In early spring 2025, I was living in a camp on the outskirts of Bend when Sabra walked into my life. She was there to run media prep for campers scheduled to speak with reporters, making sure we stayed safe and they didn’t hollow out our words. We bonded immediately over the absurdities of our shared dorkiness, starting when she learned I had been force-fed John Grisham legal thrillers at eight years old.
Then Sabra looked at me and said something that shifted the course of my life: “You should write an op-ed. Tell your story.”
I had to google what an op-ed was before I wrote a single word. But what struck me wasn’t the advice. It was a complete stranger looking past my circumstances, seeing an equal and handing me a pen. To understand why Sabra believed so much in an unhoused person reclaiming their own narrative, you have to understand the path she walked to find her own.
Long before she was a playwright, ghostwriter, journalist and media strategist, Sabra was a child running for survival. At 10 years old, she fled severe domestic violence alongside her mother and two younger siblings. For years, childhood meant life on the move, camping through the desert, sleeping under redwoods, and acting as a second parent to her little brother and sister.
Surviving as an unhoused youth meant evading the law at every turn. Under Washington state’s statutes at the time, caught runaways faced arrest. Asking a teacher or counselor for help wasn’t an option.
When the family finally found a house in Washington state, the relief was short-lived. Immediately after getting under a real roof, her mother kicked 14-year-old Sabra out onto the street.
Her first night on her own, she climbed onto the roof of her high school auditorium.
”I slept up there because I didn’t want to be late for class the next morning,” Sabra told me. “School was the one place that felt consistent and safe. And books were proof that other worlds and other lives were possible.”
Surviving as an unhoused youth meant evading the law at every turn. Under Washington state’s statutes at the time, caught runaways faced arrest. Asking a teacher or counselor for help wasn’t an option. It meant triggering child welfare systems that would have scattered her younger siblings into foster care. At 14, she carried the weight of keeping her family together, choosing rooftops and caves over the risk of forced separation.
By 17, Sabra was navigating the streets of Portland, where the margins for survival shrank to nothing. Worn out from sleep deprivation, she fell asleep on the sidewalk outside Powell’s Books, only to be kicked awake by a police officer threatening to arrest her. Terrified of being locked up as a runaway, she bolted into the night.
Trembling in the dark, she was pulled into a shadow-filled alcove by an unhoused man known as “Saint John.” He took care of her, giving up his own sleeping bag so she wouldn’t freeze on the concrete, and would take her breakfast at Sisters of the Road Café.
Living outside meant living with constant vulnerability. Just four blocks away from where Sabra slept near the Burnside Bridge, another teenage girl was set on fire in her sleep. Survival wasn’t just about finding food; it was about staying awake all night because closing your eyes made you a target.
Yet alongside that terror was the solidarity of the unhoused community.
“People who have the least are almost always the most generous,” Sabra said. “That truth has stayed with me through every tax bracket I’ve lived in since.”
Society often demands that unhoused people be either completely invisible or endlessly apologetic for existing.
When Sabra later adapted her experiences into a stage play for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, she refused the tragic, tear-jerking script society expects from survivors. Instead, she wrote a dark comedy set inside a bank lobby. When critics pushed back that it wasn’t graphic or miserable enough, she refused to budge.
“Survivors aren’t one-dimensional caricatures,” she told me. “We are witty, sharp, flawed and funny. If you make art just to make comfortable people feel good, you’re making Disney on Ice. That’s not what survival is.”
When I asked Sabra what dignity means after decades of surviving, writing and fighting for others, she didn’t cite policies or non-profit slogans. She pointed straight to the basics: sleep.
“The most basic human dignity is the right to rest,” she said. “The right to sleep safely without fear of assault, freezing or having every possession stolen while your eyes are closed. Sleep deprivation is classified as torture for a reason. When people are denied rest, it unravels everything.”
Society often demands that unhoused people be either completely invisible or endlessly apologetic for existing. Sabra showed me a third way: lived experience isn’t a badge of shame to hide, nor is it tragedy porn to be consumed. It is knowledge and expertise. When she suggested I write, it wasn’t hollow advice. She was reminding me that our lives, our humor and our dignity are entirely our own and where we sit on the economic ladder doesn’t define who we are.
-A Bend resident since 1999, Mandy Bryant is a writer and advocate with lived experience in Central Oregon homelessness. Her work focuses on rehumanization, telling the stories of the people behind the tents. To read her earlier articles, check out “Displaced by a Moment” on Substack.
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