I remember signing up for free gym memberships just so I could take a shower and brush my teeth somewhere in the morning. It got pretty stressful, because we were living out of our car for a bit, and you have to leave basically your entire life in your car where it’s exposed to all sorts of nasty people. It’s really creepy.

“My daughter and I were living out of our car for a bit.”

Photography by Jonath Mathew

Eventually, the county got me into their system. I started to have a bit more — started to understand the order of things. Ended up being able to stay at a sort of hotel owned by an immigrant Indian family. They took vouchers from the county which I had to run and get for them on a weekly basis, but they were really nice people. They’d feed us sometimes. This was majorly during the summer, so I had my daughter with me a lot. I did go through the Parks and Recreation department and enroll her in summer camps and some other programs that were cheap, but the kids got to go to Great America on Fridays or something like that. I tried to keep her busy while I was out scrambling around, you know?

When I wasn’t working, I would volunteer for the kids’ programs — Junior Giants and stuff that my daughter was involved with. Sometimes they would hire me to build furniture or something and they’d give me a gift card to some store as compensation. You’d think it’d be easier to get a job through the CalWORKs system, right? It’s not. The jobs they’d give you were all super low pay, and they’d need you in-person for a five-minute interview, which of course meant having to take the day off from whatever job you were currently doing. It was ridiculous. And it’s really difficult coordinating all this stuff when you have a kid, because she’s on a schedule, right? She has to be picked up and dropped off from school… If you’re managing your kid’s life, it makes it hard to also manage your own.

My mental state wasn’t the best at the time. I was really disconnected from everything after having to just soldier up and survive. Around this time is when I met this incredible Rabbi through a Jewish Congregation — purely out of circumstance. I’m not really religious. But this Rabbi was great. He brought me to the roof of his synagogue and chatted with me about the world and the bigger picture of things. He’s very community-conscious; he oversees something around 2,200 families. He teaches that you should be kind to everyone, regardless of their faith or situation. It’s not what your label is — it’s what you do with your life.