[nonameiguess]

Something reasonably close to this happened to me in 2002. I worked for Disney at the time and they cut back to the entertainment department and laid me off. My wife at the time OD'd, got herself committed to a psych ward, got us kicked out of our apartment, and we ultimateley divorced. I was forced to live out of my car for a while.

It frankly wasn't actionable ideas and guarantees that got me back. It was commitment to a plan once I had one, no matter how shitty the interim existence was, and the grace and goodness of other people. You're arguably in a better position if you already have marketable job skills. I was doing performance art for Disneyland. I went back to school after and eventually became this, but that took years before I had anything like an independent, stable adult existence. I was working graveyard shifts cleaning park restrooms and taking 24 credit hours per semester at a community college during the day, for two years, before I got old enough to be eligible for financial aid without having to report my parents' income and assets, and they weren't helping me.

But other people did help. Two women I knew, very good friends from now a long time ago, had parents that let me stay with them. One was a divorced Italian woman who was otherwise alone anyway and the other was a normal family that was rich and had a lot of extra space and didn't mind me taking up a little bit of it. I lived with with those two families when I had nowhere else to go and that was the initial path off the street that gave me the stability to do everything else.

I have no answer for how you find such people who will help you. I would like to say be a kind, gracious person who deserves it, but it's hard to say I was even that. I did nothing to deserve help but people who could helped me anyway. I've spent the past quarter century since then paying it forward and helping out every person I possibly can and even letting a few homeless friends here and there live with me for a couple months at a time, but up to that point in my life, I had done nothing to deserve being helped.

[jyounker]

For anyone who is still young, if you need financial aid, and if you are independent of your parents, then you can get yourself declared as financially independent from parents, so that they don't influence your financial aid status.