I turned 45 last week. I could be homeless soon.

I’m not the stereotypical homeless candidate: I have a degree in English and a small business as a copywriter. And yet, my situation says something about where we live in California right now – somewhere between a real roof and a virtual one. When your business doesn’t require a physical address, and you’ve lost your social contacts and the network of connections they provide, it’s very easy to find yourself floating more or less nowhere.

Earlier this year, the trailer park in Ukiah, where I lived for nine years, went from generally sketchy to completely unsafe. It was familiar and semi-affordable, but rising rent combined with dangerously poor maintenance (leaky roof, shorted heater, and more mice than I felt comfortable sharing my space with) motivated me to do something. It was time to go.

I searched frantically for a place, but Craigslist and newspaper ads turned up nothing. My aunt in Santa Rosa offered to rent me a room, even though her lease was about to expire; she keeps moving up the waiting list for senior housing. When he moves, the house will be sold and I will be without a room.

An apartment in Sonoma County is a little more expensive than in Mendocino County where I used to live. But in both places, available housing is so scarce that prices are stratospheric. A studio can cost $975 or more; anything under $750 is snapped up before it hits the market. I applied for subsidized housing at two places that required me to mail in the paperwork, and they didn’t put me on their multi-year waiting lists because my income was too low. On the other hand, since I run my own business and make $500-$700 a month writing full-time, I am not eligible for unemployment.

It wasn’t a shock to learn that I was too poor for subsidized housing. In my 20s I applied for welfare and was turned down – but not before a social worker advised me to have a baby if I wanted public money. There’s always been a net under the edge of the cliff for people in dire straits, only that cliff is collapsing much faster than even I expected. What little safety net is left could catch you if you fall hard enough to suddenly lose your home and your job. But if you work full time and are poorly paid, you don’t have that much to hold on to.

Since the internet wasn’t turning up any new leads, I buried myself The Job Hunter’s Survival Guidea recession-specific reboot of the Richard Bolles classic What color is your parachute? It seemed that self-assessment exercises might be helpful, and work and housing are tightly intertwined. If anything, a solution-oriented focus could bolster my resolve to keep trying. The same advice is repeated in the book: take a group of friends to dinner and compare notes. Ask 10 family members to help you assess your career. This was a problem.

There’s no comfortable way to admit this: I don’t have 10 friends and family members, or at least not the ones Bolles talks about. I have relatives, of course, but apart from the one I live with, they are scattered all over the world and we don’t see each other very often. I have no one to call or visit, no one to drink coffee with or to check big and small things on the phone. In practical terms, I have no friends.

I should say that I have no friends IRL, or “in real life”, because I have many virtual friends online. It’s a pleasure to post something I think is funny and get a thumbs up in response, and I’ve found a small group on Twitter through a blog I contribute to who are interesting and kind human beings. I also have my own blog and a network of editors around the country that I work for. But even if the turned thumbs could be substituted for shingles, I’d have trouble putting a roof over my head with them. And a roof in a neighborhood with no friends or neighbors means depending on those clicks for more than they can provide, like warmth and empathy and a two-way exchange that isn’t sterile.

I tried to figure out how I became friendless. Many years ago I lost my job when my transportation broke down and I couldn’t get to work. My friends from work stuck by me for a while, but without work to provide context to our relationships, they eventually faded away. Working from home in a remote location never replaced those lost friends, and not long after that in 2004 I was homeless for a little over a year. After I found a place to live, I worked overtime to connect with my community, but I kept getting rejected. A colleague from my first job openly told me: “Everyone here is done as far as socializing is concerned.” You’ll have to look elsewhere for that.”

But I had a laptop. I would go home and scroll through Facebook, hoping to click and click enough times to quell my growing anxiety. It is no coincidence that I felt hungry almost all the time then. When I devoted myself to writing full-time, my work connected me to people across the country and the world, even though I was actually nowhere.

In doing so, my fingertip grip on yet another ledge loosened, but instead of falling straight down, I’m floating, a kind of ghost. My work is virtual: performed, delivered, and sometimes even compensated online. I say I’m in Northern California, but as a freelancer, I could be anywhere and submit work anywhere, for a third-party client even further out in any-about-sphere. It’s nice to feel the global connection, especially since I haven’t traveled much. But if I can’t make enough per piece to pay the ever-increasing rent, I can’t settle anywhere in particular. This in turn makes it almost impossible for me to access health care or other public services, including those designed to help people find housing. It’s better than landing headfirst on concrete, but not by much.

Policy makers would probably view my situation as a simple need for affordable housing, but what I need is more complex. Yes, I urgently need a place to live, but if I end up somewhere too far from people, shops and a post office that I can walk to, I’ll end up feeling like I’m roughly where I am now. It’s exhausting to even think about. It requires me to leave the emotional security of a life I’ve spent alone, satisfying my needs with large series of zeros and ones, and grow back into a human being without my USB port.

That real person, who I have yet to become, needs my community with friends (if I’m lucky), neighbors and social access, not ports of entry. I still believe it can happen, but in the years since I first became homeless, the world has changed in ways that never let me in. I can’t be the only one. There are certainly enough of us with similar needs to take a stand and fix these social disconnects, but it’s not a world we can design with the click of a mouse. We may need to go outside, reclaim the common good of conversation instead of words with friends.