The Overton window is the range of policies politically acceptable to the mainstream population at a given time.You do not have to be looking to promote government policies to find this a useful concept. I generally think of this as a corollary to the idea that fact is stranger than fiction.
People who do not know you well will generally not readily accept any "crazy sounding" stories from you. This is true regardless of who you are and "crazy sounding" depends in part on what folks believe.
So you get anti-vaxxers who don't trust the government and if you tell THEM you are sure that the covid vaccine is an evil government plot, they will high five you and agree heartily and then there are groups who think anti-vaxxers are nutters and if you say the same thing to them, you will get a very different reaction.
Again, this is true no matter who you are BUT if you are homeless, people generally view homeless folks as "crazies and junkies," so if you are homeless, you have even less credibility than average and many people are very inclined to default to calling you nuts to your face if you say something "crazy sounding."
It's mostly not "Well, shit, how do you earn a living while staying in hiding from your abusive nutcase obsessed psycho stalker ex husband who is a cop??" No one thinks homeless people have those kinds of problems.The above quote is from a piece on this site called Sarah Connor, in hiding before the war. That example comes from conversations I had with another woman at a free breakfast site who claimed she couldn't get her problems resolved because she was in hiding from her abusive ex-husband who was a cop and this created significant barriers to earning a living, among other things.
If you are homeless, your life has basically been burned to the ground and odds are high there is some kind of social drama involved in that, such as you fleeing an abusive relationship. Odds are also high that absolutely no one will be sympathetic to this fact and will dismiss any such claims as you being drunk, high or nuts.
That is the current narrative for what causes homelessness in the US: They are all junkies and crazies. So talking about being stalked or whatever is highly likely to get you labeled as a junkie, a crazy or both.
It will tend to NOT help to try to ASK people how to cope with really extreme situations. It will tend to deepen your problems.
I was struck by the fact that many of the tactics that work if you are trying to hide your identity also work if you are homeless and maybe don't have an address or an ID card. Things like cash, gift cards and pre-paid phones are your friend.You will be better off seeing yourself like a spy trapped behind enemy lines or like "Sarah Connor, in hiding before the war" and be very cagey about not oversharing any "dramatic" truths about your life.
No one wants to take it seriously because if they did, they would need to take YOU seriously and treat YOU with real respect and also they would have to acknowledge that simply knowing you potentially puts them in harms way and HELPING you if they fully believe you to be telling the truth puts them at even greater risk.
Fifty years after Earnest Hemingway took his own life, it finally came out that his claims that the FBI was bugging all his stuff was not simply paranoid delusions. And he was an esteemed author with a comfortable life only trying to get good friends to believe him, not more or less random strangers who happen to work at homeless services or whatever.
There is a great scene in Jurassic Park 3 where Grant learns Billy Brennan stole some raptor eggs and that's why the raptors are after them. He considers tossing them out a window and then doesn't. Someone says "What if they catch us with them?" and he replies in part "What if they catch us without them?"
If you weren't mentally unstable before you ended up homeless, simply being homeless can make you question your sanity. Every social expectation you may have previously had may go out the window as you learn just how cold, cruel, uncaring and callous people can be.
If you have challenging problems of a sort that would make good friends ask you "Whatchu been smoking??" when you try to talk about them, you need to find solutions and you may need to do so without crying on anyone's shoulder about it because the act of talking about it may only compound your problems.
I really like movies like Twelve Monkeys where the protagonist questions his own sanity at times. I enjoy them much more than movies and TV shows where everyone acts like they are absolutely certain X bizarre explanation is completely true and everyone they tell automatically understands and believes it too.
If you are questioning your sanity at times, you need to figure out how to make decisions that err in a certain direction even while not certain yourself what's real and what's not. Like Grant and like some scenes in Twelve Monkeys, it may help to think of a solution that you feel is an acceptable answer in "both" scenarios in your head, one where you are right and x crazy thing really is going on in your life and one where you are wrong and you are merely "imagining it" or overreacting or whatever.
Generally speaking, spilling your guts to random people who ONLY know you as some homeless loser and who will probably be inclined to assume you to be crazy or high will not be helpful. If you have no evidence and no credibility, ranting about it generally only hurts you and feeling like "That's not FAIR!" doesn't seem to be a means to convince life, the universe and everything to budge on this issue.
Problem solve as best you can. Cope as best you can. Set goals. And try to NOT make things worse by sounding like a lunatic to people disinclined to bother to wonder if any of it is actually true.
Having said that, if you CAN find a means to get some kind of actually constructive feedback, this can do wonders to help you get mentally unstuck. It's just really challenging to find for some issues and in some circumstances.