Forgive me, Representative Omar. I'm not sure what your Tweet about "welfare queens" meant, so please accept this gentle joke when I tell you that it's all about the budgeting.

$177/month storage unit for the things I had to take out of my last apartment.  All of those things have spent more time in storage than in housing; I have now paid for a total of 4 years of storage, and am now in my 7^th total year of homelessness since 2011.

$100/month for smartphone.  I went without a smartphone for a while, but I can’t get email or other functions without it, so working, work-search and housing-search were difficult.

$15/month for the flip phone that I have kept and which I take with me when I want to leave the smartphone in my high-school-sized locker at the Pine Street Inn.  It’s probably not safe for me to walk around without a phone. 

$40-60/month for laundry

$85/month for an all-month bus/train ticket

$85/month for the gym membership, which I finally signed up for in September 2017, after 3 months of being on the waitlist for a locker at the Pine Street Inn.  The $85/month is for the membership and a small locker.  By the time that I signed up for the gym membership, my left knee was distended and both my knee and my back were in pain from having carried around everything a person needs for a week or two at a time in a backpack.  If someone would like to read the medical records from the Emergency Room where I finally stumbled in, or from follow-up appointments at primary care for months, you can ask and I can send them.  Since the Pine Street Inn Women’s Shelter only allows 10 minutes per shower, per person, and guests are only allowed to shower at night, and since there is always a line for the showers there, and since it’s really inconvenient not to be able to shower when I need to before a job interview or work, and since it’s also inconvenient to have to try to change into work clothes in bathroom stalls and get ready for work in a bathroom that you’re sharing with 120 other people, and since there is nowhere at the Pine Street Inn where you can hang up ironed clothes overnight, the gym membership has been crucial.  I keep a steamer in my gym locker.  The celebrities and other people who hack the hidden, illegal cameras in the locker room of that gym have frequently seen me getting ready for work.  Maybe they don’t know that’s what I’m doing, since they probably have either never had to iron their own clothes in their lives or it’s been so long that they have forgotten it. 

The Pine Street Inn doesn’t have a refrigerator for guests and guests aren’t supposed to keep food in their lockers.  It also doesn’t remain open during the day, 6 days per week, so it only serves lunch and dinner.  As some people may not know, the Pine Street Inn also only serves a hot breakfast a few days per year, on Mother’s Day and a few other holidays.  Dinner is heavy on starch, meat and dessert and very low on fresh vegetables.  When you don’t have a place to cook or store your own food, you can’t buy anything in bulk.  Food stamps don’t pay for hot, prepared food.  If you can’t eat what you buy in one sitting, you have to carry it with you for the rest of the day, and if you haven’t consumed it by the end of the day, you have to throw it out.  That is not cost-effective.

I have not bought or sipped one alcoholic beverage during the entire time that I’ve been homeless.  I was never a big drinker.  I also don’t smoke or do any drugs at all, including marijuana.  I was never a smoker, I have never done drugs.  

I have had at least 4 jobs since being forced into homelessness again at the beginning of June 2017 for having asked the property management of my last apartment to take the hidden, illegal cameras out of that apartment.  I lost every job because of my Google search results, which I have previously tried to have removed from the Internet, and which almost every website that hosts hateblogs about me has refused to take down.  Even so, I have paid all of my bills on time, without fail.  I have had another job since June 2019 and have been applying for 2nd jobs for the past few weeks.  I never try to keep my working hours low so that I don't lose welfare benefits.  My goal is not to be on welfare.  Without the welfare, I would be totally dependent on overnight and day shelters for all of my needs, the way that I was for the first year that I was homeless in Boston from 2011 to 2012, during which I literally did not have a dollar.  I walked everywhere and had to organize all of my time around when shelters were open to provide meals, showers, clothes, and everything else.  2013 was the first time in my life that I ever applied for disability benefits, even though I was hospitalized at 17 and have since lost track of how many hospitalizations I have had.  I could have collected disability benefits every month for my entire adult life, but I always refused to apply for them.  Either I worked or I suffered the consequences of being broke.  I won't discuss again at this time how the mental health care system and the stigma of having a psychiatric history destroyed everything I had worked for from the time that I was in elementary school or how the stigma has made me vulnerable to abuse and gaslighting since the day I first walked into a psychiatric unit, at my own request, to try to get help.    

I’ve been on the verge of losing my Section 8 voucher several times because of not being able to rent a place to live.  You’re supposed to use it within a couple of months of receiving it; I kept having to ask for extensions.  Because of all of the people saying threatening things about me online, I didn’t want to have to live in an apartment that was unsafe to begin with.  When the payment standards for a Section 8 voucher went up in the middle of April 2019, my Section 8 voucher had already been revoked and I was in the appeal process for it.  Fortunately, I was given permission to use the voucher if my application were approved by an apartment building while the voucher was in appeal.  On June 1, 2019, I paid a $500 security deposit online to apply for an apartment where I felt I would be as safe as possible.  I paid it.  The rest of that month was difficult.  At the time that I applied for that apartment, I had done so much work on my profile as a potential applicant that the automatic website for the building reported my credit as 762.  Unless something goes awry in the next few weeks, my 3^rd stint of 2 years of homelessness at a time since 2011 is almost over. 

I'll admit that saving money never was my forte, but I never have had much to save.  

Also, there's no queen in the world who has teeth like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHeMWvDQ6P0

My teeth have moved around a lot because of the gum recession that being put on mouth-drying psychiatric medications for years gave me.  Dry mouth causes gum recession.  Nobody told me that until I was over 30, and it wasn't a psychiatrist or a therapist who told me.  It was an orthodontist during a free consultation, which is still the only type of orthodontic visit that I can pay for.