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Facing Homelessness

Homelessness is happening to more and more people in our country. Most people who lose their homes, through foreclosure or inability to pay the rent, find somewhere else to go. Some are able to move to a cheaper place. Some find an apartment. Some move in with relatives. But some find themselves without a roof over their heads and nowhere to go to sleep at night.

Surviving homelessness requires planning, and yet it is not easy to make a plan when you’re facing impending homelessness. When you lose your home, you lose far more than a place to rest your head at night. You stand the risk of losing an important sense of connectedness with others. You may lose a phone link. You may lose an Internet connection. You lose a place to keep your stuff. You lose a place to receive mail. You lose the place that anchors you in an uncertain world, a place to go home to, and to go out from. Once you lose your connectedness to the world, it is very difficult to climb back in again. The place of the homeless, the unfixed floating space that the homeless live, is almost a different dimension from the place or the places in which we ordinarily spend our lives.

To lose one’s home often follows upon the loss of a job, illness or a divorce. If one loses one’s home, it becomes all the more difficult to hold onto a job, but the most common situation is that the loss of the job precedes loss of the home. To be homeless and jobless, to lose one’s lines of connection with the world, is to find one’s self in dire straights.

Finally, when you become homeless, you realize that you need a lot of stuff. You need at a minimum bedding for the night, but you have no place to store that bedding during the day. This is a bigger problem then you might think. One way to solve it is to be able to afford a storage facility. Some people pool their limited resources and share a storage facility. The advantage of a storage facility is that you can store your stuff at night and return in the morning to put it back.

Finally, homelessness does not have to mean losing ones dignity or forced to walk the streets aimlessly without a shower pushing a shopping cart of bottles and cans. There are real strategies available to you in order to survive these troubled times while you work on getting yourself back on your feet. Don’t let the stereotype image of homelessness parallelize you into believing there is no way back to the world you once had. There is but it will take fortitude and a real sense of hope and perserverence.