September tends to be a busy month for me, socially. Birthday, a partner’s birthday, our anniversary…

I tend to forget about October. But Facebook likes to remind people of what they posted this date in other years. Facebook didn’t do that for me, because coming up on a year later I’m still locked out of my Facebook account. I’ll have to look and see if I’ve posted about that yet. But that’s not today’s topic.

Four years ago was a big fancy eclipse. so many people took pictures of the little crescents everywhere. I probably took one myself. And while I use Eclipse Day to reference what happened that day, the eclipse usually isn’t much more than a footnote.

Four years ago today I was already in my second intensive outpatient program for depression. I had a relationship falling apart around me in the middle of my head trying to spiral out of control. So I was somewhere near the middle of twelve weeks of group therapy and checkins and spending five or six hours a day at an outpatient psych program.

After I got home things around me got worse. A housemate who’d taken shrooms and drank a lot, with a violent history and anger problems. I fled the house that night after hiding the hatchet where I hoped he wouldn’t find it. It wasn’t the first time I’d fled a house, but the other time I’d had time to plan. This time wasn’t much more than throwing meds and another set of clothes in a backpack and getting on my bicycle (I’d been carless a couple of years by then) and going.

A stinking pile of drama happened leading to police showing up at the house and me getting an email telling me not to come back. I think it was Tuesday night Wednesday morning. I could come back on Saturday and get my stuff. Most of it went to storage in a friend’s garage. I packed two oversized suitcases I ended up tying to my bike.

For almost two weeks those two bags were all I had. I don’t remember what I had in them other than clothes, toiletries, meds, the notebooks I’d been using in program… But they were too big, and blocked the pedals, so I couldn’t ride it. Which also meant I couldn’t get it onto bus bike racks, and heavy enough I sometimes couldn’t haul it up steps into light rail cars.

I walked everywhere I needed to go. A friend offered me couch space a few times. Another let me stay at her apartment while she was out of town for a weekend. An acquaintance on Facebook sent me hotel gift cards. So I never slept on the streets.

But I did spend a lot of time on them. Sometimes getting to program meant walking 2-3 hours from whatever sleeping space I’d been offered. Several days I only ate once. Some days it was only the granola bars the program offered as snacks. I lost a lot of weight, my blood pressure plummeted.

And I met a number of homeless people. I learned a lot about what their lives were like, even if I was only one of them peripherally. The ones I talked to never treated me like an outsider because I ended up having places to sleep at night. Not all homeless sleep on the streets.

I’d already railed at how we, as a society, treat the homeless. And I was already in the middle of writing Rectifier – The Electric Man about a homeless man abducted, experimented on, and given super powers.

So my research for that book came a little more personally than planned. And I used what I’d experienced, and what caring strangers on the street shared with me of their experiences, in the book. Most of the side characters in the book are very inspired by real people I encountered on the streets of Denver. Many of the things that happened to the homeless characters in the book came from events real people had already lived.

My life changed in so many ways that August/September four years ago. But things like that give depth to our lives, and I think I became a better writer and a better person for it. So while I’m not dwelling in the past, I am taking some time today to appreciate how different my life is, and I am, from four years ago.

How has your life changed?