“Will I always be poor?” That was the question going through my head when I lived in domestic violence shelters with my mother. Like every other low income people, I am a victim of homelessness. Whenever I see a fence, I think about those folding window gates that I always see. It was like a prison for homeless people but it’s just a unit with two beds, a kitchen, a bathroom and nothing else. I couldn’t stop thinking about the times when my mom and I had to go to Prevention Assistance and Temporary Housing (PATH) and go through the day in there and sleeping in an apartment for one night just to find another available shelter to live in because we had nowhere else to go. We didn’t care if it was in The Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, or Queens, we just needed to find somewhere to live and proceed to live our lives there. Mostly we live in shelters in the Bronx but that didn’t mean anything to me. The only thing we had to rely on is food stamps and hope that some miracle that can get us out of the shelter. My mother have tried leaving New York City, but we still ended up in a shelter. The worst part is that my classmates joke around or believe that I’m some spoiled rich white kid from the suburbs. That did not make me laugh in the slightest. If I were a rich kid, I wouldn’t have an ugly appearance, a broken used iPhone 8, and not live in New York at all. Matter of fact, I wouldn’t even have crooked teeth that ya’ll hate to keep staring at.
When JJ, Vic, Collin, and Anderson came to our school, I thought it would be a good opportunity to show everyone at the school who I am and where I’m really from. I took that opportunity to show them I’m not living a good life just because I am white. My primary goal for my portrait was to show them that it is not only non-whites suffering from poverty. White people are also suffering from poverty. It’s not just African-Americans, it’s not just Native Americans, and it’s not just Hispanics suffering from poverty because many whites suffer from poverty as well. So back to the topic, I tried to make my portrait make sense. During the Art Exhibition, I was nervous because I am not the “Speaking in front of the audience” type of guy. I struggled to make sense of my portrait because there were too many people in the audience, but JJ helped me because she knew I couldn’t handle it myself and because I was hesitant and stuttering to explain my portrait.
So yeah, there you have you have it. That’s my story of how I’m living in domestic violence shelters most of my life. On a side note, I forgot to mention that I’ve also lived in rented rooms and hotels in my life. Hopefully I really don’t go through this experience again after I graduate and go into adulthood.
