Help yourself out of homelessness: Yubanet
By Tom Durkin
Being homeless sucks. I know. I’ve been there. I’ve got arthritis in my neck and scoliosis in my spine from sleeping in the front seats of my vehicles because the rest of my car was full of all the stuff I thought I needed if I were ever going to live inside again.
I was never as down and out as the people in the streets and camps, but I know the daily urgency of finding a place to go to the bathroom and get cleaned up for work. Buying and keeping semi-nutritious food that doesn’t need to be refrigerated or cooked was not a healthy lifestyle. Finding a new and safe place to park every night made me a “transient” in the eyes of law enforcement.
It’s a hard life, and far, far harder without a car or a job.
It’s been almost 20 years since the last time I lived in the wild, but I am still keenly aware it could happen again. Once you’ve lost the security of hearth and home, you never get it back. When I shop for a car or truck, my absolute first decision point is: Could I live and sleep in this vehicle if I had to?
past, present, future
Anyone who is homeless or houseless must ask and answer three fundamental questions:
How did I get here?
How am I going to survive?
How will I get out of this?
While many homeless people are truly innocent victims (especially the children) of fate, circumstance and the critical lack of affordable housing, most of us must admit – and accept – some degree of responsibility for our plights.
Most of us can trace the cause(s) of finding ourselves on the streets to one of two broad categories: bad decisions (e.g., drugs, crime, financial mistakes, wrong partner) or bad fortune (disease, job loss, wildfire, housing shortage) and sometimes both.
It doesn’t really matter what it was we did or didn’t do, or what happened. What matters is that we honestly accept our degree of responsibility for our homeless condition and decide what we’re going to do about it.
It does us no good to wallow in the Shoulda Coulda Woulda Blues. What’s done is done. It’s a waste of time, and it’s mentally unhealthy.
The important thing is to recognize the behavior that got us where we are and to take charge of our lives. Because as long as we consider ourselves victims, and blame everybody and everything else for our problems, we’re powerless.
Help yourself
It’s often said that God helps those who help themselves. But you don’t have to believe in God to help yourself. You just have to believe in yourself.
I won’t even begin to pretend that believing in yourself is easy when everything in your life has gone wrong. And I won’t claim that everybody can do it. Some people are just too far gone.
But if you can believe in yourself, even a little, God, a social worker, a total stranger or possibly a library book or YouTube video will help you. You might not immediately recognize the help, and quite possibly, you won’t like the help being offered.
Tough love can be tough to take, but you must learn to accept – and ask – for help.
power of proactivity
Nobody gets out of homelessness by themselves. Nobody. You can’t pull yourself up by your own bootstraps when you don’t have any boots. And even if you do have boots, it’s still physically impossible.
You need outside help. Somebody must give you a break, but that doesn’t mean you just wait around to be rescued. You must be proactive.
For instance, in 1980, I was living in the basement of a friend’s house, chopping wood to pay my rent and typing freelance stories on my old IBM Selectric typewriter to sell to the Auburn Journal.
I quickly realized two things: The newspaper was using computers, and they were paying somebody to “key” my typewritten stories into the system.
I had a serious jones to get my fingers on a computer terminal, so I volunteered to key my stories into the system for free. After a few months, even though I didn’t really know what I was doing, they gave me a desk, a job in the newsroom – and a new career.
There’s magic in volunteering. It gets you out of your own head, and it shows that you are a person worth helping. People who would never give you a handout are often willing to give you a hand up.
I got a job at Hospitality House by volunteering to help with their nomadic homeless shelter in Grass Valley. I wouldn’t have the trailer I’ve lived in for the past five years if I hadn’t volunteered for One Source – Empowering Caregivers, also in Grass Valley.
Voluntarily writing a newspaper column for free and shooting videos for free of guests at Sierra Roots in Nevada City enabled me to write a grant application for Sierra Roots to the Upstate California Creative Corps. The Creative Corps is a program of the California Arts Council.
We won the grant, which gave me the job as the director of the Sierra Roots/No Place to Go Project, a social justice campaign for homeless people and folks who live in illegal, desperation housing throughout rural Northern California.
it takes a village
Part of my job is to tell homeless and houseless people this: You can’t get out of homelessness by yourself. You need help. You must suck it up, ask for help – and accept it.
Another part of my job is to tell our communities this: They are not “the homeless.” They are “our homeless.” Until we own the problem, we are the problem.
As communities, we must tell ourselves we are better than this. We must assist the people and organizations in our neighborhoods who are working to end the homeless/housing crisis. Donate, volunteer, write to your elected officials.
If nothing else, just look a homeless person in the eyes, and give them a smile. It may be the only nice thing that happens to them all day.
Because: If we are not part of the solution, we are part of the problem.
Tom Durkin is the creative director of the Sierra Roots/No Place to Go Project, an effort to establish safe homeless camps and to legalize alternative housing. The Project is funded in part by a grant from the Upstate California Creative Corps, a program of the California Arts Council. Durkin may be contacted at tomdurkin@sierra-roots.org or www.project.sierra-roots.org.