On being without a home
Wednesday September 3, 2008 — I’m back to blogging b/c it works for me!
There is a divide between those with homes and those who are without a home. There is even a name for those without a home we call them our “homeless” – we introduce them as “homeless.” This does not seem strange to us, but if we began to call everyone by their housing status we would see the obvious error in our label. Imagine someone introducing me as Carissa Phelps, she is “3-bedroom 2-bath.” Does my house really have anything to do with me? This is Carissa Phelps, she is “with home.”
The labeling is an indication of what we understand implicitly. We know without thinking about it that being homeless is important enough to go to the core of a human being. That’s why we feel the need to announce that a person is “homeless.”
Take it a step further and think about what we expect of those we label “homeless.”
A. Nothing. Maybe it’s because we understand how crippling being without a home really is.
B. To leave those of us “with homes” alone and stay out of our way. We want to avoid seeing the effects of homelessness up close. And maybe that’s simply because we’re so afraid of the realities of homelessness.
My point is that the devastation of being “homeless” only begins with a label then it goes much deeper. The label dismantles the core that makes up a person. Being labeled as “homeless” can instantly erase (1) who a person is now, (2) who they were in the past, and (3) who they will be in the future.
I’m sorry that I’ve ever called someone “homeless” – I don’t want to say that anymore, but is it even avoidable?
I want to change the way I see people and say, this is “Al.” He recently lost his wife, who he loved deeply. Last I knew Al was living along the 99, he moved nightly. Sometimes if he was lucky he only had to move weekly. He had a poor paying job asking for donations at the freeway on-ramp in his neighborhood. Al is a person. He’s a person right now. Al has a past, a present, and a future, but when he is just another “homeless person” he does not.
I totally understand that most of us “with homes” cannot imagine being “without homes.” We have some trouble with empathy. That is completely understandable. But it is not acceptable.
I’m thinking about what it means to be homeless. I’m remembering what it was like when I was without a safe home and I was running away. People took advantage of me and I was in a lot of pain. I was also alone a lot. I’m thinking about being homeless again as an adult, in this poor economy. With current housing trends, it seems like it’s a possibility for even more of us to be without a home — or with a shared home — or back at a parent’s home.
What if you didn’t have friends? What if you didn’t have your parents? What if your elderly parents didn’t have you? Would you want to be called homeless? Or by our name? Would you want to hold onto your past, your present, and your future or let them all go for a label?
I think most of us would be devastated with losing our housing, but we’d be even more devastated if we lost our identity.
Think about what it means to be without a home, or without a safe home, or living on the streets — moving nightly or weekly — finding another friend’s couch, staying in a shelter, or a tool shed. All of that is somewhat doable in a mechanical sense, but then imagine losing your identity and trying to do it. I think what hurt me the most on the streets was becoming a label, and losing who I was (or who I was becoming) as a person.
How I know that labels hurt and they don’t tell the whole story…
My label when I was 12 began as “601.” (601 is the number of the truancy code that I broke when I ran away.) Quickly my label changed to “602.” (602 meant I had actually broken an adult law, and also meant I was on formal probation.) The 601 said nothing about what I was running away from. And the 602 label did not let anyone known that I had to shoplift to survive — for basic necessities because I was too young to work.
These two labels put me in a category of people that were socially foul. No one wanted to hear about my excuses or my reasons, and definitely not a word about my hopes or dreams — and that is how what it is like to be without a past, present, or future.