I was asleep when I heard the door rattle against the frame. My eyes flashed open and I sprung upright in my under-desk sleep space. Was it all over? Had someone come to work early? I peered over my desk, afraid of what I might see. The morning sun burned through the chicken-scratch graffiti of the office’s front door, spilling across the labyrinth of desks spread out before me. There wasn’t a soul in sight. I breathed a sigh of relief. Probably just paranoia. Or maybe not — a breeze blew the front door against its frame, the pygmy-like rattle of a loose door jamb. It was the same sound I heard moments before and would hear countless times in the future but never quite get used to.

A little paranoia goes a long way when you live in a 10-square-feet workstation. I stood up, stretching my limbs toward the sky like a thawing, cryo-preserved humanoid, neck kinked and back stiff. I bent down to deflate my air mattress. The clock read 6:45 a.m. Under normal circumstances I’d still be asleep, but these circumstances were far from normal.

Earlier that week, I had moved into my office. Secretly. I rented out my Venice Beach apartment for the month, packed a few duffels with my clothes and prized belongings, and started taking up residence behind my desk, carefully using each square inch of out-of-sight real estate to store my stuff. Not everyone aspires to have their co-workers catching them at their desk in their tighty-whities—at 6 in the morning. Believing the absolute best-case-scenario reaction to my being there would be supreme awkwardness, I kept the whole thing to myself. Every morning I’d neatly pack away my personal belongings, turning the lights back on and lowering the air conditioning to its too-chilly-for-me 72 degrees—the way they always left it overnight. I’d leave for a morning workout and shower, simultaneously keeping clean and in shape while ensuring I wasn’t always the first to arrive. Occasionally I’d even make myself late to work, blaming the awful L.A. traffic. Just to fit in.

If living in the office seems like too much effort, it was a cakewalk compared to making monthly rent payments.

It had been two years since moving to Los Angeles and, like many Angelinos, I was broke. I stretched the definition of affordability by taking a studio apartment within 20 minutes of work, cramming my belongings into 250 square feet of glorified tenement housing while my savings vanished like a roach in the daylight. I put my dreams of traveling and writing on hold so I could stabilize my living situation. I figured I could suffer for a bit in the meantime.

By the summer of 2012, those dreams gave way to a nightmare. I’d been working two jobs — 60 hours a week to keep an apartment I rarely had time to enjoy. Then, disaster struck. Company raises and bonuses were frozen. My identity was stolen. I got a hefty hospital bill for a surgery earlier that year. With existing student loans, a car payment and my rent set for its maximum-allowable annual increase under the California law, I started to wonder: What happened to my American Dream?

I had little left to sacrifice. Without money, I had two choices: Give up my dreams of working creatively or surrender my time working even more. Either way, the outlook was gloomy. Until I remembered my ace in the hole.

A few months earlier, I stopped by the office on a late-weeknight assignment. Everything around the place was closed. The land of business plazas was a veritable ghost town, a blank spot on the map, stripped naked from the daytime bustle. Around that time, the news was filled with stories about an influx of U.S. congressmen taking up residences in their D.C. offices. They were converting perfectly livable, neglected space into their own white-collar Walden for the working man. I wondered if I could do the same. But before it became necessary, it seemed impossible.

Yawning myself awake in an empty office, that impossibility disappeared. So what if there was sacrifice? Waking up with a pumping adrenal gland wasn’t ideal, but it was better than lying in bed knowing your hours were auctioned off to a status quo you never wanted in the first place.

I was never one to value money over time. Growing up in a small town near the Gulf of Mexico, life was more about community than profit. My parents stressed achievement, but championed leisure. My sister and I were pushed to make straight A’s, earning annual road trip vacations to diverse locales—beautiful Fort Walton Beach, Florida, historic Williamsburg, Virginia, or rustic Bangor, Maine. Our dollar seemed to stretch further than other families’. When my sister became a lawyer, I drifted slowly into the arts. I pushed aside my sexy-school graduate degree to pursue acting and writing, taking a 40-hour-a-week job to pay the bills.

I’m not your average homeless person. To many, I look like the typical middle-class young professional — clean-cut, well-spoken, well-dressed, hygienic. But what is the average homeless person nowadays, anyway? The once-wide chasm between “homeless” and “middle-class” has shrunk to little more than a fault line, over which many find themselves standing in a precarious straddle, a little bad news away from losing it all.

Living at the office remains a unique solution to overpriced housing woes. But there are alternatives. Many working folks, balancing skyrocketing cost-of-living with grounded wages, are employing their own varying degrees of minimalism. From starving artists living in their vehicles to the middle class moving into tiny homes, from dumpster-dwelling college professors to Volkswagen “vanimal” Major League Baseball players, how Americans are defining “home” is changing at all levels of the socioeconomic scale.