10.29.19
Today as I was driving to work, which usually takes me twenty five minutes and today took an hour and twenty, I saw a man experiencing homelessness with a sign that said, “Anything helps” on the corner of Speer and Colfax. I gave him the $7 I had in my wallet, a Christmas miracle since I joke that I haven’t carried cash since 1997. He told me to drive safe and then I thanked him, rolled up my window, took my foot off the brake, had a sip of hot coffee, and coasted along to work in relative peace, heat blowing and music playing. And even though I spend most of my life hanging out with folks experiencing homelessness, the ones we shelter are the “lucky” ones. Some people’s addictions or mental health struggles or past traumas make accessing safe shelter exceptionally difficult for them. And so this morning I was reminded of my insane class privilege and feel so weepy about the drastic, vast, unfair, and inequitable comfort of my life in comparison to the difficulty of his. Because no matter how hard I and colleagues work to serve this community, our work is a band aid to a bigger problem that involves us all.
You don’t hear about it, but every year people experiencing homelessness freeze to death on the streets of Denver. I’m preparing a presentation to give to some Boulder city employees next week about homelessness and trying to figure out how to convince a group of safe and housed humans to see the humanity in a population of people we think are so different than ourselves, whom we have too often and too easily labeled a problem and nuisance. What I keep coming back to is that homelessness isn’t an individual problem, it’s a community problem. There are so many more things that contribute to a person becoming homeless besides laziness or poor choices as we conveniently like to think. Often the causes are structural and when institutions fail some people, there are not as lucky as those of us who have support systems to fall back on when times are tough. Until all of us commit to working towards solutions (which btw, *IS* affordable and supportive housing), the experience will continue to exist for people. Something important to know about homelessness is that while trauma isn’t always the cause of it, it is always, 100% of the time, the result. And for those experiencing it, they are in a state of perpetual crisis.
I’ve worked with folks experiencing homelessness day in and day out for the past six years and volunteered with them a decade or two before that. Thus far it is my life’s greatest honor because of the empathy, education, and deep gifts this calling has given me. It has also reaffirmed to me that while we all come in different packaging on the outside, inside we’re mostly the same; we all want to be safe and warm and loved. The rest is gravy. It’s also truth that when we are closer to people we have more empathy for them. Please consider deeply that experiencing homelessness is only one part of the identities of the people I serve and work with. The community of people experiencing homelessness is so much more diverse and important in who they are beyond the fact they’re without housing yet in spite of their diverse humanity, this one thing continues to be how we choose to see and label them. I think constantly, if people only knew a few folks experiencing homelessness personally they would have never voted to uphold the camping ban which criminalizes the existence of already traumatized people in crisis.
So, here’s my invitation to you. Get proximate. Lean in. Get to know your discomfort. Move beyond whatever fear you may have of those experiencing homelessness and how they may react to you. Because the antidote to trauma is relationship, is kinship, is community, and there’s thousands of people in Denver that need our love and support rather than our judgement and pity.
Every life is a holy life. Every life is a holy life. Every life is a holy life. We are born knowing this innately and then the world slowly robs us of it, forces wedges between us and other people, convinces us that our differences are reasons to avoid one another rather than celebrate and support one another. Don’t fall for the trap, friends. Lean in.
