The thing that always strikes me about homelessness is not its remoteness, but rather how it seems that any one of us are only a few unfortunate events and wrong moves away being in the gutter, and how most people feel that it could never happen to them. I find David's account brutally honest, enjoyable and yes, uplifting because it shows that there is a real (albeit long and painful) route out of the damning poverty of homelessness, not because of any particularly joyful spin that he puts on his story.
Is he making it uplifting because he's desperate and he wants people to help him? I don't think that's the overriding reason, but maybe, who knows? At any rate, if he's managed to pull himself so far out of the lows that he's able to adopt that strategy rather than just accept a life of homelessness that just happens to him then fair play - he deserves every success he can find.