I’d start by checking into a homeless shelter. Then I’d get a job within walking distance. That’s the hard part, the walking distance part.
I was in ALMOST this situation in summer of 2022. I was homeless, and stayed in a shelter, and got myself a job. But I wasn’t penniless. I had maybe a hundred bucks when I started, meaning I could ride the bus to work.
The lower you go, the harder it gets. So my solution would have been impossible without the bus fare.
The shelter had a very early curfew. 6:30 pm or something like that. It would have been impossible to walk to the job simply based on time – about two hours’ walk to and from which wouldn’t leave enough time between wakeup and curfew to get to work, work, and get back.
The lower you go, the harder it gets. That’s one of the most useful things to know about life. If you take a break and you slide back, that break just made your life harder. Below a certain threshold, you can’t climb back up again.
I got out of homelessness, but I had the benefit of mental health, and of being pretty tough already when I became homeless. I guess toughness is an aspect of mental health, so suffice to say I had the key ingredient to get out of that which was mental health. Well, and a functioning philosophy of life.