I’ve been living in my car for almost a week now.
The reasons for this are multifaceted, but it has been a
conscious choice on my part. While there could be a whole essay written on the
privilege I’ve been lucky enough to have to be able to choose homelessness,
that’s not the reason why I chose to write about my experience today.
I’ve done this as a way of pushing my own boundaries and for
the sake of my own expansion, to bring me right outside my own comfort zone. While
this is also somewhat spiritually bypassing the very real difficulties that
come with living in my car, for the sake of this piece I’m going to choose the
‘higher self’ perspective that as a conscious creator I am choosing this path which is just one path of many.
Being in a place of recovering from abuse has put me in a
lot of very vulnerable situations, and tossed me WAY outside my comfort zone. I’ve
been put in the very vulnerable space of relying on other people to help me in
my times of need, which is about the hardest thing to do when you have ptsd and
in the core of your being have every reason to distrust other people’s
intentions and motives.
Don’t get me wrong, I have been very grateful to the help
that has been given to me. However, I have also noticed the dark side of
offering help to people, and I want to expose this shadow today.
When receiving help from others, I observed an unspoken
pressure to ‘get better’ already, or to ‘just move on’ from a past that still
has a very real grip on my present. Help came with a price. The thinking behind
much (though not all) of the help I received was one of, “If I give this person
a place to stay/an ear to listen/money, they will not have a reason to be
anxious/sad/powerless, and thus will feel better again.”
When I still felt those things after receiving the sort of
help I need, I almost felt worse because not only did I still feel those things
(anxious/sad/powerless), but now I had no tangible reason to be feeling that
way.
The difficult truth that I’ve witnessed is that people are
not willing to be present with these hard emotional states because they’ve
spent so much time running from these spaces within themselves.
Because of this, receiving help feels like rejection of
where I am, and I have ultimately witnessed that allowing this rejection of the
self to take place is causing greater harm than good. This may not be the case
for everyone, but in myself personally I have witnessed again and again that
the pressure to ‘get over it already’ has actually inhibited my ability to heal
at all.
This is my thinking behind ultimately choosing to live out
of my car, than to be given a place to stay from others. I do not want to receive help
because I cannot promise that I will be better as a result of the help I
receive from others.
In America, we claim to be the land of the free; Yet it is
illegal to be homeless, and it is illegal to be suicidal.
This is a microcosm of the bigger issue at hand… We have
built our entire society on a unifaceted existence, when existence is anything
but unidimensional.
We are free to be anything but broken, hurting, and alone.
And in fact when someone is broken, hurting, and alone, we assume that they
must need help moving out of these spaces. It is not comfortable to be broken,
hurting, and alone. We take the task upon ourselves to rid other people of
these feelings because we have not allowed ourselves the ability to feel this
way ourselves, and thus we can't handle it or don't know how to.
And honestly I am probably the minority in this thinking
because again, I am choosing to dive into my shadows and that is why I am
choosing homelessness over seeking to escape homelessness.
In my time living this way, I’ve kind of laughed to myself
at the morbid truth that it’s more culturally acceptable to be a white
supremacist than it is to be homeless. That wishing or perpetuating violence on
other people who supposedly deserve it will not land you in prison, but being
homeless will.
A person who only feels good in their lifetime, in truth,
can never be really sure that they have lived at all. There will always be a
part of themselves that wonders if there is anything ‘better’ out there.
Our existence is not all
sunshine and rainbows and we need to be allowed to experience the rainstorm in
order to really understand the beauty of the sunlight.
Making suffering illegal does nothing to alleviate
suffering. Making suffering taboo in fact puts suffering on top of suffering
for those who have tasted the bitter consequences of feeling in a society that
only allows us to feel good.
The thinking behind this is capitalistic in nature. Feeling
bad is not productive, feeling bad is not conductive to creating value, and so
feeling bad must be bad and we must get rid of feeling bad in any way possible.
Because creating value is
more important than truly living, we have made it not okay to be not okay.
Suddenly we are punished for feeling bad. Suddenly we are
punished for not having our ducks in a row. Suddenly we are punished, for
existing at all, if our existence is rebellion to the status quo.
The intention behind making homelessness illegal was done so
with the vision that making homelessness illegal would prevent it from
happening. But we did not do anything to stop it from happening. All that has
been accomplished is that it is taboo to have that happen, which prevents
people from reaching outwards in fear that the hand reaching towards them will
hurt them.
People say what I’m doing is hard, and while I suppose they
are right, the truth is living in my car in the wilderness is not the hardest
thing I’ve ever done.
In fact, after living this way for several weeks, the
lasting impression I’m left with is how sad it is that living in your car is
illegal.
So many people, myself included, have an excess of material
possessions. In America specifically, people think they need a large amount of
space to live, when this isn’t actually the case. While the task of living on
my own was daunting at first, it was brought to my attention pretty quickly how
little we need to live, and also the ways that I had excess in my own life.
Because this lesson is one that I think many could benefit
from, I wish there to be an end to the stigma of homelessness.
Typically when people hear what I am doing, they react with
resistance. I feel like this resistance is a reaction that goes mostly
unquestioned in people… Similar to how people react to seeing girls stop
shaving their armpits, there’s an immediate energetic constriction that says,
“this should not be happening!”
Few people have found a reason to question the seemingly
inherent belief that there is no value in suffering, and as a result just cast
their suffering out.
I am here to tell you that there is inherent value in our
pain, but this value is realized only with the passage of time.
Suffering is the seed from which all sweet fruits are
born. We can’t just carelessly toss the
seed anywhere and expect it to change form. We must nurture our own suffering,
carefully tending to its needs. With time, we will begin to notice our
suffering has transformed into something different entirely… And it is from
this slow transformation that we can begin to cultivate the fruits that we seek
to harvest.
It sounds so backwards, right? But I am here to be a living
example of what it means to live authentically, and so living authentically
means being open about my genuine experience. Someday others will be around to
witness when my life seems to change shape, and when that day comes, I will
direct them back to this day, when I chose to consciously embrace my suffering.
