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By Root 549 0

stubs down to the Department of Social Services to apply for food stamps. Most of the guys who were living at the shelter that were unemployed or working cash jobs on the side were getting food stamps. At the time that I was living in the shelter, they were receiving $152 per month. After going through the rigorous application process, which included a thirty-minute meeting with an individually assigned Social Services caseworker, I was awarded $80 per month. My caseworker explained that the consideration for food stamps—similar to the consideration given with Medicare—was based on number of household members and income level. But even with a metabolism that burned food like a furnace, I could make $80 go a long way, especially after I moved out of the shelter.

Life at the shelter remained lively despite the routine: get up, eat, go to work, check to see if my name was highlighted to work the next day, eat, return to the shelter, eat, socialize, shower, argue with some random guy about something ridiculous, and go to bed. My job at Fast Company offered the happy escape that I needed—to fraternize with so many different cultures and attitudes. As time dragged on, though, evenings at the shelter started to kill my mood. The longer I lived there, the more I realized what a downer it was to live that lifestyle, and I couldn’t wait for the next step in my life, whatever that would be.

Beyond the fact that I was sleeping on a mattress on a floor with more than ninety other men and questioning higher powers as to when I could eat, shower, and wake up in the morning, there were certain things at the shelter that were difficult for me to adjust to. One of those was going to the bathroom. For my first forty-two days in the shelter, I didn’t squat on any one of those toilets. I just couldn’t do it. I could use the urinal, but other business was taken care of right before I entered the shelter or it was held—often, quite uncomfortably—until the next day. It was the only way. It was so humiliating, to me and probably to many of the other fellas, to sit down on a toilet in an open stall without a door to shield us from everybody that came into the bathroom. The one time that we were supposed to be able to sit back and relax, free from the anxieties and realities of our world, was now a communal event, and the mere thought made me very uncomfortable.

But, I suppose, we adjust. And that’s what I was forced to do on day forty-two. Without volunteers to prepare dinner, Robert and a few other shelter inhabitants had whipped up a soon-to-be-infamous concoction of chipped beef with shredded cheese and a side dish of green beans with gravy. It was delicious, no doubt, but the line started forming to use the toilets before everybody had even finished their evening meal. One guy even ate his meal in the bathroom line, knowing that it was going to go right through him. And there I was among them, defaulting on my vow that my cheeks would never touch the stained porcelain lavatories at Crisis Ministries.

We adjust. That’s what we do. We seize the opportunities that are given to us, and we adjust to make up for what is kept from us. In some cases, and certainly in the case of the toilets on my forty-second day at the shelter, we don’t have a choice. We embrace change or we fight it off. In the end, they say, change makes us stronger. Even if we deny the change and retreat back to the norm, the experience has helped us to grow and understand what is on that other side, and it has given us the freedom to make more informed decisions in the future.

But I didn’t retreat. My first experience using the open-stalled facilities at Crisis Ministries wasn’t nearly as bad as I had expected, and it gave me the freedom to make the choice to come back and use those facilities or not. And I did. Every night. It wasn’t as serious of a predicament as I had anticipated, and it definitely wasn’t worth the risk of forming ulcers in my stomach if I continued to wait until the next day.

So is it a stretch for me to compare my bathroom habits to life-changing moments?