When you see a homeless person, typically your first instinct is to turn up your lip, or look at them in disgust. Sometimes, you have a nagging compulsion to help them. But more often than not, you just walk on by. If they ask you for money, most times people respond with discouraging words, or make up tiny white lies, and very few actually part with their money.
Homelessness is becoming more and more rampant as the years march on. Be it due to increasing rents, loss of jobs, mental health, or just a series of unfortunate events that have lead these men and women to become street dependent. Sometimes it is a choice that they walk out of their homes and on to the streets. Sometimes its forced upon them. We so often look at street dependent people and say things like "get a job" or "I would/wouldn't do (insert "wisdom")" But we each are closer to being homeless than being the next Kardashian, or becoming Insta-famous.
We dont realize that we are just one missed payment, one lost job, one missed connection from being in that situation ourselves. I myself have experienced homelessness, through no fault of my own. My sister and I lost our house in the 2003 wild fires that went through San Bernardino California. In a blazing instance all of our prized possessions were gone. Decades of memories. Irreplaceable pictures. Treasured family heirlooms. Pets, clothing, furniture, everything that we had worked so hard to build, gone in an instance.
Remembering the last moments before we lost it all. The panic, the terror, the slightest tinge of hope that somehow a 4 alarm fire could be extinguished by a garden hose. The walking outside to see a hell scape where you beautiful neighborhood once stood. The sheer arrogance of people who didn't even belong in the area, driving up and down the streets watching people try to evacuate, and blocking the street so that the fire crew were not even able to make it. Piling everything that you could carry into the back of one of the 3 cars you had, and driving away from a burning inferno, hoping and praying you would have something to come home to, but knowing that you aren't. Thinking of the pets who you couldn't save because their fight or flight instinct kicked in. Hoping that the dog somehow got out of the garage, and knowing she didn't. Having to wander the streets of a city you've lived in for years, like nomads, because you have no place to go.
You seek out what little comforts you can. You call on friends and family not really effected by the wildfires. They graciously offer you shelter for a night or two. But come the fifth day, patients and welcomes wear out. The same outfit you had on since you ran out of your burning house, crusted with sweat and tears, and in desperate need of being laundered, but it some how feels like a security blanket, covered in the ashes of what once was.
Your daily struggle takes on a whole new life. Now you must graciously walk away from your friends house where they have let you stay for a few nights, even though they politely tell you that you can stay, even though they in their hearts want to go back to how their lives were before you and your family showed up on their door step. You now have to find food, shelter, a place to leave your car while you return to work, and school. Trying to be upbeat and positive, even though you have told your story 1900 times before. Each time a new piece opens up that you had forgotten. You have to relive that nightmare over and over. The pity and socially expected "oh my god, I am so sorry to hear that, is there anything that you need? What can I do to help?" Knowing that there isn't anything that they can or would actually do for you even if you handed them a list of things that you truly needed at that moment in your life. To call upon those "offered" favors with any type of expectation, would only place a wedge between you and that person. So even though you quite literally need everything and anything, you say "no but thank you, just let us know if you happen to see a place for rent."
The true scope of humanity comes when you find yourself looking for a home, after a natural disaster happens. Places that were once within your price range, and for years had never rented for more than $600 a month are now $1200 because its a golden opportunity for the greed to seep in because you know the whole cornerstone of capitalisms "supply and demand". Three long winter months. Your family separated when you are at your most vulnerable. One part stays with co-workers, but they have no place for you, so you have to find some place to go. There's family 70 miles away, that you go and stay with, and do, just so you dont have to sleep in your cold car again.
You begin fighting with them because they don't understand what you have gone through, and want you to get up, brush it off like it was just a small thing, and return to your daily life, when your daily life is now just trying to find a place to live, a way to eat, shower. Oh god what it was to be able to take a shower during the first few weeks of this new life. And to do something as simple as sleep without having waking nightmares, thinking you smell smoke. The "what if's" they keep you awake. Running down every impossible scenario like it was some how an option. Questioning every choice that you made leading up to the day the fire happened. Living with these open internal scars that are still raw and bleeding, and just needing time to process things. And every discouraging word rips open the fragile scab you have over them. People expect you to heal and move on in a timeline that they set upon you, not one that you can not even begin to have for yourself as your lungs still hurt from the amount of toxic smoke you inhaled trying to rush back and forth to save your home and life.
Seventeen years later, it haunts you like a ghost, making you remember every moment of it. You heart beats fast, your eyes dilate, and the memories come flooding back, when you have to remember any portion of it. It hurts less now. You can talk about it without much pain. You can recant the feeling of going to sleep in your car, in a Walmart parking lot, and hearing people talk, and the security guards drive by speaking into their radios, giving the store management updates on your car, and how "it appears someone is sleeping in there." Because you know, a thin blanket rolled up in the windows to give you some sense of privacy, and provide just a small layer of warmth in the dead of winter, would suggest anything but?
And now you have a 70 year old parent who is homeless, and scared. You understand their situation, but can not have them stay with you or even close to where you live because of their toxic behaviors. You see, my sister and I tried to help her a number of times over the years. And her lack of basic respect and decency, along with her substance abuse, and possible underlaying mental health issues make it a horrid situation to even try and help. She labors under the delusion that things are still how they were prior to the 1990's. That she knows best, and that certain rules do not apply to her. Like smoking indoors. She has basically smoked since the day she was born. At times as many as two packs a day.
My sister nor I smoke. We asked her the last time she lived with us, not to smoke in the house. She would light her cigarette in the kitchen, and then walk all the way through the house to the front door, so that she could smoke on the front porch instead of the 3 feet it was to the back door. We would come home and she would be sitting in her bedroom smoking with the window open, like that was somehow not smoking in the house, because the window was open.
When she came to stay with us that last time, we told her in advance that we were going to be moving out of state, and that she could only stay with us for a short period of time, basically up until the time we packed up and locked the door for the last time. She went around to all of our neighbors, people we had only a communal association with, as we lived in a trailer park and my niece played with their children, and would tell them all types of things about us. Her favorite 'tweaker' saying at the time was "i dont know what the fuck they are doing, they treat me like a mushroom, kept in the dark and fed shit". Because we didnt have a solid plan when we moved out of state.
It was originally supposed to just be me, so I had a plan and things situated for myself, but adding on another two people was difficult enough, but to add her to the mix would have made the whole thing impossible and would have burned all the bridges we could have had before they were even built.
At the time of writing this, I have to my left, a clipboard of information, housing agencies, federal and state programs, phone numbers, addresses, quickly jotted notes, and the like with ink freshly drying. Trying in vane to help someone who isnt even trying to help themselves. Every phone call I make, brings me that much more closer to getting a place established for her, only to receive a phone call from her and listening to her tell me how she doesn't "want to move into a studio apartment, it "HAS" to be a one bedroom, because a studio is to small" and this coming from the homeless woman living in a four person tent. The countless listings I've scrolled past because the simplistic rules established in the advertisement would be to much for her to begin to follow. The housing codes, and rental laws, I've taken the time to lean and to educate myself on, in hopes to help. The delicate integral dancing and word play, I have done speaking to these agencies and people to get to the point where a studio may even be an option, is like that of a Prima Ballerina Asaluta. Carefully choregraphed, carefully worded, key phrases mentioned, insiders jargon, brown nosing customer service, pampering, ego stroking, and professionally educated vocabulary spoken, to those who with a stroke of a pen could open the doors to a shelter for her to live in. Only to have her smack it away because it doesn't fit her bougie idea of living, yet being a street dependent tent dweller is some how the better option?
What does one do for a person like this? How can you begin to mask the drama that she brings with her. How do you window dress a situation in such a way that people do not see the tape holding back the deluge of negativity that embodies her. There comes a point and a time when you just sit back and wonder "why am I doing this? She is just going to mess it up again. She's not going to follow the rules. All of your hard work is going to be for nothing. Yeah she may get into a place and squeak out another five years or so, only for her to then be homeless at what 75 maybe 80. At which point you will then have to try to figure this all out again? At that point her health may be even worse, and nursing homes are expensive and even if that was her only choice, she would some how figure out how to make them kick her out."
The mental, emotional, spiritual, physical stress and exhaustion you feel, letting this all take up space in your mind, begins to effect your own mental well being. Your peaceful nights rest is taken from you, because you think about how cold you are laying in your own bed, safe in your own space, only to remember the time that you lived in your car, and felt unsafe at 23, let alone in a tent at 70.
What do you do? What can you do? You speak your heavy words in prayer, hoping that if there is some higher power, some universe creating being, that some how, some way, it would hear your voice, your humble prayers, above all else going on through the expansive universe. The shear hubris of even begining to believe that your voice, let alone your issues, would make the smallest difference to a cosmic being such as a god or goddess, or even register to them is laughable. But isnt that what we are taught from a young age? Let go and let god (whatever that looks like to you).
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