I was living in north Wales when my life spun out of control. I was 15 when I started using alcohol to treat my social anxiety and negative thoughts. Eventually, the drinking caused me to lose touch with family and friends, and to lose jobs.

I became addicted to drugs. I had my own job and my own place, but I ended up getting into debt with drug dealers and had to flee my home. In hindsight, I was lucky to escape: I learned these dealers had broken into my flat and trashed the place.

It wasn’t safe for me to remain in the area, so I moved to Chester. Because I had no local connection to the city, I wasn’t eligible for housing, so I began to live on the streets. I spent six months in a tent and after that I combined sofa surfing with rough sleeping for the next seven years.

For most of these years, my daily preoccupation was getting high and preparing for another night on the streets. I spent most of the day shoplifting. I had fallen out with my family a long time before and my circle of friends was minuscule. For a long time, I never saw past my next drug use and was resigned to the belief that homelessness was my life.

Eventually, I ended up in Sheffield, living on the floor of a friend from north Wales. There wasn’t a single event that made me think enough was enough. One day I just woke up and decided I didn’t want to live like this any more. I had been using the Cathedral Archer Project in the city over the two years that I had been living at my friend’s and I decided finally to engage with drug dependency services.

Having my own home is amazing, but when I first moved in I couldn’t settle. I had spent so much time on the streets that having my own space was an alien concept to me. I don’t miss being homeless, but there was a freedom to being off the grid; I had no one to answer to, no bills to pay and no responsibilities. Now that I have a full life, I see that freedom for what it was: a very unhappy time in my life. I have been clean for more than three years, I am engaged and my partner has just given birth to triplets. I am operations manager for a social enterprise that is an initiative of Cathedral Archer Project; it provides printing workshops for people who have experienced homelessness. I was recently voted small business personality of the year 2019 by the Star, a local paper.

I wish more people would recognise that not all homeless people are drug addicts with only themselves to blame, but rather people with something to offer to society. Homeless people are just people and they deserve our compassion.

If you are worried about becoming homeless, contact the housing department of your local authority to fill in a homeless application. You can use the gov.uk website to find your local council

For more stories of life after homelessness, read Guardian Cities’ the empty doorway series

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