Originally written and published on Facebook on 16 February 2026.
I met my biological mother during COVID, a few years after my adoptive father transitioned, when the grief had begun to settle into something quieter but heavier. My adoptive mother had been gone for years by then. I had not yet built relationships with my children that I could stand on with confidence, and I did not really know either side of my family.
At some point, loneliness stopped being theoretical and started feeling structural. I resolved that I was in the world alone.
I do have friends. I have a small online community of people who seem to care about my well-being, or at least wish me well when I upload a video. I am not destitute. But many days, I still carry the weight of perceived solitude.
People see me. I am just not always sure I am anchored anywhere.
The first episode of my new YouTube series, The Road Ahead, documents the day I had an accident in an RV unit I was moving. That day was heavy and frightening, but I got through it. I was even allowed to continue working, moving two more units and covering roughly 3,700 miles between them. Then today, I learned that my contract with that company is being terminated.
I am lying in a hotel bed in Elkhart, Indiana, preparing to onboard with a different company to do essentially the same work. On paper, I am fine. In reality, my chest still feels heavy and tears keep coming. Not from sadness exactly, and not from guilt either. I cannot quite name them.
Right now, my dominant emotion is fear. Not the loud kind. The quiet, practical kind. The kind that starts asking questions in the dark. What happens when I cannot lie in a hotel room waiting to onboard? What happens when the money runs dry and I can no longer hold collapse at bay?
If driveaway goes away for me, what happens to the YouTube channel I am building on the back of this freedom to move? Do I leave this again and return to a more stable career in IT? Is IT even more stable than this? Are people’s lives stable at all, or is stability just what we call a stretch of time where nothing breaks?
There is an ever-present sense that another shoe is waiting to drop. I am already listening for the thump.
My mind pulls at something my biological mother told me when we met. She said she had been the “bridge over troubled water” for her family, and that by the time she was eighteen, she had nothing left to give the world. She has spent roughly forty years homeless on the streets of South Central Los Angeles. In a strange way, I almost praise her endurance.
What I do not fully understand is how someone gets knocked down by life so many times and still finds the will to stand back up.
I have been homeless a lot. Or maybe displaced is the more accurate word. At this stage, it is hard to tell the difference. I have stayed in veterans’ shelters. I have squatted in Los Angeles’ underground network of slumlords. I have slept in my vehicle in a Target parking lot, eating Bangladeshi food cooked for me by a cherished partner while pretending the circumstances did not matter.
There were also nine months when I lived on the Las Vegas Strip. On paper, that part of my life looked like indulgence. Hotels. Casinos. Buffets. Neon. The appearance of abundance. It did not look like homelessness. It looked like the life of someone who had figured something out. In reality, it was still displacement, just dressed in better lighting. I was not building a home. I was passing time inside comfort.
So what does homeless even mean? Is displaced the softer word? Is unfavorable condition the polite one? I am not sure any of them fully capture the feeling of not having a stable place to land.
My adult life has been a cycle of ascents and crashes that often feel uniquely mine. I know that is not true. I know this is what Frank Sinatra meant when he sang “That’s Life.” But knowing something is universal does not make it lighter when it lands on your shoulders. It still hurts. It still wears you down.
If I examine my own situation, I was not blindsided by this termination, though I cannot say I was prepared for it. But here I am, in a hotel room, preparing to onboard with another company doing the same work. If I pull the lens back further, I am back in driveaway because I was terminated from my IT position in September. Before that, I discovered driveaway in the first place because I had been laid off by the same company a year and a half earlier.
This is not collapse. This is repetition.
I am not confused about how to survive this moment. I know how to pack my things, make the calls, fill out the forms, and move forward. I have done this before. What I am confused about is what it means to keep standing when the pattern does not seem to change.
There is a difference between resilience and durability. Resilience is getting back up. Durability is not having to keep falling in the same way.
I am resilient. I have proven that to myself many times over. What I am still trying to understand is whether surviving over and over again is a strength, or simply the only skill I was given enough chances to learn.
Around 4:30, I walked to Buffalo Wild Wings, my designated comfort meal for this termination. On the way, I listened to “That’s Life.” First Sinatra, then T-Pain’s version from On Top of the Covers. Same song. Different weight. One sounds like resignation dressed in a tuxedo. The other sounds like survival said out loud. Both felt uncomfortably accurate.
I sat alone at a table while the 2026 Winter Games played on one television, the news on another, and a third game on the last. I stared at the screens without really watching them, and my mind drifted.
I began to wonder what kind of quiet hell people carry.
As a man twirled a female ice skater through the air, I wondered if her light bill was paid. I wondered if she had suffered a career-ending injury just eight months ago and was now smiling through it, suspended in someone else’s strength. I wondered what the people in the crowd were carrying home with them after the applause died down.
My thoughts moved closer to home. I thought about friends whose lives I only see in pieces. How do they make it every day? How do they wake up, get dressed, walk the dog in the rain, and keep moving when things are heavy? How do they tolerate the layoff and the unemployed partner? How do they keep showing up when the math does not work yet?
I tell myself they have families. I tell myself they have people. I tell myself they are anchored.
Then I sulk in the idea that I do not.
That is not fully true. It is an emotional truth, not a factual one. I have people who care about me. I have friends. I have voices in my phone who would answer if I called. But there is a difference between being known and being held. There is a difference between having people in your life and feeling like you belong somewhere in it.
When I look at strangers on screens or friends in passing, I am not really envying their lives. I am envying the illusion that someone is standing behind them, steadying their back when they lean forward into the world.
Sometimes what I want is not relief from hardship. It is the quiet certainty that if I fall, I will not fall alone.