Kara Zordel has worked with homeless people for nearly two decades and has learned that everyone on the streets has their own painful story for why they’re there.

Sometimes it’s a major health problem. Or the breakdown of a marriage. Or the loss of a job. Or the inability to pay rent. Sometimes it’s all of the above, mixed into “one of those atomic life bombs,” as Zordel put it.

Ironically, the longtime CEO of Project Homeless Connect, the city’s one-stop shop for homeless people to receive services, is now experiencing the fallout of one of those atomic life bombs herself.

After three years of struggling with a mysterious neurological condition that causes seizures, tremors and falls — but which myriad doctors have not been able to diagnose — Zordel can no longer perform the job she’s loved for the past seven years.

She’s officially leaving her post next week, though she’s been confined to working from home for the past few months. She and her husband split up after weathering the illness proved too hard on their marriage.

Without her job and its health insurance — and without a partner to support her — Zordel can’t afford the medical care she needs. And she can no longer pay the rent on their lovely home in Bernal Heights.

Zordel said that despite her $120,000 annual salary, she’s in dire financial straits. Even with good health insurance, she’s racked up $30,000 in medical bills on top of the $60,000 in student loans she already owed.

So she’s packing it all in to move, at least for a while, into a cheap rented flat in Alicante, Spain, a beach town that she says has a big expatriate community with access to affordable health care. She plans to write about her work with the homeless and, for the first time in her life, just slow down.

“I’m going to ‘Eat Pray Love’ the s— out of this,” Zordel said in her trademark candid, funny way during an interview at her home on a recent afternoon.

Zordel, 43, said she didn’t even like the 2006 bestseller by Elizabeth Gilbert about traveling the world after a divorce, finding the author self-indulgent and self-centered. But, hey, it worked for Gilbert, so the constantly whirring Zordel says she’ll give it a try.

For somebody like Zordel, who joked she can’t even sit still long enough to use her home’s hot tub, having nothing to fill her days is daunting.

“It’s this really weird thought of, now what?” she said of her suddenly empty calendar.

“I need to be selfish and say, ‘I’m broken.’ I’m not just broken physically right now, I’m broken in every part of my life. I’ve never felt this way before. It’s very uncomfortable.”

Zordel said that despite her discomfort with being so public, she wanted to tell her story because she wants people to understand that everybody — from a homeless person on the streets to a CEO — has value. And anybody’s fortunes can rapidly turn.

“People look at me and would have no idea what’s actually happening in my life,” Zordel said. “The thing I’ve learned from this work is everybody has a story, and everybody has a pain point. Finding compassion can be really difficult when you don’t know the whole story.”

Zordel said she also wanted to share her story in light of the frustrating national conversation about health care. She said too many of the country’s leaders are blaming sick people for their fates rather than figuring out how to pay for their care.

Remember Rep. Mo Brooks, R-Ala., who said in May that there are “people who live good lives” and “who’ve done things the right way” and implied that they should pay less for health insurance? Zordel’s comments about him aren’t printable in a family newspaper, but suffice it to say she vehemently disagrees.

“The culture that is being created of thinking people who are ill have no value, it’s disheartening, to say the least,” she said.

Besides, if anybody’s led a “good life,” it’s Zordel. As a child, she was often homeless — traveling around the country with her father, a conservative Baptist pastor, who moved the family to wherever a congregation needed him, regardless of whether it could pay.

But despite her rough beginnings, Zordel worked her way through Columbia University, where she earned a dual master’s degree in social work and public policy in 2002. She worked at a homeless shelter in the Bronx and then ran an eviction prevention project for New York City.

In 2010, Zordel was recruited to run Project Homeless Connect, a bimonthly day of service for homeless people that’s usually held at Bill Graham Civic Auditorium. Two years later, she launched Every Day Connect, which offered services on a smaller scale out of the nonprofit’s offices on Van Ness Avenue.

She also was instrumental in founding Lava Mae, the nonprofit that provides mobile shower services for the homeless; HandUp, which runs online fundraising campaigns for individual homeless people; and Replate, which facilitates the donation of extra food from events and offices to the needy.

“If she thinks it’s a great idea, she gets behind it 100 percent and works with you to make it happen,” said Doniece Sandoval, founder of Lava Mae. “Losing her is definitely a sad day.”

Zordel tried to brush off her tremors and falls for a long time, until an experience at the office earlier this year convinced her she had to step back. A homeless man came in, saying he’d just been beaten up. Zordel knelt and tried to put bandages on his face.

“I couldn’t — my hands weren’t working,” she said. “That’s when I realized I was actually doing more harm than good. Because he thought I was afraid of him, and he kept being like, ‘I’m not going to hurt you!’”

She felt OK about resigning after finding a replacement: Meghan Freebeck, founder of Simply the Basics, which provides hygiene products to homeless people. Next week, Freebeck will lose the “acting” part of her title to become, simply, CEO.

“These are huge shoes to fill — I’m kind of swimming in them,” Freebeck said of replacing Zordel. “It’s just such a humbling honor that she trusts us to do this, to achieve her vision.”

Zordel’s future is one big question mark, but here’s a certainty: San Francisco is a better place because she was here.

San Francisco Chronicle columnist Heather Knight appears Sundays and Tuesdays. Email: hknight@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @hknightsf