Crossroads: The Place That Split Me Open

It’s been five years since I worked at Crossroads, but the impact hasn’t faded. If anything, time has only made the truth sharper, more undeniable. That short stretch of work didn’t just change me—it rearranged me. It cracked open parts of my story I had sealed shut, and it forced me to look at the pieces of my life I had spent years trying to outrun.

Addiction was the first language spoken around me. My mother used while I was still floating in the dark warmth of her womb, and she kept using after I was born until the drugs claimed her. My father’s addiction was quieter, slower, but just as lethal. He died from alcoholism while I was working at Crossroads, and that timing still feels like a cosmic punch to the chest. Like the universe was saying, You can’t pretend this isn’t your story anymore. Look at it. Really look.

Walking into that shelter every day felt like stepping into a world that was both foreign and intimately familiar. I saw my parents everywhere—not literally, but in the tremors of someone’s hands, in the way a person’s eyes darted around the room, in the exhaustion that clung to people like a second skin. I saw the chaos I grew up in, the desperation, the humor people use as armor, the tenderness that leaks out even when life has been merciless.

And the hardest part wasn’t the work. It was the recognition.

It was seeing the echoes of my childhood in the adults sitting across from me. It was realizing that the people society dismisses as “lost causes” were the closest thing I had ever had to a blueprint of my parents’ inner worlds. It was understanding, maybe for the first time, that addiction isn’t a moral failure—it’s a gravitational pull. And some people are born too close to the center of it.

Before Crossroads, I had been homeless more than once. I had slept in places that weren’t meant for sleeping. I had felt the kind of hunger that makes your ribs feel like they’re vibrating. I had known the humiliation of needing help and the shame of being judged for it. But working at the shelter didn’t just remind me of those chapters—it reframed them.

It made me realize how easy it is to judge systems when you’ve never been inside them. How easy it is to blame individuals when you’ve never felt the weight they carry. How easy it is to say “just get help” when you’ve never had to navigate a system built like a maze with no exit.

Crossroads stripped away whatever judgment I had left. It softened me in places I didn’t know were still hard. It made me angrier at the systems and gentler with the people. It made me understand that compassion isn’t a personality trait—it’s a practice. A discipline. A choice you make again and again, even when you’re tired, even when you’re triggered, even when someone’s pain mirrors your own so closely it feels like you’re staring into a past version of yourself.

And maybe that’s why it hurt so much. Because every day at Crossroads was like holding a mirror up to my own history. Every intake, every crisis, every story was a reminder of what I survived—and what my parents didn’t.

My father died while I was there. I remember the surreal feeling of showing up to work with grief still wet on my skin, surrounded by people who were fighting the same demons that killed him. I remember thinking, This is what it looks like from the outside. This is what he must have felt like on the inside. It was a brutal kind of empathy, the kind that doesn’t let you look away.

Crossroads didn’t save me. It didn’t heal me. But it transformed me.

It made me more human. More aware. More willing to sit with discomfort instead of running from it. It made me understand my parents in a way I never had—not to excuse them, but to see them as whole, complicated, hurting people who never got the chance to step into the kind of clarity I was finally finding.

Five years later, I still carry Crossroads with me. Not as a job I once had, but as a turning point. A place where my past and my purpose collided so forcefully that something inside me shifted forever.

It was short-lived, yes. But some experiences don’t need time to be transformative. Some experiences just need to hit the right wound.

And Crossroads did.