Me? I’m a girl, who loves community… and flowers.
I’m a woman who loves to create innovative solutions to complex problems.
I’m a mother who loves her children and the world deeply and… I am currently homeless.
Hmmmm, where to begin?
It is interesting to try to decide what elements of myself and my complex life are relevant to this introduction…
I have a Bachelors Degree in Designing Spaces That Foster Community from union institute & University – which began with a foundation in permaculture and community gardening and a deep dive into creating sustainable and integrative solutions for community issues around housing and food scarcity. This was then supported by a deep dive into the importance of positive leadership and powerful communication – and then topped off with a fascination for creative economic systems that are inclusive, dynamic, restorative and regenerative.
This degree initially began as an effort to design sustainable community housing for single mothers that would be educational and healing through collective “learning together” experiences as well as lucrative through creating products and services that would support the women living in these collective housing experiences. But this initial idea of mine evolved into something much bigger as I quickly realized that so many people need solutions to housing, that so many people need community, that we all need connection and that our entire society needs regenerative social solutions to the collective social issues that we all are facing.
At the end of my degree I was offered a position with a community organization that was fledgeling and on the brink of closing. I saw the opportunity to put many of my ideas and visions into practice with this opportunity so I took it! I began running this community organization that was created to support families with young children. It was great, and wonderful, and amazing! And I really got to see what I was made of in that experience.
I organized volunteers, I created marketing campaigns, I created community resources, I wove the organization into the fabric of what the community needed it to be so that all of the organizations and community members that participated in it would be more enriched and vital through the collaboration. And I was in it for win-win-wins! I created jobs and opportunities for other community members and even helped so many families in need by creating accessible programs and resources to help fulfill their needs.
At the same time I was the president of a non-profit organization that was committed to creating solutions to poverty, inequality, and the effects of climate change. With this organization I helped to facilitate cooking classes at schools who served low income families, I helped to establish community gardens at low income housing complexes, and even assisted in creating CSA’s (Community Supported Agriculture) for low income families! It was amazing! And I loved every minute of it! I loved every board meeting, I loved every minute of note taking, I loved the community networking and developing solutions that created real change for the community that I loved so deeply.
It was incredible! My life was booming and blooming exponentially!
So, what happened?…
How did I get here?
Well, as I neared the completion of my time with this community organization (i was ready to move on to next things!) I met an incredible man, the man of my dreams. He was new to town and was the current Executive Director of an amazing organization (that I loved!) that was dedicated to housing homeless people with extreme life challenges. He was funny and articulate and playful and silly. He was talented and savvy and completely capable of doing amazing things including building and carpentry! He was like a dream. He was savvy and sweet! And I was excited! I was excited to share the rest of my life with him! And to top it off he also had a son who was just a couple years younger than mine! And they LOVED each other!!!! It was a dream!
And what was even better was that he had come from a tumultuous upbringing just like I had! He had also survived abuse and homelessness as a teen, just like I did! And he had chosen to be a good person! Just like me!… or so I believed…
He had quickly asked me to marry him. I had known lots of couples who had similar experiences of meeting their partners quickly and choosing them fully and living great lives with them, so I did not know to meet this prompt invitation with apprehension… But after I said yes his dreaminess didn’t last long. He was not able to keep up the facade of the good person he had seemed to be. Weird habits started creeping in. I began noticing things, discrepancies in the things he would say and the things he was doing. I began asking questions. I began to feel an unease around him. He started being mean. He started being shifty. He started saying fucked up things to me. And I began to meet this “dream man” with questioning and skepticism. He had asked me to marry him quickly. And I had no idea that this could be a problem, that moving too quickly could and should be concerning. I began to want to take things slowly. Then he began getting creepy.
He had secrets that he was hiding from me… beyond all of those amazing things that he seemed to be, he was actually an addict and a criminal. And he was not able to keep up his charades for long. And as I began to catch on things got worse quickly. But I was totally naïve to the situation I was in and what I was about to be up against.
Then one day it happened. The world he and I had been building shattered suddenly, as did his illusion when he decided to “teach my son a lesson”. That was it. I was done. It was over in a moment. I had had way too much tolerance for his BS with me, but I had non when it came to my son. I asked him to move out immediately. I told him he needed to seek help and we would see if we could work it out (I really did love him, the him that he had presented as reality to me, the one that was so short lived). But then things got worse. Way worse! And rapidly. As I asked him to leave he began divulging everything to me – every little detail of his past and who he really was, who he had been before he met me. It was awful! He started acting so scary, flip flopping between some Jack Nicholson in the Shining character and some sad pitiful child that needed saving. It was breathtaking and dizzying! And I was trying with all my might to navigate things safely for my child so that the experience would not be traumatizing for him. It was down right horrifying and as things escalated I became afraid for our lives. And it only got worse from there.
He robbed my work, twice. He began weaving his way into my social networks, he began rooting himself in my reality right as I was pushing him out of my house. It was so scary. I went to the police, but the officer I met with informed me that there was nothing they could do with a man like this and that the best solution would be to disappear. He helped me to understand that men like this have no respect for law or boundaries, they have no respect for anything or anybody, which just validated everything that I had already witnessed with him. The truth was I had fallen in love with a con artist.
I strategically extricated him from my house and my life. I left my position with the work that I loved. And I began isolating myself. And to make matters worse I was pregnant with his child.
I lived in absolute and utter fear for the first 3 years of this child’s life. I was afraid to live. I was afraid to be alive. I was afraid to leave my house. I was afraid to be in my house. I was afraid to get a job. I was afraid to exist.
I learned recently that when a person lives under that about of relentless stress it costs them. It costs them their resilience. It costs them their executive function (their ability to make decisions and plans). But even worse, it costs them their wellness. It literally costs them their immunity. Because when people live in fight or flight for too long their body deplete their vital organs to keep them in the state of being able to run at a moments notice. And this is just what my body had done all the way through my pregnancy and for the first two years of my child’s life. And it cost me everything.
But to make matters worse, another tragic side effect of horrifying experiences such as this ~ is the shame that accompanies living through them. It is amazing how intense it is. It is almost deafening to live in this level of shame.
And I lived there in this place of shame and fear and guilt until the day he died. His lifestyle and choices had finally caught up with him.
And when this happened I was simultaneously relieved and devastated! I thought I would be liberated and able to now bounce back into my old life and my work with community! But those three years of living in complete fear had cost me. Instead of bouncing back, instead of resuming life, my whole body collapsed into a total system shut down. I was in and out of hospitals for months with no answers and no solutions. Just a fever and a level of exhaustion that would drop me on a moments notice in a total collapse. First this experience cost me my job. And then it cost me my housing.
That was 7 years ago. And I have been struggling ever since navigating both homelessness with my children and desperate attempts for healing. We bounced from place to place and room to room trying to find stability. Trying to rearrange my life so that I could get the money I needed to help me heal so that I could get back to living life in some normal fashion. Before this experience I had always been a person who payed my bills and at least did my best to stay on top of things. I always did my best to be the best person that I could be, the best employee, the best friend, the best mother and the best community member I could be. But now I was homeless, with my two children, bouncing from room to room, trying to find a place to stay, trying to find a place to live, trying to rearrange my life so I could afford the medicine to help me get better, trying to find a place to heal, trying to find a place to be ok. But over and over again my entire world kept colliding and collapsing in on itself.
I felt desperate. Desperate for a solution, desperate for connection, desperate for anything solid to lean on, something solid to count on. And things only got worse from there. Over and over again I ended up in situations that were convoluted or compromising for me or my children. Over and over again we moved from place to place just trying to find a space we could exist in, a space to regroup in. But it was and endless pursuit.
But through this experience I began to wake up.
This experience woke me up and forced me into the harsh realities that so many people deal with and live with every day. It woke me up to the different aspects of reality that keep us from community.
Before this experience I had approached all of my work and my studies to and through the solutions of the problems, but without recognizing the problems themselves AND what lies at the root of those issues. The issues that keep up from community, keep us isolated, keep us from collective solutions, keep us from being open to the world around us.
I had been so traumatized and re-triggered by this experience it actually unearthed my own root issues. The ones I had just walked away from without ever acknowledging or realizing what it was that I was even walking away from, the aspects of my childhood that I did not choose.
This experience helped me to see and understand that my parents didn’t just “party a lot” they were addicts. The reason he felt so familiar was because he was just like them.
Over the past 10 years I have learned about what happened to me. I have learned endlessly about trauma and the world of addiction. I have learned about real friends and the cost of superficial connections. I have also learned about the systems of poverty and the ins and outs of homelessness and the need for creative solutions to these collective problems.
And I am not quite sure yet where this effort will take me. But I know that I need to put these things out there so that there is a different possibility than the reality I see and am still facing. I am creating this page as a seed to make the necessary connections to build community and see what happens. Because I believe that when we put ourselves out there when we open up in our vulnerabilities with strength magic can happen – solutions can find us, and connections can build bridges to new opportunities.
So here I am. That’s me and my current situation in a nut shell. I hope you will join me on this wild adventure that I am on of healing and finding our way to stable and secure housing. And then who knows what will happen!