Fascinating and yet terrible

[cheerful_deviant]

Park and write

By Sean Coughlan
BBC News Magazine

A homeless woman in London has been living in a car since last summer. But by writing a blog she has put herself in touch with an international audience.

It's a tale of our time - about being cut off from everything around you but still connected to people thousands of miles away.

A woman becomes homeless, so she gets into her car and drives. Except she has nowhere to go - so she stays in the car, with all her possessions heaped in the back, sleeping in the front seats, parking in secluded streets.

For eight months, no one notices her, because she makes sure she looks respectable, taking showers and even ironing her clothes in public places like hospitals. She has made herself invisible, out of touch from anyone she used to know - and keeping separate from other homeless people.

Full Article

Wandering Scribe Blog

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There is something oddly compelling about reading her blog. It makes for fascinating and emotional reading. I kept looking ahead, hoping for the happy ending like most stories. But of course, real life isn't like that.

 

[R. Richard]

The lady may have suffered a breakdown that left her without a regular income and had her sleeping in her car. However she apparently did not lose the most important thing, her pride. She used what little money she had coming in to feed herself. She kept herself clean and presentable. She always kept one foot on the path back, despite a lot of hardship.

Most of the homeless have lost their pride. They have suffered adversioty and they then surrendered to booze or drugs.

I was not what you would call homeless, I lived in an abandoned building. I had to shoplift my meals. However, it was a temporary situation until I could train myself to make a living. I always had the goal of earning for myself a comfortable life. I always kept my pride.

 

[Lucifer_Carroll]

Linking this to the homeless beating I think are these quotes after the article:

It seems to me a sad indictment of our shallow, media-obsessed age that somebody like this should think it a more worthwhile use of their time and effort to write a "blog" than to try and sort themselves out by making social contacts and efforts to get housing.
Bertie, Stockport

f all this is true, and I'm yet to be convinced, I think it¿s a load of self-indulgent claptrap. There is plenty of government and private help available to this person, both medical and financial. But if she chooses not to take it, spending time to set up and maintain a blog instead, and then cry about it, then good luck. You have to question this person's priorities. Come on people, assuming this person really does live in a car, this is clearly a middle class stunt by someone who probably has a Visa or Amex card in the glove box, just in case.
Stuart, Ipswich

There is no need for anyone to be homeless. There are very many tireless, selfless people doing paid and voluntary work to help people like this woman. She knows this and her refusal to go to them is an insult. It is her choice to live on the street and it will be her fault if something bad happens to her. The opportunity to help herself is there.
Huw Roberts, Creigiau, Caerdydd, Wales

I find it very hard to feel sorry for these people who simply refuse to contact homeless shelters and other organisations which are out there to help people back on their feet. It's like they're choosing to stay homeless over the pain of facing up to their own mistakes in order to get over them.
Jennifer, Netherlands

Most of the chatter after the article was supportive about how terrible it is and the grim truth that it could happen to anyone. It seems interesting when a homeless person with this level of pride, who refuses to abandon society as she is asked to do, is still aforded disdain. There are mystical charities it's cried out. These charities apparently are bottomless in funding and buildings and volunteers and everywhere. In my city alone they are desperately difficult to find without savvy and the internet. Even then they are overcrowded and are being cut down everyday. The docks are now overflooded in the tourist areas with homeless men living on bicycles (they don't even get cars) who were displaced from the destroyed homeless shelters that were torn down without replacement for "bringing down value".

I'm a big fan of Charles deLint novels where he often tries to enter and sympathize with the homeless world and where many characters are homeless types for various reasons. A great example is the novel Trader wherein the main character becomes homeless after being thrust into someone else's life.

I also currently live on the raggedy edge. A poor, sometimes broke student living among other poor students in areas filled with rich people but also burdening the overflow of beggars standing on cement medians and freeway exits with signs. Knowing that a late check or too long of an unemployment could very well be the difference from a comfortable existance and hoping a friend has a couch. Our household has more than once served as someone's buddy's last refuge as they did something as simple as look for an apartment within 20 miles whose rent they could afford. People with jobs.



Seeing how some people have a block to that, who assume it's these people's ill-hearted choice to suffer the street instead of finding this mystical help, the oft-alluded to welfare state, who fail to realize that by attacking said institutions and buildings they eliminate the options. Seeing how some people can blame the homeless for their own predicament, see them as inhuman, lazy, and an easy skip from normalcy if they cared, it becomes obvious how people can beat them to death in all ease of conscience.

The system isn't flawed. We are.

Okay, the system is too.

And the gnu...definitely imperfect.

 

[Guest]

i can't bring myself to castigate those who are homeless regardless of how they obtained that situation. i certainly can't see why people would be angry with homeless persons for not taking advantage of shelters...if they can be found...if they have space...are they really all that safe? i dunno. a single woman in this situation might be better off in her car than in a shelter. this could be my perception skewed.

i was close to being homeless for a very short spell in my life. when i left dick, i had no place to go, very little money and two kids. it was very frightening times...options were few but i would be damned if i let my kids see me falter. we were fortunate in that we found places to stay until we found a home. i did have one foot dangling there for a while and that feeling has stayed with me to this day.
i say all that to say this: you never know. you just never know when or if this could be you. tread carefully in your perceptions.

 

[Ravin the Poet]

I have to agree with someone of the more "negative" comments. If she has a will to write a blog, why not get help? These people who are all "I won't drop my pride" are real stupid. I'm sorry to anyonr I offend, but if you are living in your car, have no way of getting a job, and you keep your daily life on a blog, its time to swallow your pride for a moment and help yourself. You're no good to anyone if your dead in the street.


Ravin

 

[rgraham666]

Having been homeless myself once, I get a bit exercised at the attitudes of a lot of people towards it.

First, there's a lot less help out there than you know. I used up a lifetime's worth of luck getting the place I am in now. After ten years I'm still piecing my life together.

And once you fall that far down, the way back is horribly difficult. Far harder than the usual way of integrating yourself into the world.

Few employers will risk hiring formerly homeless. And many who do are quite exploitive about it. Getting a decent job isn't something that happens often to people who fall that far.

Take myself for example. Few people are going to hire a fifty year old with only a high school education and with a history of mental illness. Any resume I send out is going in the garbage, not filed for future reference, the garbage.

Despite our Christian antecedents, we're not a very forgiving culture.

 

[entitled]

Been there, did that, worked my ass off to get to where i'm at now - which is technically still so far below the poverty line that people who know about it tend to not want to socialize anymore.

It's not as easy as walking down the street to a Salvation Army or some such place and demanding they take care of you. If i hadn't already had a job, i wouldn't have been able to find one. The place i was working at very nearly fired me when i let it slip that i was living in my car and taking showers at a truck stop.

The government really doesn't do much for the homeless or impoverished. Even now, after the RA has spent nearly 7 years at the same job - local government, so it's easily verifiable - they choose not to grant us any more than free health insurance for the younguns. In theory, if we're eligible for the healthcare, we should be receiving things like food stamps as well. Even after applying six separate times we haven't received a thing.

It's not nearly so easy to pull yourself out of a situation like that than you might think. The only way a person could really know is to experience it. Not something i would wish on somebody.

 

[Guest]

So often I make a prayer of thanks for my situation. I live with gratitude. Whenever I think to moan about what I don't have, I make myself stop and count up everything I do have, and I'm damned lucky. I am one of the luckiest people I know.

I've never been homeless (close, a few times) I've never had to go without food (although I've eaten my weight in mac-n-cheese and raman noodles) and I've never lacked for basics. My current life is luxurious by many standards. After my parents divorce, my mom hustled hard to keep the two of us together -- and my dad wasn't a deadbeat by any stretch. He kept me on his insurance, paid my medical, paid for all my school clothes, and kept me in lunch money. I stayed with him every weekend for years so that my mom could have some time off, and he bought me toys and books and took me to the library. He turned over his car and the house he'd rented to us when my mom's plans fell through after the divorce. Still, my mom's life was no easy thing. When she remarried, I know for a fact it was at least partly for money and security for me.

I was lucky. Damned lucky, all my life, even with some of the awful stuff that happened to me. I don't forget that luck. Not everyone has it.

Even now I sometimes worry what would happen to me if my marriage failed or my husband was taken away. I've got some health problems and I've worked only part time, as a contractor, for years now. I have no family to speak of, at least that would help me if the worst happened. Most of my friends, goodhearted people, are also a paycheck or two from disaster or are too distant.

How people percieve homelessness varies so much. Yes, there are those homeless who have given up and given in, who don't have anything left to use toward improving their situation, just as there are a lot of people better off who are unprepared for a disaster like illness or job loss.

I don't know that it's ever been better or different. History is full of the plight of the poor and disowned. Only now, some of them have the opportunity to tell their own story rather than have it told by others from some other perspective. Sometimes telling their own story is the only thing such a person has, and they can put it in the faces of those who haven't been there and, through luck, smarts, or gifts of the magi never will be.

However, it's too easy to slip and slide down that slope. It doesn't pay to be smug, self righteous, or self satisfied. Millionaires have fallen. Great names have fallen. There's plenty of room at the bottom.