Violet, who has experienced homelessness due to LGBTQ+ identity, urges for more empathy

My parents are very religious. So I grew up very religious and they were not very accepting of me being transgender and bisexual. So I didn't feel very comfortable living in *** space like that. I was homeless for about three months. How it feels to be homeless. It's kind of embarrassing. Honestly. Like you feel embarrassed at first because it's like, wow, I actually don't have *** house and you feel kind of ashamed. It was difficult when I lived in the shelter. It was difficult to balance work and life because you have to be in the shelter at *** certain time at night time. Or else you lose your bed. And if you had any belongings there, they would have to throw them away. If you didn't come back when you're in that kind of situation, you get really depressed, at least I did. And you feel stuck. I remember there were times where I would be walking to the soup kitchen in the morning to get breakfast and there would be cars that would purposely like swerve into *** puddle to splash water on me. And there would be people who would like cat call and yell at me. So the stigma with homelessness is very tough because not everyone is *** drug addict. Not everyone. Um like I said, was rebellious and just decided to run away from home because they felt like it. Not everybody is like that and some people like get kicked out because they're LGBT or some people lose their house because they can't afford to pay for it anymore. It really just depends on the person and what they're going through. I feel like to help change the stigma around homelessness, people could be more empathetic. You don't have to give anybody your money or do anything like that per se to be *** good person and to help somebody out, you could just be nice and that could help impact someone's day dramatically. *** message that I would like to send out to Granite Staters is that if you are homeless or if you're becoming homeless, it's not going to be forever. And that there is *** way out and that not all homeless people are bad and wrong and things like that, they went through things that they went through and you can't really change the past. All you can do is just make changes to impact your future.