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The Homelessness Diaries, pt 1

“Begin at the beginning, and go on till you come to the end: then stop”

I wish I could take that advice, but you’ll just have to forgive me for jumping in at the middle. At some point I will tell you my tale of woe, but for now, I just want to introduce myself.

Hello, I’m a statistic. I’m 47, I have no job, no home, and am really just trying to figure out where my next meal is coming from, and how I can escape this mountain of debt piling up and threatening to bury me under an avalanche of late fees and hardship forms.

I also have four cats, who live temporarily in a little room in the suburbs, and are thankfully pretty happy and healthy. I had a fifth cat, a cranky 13 year old tabby, but he was never going to be happy crammed into the room with all the others, so he sadly had to go to foster care until I can find him a more permanent home.

I go to see my cats every day, and give them as much cuddles and food as I can afford, and tell them this will all be over soon and I will find us a home again. Sometimes I sleep there in the little single bed there, and they all pile on. And even though I wake up with a bad back and twisted up like a pretzel, I am so grateful I still get to do that.

This actually isn’t the first time I’ve been homeless, but I’m a lot older than the last time (when I was 33). I’m more tired, more disabled, more ill than before. And I’m sad and angry that everything I spent the last 14 years building has vanished like it was nothing.

I wouldn’t be in this position if I had work. But unfortunately the same resume that’s served me well over the years has become an anathema to the AI bots that now sift through all hopeful job applications, selecting only the “right” ones. I haven’t learned how to hack the system yet, and to be honest if my fate is being decided by AI then we have bigger problems at hand.

Of the hundreds of jobs I’ve applied for this year, if I do get a response it’s usually a form rejection email. If I get a rare interview, I’m told I’m “overqualified” or “not the right fit”. The last place I interviewed at (who, ironically, are set up to provide services to older women who are struggling) said I didn’t answer their questions in “the right way”.

My mental health is suffering with every rejection, so I have stopped looking for work right now. Thankfully I am on government benefits but they don’t stretch far. Hence the debt I racked up while I was moving out of my last property (under duress – which is a story for another day!), which has started to accrue late fees and attract nasty phone calls and I am drowning.

Anyway, I’m sure I will unpack all of this as we go. I slept over with my cats last night, and today I have had some Devon and crackers and cheese and an apple that I had in the fridge there. I stopped in at the TAFE library to work on and submit an assignment, but will go now to the place I’m staying at this week as I have some food in the fridge there – a burger I saved from an event on Saturday night, and a bit of salad.

Really, my life has become all about food, and I hate it. Where can I go to get a meal? What food vans are operating today and where? Where’s the nearest food pantry? What groceries can I buy with $5? How long will this food last without access to a fridge? Who can I hang out with who will feed me? And every fortnight after I get paid I like to treat myself, but that’s turning into an accounting exercise as well and I can’t even enjoy McDonald’s without feeling guilty.

I’m a bit worried about the long-term affects of all this instability and food insecurity. But c’est la vie I suppose. I just need to keep going, try to keep a pragmatic outlook, and hope for the best.

blog: the teeth of madness

I have a bad tooth. I used to have more, but over the last decade I’ve worked to have them filled, pulled, etc. and now there’s just one last tooth giving me trouble. It has a cavity that goes almost to the root. I had it filled between jobs in 2019 by a dentist who gave me a choice – fill, root canal, extraction. I was warned then that the filling would be ‘temporary’ and only likely to last 6 months. Well, part of that filling has come out, and the back half of the tooth has cracked and is extremely wobbly, but 6 years later it’s still hanging in there.

If you ask me why I haven’t had it pulled (root canal is just a no bueno in my book), I would cite the reason the dentist gave me… that because this tooth is next to one that was extracted a few years ago, it would leave a two-tooth gap between my back molar and the next tooth, which could affect the structural integrity of that molar (unless I invest in some implants for several thousand a pop). I’ve also justified not having it pulled due to work responsibilities and important events I’m working on; I know from experience extractions put me out of commission for days. Lately the excuse has been that I just don’t have the money.

But the real reason is… I just don’t like change. I hang on to old shit, put up with adverse situations, deal with (read: ignore) ill health conditions and broken teeth, far longer than I need to. Even when I know removing those things from my life or removing myself from those situations would make my life infinitely better, I still hang on.

And if I had to play armchair psychologist, I would say some of this might stem from the fact that my life has always been transient. Even before I was kicked out of home at 17, my family relocated a lot. In the first 13 years of my life I had lived in at least 8 different places across two different countries. And a lot more after I left home; in the last twenty years alone I’ve lived in 20 different places, some for only weeks at a time. I’ve definitely fallen into the “no fixed address” category a few times. And very few of the places felt like ‘home’, felt like places I could set down my load and relax my guard for a bit.

When you don’t have any real sense of permanence in life, especially when that is tied with low income and borderline poverty, you can fall into a line of thinking like “as long as I’m breathing and have a place to lay my head at night, let’s not rock the boat.” When you’re on Struggle Street for any significant length of time (like your whole life), you just try to fly under the radar and get from one day to the next. Any change to your existence – good and bad – threatens that status quo. And you’ve learned that even the good stuff doesn’t last, so you don’t want to risk putting too many eggs in that basket anyway.

To give another example, I am drowning in my current location. I’ve lived here for four years, and while I have a good relationship with my landlord, there are also certain infringements upon my privacy and my property that I’ve had to put up with. I have neighbours that blare their music at nightclub volumes at ALL hours of the day, sometimes up to 3 or 4 am. I have neighbours that get into wild domestics, sometimes involving physical fighting in the street and the cops getting called. On top of that I only have only 2 or 3 friends left in the area that I see on a regular basis, if by regularly you mean once every couple of months.

I’ve kept justifying staying here because the rent is cheap as dirt even for the ghetto area I live in, and the cats have plenty of room to run around. But my mental health is suffering so much because of this isolation and disturbance of privacy and peace of mind. There’s another area of Sydney I am contemplating moving to, where I would have at least a dozen friends I would see regularly. Where I would have access to a few spiritual communities. Where I would be closer to vet care for my animals, closer to the city for commuting and socialising. Yes the rent out there is more expensive – well over double what I pay here. But assuming I could find a housemate, I could make it work. I just need to save for the move.

And yet I hesitate to do this Good Thing for myself. And I don’t know why. It’s as mad as not having my bad tooth pulled. I just need to learn how to prioritise WELLBEING over SURVIVAL, but I don’t know where to begin.

blog: life is but a dream

I have very vivid dreams; a lot of the time my dreams are like movies in my head where I’m not represented in them at all, and there’s no deeper meaning. I can tell the ‘mouthfeel’ of these dreams are different. I watch fictional characters react to situations and I wake up thinking ‘damn that would make a great story’. I’ve even tried to write those stories, but there’s never enough meat to flesh them out.

Other times my dreams have very overt references to my life. The kinds of dreams you wake up from and know exactly what they mean, why those themes would have been on your mind, and what (if anything) you’re supposed to take from them.

Then there are others with meanings that are older, deeper, harder to pick apart. Recurring themes that keep popping up in my head; my brain’s way of communicating the issues I struggle with chronically.

One recurring theme I have is around houses and possessions left behind. For example:

  • I will dream I left behind an apartment in the States with a lot of stuff in it (I actually did leave things behind when I moved, and have no idea what happened to it all or even what exactly I left behind), or I dream I am in the US trying to locate or gain access to the apartment I had when I was there last.
  • I enter a building where I used to rent a room and suddenly can’t remember if I got all my stuff when I left, but can’t find which room I used to have so I can check. Or I’ll remember that I DID leave stuff behind, and gain access to the room, but the room will be empty.
  • I’m at my parents’ house which has a granny flat or large garage where my stuff is stored. Sometimes there’s urgency because they’re moving / have moved out of the house. If I go in the granny flat/garage, it’s either too dark to see what’s in all the boxes, or I can see it but it’s all so jumbled up that my mind can’t really process the actual things in the room.
  • I’m renting a new house, when suddenly I realise I still have a lot of stuff at the old house that never got moved across. Or I have access to an old house that I used to rent, and I go there but it’s empty and everything’s different.
  • I’m renting an old house that is literally falling down around me (ceiling caving in, walls with huge cracks in them, water damage and flooding, etc). This is slightly different in that there’s no element of owning material things, but I still include it in my ‘house’ dreams.

In most of these dreams there’s a sense of things that have been left behind but not a clear sense of what those things actually are, so no real way to tell if I’ve lost something valuable or not. And it all revolves around housing, and usually family. Houses in dreams often represent your ‘self’ or how you view yourself, so to me these dreams are about how unresolved issues from my past impact my current sense of self or areas where elements of my past are holding me back.

A therapist would have a field day with me, haha. 😛

poem: an ocean in my back yard

Today there is an ocean in my back yard.
I sit on the wooden dock of my back porch
And listen to the sound of the waves crashing through the leaves with a deafening whisper.
George the cat sits calmly at my side,
Ear flicked back whenever
A stray leaf escapes and swirls kamikaze towards us on its suicide run towards entropy.
The wind whips my hair around my face
But stirs not a ginger hair on George’s furry back.
If I close my eyes I can almost feel the sand crunchy between my toes,
Instead of these stray weeds growing up wild through the gaps in my steps.
Even the birds caw plaintively over their ruffled feathers,
mimicking their sea-sworn cousins.
The only thing gratefully missing is the salt air stinging my face.
If you hold a conch shell to your ear you will hear the same sounds;
The sound of Mother nature on a journey,
The sound of unbound joy.

blog: new year, new home, new start <3

In our minds, we had plenty of time to pick out the perfect house, plenty of money to buy new furniture, scores of movers to help us – in reality, we applied for almost the first house we saw, had to prioritise our spending because some fool (which would be me) decided the Christmas holidays was the perfect time to move house, and although we had a couple of friends help with our heavy furniture, most of the moving was done by us in our beat-up station wagon.

So it wasn’t exactly the fastest move in the west. Iit’s been exhausting and in future I will definitely hire movers to do the lot in one day… and Jim’s Mowing to do the yards. Doing the yards at the old place was such a chore – although I did get to use a hedge trimmer, and destroy things on purpose. :)

Our new place is on a hill in the very middle of a small cul-de-sac. We’ve met one set of neighbours, nodded a ‘hello’ over the fence to the other side, and spied on the rest through the curtains (spying being something I tend to excel at). The back yard is pretty, and I can’t wait to have parties out there! :)

Our little fur family are settling in well. Our ‘firstborn’, Sherlock, is a 4 yr old medium hair tabby; highly intelligent and independent, and the least affectionate of our brood, but he likes being in the same room as us and gets upset when anything in his environment changes… like getting a new kitten, haha.

Sherlock

Sherlock doing his best ‘reflective gaze’.

Then there’s Benny, a 1.5 yr old short hair tabby with a really sweet nature, who we got as a rescue when he was about 7 months old. He has what RZ and I call an “antenna tail”; he walks around with his tail straight up and when he finds something to investigate, his tail flicks forward quickly like he’s typing out a Morse code message!

George is the latest addition. We rescued him from a shelter last August; he is a short hair white and orange kitty about 4-5 years old, nearly toothless and built short and stocky like a bulldog, and very affectionate (but not very bright!). I do think he thinks he’s a dog, he follows us around and sits down at our feet and even when he goes outside he just sits on the porch watching the street until we let him back in.

IMG_1303

Benny and George make a furry Yin Yang

George quickly decided everything was fine as long as his humans were there and he was getting fed twice a day, and he was pretty calm from the beginning. Benny hid under the bed for the first day or two, but like George, quickly decided that as long as he’s getting fed and patted and can still sleep on the bed beside me, life was pretty much the same. He is still a bit skittish, but that’s probably just as much to do with the kitten side of him as it is the unfamiliar landscape.

Sherlock spent longer hiding under the bed than Benny, and slinked around the house with his tail down for a few days, but has started to put his tail up more (which means he’s happier) and sit in the windows looking out. He was the Alpha cat in the old place, since he was there first, but now all three have been moved into the new place at the same time it will be interesting to see who ends up “top dog”.  :)