Most people picture homelessness as someone sleeping on a sidewalk or holding a sign at an intersection.

But youth homelessness often looks very different.

It looks like a student wearing the same clothes for days. A teenager quietly sleeping in a parking garage. A young person carrying everything they own in a single plastic bag while trying to blend in with classmates who have no idea what they’re experiencing.

Those are the stories explored in the first episode of Upfront Gwinnett: The Hidden Homeless 2, “What My Better Looks Like.”

The episode follows two young people, Michael Ayling and Destiny Thomas, whose paths into homelessness were different but shared one painful reality: Life changed almost overnight.

Ayling remembers the moment everything changed. His father packed his clothes in a trash bag and dropped him off at a police station. 

With nowhere else to go, he spent two months sleeping in a parking garage. During the day, he attended school. At night, he returned to the garage. When he needed to wash up, he used a public park sink. When he was hungry, survival sometimes meant making impossible choices.

“I had no food,” he said. “I had nothing to eat.”

Thomas’ journey began after conflict at home left her without a safe place to stay.

“I wasn’t gonna ask for no help,” she said. “But they saw that I needed help.”

Like many young people experiencing homelessness, she worked hard to hide what she was going through.

“The habit of thugging it out and not telling nobody what’s going on with you… it’s hard,” Thomas said. 

That silence is something service providers say they see every day.

Tami Wilder, Executive Director of Positive Impact International, leads the only emergency youth shelter in Gwinnett County. With just 24 beds, the organization serves young people not only from Gwinnett but from nearly a dozen surrounding counties.

Many of the youth she encounters aren’t living on the streets in ways most people recognize.

“You’re going to find kids sleeping on their friends’ couches,” Wilder said. “Staying in Gwinnett County libraries… parks because they’re well lit.”

“They’re just literally trying to survive as long as they can on their own until they learn about us and call us to help.”

By the time many young people arrive, the emotional toll has already begun to reshape how they experience the world.

Aimee Worlds, a holistic therapist with Positive Impact International, says prolonged survival mode changes far more than a child’s living situation.

“When they get here, their nervous system is in override,” she explained. “Emotionally dysregulated and exhausted.”

Her goal is to help restore something many young people haven’t experienced in a long time.

“We see the child for who the child is. The human being.”

For Destiny, that care made an immediate difference.

“When I first came here,” she said, “I finally felt like I could breathe.”

Mental health professionals say those early interventions are critical, yet often difficult to sustain.

Licensed Clinical Social Worker Te’Kesha Smith says trauma experienced during childhood affects every aspect of development.

“When you displace a child during their developmental stages, it changes who they are,” Smith said. “How they eat, sleep, behave, think, feel… the entire child has changed.”

Smith also points to another challenge many providers face: funding.

“Fifteen minutes. $13.61. That is what Georgia Medicaid reimburses.”

She said that reimbursement falls well short of what’s needed to provide intensive trauma-informed care, leaving many clinicians to continue the work because of their commitment to the young people they serve.

“We’re expected to provide intensive services,” Smith said. “A lot of clinicians are doing this work because they care, not because the reimbursement supports it.”

Today, Michael has what once felt impossible: a place of his own.

The memories remain, but so does the perspective he gained along the way.

“Don’t give up,” he said. “If I would’ve gave myself up and went back, I probably would’ve never had my own place.”

His story, along with Destiny’s, reminds us that youth homelessness is often invisible to the people passing by every day.

For many young people, the greatest burden isn’t simply the absence of housing. It’s the exhaustion of carrying trauma in silence while trying to appear as though everything is normal.

Their stories may often go unseen.

The need does not.

Watch the episode below: