I Was 17 When My Family Lost Our Home. This Is What No One Tells You About Foreclosure.

Our trouble began in 2009, the beginning of my senior year of high school and the middle of the subprime mortgage crisis. My father, deep in the throes of addiction, stopped paying the mortgage on our house in upstate New York and abruptly moved away, taking my little brother and most of our furniture.

My mother and I stayed as long as we could, kindling the hope of reuniting as a family once I graduated. That winter, squatting in a house we were no longer paying for, the cold closing in around us and foreclosure on our heels, I was afraid unlike ever before. Fiercer than the cold and bigger than my fear, however, was an immutable sense of embarrassment.

Shame became the shadow I could not shake.

Knowing that I was about to lose my house internalized the untrue belief that I no longer deserved one. At 17, I believed that everyone who still had a home must in some way be better than I was. I did find moments of solace — a homemade pizza dinner with my friends, or the aimless nights driving around our small town — but ultimately I felt myself slipping from a world I so desperately longed to stay part of. I was on the cusp of a great unknown in which I’d have no home to call my own.

Anyone who’s experienced poverty knows that surviving means learning what you can live without, even amid great irony. You might train your body to skip breakfast because your bank account is empty, yet take a job handing out cheese samples in a Whole Foods while your stomach grumbles, as I did the summer I turned 21.

There is no trade-off for a roof over our heads. Losing one’s home breeds a unique brand of shame because housing isn’t something we can live without — at least not if we want any sort of quality of life, or want to be accepted by