Normalcy

I remember a time when I was homeless. People asked me some questions.

“What is it like? How do you survive physically and mentally? Whom do you trust? Do you feel a stigma? I have no idea what you are experiencing so in order to be more empathetic and perhaps active in doing something about it, what can you tell us?”

Now, I have never had a problem answering these questions. They are not hard nor complicated questions to answer. Not for me, anyway, and I will gladly answer anytime I am asked but I wanted to address one thing that caught my ear. They said, “As you fight your way back from homelessness to normalcy…” That word stood out to me. “Normalcy.” What is normal?

For most who are homeless, THAT is their normal. What they’re experiencing IS normal…for them. Not everyone was raised with the necessary life skills needed to live a sustainable life. I wasn’t. My mother never taught me anything important. She never taught me about personal hygiene. I went practically until the 6th or 7th grade barely ever brushing my teeth. Even when I moved in with my dad and stepmother at 16, they barely treated me as anything more than a tenant who didn’t pay rent. I wasn’t taught about savings. I wasn’t taught how to cook. I didn’t get proper documentation needed to be able to even get an ID until I was 18 and looked into it myself. Yet between ages 16-18, I was constantly bugged about getting a job and completely baffled on why I wasn’t getting so much as an interview. Then upon graduation, I was basically kicked out without anything of use. No money for school, no car for transportation (never even got put into Driver’s Ed), no offer of any kind of help to get started in my adult life, nothing.

Now while I didn’t end up continuing schooling, I more or less managed well enough to get by. Got by for about 11 years albeit living paycheck to paycheck and a lot of help from the government via EBT benefits and treatment services. Then the house fire happened in 2022 and I still hadn’t learned about savings so at the end of it all, I ended up homeless. I couch surfed for a while but ended up living in a shelter. That was MY normal.

So what exactly is meant here by “fighting my way back to normalcy”? Are you speaking of society’s delusion of how an adult should live? Because if so, I’m not fighting my way to that. I’m fighting to step out of simply surviving and into learning how to live. The stigma you asked about, I assume, must be the one that homeless people are lazy or addicts/alcoholics or mentally disabled. Truth is, that is true to some degree; a small percentage of homeless do fit that category. But most of them are like me. Some event happened in their life that ripped their worlds out from under them and they were never taught how to take care of themselves after something like that, if they were ever even taught to take care of themselves in the first place.

Also, no matter what, you should have compassion for another human being whether you understand their situation or not. Most of the homeless people I knew were trying their damnedest to get off the streets and into more permanent housing. There are so many barriers that it’s not as easy as it sounds. Avenues are there and help is there but not everyone knows where to look. Normalcy is relative. Normalcy is different with everybody. Please be careful with your words as you talk to be these people.

Either way, be compassionate and sympathetic toward the homeless because I can guarantee you that NO ONE on the street woke up one day and decided, “Hey – I’m gonna go sleep on the street or in a tent by the highway or in a shelter with 50 other men/women. Yeah, that sounds good.” Everyone had something happen to them. Could’ve been addiction. Could’ve been a disaster, a house fire/flood/etc. Could’ve been fleeing domestic violence. Could’ve been as simple as being kicked out with nowhere to go and no money saved at a young age. You never know. Don’t judge someone just because they’re on a path you haven’t had to go down. You don’t know their story. You only know it isn’t yours.