No home. No roof overhead. That’s a hell of a new and unwanted experience. Ignore what the YouTube Influencers say, you never sleep well in a car, surrounded by your worldly goods stuffed into a couple of bags, especially when you are old and not street smart.
But that is not the beginning, or even the end, of the story or the unfolding journey. Homelessness rarely just happens out of the blue like a capricious stealth strike from a malevolent Universe, there are always lead in signs, always indicators subtle or otherwise, always portents of the possibility of domicile discardation. I felt it coming in so many ways. The writing of that can wait for another time.
Right now, as I write this, within smell of my 72nd birthday, my existence is tagged by the number ****#. That is the keypad entry number to both the secure facility and the monk’s cell sized room I sleep in. All the people who live here live under a protective veil, and necessarily so, for many are escaping domestic violence, many are escaping the ravages of their own addictions, and others like me are finding temporary respite from the unrelenting internal pressure caused by the brutality of childhood abuse experiences and the unexpected removal of secure accommodation.
This environment, this institutionalised environment, reminds me so much of the Catholic Orphanage I grew up in. Not in the sense that it is rife with the abuse that the Orphanage was, for it is not, but rather because it is a very controlled environment. Everything happens under the gaze, for safety reasons, of CCTV, so privacy becomes a removed item. It is like living in a fishbowl where the observation and monitoring is as needed as the need to breathe is needed, for some of the people who temporarily live here have endured life experiences that would crush the souls out of smarmy judgemental types, and it is understandable if, on occasion, as I’ve been told, a touch of psychosis can reign.
Of course, I can simply leave anytime I like, it is not a prison. It is a Transitional Housing Facility offered up by the Qld Dept of Housing. It sits on the continuum between emergency accommodation at the sharp end, which I was afforded for a period, and the ultimate aim of a place of one’s own in the world of Social Housing.
This facility houses people from many backgrounds. There are women here escaping domestic violence, and there are women here who were divorce-dudded into totally unexpected penury and homelessness, and there are men here who have experienced the same. There are others, like me, with old age pensioner incomes, who were tossed out of once secure accommodation into the now unaffordable private rental market by property owners simply exercising their right to sell. There are people here with alcohol and other drug addictions, and some are quite ravaged by those addictions. Some are ex-prisoners on transition back into the world. Others here have fallen through the cracks in our mental health systems. Some of the people here are probably just like you, the reader, pretty normal folks, the only difference between them and you is that a perfect storm of unwanted experiences hit some of them at the perfectly wrong time. All that I am saying here is that judgement is an arsehole’s game and thankfully not everybody judges.
Homelessness has a feeling all of it’s own. It is a de-tethering from the comfort of sense of place, a rapid de-coupling from a personal environment carefully constructed with objects placed just so. The photos of the kids on that wall, that favourite coffee spot on the verandah, the very unscrutinised nature of just being, just being in your own chosen environment. All of that goes out the window and you are left holding the material aspects of your life in the couple of bags that each hand can hold. It becomes a brutal winnowing out process that dumps away what was once thought necessary.
I was quite surprised by the getting rid of things process, because there was nowhere to store everything. I’m a minimalist, even so, there was some amazement at the number of objects that crawled out of the woodwork when I was emptying out my place. Some things are now in plastic crates under a friend’s house. Some things went to Op Shops, some things were given away, some things couldn’t even be given away and ended up at the dump. Humiliating. The end of some treasured things.
Homelessness also contains many surprises that come from the far left of the left of left field. Within three days of landing on the street I was contacted by an Australia-based Survivor Advocate who stepped into my despairing mind space and who, with solid tangible help, enabled the creation of a viable pathway back to eventual independence. He knows who he is, I know who he is, and I am grateful.
So, I am in transition, on the path from where I was to where I will next be, with no great moans coming along for the ride. Nothing about the experience of being homeless compares in magnitude to my childhood abuse experiences, doesn’t come remotely close, and that fact helps me to maintain some perspective on what I am currently going through. Yes, being homeless is beyond difficult, it is hard, very unnerving, and it would be an empty glossing-up if I tried to pretend otherwise, but take it from me, there are far worse things than that in life. The sad thing is that any of these things exist at all.
Homelessness is eminently visible in our society and yet remains strangely unseen and seriously untackled. Yes, it affects the older poor like me, and the younger poor, but it also affects the working poor, and the lower middle class who never dreamed it could happen to them. It affects people who cannot care for themselves and it affects people who can. Homelessness holds up a mirror to the greed-based and profit from real estate at any cost nature of the society that we all live in.
And … I guess there are always personal lessons contained within the homeless experience, and I am finding some. The autistic traits I carry, which may be natural to me or may have been induced by childhood abuse and trauma, mean that I have an ingrained penchant for wanting to be invisible and unnoticed, and since one of the traits I carry is a low level of voluntary social interaction skills (hermitsville) … well … homelessness seems to grandly hit all of those buttons all at once because the invisibility of homelessness envelops like a cloak. Even I can see that I need to learn to become a bit more social, and a bit more visible, like, real quick.
So there you go … I see no particular value in complaining and blaming all and sundry on any issue. I write about how an experience feels, and this has been about homelessness and how it feels, to me. It strips artifice away, and it leaves you standing naked in the real.
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