u/ScoutChecksOut

I recently moved back home and I’m basically starting over in the childhood home I grew up in. The house had been sitting abandoned for years, so when I came back, there was a lot wrong with it and a lot that needed to be repaired. I’ve been slowly trying to bring it back to life and make it feel like a home again.
My boyfriend lives with me and has been helping me with the house, which I’m grateful for, but financially I’m struggling to make the repairs anywhere near as quickly as I’d like. Right now I’m only working part time, and I’ve been looking for something better, but there just doesn’t seem to be much around here that pays enough.
The weird part is that on paper I’m probably in a better position than a lot of people. The house is paid off, I have a paid-off truck, and I really don’t have many major bills. But my income is so low right now that I’m barely keeping the utilities paid, and I can’t even comfortably afford insurance on my truck. Then every time I get a little money ahead, the house needs something else.
The house has four bedrooms, so I’ve seriously been considering renting out the other two rooms. The extra income could make a huge difference. It could cover the utilities, let me insure my truck again, and actually give me some money to put toward fixing the house instead of constantly choosing which problem gets dealt with first.
What worries me is giving up my privacy and, more importantly, inviting the wrong person into my home. This isn’t an investment property to me. It’s my childhood home, and after everything it took to come back and start rebuilding it, I’m nervous about having strangers living here. A good roommate could make life dramatically easier, but a bad roommate could turn the one stable thing I have into another source of stress.
Has anyone here been in a similar situation where you had a house or extra rooms but didn’t really have the income to maintain everything on your own? Did renting rooms actually help you get ahead, or did the loss of privacy and roommate problems make it not worth it?
If you did it, I’d especially like to hear how you screened people and what you wish you had known beforehand. I’m trying to figure out whether renting the rooms is a smart way to use what I have or something I’m going to regret.

I’ve been back in the New Orleans area for about six months now, living on the Westbank, and I’ve realized something: making friends in your 30s is weirdly hard.

So, fuck it. I’m trying Reddit.
I’m 34, gay, and originally from the New Orleans/Westbank area. I’ve spent a huge chunk of my adult life moving around and have lived in more than eight different states. After being gone for so long, it’s honestly weird being back home.

New Orleans is familiar because I grew up here, but at the same time I feel like I’m getting to know the place again as an adult.
Coming “home” is also a little different when most of your family is gone. Most of my immediate family has passed away over the years, so these days it’s mostly my older sister and brother who live down the road from me. I’m grateful to have them close, but it definitely makes being back here feel different from the New Orleans I remember growing up in.

Earlier this year I moved back into my family’s old house in Marrero after it had been sitting mostly abandoned for years. It needed a ridiculous amount of work, so a lot of the last six months has been me slowly putting the place — and my life — back together.
The upside is the house is paid off, which in this economy is something I’m extremely grateful to have. 😂 It gives me some stability while I figure out what I want the next chapter of my life to look like.
My boyfriend and I live together, We’re both pretty laid-back and mostly homebodies, although I’m definitely the bigger nerd of the two of us.

I’m a gamer and have been playing League forever, Wild Rift lately, Diablo, RPGs, co-op games, and whatever else catches my attention. I’m also into technology, cars/trucks, random DIY projects, cooking, and conversations that somehow start with something completely normal and end three hours later talking about life, psychology, politics, aliens, or why New Orleans is simultaneously one of the best and most frustrating places on Earth.

Personality-wise, I’m sarcastic, open-minded, and tend to get along best with people who don’t take themselves too seriously. I can be social, but I’m definitely not somebody who needs to be at a bar or club every weekend. I’m perfectly happy hanging out at somebody’s house, gaming, cooking, having a few drinks, finding something cheap to do around the city, exploring random places, or just sitting around talking shit.

I’m also not specifically looking for “gay friends.” Gay, straight, bi, whatever — I really don’t care. Men, women, couples, singles, also don’t care. I’d just like to meet some decent people around my age-ish who genuinely want new friendships.
After moving around so much, a lot of friendships naturally faded. People moved, got married, had kids, careers took over, and everyone went in different directions. Coming back home made me realize that while I know people here, I don’t really have much of a friend group anymore.
And after spending so many years moving around, I’d actually like to put down some roots again. I have the house, my boyfriend, a little bit of family nearby, and I’m slowly rebuilding everything else. I think the part that’s missing is having good people around to actually share life with.

Tell me a little about yourself or shoot me a message. Worst-case scenario, we awkwardly talk for five minutes and never speak again. Best-case scenario, maybe a few of us actually find our people.

Quick disclaimer: This is a repost/adaptation of a longer version of my story, so it’s still a bit of a long read. I’ve added to it as I’ve tried to make sense of everything I’ve been through, and I thought the parts about homelessness, couch surfing, starting over and trying to build some actual stability might belong here. Hopefully some of it resonates with somebody.

I spent years thinking starting over meant moving forward. It took coming home to realize what I was actually looking for.
I’ve been reading some of the stories here, and I wanted to share mine because homelessness isn’t something I’ve only been afraid of.
I’ve experienced it before.
And I’ve probably spent more of my adult life closer to housing instability than most people looking at my life from the outside would ever guess.
Years ago, after my divorce, I ended up sleeping in my car.
During that relationship, I had pretty much isolated myself. I was so focused on trying to hold onto the relationship and make something work that was falling apart that I let a lot of the rest of my life disappear around it.
When it finally ended, I didn’t have much of a support system left.
The worst part was that I was too embarrassed to ask for help.
There were probably people I could have called, but admitting that I was sleeping in my car felt like admitting that my entire life had fallen apart.
So I kept it to myself and tried to figure it out alone.
That wasn’t the only time I’ve dealt with unstable housing either. I’ve couch surfed when things got rough. I’ve stayed wherever I could while trying to get established again. I’ve packed everything I owned and completely started over several times.
I’ve lived in more than seven states at this point.
For a long time, I thought I was searching for where I belonged.
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized I wasn’t really searching for a place.
I was searching for stability.
I grew up around a lot of chaos, and stability wasn’t something I really learned how to create for myself.
When you grow up without much of a safety net or resources, independence isn’t as simple as turning 18 and suddenly knowing how to build a stable adult life.
So I found stability wherever I could.
A lot of the time, that meant relationships.
I don’t think that’s completely unique to me. To some degree, we all look for comfort, security and a sense of home in other people.
But I think my circumstances amplified it.
When you’ve spent a lot of your life without something solid underneath you, another person can start feeling like the solid ground you’ve been looking for.
When a relationship becomes your home, your support system, your emotional security and part of your financial stability, losing that person doesn’t just feel like losing a relationship.
It can feel like losing your entire life at once.
That’s something I’ve had to learn the hard way.
Interestingly, my sexuality was never really the identity struggle for me.
I’m gay. I’ve pretty much always known I was gay. I never had some huge internal battle about that part of myself, and in that sense I know I was fortunate.
My self-discovery has been about completely different things.
Learning who I am when I’m not attached to somebody else.
Learning that loving someone and needing them to provide the stability I can’t provide myself are two very different things.
Learning how much of my identity I’d built around relationships, jobs, cities and whatever version of my life I was trying to make work at the time.
And learning how to create a life that doesn’t completely collapse when one piece of it disappears.
Looking back, I think that’s part of why I moved so much.
New state.
New city.
New job.
New relationship.
New version of me.
I convinced myself that if I kept moving, eventually I’d reinvent myself into the person whose life finally worked.
And I know what that can look like from the outside.
If somebody tells you they’ve lived in seven-plus states, slept in their car, couch surfed and started their life over multiple times, it’s easy to think:
“At some point, this person must just be irresponsible.”
I’ve wondered that about myself too.
But I’ve always worked hard. I’ve never struggled with addiction. I’ve never had some major destructive habit constantly blowing up my life.
A lot of the things that knocked me down were circumstances I couldn’t completely control, relationships ending, financial setbacks and trying to build stability without much of a safety net underneath me.
That doesn’t mean I’ve made every decision perfectly.
I haven’t.
Part of growing up has been recognizing the decisions that were mine, taking responsibility for them and understanding why I made them.
But I also don’t think people understand how unbelievably difficult starting over is when there’s nobody underneath you to catch you.
“Fresh start” sounds almost exciting when people say it.
It’s a lot less exciting when you’re actually living it.
It’s trying to find work while figuring out where you’re sleeping.
It’s trying to save enough for a deposit while paying all the extra costs that come with not having a permanent home.
It’s showing up to work acting completely normal after sleeping on somebody’s couch.
It’s having one car repair or unexpected bill wipe out whatever tiny amount of progress you just made.
And if getting back on my feet was that difficult for me while being able to work, having transportation and never struggling with addiction, I genuinely can’t imagine how difficult it is for someone trying to climb out while dealing with addiction, mental illness, abuse, health problems, a criminal record, kids depending on them, no transportation or any of the other things people can have stacked against them.
That’s probably why I judge people experiencing homelessness a lot less than I once did.
Sometimes people aren’t irresponsible.
Sometimes they’re exhausted.
Sometimes they never had the resources that teach you how to become independent in the first place.
Sometimes life simply collapses faster than you can rebuild it.
Eventually, Louisiana became the place I didn’t want to come back to.
Louisiana has always been home, but most of my family is deceased now. There wasn’t some big family waiting here for me anymore. A lot of the people who made this place feel like home when I was younger just aren’t here.
What I did have was my family’s old house on the Westbank outside New Orleans.
It had been sitting abandoned for around five years.
I knew it existed.
I also spent years convincing myself that coming back to it wasn’t an option.
Part of that was because I knew what condition the house was in.
But if I’m being truthful, a much bigger part was pride.
I’d spent all these years leaving Louisiana, moving around the country and trying to build something for myself.
Coming back to the same place I started felt like admitting none of it worked.
Then earlier this year, another relationship ended.
Suddenly I was living out of state again, watching the life I thought was stable disappear incredibly quickly and asking myself a question I’d had to ask before:
Where am I actually going to go?
Except this time I knew exactly where that road could lead.
I’d slept in my car before.
I’d couch surfed before.
I’d started over before.
I knew how quickly “I’ll figure something out” can turn into realizing you genuinely don’t know where you’re going to sleep.
Eventually I had to accept the option I’d spent years treating like failure.
I had to go home.
So on Valentine’s Day, I packed what I could into a U-Haul, put my truck in tow and drove back to Louisiana.
When I opened the door to this house, I wasn’t walking into some comfortable family home waiting for me.
There was no power or running water.
The house was full of molded clothes, junk and rotting furniture. There were old unpaid utility bills. The gas couldn’t just be turned back on. The water heater was shot. Plumbing leaked. Most of the electrical outlets didn’t work.
Everywhere I looked there was another problem.
I remember standing there thinking:
This is what I came back to?
I couldn’t afford to hire people to come in and make everything okay.
So I started.
I hauled garbage to the dump.
I cleaned.
I painted.
I replaced the water heater. I repaired plumbing. I traced electrical problems and learned how to fix whatever I reasonably could myself.
Little by little, the lights came back on.
The water came back on.
I had hot water.
Rooms filled with garbage became actual rooms again.
And somewhere in the middle of rebuilding this house, I realized I was doing something I’d spent most of my adult life looking for other people and places to do for me.
I was creating stability.
Not perfect stability.
Not “everything is finally figured out” stability.
Just something that was mine.
Something that wouldn’t disappear because somebody decided they didn’t love me anymore.
Something that didn’t require packing my life into a car and crossing another state line.
Something I could actually build on.
And then, because apparently life has a sense of humor, I came back to Louisiana determined to figure out how to stand on my own…
…and unexpectedly met someone.
He was going through some of the same things I was.
Different story. Different circumstances. But I recognized something familiar in him.
I could tell he was a good person. I could also see someone strong who was trying really hard not to become a victim of his circumstances.
I understood that.
There’s a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from knowing life has dealt you a shitty hand while still refusing to let that become your entire identity.
We both wanted a lot of the same things.
Stability.
Safety.
A home.
Someone who stays.
A life that doesn’t constantly feel like it could disappear overnight.
One thing led to another, and now we live together.
Our relationship hasn’t exactly followed the normal order of things.
We basically skipped the part where two people with established lives meet, date for a while and slowly decide whether those lives fit together.
There weren’t two finished lives to combine.
We went almost immediately into trying to build something together while both of us were still figuring out what the hell we were building individually.
We’re learning each other while rebuilding a house.
We’re figuring out a relationship while figuring out money, work, responsibilities and what stability even looks like for us.
There wasn’t a finished life for either person to step into.
We’re building it while standing inside it.
And that’s difficult sometimes.
But there’s also something different about being with somebody who understands that struggle without needing it explained.
When you’ve spent years feeling like people look at your circumstances and see irresponsibility or failure, there’s something incredibly comforting about someone looking at the same mess and essentially saying:
“Yeah. I get it. Let’s figure it out.”
Some people might look at two people meeting while they’re both hurting and call it trauma bonding.
I don’t think that’s what this is.
Trauma doesn’t have to be the thing holding two people together just because it’s something they both understand.
Sometimes you meet somebody who’s hurting in some of the same places you’ve hurt, and instead of using each other to stay broken, you recognize that you’re both reaching for the same things.
There’s a difference between needing another person to save you and finding someone who understands why you’re tired and still wants to build alongside you.
And that’s an important distinction for me because of my history.
I don’t want him to be my stability.
I’ve done that before.
I want to learn how to provide stability for myself.
I want him to be able to provide it for himself too.
And then I want us to choose to share what we’re building with each other.
Maybe that’s what a healthier version of what I’ve been looking for all these years actually looks like.
The house still isn’t perfect.
It needs a roof. It needs windows, doors and plenty of other work. I’m working part-time right now and still trying to catch up financially.
Neither of us has everything figured out.
But I have a home.
And after knowing what it’s like to sleep in your car or on somebody else’s couch because you don’t have one, that word means something completely different to me now.
The difference between me and somebody sleeping in their car tonight isn’t that I’m smarter, worked harder or made better decisions.
This time, I got lucky.
I had somewhere to land.
Most of my family may be gone, but something they left behind was still here taking care of me years later.
The house I spent years looking at as somewhere I never wanted to end up became the thing that kept me from becoming homeless again.
And now it’s me and my boyfriend living in this four-bedroom house.
Sometimes I look around and think about how fucking strange that is.
There were periods of my life when I genuinely didn’t know where I was going to sleep.
Now there are bedrooms nobody is sleeping in.
Life is weird like that.
The whole experience has completely changed how I think about homelessness and people who repeatedly have to start over.
The distance between “I’m doing okay” and “I don’t know where I’m sleeping next month” can be much smaller than people think.
I’ve also realized there’s a difference between taking responsibility for your life and believing every bad thing that’s happened to you must somehow be a reflection of your worth.
I’m responsible for building stability for myself now.
I’m responsible for learning from the choices I did make.
I’m responsible for recognizing the patterns that kept putting me in situations where losing a relationship could mean losing almost everything else with it.
But I’m also allowed to acknowledge that I started adulthood without many of the resources, stability or support that other people take for granted.
Both things can be true.
I’m still rebuilding this house.
I’m still rebuilding my finances.
I’m still figuring out this relationship.
And I’m still learning how to be the person who provides the stability I spent so many years looking for in relationships, cities and other people.
For years, I thought independence meant being able to leave everything behind and start over.
Now I think real independence might be building something you don’t have to run from.
And maybe love isn’t finding someone who rescues you from your circumstances either.
Maybe sometimes it’s two people who understand what it feels like to have very little underneath them deciding that neither one has to carry everything alone anymore.
Not saving each other.
Not fixing each other.
Just building beside each other.
I came back to Louisiana thinking I’d returned because everything else had failed.
Instead, I found an old house that needed rebuilding, someone else trying to rebuild his life, and a version of myself that was finally willing to stop running long enough to build something.
The house wasn’t ready.
I wasn’t ready.
He probably wasn’t completely ready either.
But life doesn’t always wait until you’re healed, financially secure and perfectly put together before it starts happening again.
Sometimes two people meet in the middle of the mess.
And sometimes home isn’t the place where you finally have everything figured out.
Sometimes it’s just the place where you finally decide to stay and figure it out.

Earlier this year, a breakup basically pulled the rug out from under the life I had built. I was living out of state at the time, and suddenly I was trying to figure out where the hell I was going to live and what I was supposed to do next.
I got incredibly lucky because I had one option a lot of people don’t have: my family’s old house back home on the Westbank outside New Orleans.
The problem was that nobody had lived there for around five years.
So on Valentine’s Day, I packed what I could into a U-Haul, put my truck in tow, and came back home.

Calling the house “livable” at that point would’ve been generous. There was no power or running water. It was full of molded clothes, junk and rotting furniture. There were old unpaid utility bills, plumbing problems, electrical problems, a dead water heater and repairs everywhere I looked.
I didn’t have the money to hire people to come in and fix everything, so I started figuring it out myself. I hauled load after load to the dump, cleaned, painted, replaced the water heater, repaired plumbing, worked through electrical problems and slowly turned this abandoned house back into a home.
It’s still nowhere near perfect. I’m still fixing things, still catching up financially and still rebuilding my life.

But sitting here now, what really gets me is realizing how thin the line actually was.
I wasn’t sleeping under a bridge, but I was one family house away from genuinely not knowing where I was going to live. I had somewhere to land because people in my family held onto this place long before anyone knew I would eventually need it.
Going through this has completely changed how I look at homelessness.

Sometimes it’s not somebody who has been struggling for years. Sometimes your relationship ends. You lose a job. Your rent goes up. Your car breaks. You get sick. One thing happens, then another, and suddenly the life you thought was stable isn’t stable anymore.

Now I’m living in a four-bedroom house with my boyfriend, and sometimes I look around at how much space we have compared to how uncertain my situation was just months ago. It’s a strange feeling.
I don’t really know what the bigger point of this post is other than to say that I understand this community a lot differently now.

If you’re here because you’re staring down that possibility yourself, don’t assume that being in this position means you’ve somehow failed at life. Sometimes survival is just finding whatever door is still open and walking through it.
Mine happened to be the front door of an old family house that desperately needed somebody to come home.
And apparently, I needed it just as much.

I’ve been grinding ranked lately and have been finding Diamond to be one of the more frustrating ranks to get through. I’ve played League of Legends on PC for about 11 years, so I have a solid understanding of macro, vision, objectives, and team play, but solo queue in Wild Rift can still feel like a coin flip some days.
I mostly play Support, ADC, and Mid, depending on what the team needs. I play pretty much every day, enjoy communicating, and usually use Discord since I think voice chat makes coordination a lot more enjoyable.
I’m curious how everyone else found consistent teammates to climb with. Did you mostly grind solo, find people through the game, or build a regular duo or trio over time?
If anyone has had a similar experience or just wants to talk strategy, I’d love to hear what worked for you. And if we happen to click, I’d definitely be open to running some games together sometime.