The story society is told about homelessness is often two-dimensional. Nameless faces down on their luck, carrying their lives in big overstuffed bags, sleeping on the street, holding cardboard signs asking for spare change or standing in line for a hot meal. When one types ‘images of homelessness’ into Google this is specifically what they will find.
This limited view is frustrating when you know the story is far more complex. When you put names to faces and realize that, for many people experiencing homelessness, hardship is not where they intend for their story to end. They have a past, they have a future, and in the present they are doing everything they can to find their way home, wherever that may be.
People experiencing homelessness
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Loss is ubiquitous in the shelter and individual resources for therapy and coping can be limited. Several months ago the director of WHRC asked us if we’d also be willing to put together a monthly workshop for residents who were on the verge of being housed because the transition from the shelter to housing was proving difficult for some. It seems that somewhere in their frenetic momentum to leave the shelter, many people had neglected to consider that this next step might be hard. Change and transition, no matter how positive, has the tendency to evoke memories, anxieties, and emotions. Not the mention the fact that, without realizing it, many people had laid roots in the shelter’s community.
As humans we are always shifting, building, and transitioning in the face of loss and change. We learn to adjust; we leave things behind; and we bring pieces of our past into the future. We move into empty houses and we furnish them with our memories, values, traditions, and comforts. As we decorate our walls with fragments of the past, gifts from the present, and hopes for the future we see these empty spaces transform into