It's not fun, that's for sure. Imagine you've been assaulted a number of times before and you are out walking alone after dark down a street in a bad area of town. For me, being homeless felt an awful lot like that, most of the time. It makes a person very vulnerable to human predators and after a short time most people find this out the hard way.

When a person loses a home they lose a lot of things at once. Safety and security are gone. Possessions are gone because all a person can keep is what can be carried around. Relationships and friends disappear. Faith in family can be lost. Children can be taken away. Jobs may be lost if losing a job wasn't the reason for becoming homeless in the first place. Dignity is stripped away.

There's no regular place to bathe so it's almost impossible to stay as clean as one would usually like.

Most human beings are used to having somewhere to sleep, somewhere to retreat from the world, to have privacy. Homeless people don't have any of those things. Some of them are so sleep deprived they can barely function.

So, for many, homelessness is a life of fear, loss, filth, humiliation and profound exhaustion - not a walk in the park by any means.

You can read more about my experience at What I Learned While Being Homeless.