I get interesting email ideas and questions from students spanning grade school to university about homelessness, addiction and mental health. This is due to the fact that if you google Abbotsford and homelessness, at or near the top of the results is homelessinabbotsford.com with its email link to me.
In recent weeks I had spoken to several university students doing papers for their classes with questions on homelessness, addiction, mental health, the current system and what I would do to end homelessness and address addiction and mental health.
One comment I made to all the inquirers was that if you set out to deliberately design a system to not only keep people down but to beat them down, frustrate their efforts to get back on their feet and strip them of self esteem – it would look pretty much like our current system.
In a twisted quirk of fate I am, as I write this, currently living one of the (many) nightmares that those on the Ministry of Housing and Income Assistance disability constantly live with as we struggle to rebuild our lives.
At $375 per month the rent portion of welfare is ridiculously inadequate. It takes the $375 plus all, nearly all or more than all of the $235 ($282 on disability) monthly living allowance to pay the rent for a safe, healthy home environment.
Yes one can find places cheaper but those places are neither safe nor healthy. When you are working on recovery and wellness a home space that is both healthy and safe is vital.
I have watched people who were honestly struggling to find and stay in recovery and wellness, have their efforts destroyed by being forced to live in unhealthy and unsafe housing. This is one of the reasons I say that it is as if the system is designed to break people down and keep them down.
I feel so strongly about the importance of environment to wellness and recovery that when I had to move out of the supported independent living spot I was in I chose to move back into my car for the two additional months it took me to find a safe and healthy place. A place I have been in for near a year and a half and that supports my continued recovery and staying in wellness.
Given that my life is still moving forward in a positive manner the decision to live in my car for those two months, while an inconvenience, was the right decision for my recovery and wellness.
I said additional months because I had spent the two months before I had to move out searching for someplace to move into. When a place I judged acceptable for pursuit of recovery and wellness failed to be found I moved into my car rather than become another victim of being forced into an unhealthy environment.
Four months. It took me four months to find my place and I have a large network of people and contacts that were helping me look. Indeed, it was one of these people who not only found my place but whose landlord recommended me to my landlord.
One of the problems of having found oneself homeless is that you do not have a ready current reference for yourself as a tenant. Couple the lack of references with the prejudice that is attached to the term homeless and the problem is not only finding housing but being accepted as a tenant.
Given the rent levels in Abbotsford and the problems that simply being homeless causes in being accepted as a tenant it is far harder for the homeless to find safe, healthy housing that most people realize it is.
Safe, healthy affordable housing is a scarce precious commodity that is an integral part of wellness and recovery. The community of Abbotsford must demand that governments at all levels, municipal, provincial and federal, make a priority of bringing into being the hundreds of units of this type of housing desperately needed in our community.
Losing safe, healthy affordable housing and ending up homeless and on the streets again is mentally and emotionally devastating.
My monthly cheque covers my rent. Now fortunately being on disability I am allowed to earn up to an additional $500 a month. Phone, insurance, gas, internet, pool pass, old debt repayment and office supplies leaves me with a surplus of $20 – $30 a month as long as gas stays under $1 per litre. As it rises above that $1 level money gets tighter and tighter for me as it does for most people.
And no the pool pass is not a luxury. Swimming is, for me, the difference between walking and not walking; for being able to get out and accomplish things relatively pain free and being confined to bed where simply getting up and going to the bathroom leaves me covered in a cold sweat from agonizing back pain. Swimming keeps my back and back muscles in shape so that most days I am mobile and the pain level is such that I can live and deal with it.
I still cannot fathom how it is that Income Assistance does not consider a phone a necessity if one is going to find a job or simply for emergency use.
Not only does my budget not contain money for food, there is also no money to put away for those emergencies life throws at us such as car repairs or any other of the many somethings that require money to address. Honesty requires me to admit that using a change jar over the past 18 months did allow me to save up the $100 I recently had to spend on a new car battery.
A belt on my car broke. Now a broken belt is an annoyance but at $23.42 falls within the discretionary spending limits of my budget.
Unfortunately, shortly after installing the new belt the real problem announced itself with a horrific squeal and the engine temperature gauge soaring.
I was afraid it was the water pump which would be the end of the car because there was no way I could afford the cost of the repair and where would I find another $100 car that was as reliable as mine had proved to be for the past 18 months?
Sitting there with my anxiety threatening to turn into a full blown panic attack the ringing of my phone was a lifeline of a distraction. The friend who had helped install the new belt in the parking lot of Canadian Tire called to see how it was working. When I related the new belt had been eaten by the engine and that I had concluded it was the water pump and a disaster as I had never had an alternator that needed replacing seize. “Oh no it could be the alternator” he said.
A trip to the car revealed the water pump turned fine but the alternator stuck and when it turned you could hear the bearings grind. The pulley wheel on the alternator also had a large lump of melted belt material on it.
Hmmm. Not a total disaster then as an alternator is a cheaper repair still….
That is cheap in auto repair terms which in the case of an alternator range $190 – $350, depending on finding an appropriate rebuilt alternator or being forced to buy new.
Even at best case scenario of $190 that $190 has to come out of my budget someplace. Rent must be paid. Insurance comes out of the bank automatically. I have to swim to walk.
I can minimize my driving by not attending any of the committees, meetings or board meetings I participate or am a member of. Such actions would be extremely unhealthy to take from the mental health aspect of my life and would have consequences for others and the community as a whole.
Even cutting back gas it would still require not paying other bills in order to have the cash to pay for repairs.
This is why a car repair or any emergency that requires as little as $200 is one of the nightmares those on limited incomes live with as a day to day reality.
You get behind and you have started down the slippery slope that leads to homelessness, where even the $23.42 cost for an engine belt is now a problem pushing you out the door and onto the streets.
It is a nightmare you live with because even if you have been fortunate enough not to have been down this path to the streets (and I have been down that path) you know people who have been; know people currently in this or a similar situation who are struggling to stay off the streets.
A possible reality that gnaws at you day after day, undermining you mental health, until and unless you learn to accept that there is nothing you can do about it except let it go and focus on wellness and recovery.
Until the laws of probability catch you and you are face to face with such an emergency. At which point any gnawing worries are lost in the face of anxiety, panic attacks, depression, agoraphobia and the possibility of homelessness.
Your life implodes, mental health wellness and recovery disappears into the black pit you mind becomes and you are back on the streets struggling to survive – never mind get well or into housing.
This is why I have a WRAP plan; a Wellness Recovery Action Plan. When the *bleep* hits the fan and you are staring at the black abyss of plunging back into the dark depths of your mental illness; when your brain is heading so far into overdrive that rational thought is beyond you; when your thoughts are racing at the speed of light in endless circle; you can pull out your emergency sanity kit and break out of the downward spiral.
Forget base jumping or bungee jumping for shear heart pounding terror there is nothing like teetering on the edge of madness looking down into the abyss.
Which is where I found myself the other day and the fact that I managed to back away from the edge is why I find WRAP an invaluable tool of recovery and mental health.
It was by following my WRAP plan, that when it developed that an alternator for a 1987 Plymouth Turismo of the subspecies Duster is a rare bird meaning that I was facing putting a new alternator in, I dealt with it.
While I do not know all the details of the final outcome of this matter as I write this, I am calm about the matter. Mainly because as far as my mind is concerned the matter is dealt with since it is in the hands of competent and good people and the little hiccup, the weekend delay in not getting it resolved until Monday, is neither here nor there.
Little hiccup? There was only one alternator in the warehouse and when it was installed and tested it was found to be faulty. Getting a replacement in will take several days, hence the delay until Monday in getting my car back.
When the fine gentleman responsible for the repair apologized for the problem I told him I considered it an inconsequential minor inconvenience and I was just truly grateful that the matter was, to all intents and purposes, resolved. That having the matter resolved allowed me to find my serenity and that was the important concern for me.
Sitting here typing this I am calm and relatively serine because of having a WRAP plan. I facilitate WRAP groups to “pass on” to others the boon that I have found in the plan.
I say relative serenity because, as I shared with a friend, I was and am most fortunate to have people to reach out to who could and did help me out on the matter of the alternator. Thank you seems so inadequate to express the immense gift they have given me. This is not the type of gift you can repay, but you can pass it on to others.
But what about those others? I had and have people I could reach out to for help dealing with my car problems. Our current assistance system is loaded with people dealing with the same financial reality, the same grinding poverty, that live with. What happens to those people when one of their financial nightmares occurs?
Without help my most viable option would be standing on the street somewhere with a sign asking for donations to repair the alternator, the brake pads and rotors or deal with whatever small disaster needs a relatively small amount of cash to deal with it. My $200 share of the repair may yet find me out there with a sign.
Standing there humiliated and knowing that most people think it is money just for drugs (admittedly often the case) but having no other choice but to swallow your pride and beg.
As I said the system beats you down and strips you of any self-esteem.
The soul devouring reality of disaster being one small emergency away is a fact of life for all those without supporters to whom they can reach out and ask for help.
My luck is not the type that is going to win me the 6-49 millions; my luck is the more valuable type that has put people who will help me over the rough spots into my life.
Luck is not what a persons wellness, recovery and future should depend on and any system were a person’s wellness, recovery and future depends on luck is in need of serious change.