Destined to be Destitute is the story of someone who never made it in life. It’s my story, and I will be blogging about my lifetime of poverty, homelessness and car-living. The term used in the URL, gutterpunk, refers to my years of being homeless as a teenager. A gutterpunk is typically a kid that’s either unwanted or abused and chooses to live on the streets instead. Though I’m not a kid anymore – I’m 30 years old – but I’m still poor/homeless and have really only seen life through the eyes of a street person.

For a little bit of a back-story on me, I go by Ashe (pronounced “ash”), so that’s what you can refer to me as. I’m a woman who was born to a poor/lower middle class family in West Virginia. I’m a 7th generation West Virginian, all of which has been nothing but in poverty in my family. Now, I don’t say this to be hateful or spiteful towards my family, it’s just a fact of the matter in how I personally feel about my childhood. But anyway, I had a rough childhood, although not physically abused in any way, I was just unwanted and uncared about. School was a big part of the problem because I was severely bullied and never fit in – and got the blame and punishment for the bullying, which I believe caused my mom to not care about me. And then I became homeless and lived on the streets on the west coast in my teens, so I know all too well the realities of homelessness and street life. My grandmother had me come back home to West Virginia ten years ago. Almost right away, I went to college and got a computer degree, but six years later still have never been given a job due to the rampant discrimination around here. (I became disabled shortly after returning home as well, but that may or may not get discussed in the future.) So, here I am, 30 years old, in debt, and about to hit the road as a mobile homeless person. And that’s what this blog will be about.