is the dichotomy of it all.

In my mind, I wanted to go homeless, but for today, I solved my business idea for LeadGuardCT.

Then I was able to connect a printer and figure out how to bill my clients.

To be honest, I kind of feel stuck.

I don’t have it all figured out.

I’m still at my mom’s apartment, still navigating the weight of a diagnosis that has followed me since I was 17 years old in California.

Still managing the medications, the side effects, the quiet understanding that my mind can turn on me without warning.

Some days, the pull to disappear is louder than others.

A few weeks ago, it was loud enough that I walked out the door and tried to make the fantasy real.

But today was different.

Today I solved a problem I’d been frozen on for months.

I built a working business system, wrote about things I’d never said out loud, and figured out how to send my first invoice.

Nobody looking at my life from the outside would have predicted that.

The guy who walked away from his mom’s apartment a few weeks ago, wanting to vanish, was the same guy who spent today building something real.

That’s the dichotomy of living with schizoaffective bipolar disorder.

The distance between wanting to disappear and building a future isn’t years of therapy or a dramatic breakthrough.

Sometimes it’s just a Saturday.

Sometimes what brings you back isn’t hope or purpose, it’s hunger and the need for a place to sleep.

And once you’re back, you make coffee, you open the laptop, and you start solving problems because that’s all you know how to do.

I’m still stuck in some ways.

The finances are hard, the road ahead is uncertain, and there are days when stability feels more like exile than recovery.

But I’m here. I built something today. And for now, that has to be enough.