My leaving home

Story by a young woman

My leaving home was not a conventional one. I didn't have housewarming gifts from my parents or a housewarming party from my friends. To be quiet honest, I didn't have a place to live, so a party wasn't really necessary. For eight and a half months, without even knowing it, I was a 'missing person'. I had left home and decided to have no contact with my family and it wasn't until everyone started cooperating with an organisation called Reconnect that I was able to get my life back on track, and eventually move back home.

When I first contacted Reconnect I was living with a family friend. I'd spent a few nights in a refuge previously, but when a friend offered me a place to stay, I jumped at the chance. While refuges are a safe house, a place where people who have nowhere else to go stay, sometimes it's really difficult to live with so many other young people, all with issues of their own, when you're struggling yourself.

After a few months, due to circumstances out of both my control, and my friend's control, I moved back into the refuge system. This time, however, it was different as I had the support of a worker who helped me be more proactive in deciding my own future, while plans were being made to help me deal with the mess that had become my family. A youth worker worked with me and the issues I was facing, and a family worker worked with my family to try and understand what some of the issues were.

As well as dealing with a family melt-down, I was also struggling with health issues, and housing issues and my worker helped me work through all of this. If she couldn't help me access a service, she would research another service which could help me access the original service, or look for completely different ways of dealing with that issue - most of which were things I never would have thought and were somewhat unconventional, but almost all of which helped, even just a little bit.

She helped me get on the list for community housing, and in the interim, she advocated on my behalf at the refuge I was living in, to try and get me into their medium-term refuge, which would mean I had more time to deal with my current housing situation. Obviously the ideal in this situation was to have me back home, and safe at home, but there was always an alternative plan in case a resolution couldn't be reached fast enough, or wasn't reached at all.

I was told I could use their office to print things, or have internet access to help me get through school and when I was unable to enroll myself in school because I was under the age of 18 they advocated on my behalf. My worker did everything in her power to enable me to enable myself.

Unfortunately for me, my worker left to go back to her home state and I didn't want to go through the process of getting a new worker. However, the help I received from my worker started my journey to reconciliation with my family. I moved home last year and while things aren't easy, things have definitely changed and I don't think those changes would have been possible without Reconnect.

For more information on going missing, homelessness or leaving home, take a look at some of our other fact sheets and stories...

• Missing people: are you a young person who has considered going missing, or who is currently missing from their family and friends?(Fact sheet)
• Homelessness(Fact sheet)
• Moving Out(Story)