Knowing and Doing What to Do

Juan was born in 1989 in California. His mother worked long hours cleaning offices, and his father was rarely home. From a young age, Juan describes feeling “off”—a kind of bad feeling that followed him through childhood. “I can’t explain it,” he says. “It’s like I always knew something was wrong, even when nothing was.”

In school, Juan struggled. Teachers called him smart but unfocused. He skipped assignments, avoided group work, and spent hours drawing in the back of class. “I knew what I was supposed to do,” he says, “I just didn’t want to.” His grades dropped steadily through high school. Friends began talking about college applications, but Juan drifted in the opposite direction.

By his junior year, he started experimenting with drugs. At first, it was a way to escape the heaviness he couldn’t name. “It made me feel normal for a little while,” he says. But the habit grew fast, and by the time he graduated, school and family had slipped out of reach. “I thought about community college,” he recalls. “I even looked at the classes once. But when the time came, I just didn’t go.”

For a few years, Juan bounced between short-term jobs — construction, kitchen prep, warehouse shifts — but addiction shadowed everything. “It’s not like I didn’t know how to fix my life,” he says quietly. “I always knew. I just couldn’t make myself want to.” Eventually, he lost steady work, lost his apartment, and started sleeping in parks or shelters around the city.

Now in his mid-thirties, Juan lives most nights behind a church downtown. The volunteers there know him by name. He keeps his belongings neatly packed in a small cart and washes his clothes at the public laundry when he can. “People think being homeless is all chaos,” he says. “It’s not. You get routines. You figure out what works.”

Juan still draws. He carries a small sketchbook with pencil portraits of people he meets—other men from the shelter, a woman who sells flowers on the corner, a volunteer who brings coffee on Sundays. “I don’t draw to show anyone,” he says. “I draw to remember that I’m still here.”

Despite his circumstances, Juan speaks with surprising calm. He doesn’t blame anyone, not his parents, not the schools, not the city. “It’s all on me,” he says. “I could’ve done things differently. I just didn’t.” When asked if he wants to change, he shrugs. “Maybe one day. I still think about it. I still know what to do.”

There are moments of hope. Some evenings, he helps younger people at the shelter who are new to the street. He tells them where to get food, which corners are safe, and how to stay warm when it rains. “I tell them, don’t get used to this,” he says. “Don’t let it become normal.”

He still visits the public library a few times a week. “It’s quiet there,” he says. “And warm. I read or charge my phone. Sometimes I just sit.” On one page of his sketchbook, he has written a short line in shaky handwriting: ‘It’s not that I don’t care. I just can’t keep caring all the time.’

Juan’s story is not one of redemption or resolution—at least not yet. But it is honest. He doesn’t pretend, doesn’t perform, and hopes for others. He knows what recovery would take. He knows where the help is. He just hasn’t stepped toward it.

Still, there’s something unmistakably human in his steadiness. He greets the same people every morning, thanks volunteers for meals, and keeps his drawings clean and safe from the rain. “I’m not proud of where I am,” he says. “But I’m not gone either. I’m still here. That counts for something.”

Juan’s story reminds us that not every life follows a clear arc of success or recovery. Some remain caught between knowledge and will, between what could be and what is. His life, quiet and unresolved, shows a different kind of endurance—the strength it takes simply to stay alive, day after day, still knowing, still aware, still here.