These are the words that snapped one man out of homelessness

Aaron was sitting on a Ballard park bench in 2013. He was homeless and had been making “poor choices.” That’s when a stranger, a women, walked by. But she stopped and turned around. What she said has stuck with him ever since.

He’d been living in a tent and hadn’t seen his wife or 3-year-old son for months, and was having an even worse day than usual. He told KIRO Radio’s Dori Monson that the female said: “I don’t know what you’ve done, I don’t know what you think you’ve done, but I do know you are your own worst judge. Give yourself a break.”

“And I’ll never forget those words,” Aaron said. “And she walked off.”

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After four months of homelessness, the eastern Washington native checked himself into the hospital and ultimately made amends with his family.

“It comes down to freedom of choice,” he said. “You’ve got to want it.”

Aaron says it wasn’t the economy or a lost job that forced him onto the streets, but a nasty mixture of not taking medication for his mental illness and alcohol addiction, along with “the poor choices he made daily.”

“I didn’t care about anybody else’s needs, whether they were my friends or my families, or anyone. I just cared about mine,” he said. “And I always ran around from place to place and wherever I would wind up a couple weeks later, God, all those problems would follow me wherever I was.”

Aaron said his job options were limited, since “after about four or five days of being on the streets, you start looking and start smelling like the street… You’re not trying to be a bartender or waiter anymore, you’re trying to work on the boats.”

“By the time I got to being on the street, I had burned every bridge that there was,” he added. “There was no magical payphone to go to deposit 50 cents, or a dollar, or whatever it is… There was no one to call. My poor choices, my selfishness and my unwillingness to try to conform to anybody’s ideas or anybody’s thought of law.”

As the debate over what constitutes a homeless person versus a drug addict rages on, Aaron has his own perspective.

“If there’s needles and human waste and garbage out where an RV is, they’re not homeless, they’re lazy and they’re drug addicts. And there’s definitely something going,” he said. “If there’s a guy in a tent, not sleeping in the sidewalk in downtown Seattle… he’s homeless and he just got lucky to get a tent.”

Aaron has the success story Dori hopes more down-on-their-luck people can strive toward. As he looks for a solution, Dori asked why the stranger’s words spurred change in him more than looking into his child’s eyes. Aaron didn’t have a certain answer, but does know that for the first time in months, he felt treated like a human.

“She had no reason to stop, talk to me and tell me that,” he said. “But she took time out, she acknowledged me as a human being and was just like, ‘give yourself a break.'”

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