1)  The need to be someone:  

What does it mean to be someone?  It is to have an internal sense of standing.  You have no outward need to show or to justify to others that you are someone.   That is because the person who has made something of themself, knows themself, and is therefore secure within.  Until this happens you are consigned to being restless and unfulfilled within.

 Becoming someone is knowing how it feels to have a defined and strong identity.  Essentially it’s about becoming an independent being.  An independent person is a person who choose what it is that defines who they are.  The ability to do this is a reflection of how well you know yourself and so can be true to your known self.

In pursuing a worldly challenge and dedicating yourself to it with commitment and perseverance you will overcome things.  Through this you prove first to the world, and then most importantly to yourself, what you are made of.  Meaningful challenges test us, they entail moments of tribulation and self-doubt; overcoming these obstacles brings many self-realisations.  Unless one lives this, I don’t think one can really know oneself.  I think it encapsulates much of the process of making yourself into someone.  

2)  The consequences of not becoming someone.

A failure to become someone, even if one isn’t explicitly and consciously aware of it, will be felt inside.  You feel weak and ill-defined.  You go through life lost and bereft.  This is manifested in not knowing what to go for, and from here it means not knowing what is you are supposed to become.  Being in such a place can lead onto self-loathing.  It does so because you are frustrated at life.  You have no sense of ever having developed at all.  A recurring question you ask is, what the hell have I done with my life?  The terror of this causes despair.   When life feels hopeless then invariably you begin to give up on yourself.  From here you let yourself slide into ruin.  What better way of conveying your own ruin then to become homeless?

In an ideal world, where we all imbued with an inner sense of peace, I think that our sense of direction would come of itself. As corny as it may sound I do think the person whose connected to life will be at one with their heart.  Since no person is an island our internal sense of direction is fed to us by life, and most particularly by family or those we are closest to.  When you have been given adequate love and encouragement it’s far more straightforward to become someone.   Others help in providing us with the foundations we need so that we, as adults, can freely set down to realising our own potential in life.  

Life is about growth.  We ourselves, as with every life, are someone.  We all have unbounded potential within.  To learn about life we have to develop ourselves.   Through our own evolution and development we become someone.   Only by challenging ourselves and facing our own vulnerabilities and fears can we do this.  A failure to have done this with one’s life comes to feel like a repudiation of life.  Therefore it is vital that we live life and we do things.  It is through what we do that we become something more.  This is how one becomes someone.  

Finding a defining challenge to pursue and to dedicate yourself to really matters.    What you do determines what you become.  This process doesn’t always happen in life.  Subservient to becoming someone are our basic survival needs and a basic emotional wellbeing.  Without these components in place every other aspiration in life falls away.  For a person who is alone in life and has lacked a sense of love and of encouragement then one will struggle to know how to take constructive actions for themselves.  One may want to bother, but one lacks the inner will to do it.  When riddled with emotional emptiness lives wider processes are inconsequential.  And yet the frustration of not developing and becoming someone is regularly felt…….A point may come, when if you have not found your challenge and become someone, then you will let a challenge be imposed upon you.  Unconsciously you will seek out something bleak, because in terror there are no end of challenges.  Let hell become you, because whatever comes next is a guaranteed challenge.  Being in a hellish place in life goes against all our better judgements.  But so strong is that greater life need of challenging oneself and becoming someone, that an integral part of ourself doesn’t care about anything else but the need to live a challenge.  And since every challenge contains the potential for a transformative experience, its experience can potentially be a teacher like no other.   I maintain the view that one would rather put oneself in a worldly hell if, as it does, it guarantees a challenge, than to be in a paradise, where all basic needs are provided for, but which lacks all scope for a challenge.  The need to challenge ourself is so great, that to live a life without challenges is to find oneself trapped living comfortably but anodynly.  When life is artificially benign the world is malignly warped.  From a position like this I think many individuals would banally destroy all that is benign because of the need to discover what life really means on their own terms: is joy not made meaningless without a notion of hardship?  A life without challenges makes you doubt your existence.   One who is stuck in such a state will in the end go looking for hell, against all rationality, because in hell you will at the very least be challenged.  How, afterall, can we know what we are made of unless we are challenged?   To be clear I do not think suffering for the sake of suffering is good.   Definitely not.  But I think gratuitous, self-inflicted suffering comes unless we find meaningful challenges for ourselves to live.  Lives overarching developmental process is greater than us and our own issues.  I think life requires us to live challenging journeys.  In a good challenge there is suffering.  If the challenge you set yourself has an authentic purpose then this suffering that comes in the journey is, ultimately to be valued, because it is through this that we overcome difficulties as we prove to ourselves that we are greater than the obstacles we face.  I think we have know what the notion of suffering means to understand life more fully.  This relationship is an arduous one, but far more dangerous is the attempt to airbrush suffering from life because it only leads to self-sabotage.

3) My own decent towards homelessness and the allure of its challenge.

Before I became homeless I had a materially comfortable life.  I had a job and I had money.  My basic needs were provided for.  But, with time, these came to feel worthless when my internal world was one of emptiness.  I was alone and never had I been able to envisage a genuine future for myself in life.  I had tried to do things with my life, but my inner emptiness was so all pervading that it crippled me in my ability to find a sustained reason in why I was bothering with anything.  I was so used to being alone that I was imbued with the sense of forever being stuck in the isolation of emotional turmoil.  Worldly achievement didn’t really mean anything to me when I had no notion of having anyone to share anything with.  I had passions, but I’d not found that worldly challenge to go for.   This hurt.  I felt my life to be one aimless drift.  Without an overarching purpose to my life I felt stifled and condemned to never being able to develop and become someone.   This saddened me.  What a waste of life this was.  

Because emotional pain was a constant in my life it blocked me from responding to the inner need for discovering a purpose for myself to live by.  This led me to feel I was living to merely exist.   I couldn’t stand this anymore.  A slow slide towards homelessness had begun.  I didn’t want to become homeless, but it was almost as if something was inexorably drawing me there.  It was a kind of joke.  Its encroaching reality was perversely exciting.  And yet homelessness was incomprehensibly terrifying, I saw it in an abstract way as a hell.  I had no idea what I would do if I became it, which in itself was enticing. The mystery inherent within it, no matter how bleak it was, was a challenge I wanted to face.

4)  Developmental forces that propel one towards homelessness.

When you don’t know how to find a worldly challenge for yourself you will take anything that comes.  Like societies that lapse into war, the individual will find ways to blindly slide into gruesome life places.  It may seem senseless, but somewhere within its essence there’s a certain reason in it. It’s a tragic reasoning, but it will unconsciously be pursued while that need for a developmental, coming of age challenge remains an unfulfilled yearning within.  If we are not organised or in control within then life will throw us into frightful places.  If we were only more conscious then life would not do this.  

Homelessness is a way of giving oneself that defining challenge you were searching for but were unable to find.  You force upon yourself this ghastly life, because however bad it may be, there is the potential within it for great challenges.  By plunging yourself into this place you are inevitably going to face great fears, and in this you have a serious challenge to live.  It takes you for a while outside of yourself in the real world difficulties it causes you (the danger here is that the horror of being homeless will throw you into a deeper internal chaos than ever before).  Because its challenges are many the potential for finding out things about yourself are equally great.  

Firstly I will say its challenge is a lowest denominator, because it is about surviving.   This is what it reduces you to.  Life is turned into an unrelenting battle, where all you can do is survive.   One of homelessness’s contradictions is that on one level it’s the most degrading and limiting of lives you can live, it rips you apart, you’re tired, cold, dirty, malnourished and unprotected.  But in another sense it’s profound and nourishing because in all its abjectness it provides a life affirming challenge.  It can turn a hitherto purposeless life into one with a constant purpose.  However much about its life you wholeheartedly loathe, there’s something enticing in it too because in the constant challenges it throws up you feel alive, life has a great intensity.  The contradiction is that physically for so much of the time you are a zombie who can barely function, and yet it provides a sense that you are living live because of the breadth of places it takes you psychologically.  As I said earlier to make ourselves into someone the need to overcome challenges is an integral part of this process.   Homelessness provides no shortage of challenges that somehow one has to find a way to overcome.  It may destroy you, but there’s the sense it is within your control whether it does so or not.  It’s important to be reminded in life that are every action and our every response matters.  When life is anodyne it can be easy to forget this.  In adversity is a reminder of how we possess the ultimate human freedom which comes in how we respond to what happens.  The power of this to young, naive minds is made most real when in difficult situations.  Homelessness is a great way of getting a measure of this freedom. 

Another aspect in the potential within homelessness journey of self-discovery, is that homelessness can make you question who you are.  This is useful since a route towards knowing ourself is about making conscious and then questioning ourselves and our prior self-notions.  For instance a person who goes to the street may well do so because within one has an internal sense of worthlessness.   What better way of making real this self-notion then by being homeless.  By being as worthless in societal terms as you can be, you are now in a place where you can face this notion that has become you.  

A natural reaction when one sees a homeless person if one doesn’t feel disgust or contempt is to feel pity.  Isn’t it sad they’ve fallen into this place? What a waste of a life!  Yes, for certain people who end up on the street a certain self-destructive implosion has brought them there.  But for such people there is something more than simple self-destruction, there is a noble endeavour to find themselves by taking on a challenge that tests them.  They are honouring their life seeking, child’s spirit that wants to know life.  The paradox is that in allowing yourself to become homeless you are effectively saying to hell with life, I don’t care about anything.  The intensity of this feeling reaffirms the contrary sensation, that in fact you really do care.  When we seek out intense experiences we really do care about life.  Life is known most fully through the intensity of what we live.  Many people who go to the street have a yearning for great adventures and challenges.  Rather than pity this spirit should be celebrated.   

The problem here is that I am describing something that’s largely unconscious.  Because it’s unconscious we blindly stumble into such places.  Our ability to properly react, and not be turned insane, is affected.  In the time I first became homeless I had some sense of this impulse.   Therefore I was able to withstand many difficulties because I understood it was but a choice I had made and it was one I needed to live.  

The great danger is in not being aware of our impulse to be challenged and our inner need to know life on the edge, that we become prey to be manipulated by unscrupulous people who care nothing for us or for life, they offer us the panacea of some great purpose we should live.   Our destructive, tyrannical part of ourself does this to ourselves as well.  How many unconscious young boys,  for instance, have been sent to war and slaughtered because of this impulse?  And the allure of war never stops enticing, we never seem to learn.  However I think its impulse is natural and admirable, one is prepared to risk everything to live a true, life defining challenge.   It’s reflective of the yearning need to know life and to prove ourselves, it shows how much in our heart one cares about life.   The tragedy of life is that to honour this impulse for so many only ruinous outlets exist for this.  Finding our own challenges to consciously live and having outlets to live these, which don’t as war does, inflict senseless devastation on others, should be possible.   

Homelessness says many things about society, most obviously about the inequalities that exist.  Another, less obvious thing it says about society, of which this piece was about, is my sense that for many young people there are a dearth of meaningful outlets available to them in helping them realise their purpose of becoming someone.  

The motions of life are poisoned when survival in life is nothing more than you can hope for. Survival for the sake of survival is not to live, it is to merely exist. One’s life feels but a travesty. This, in the worst prolonged passages of time, can be what you become when you spend too long on the street. Your life is wasted. You can barely function, you feel sub human. When you live in such a state for too long you feel dehumanised within. With this goes one’s self respect, and from there one’s spirit, one’s zest for living degrades very fast. Tyranny towards those most downtrodden happens easily when the downtrodden are seen as dirt. History shows endless brutalities inflicted upon prisoners when regimes start dehumanising these others. Those made to appear worthless and sub human are fair game to be slaughtered. On the street some steps in this direction begin to happen of themselves. Life on the street strips you of your humanity. When this happens you can become your own worst tyrant.

Getting by is difficult. There are many humiliating and horror filled periods of time. The very worst moments keep on coming. Take for example sleeping outside on a winter’s night. The air is cold, there’s a breeze in the air. Inside your sleeping bag you drift off uncomfortably to sleep. You think you have on enough layers. But the chill outside perculates. You awake in the middle of the night frozen. Drowsy, you hope you can fall straight back to sleep if you roll over once, but you can’t, the cold is too hideous. You try to convince yourself you’ve slept many hours – and so hopefully you look up at the black sky and scan the horizon for the first sign of sunrise. Please be here. Make this bloody night end. Nothing. It’s still the middle of the night. It dawns upon you how stuck you are, outside in this freezer and its all encompassing desolute blackness of time. You crunch up into a ball, tucking your hands down into your body; childlike, pitiful it is, but it’s all you can do as you cling to the futile hope that nourishing sleep will come. Deeper down into your sleeping bag you squirm. You want to sleep, you need to, but it’s too bloody cold. You shiver some more; again you turn over and pull the sleeping bag right over your head. Something, anything to find a little extra warmth. But it is useless. What the fuck is this life? If only you could fast forward to morning, but you know you are stuck in this unending hellish interlude of stopped time. Pointless hopes. A moment comes when the best option is to get up and pack your things. Just so you can walk about. You have nowhere to walk; but at least if you move you won’t be so cold. A pointless walk around deserted streets. What is the point? There are no good options.

You think of everyone inside. The contrast jars. What a wasted, pointless existence yours is. Another stab to your shattered spirit. Why subject yourself to this anymore? Put yourself out of your misery and make life end. Right then in the abandonment of night you would rather be dead then go on for another second as you are. If I had had a gun right beside me when I went to sleep, then many a night when awoken as I was by the grimey cold, I would have used it against myself there and then. In the moment it makes sense, because being homeless is a senseless existence.

Finally you do get through the night. The day can only be an improvement on the misery of night ( most days are, but not all). You remain groggy. The humiliating pounding in body and spirit you took by night reverberates on within your imbued disposition next day. The world comes to life. The streets become busy with normal life. Clean, fresh, secure, snug people. You, dirty, disheveled, shattered and frozen feel conspicuous in your utter contrast. So painfully is it felt inside you feel as if every pair of eyes can read the words, Tramp, as if emblazoned in neon lighting across your head. How loathsome it is to be this and for all the world to see what a washed out, pathetic person you are.

The hell of night has only just been come out of. You bring yourself back to. It takes a while. When you feel a little less cold and worn through, by that time the day will almost be through. And hell will return: Another freezing night awaits.

What a life this is. All you can do is hope to get through it. Your mind is not your friend. Don’t think too much, or else your mind will rationally tell you you are a no one; a disgusting, useless, failure. End it all now. Self respect like a vigorous mind can be unhelpful because it means finding a million ways in which you are intolerable to yourself. Such pride can mean suicide. Yes, sometimes it’s better to disengage your mind and just get by.

Better times will come. This notion is nebulous when finding a way out of homelessness seems impossible. But if you don’t question it too thoroughly then summer will finally come, and summer is not so bad. Therefore don’t live, just exist. Cling on. Be nothing and then you may just get by. Hopes, aspirations should die; unwanted baggage they are. When degradation is you things are somehow simpler. No need to worry about the future, there is nothing there. Half the struggle of the battle is done when you can let go of some future horizon for yourself in the world.

Like the rubbish bags that appear on the streets each evening you can become such an indistinguishable feature of the street. Now this is you, your place is set forever in stone. No fighting being homeless, because security comes when it is you. Like a mangey street dog, you can be left alone to exist. Existence has become you. Worthelessness means freedom to exist. You are apart, it is you. Sub human. It no longer matters. You are you, the world can fuck off. Your spirit has borne a lot to get to this place. The hellish interludes of time left their mark. You got through them, and they have carried you away. Your place is here, no need to be answerable to any conventions. When you earn true freedom on the street depravity has claimed you.

Street life has an allure. To those who have no choice but to end up on the street it may feel as if there is something irresistible and inexorable within the decent to this place. For all its horror and for all the malign circumstances of life that force you here, in our unjust world, there is, I maintain, something existing within the free will of many homeless that have, too, enticed them to the street. Once you are here, however, it’s easy to be ravaged by the devouring tendencies of this way of life – these themselves were the forces that latently, in the first place, seduced you into becoming homeless. (The forces which pull you here include, the calling to return to nature, in which there is a soothing innocence. Your vulnerability, helplessness and degradation has a simple purity of expression. You are shielded from the capricious complexity of a cold, impersonal society, full of its obscure responsibilities that you’re too inadequate to fulfill and too unworthy of receiving help from others in your struggles. Street life placate this confusion, it cradles you, there is a protecting embrace within it.)

With a strong allure enticing and then keeping you here, on the street, you continue on in staying because there’s something powerfully insatiable within it. It makes you someone. And it nourishes tender parts of yourself that have been, and remain, blocked and starved of expression. It connects you to a fundamental part of life that you yearn to know. You are gripped by these forces. And they may never stop gripping you. Even if you have left the street its grip remains as a pressure within – you feel the call to return to the street.

It is no coincidence that many people who have been homeless once become homeless multiple times onwards in life. In the same way a criminal whose been to jail once may well always be regarded as a criminal, or as a soldier whose seen war is always a soldier, to be homeless once is to forever be someone who is homeless. It is an identity. This makes you someone. If your life before had always felt senseless the definition that therefore comes in being a homeless person gives you an internal foundation you may never otherwise know. No identity, no defining sense of who you are means no sense of pride. Street life’s all-consuming life gives to you an identity and through this comes a sense of pride.

It is perhaps no wonder then that a homeless person, even after they have returned to, and supposedly become settled in, ordinarily life, have a proclivity towards becoming homeless again. Doing this may be a conscious choice or it may be done unwittingly as the forces within homelessness exert their considerable unconscious grip over you. The clear-cut sense of definition to this life has a purity that can be hard to ever find in the real world. Why not therefore return and be homeless again? Make it your life forever. No going back to normal life is to honour your homeless identity, by making being homeless your everything. There is an alluring authenticity in aspiring to live out a way of being to the full. Since being someone of the street remains forever in who you are, the call to return may never leave you; responding to its call removes the ambiguity of struggling to find a place in and fully part of normal life. Therefore, definitively becoming and remaining forever homeless can bring liberation.

When this definitively becomes you it means dying in this way. In this you have a known destiny. Your life has a perverse certainty and direction. Who can say this is not in some way desirable? How can I say that? Because through this comes a kind of acceptance. You know your place and you know who you are. No more need to struggle with hackneyed bourgeois notions of continually reinventing who you are and finding yourself. One’s calling in life does seem to be something we as a society are fixated with – How much we want to know who we are and what our destiny, or our path, is supposed to be. Most often so many well to do people have no idea; how much unhappiness and internal struggle this uncertainty causes. Therefore, the person who is homeless and makes this their self-defined destiny has a certainty that so many others lack. Yes, this destiny may be the lowest denominator, but there is a refreshing vigour in accepting who you are and in being there, already, in the place you’re supposed to end up.

Our identity is fused most often by our place in the world. Although it may be tragic for one to imbued that they are no more than a homeless person and the street is where they belong, there is also something forthright and honest in this surrender. How many people, after all, in ordinary life have either a muddled identity, or have an identity incongruous with both who they really are and which is not reflected in their lifestyle and place in societal life?

Homelessness is an all-encompassing identity. When you are a person who is homeless it defines you and your place in life. It doesn’t take much getting used to for this lifestyle for it to quickly have a hold over you. This identity sticks. It is you. You see yourself as this. What is it you are? You are a person displaced from life. Society has no place nor no use for you. Amongst the first things you feel when you become homeless the first time is a rupture from the world. This rupture goes very deep. Once you have cut your link to something substantial it can be hard to ever undo such a schism. In this way, such a rupture with the world becomes your identity. You are a person apart from the herd of the world. There is an independence of spirit within this. There too is a sense of defiance and strength. A homeless person is distinct – you mark yourself out, by the nature of the life you live, as someone different form the mass. And once this known world of being homeless ensnares itself upon you, you feel a certain comfort and security in this distinctness you live. Moreover, since the vast majority of people in humdrum life have neither been homeless nor given a moments thought to what this life is like, the homeless person’s inherent separateness of spirit is underscored even further when they start to live out a life on the street. Thus, your distance from, and your relatability with and from, ordinary life deepens. The all-encompassing life and identity of being a homeless person definitively marks you out as odd. You become that lone outsider you’d always somewhere within felt yourself to have been. You are an other, cut off from life. That’s how society sees you and that’s how you feel – the two are perhaps one and he same.

Another aspect in the identity of being homeless is being a person of ideals. Naturally independent minded people separate themselves from the normal way of things. And so by nature, I think, a lot of people who end up on the street are by nature singular. A person who goes against the grain and goes their own way is an idealist. You search for something greater and deeper than can be found in the normal way of things. And if you have lived a life that has been sadly soured by disillusionment then your idealistic spirit can be channelled into going after the last remaining intense experience open to you, becoming homeless. So what if it is your ruin, at least within it there is an adventure and some sense of bittersweet feeling. Hense, when your life situation has been such that you can find no outlet nor mode of being in which to live out your ideals as a citizen with a role, a place and a function in society, then the conclusion you, as a homeless person, can very naturally come to, is that there is no place in the world for you.

A person with ideals is very liable to be someone whom the notion of destiny resonates strongly with. When your ideals, in worldly terms, can never be fulfilled, you set yourself upon saying, Yes this is me – I am a homeless person – who will finish up here tethered to nothing and will die outside in nature. When life is a tragedy, it at least gives some sense to things when otherwise there may have been none. To be this, in the end to some final degree, is comforting; you can find acceptance in the bittersweet final conclusion that the world has no place for you. Things never worked out for you, and that is just a fact of life. Your defiance, your final sense of standing, is in imbuing being a homeless person with all your being.

The conflict within about how you should be living in normal life and how you should be doing this or that lessens and eases when you come to the conclusion, the street is the only place for you. Your ideals, therefore, go into being a person who will forever be apart. You live it to the full when you forever surrender yourself to the street. This is where you will die. There is a certain integrity in this because you live in accordance with the final all out identity of being a homeless wanderer. This is you, this is how you will die.

Homelessness is something that grips you. The hold it has over you is who you become. And once you are this, why ever should you want to shed this identity? It brings with it certainty and definition. Why try again for anything else? Experience has taught that trying to find a place in the ordinary fabric of things is dispiriting, futile and painful. If your definition of yourself is as someone who is homeless – with all the components I’ve mentioned that this entails – then however hard you try again to find a place in ordinary life, it will never amount to anything substantial, while so much of your heart and your imbued sense of being is as someone who is homeless. Attempts to find a place in the world will be done disinterestedly. It will be so when the call to be homeless still grips you. And so, a final time may come when you surrender yourself totally to its life and its identity. In that there is a semblance of peace; since there need be no more existential struggle and no more wretched attempts at being an imposter in ordinary life. Your identity is affixed. Ordinary people may try to reason with you otherwise; but to finally be at the place where no ordinary person can sway you any other way is liberating. Definitively you can say, No, leave me alone: I don’t want this help. My place is the street. Leave me be and let me live. I am a homeless person; wandering the streets, beholden to no one or nothing is me, and it is how I will live out the rest of my days.

It´s you against the world,
Outside homeless you’re on your own;
The days end is here – Nightfall means apocalypse
Only you know it, only you live it
Every day at this hour the end of time comes,
Life is at its terminus,
You are living this out all over again.

By day the streets were awash with bulging crowds – senseless, no space to breathe, no dispersion in all the busyness.
Suddenly night time arrives
And now there is nothing….
Just you in an empty bell jar vacuum
A microbe in an eerie, sterile world.
The buildings are standing, but outside on the street, where you are here, on your own, lost, it’s dissolution:
You face this alone.
Heart breaking it is, but your heart break means nothing when life is no more.
Alone you trudge
Why bother?

The buildings warm, alit, secure, like spaceships from another planet;
The people you spot inside are oblivious to how they glibly mock you – their complacent contentment underscores your own chasm from life.
Sheltered lives off limits,
Snuggly they rest,
They don’t know their alive;
You, however, are out in the cold.
Vapid air,
Callous existence made insignificant.

The suffering of this life is hard
But it is you, it is all you are:
By day there is shame, by night just this cataclysmic secret;
With the apocalypse of this hour, though you are living it no one else knows it, it’s irredeemably lost within and consuming you,
Life is hopeless,
Death is at hand.
The end of time hour on the street is interminable.
Sleep will be hard,
Tired tomorrow,
Tomorrow will pass,
And then repeat,
Here you go again,
Around it comes again too quick
This night time hour encapsulates what homelessness, your life, is.

The apocalyptic sense of life that comes daily at this hour is never overcome;
In the end, though, it’s fortifying
It tells you what you are:
An insignificant being, locked out from life.
No way back
Nowhere to go
Hopelessness is swallowing you
Your spirit is sick
Alone on the street, all you can do is secretly live out its horror….
And deal with the world ending each day.

This way of being is seductive
Because only you outside here, alone, are privy to the imminence of the apocalypse,
You glimpse something senseless
It’s crushing
But it’s sweet;
You are playing out life to its bitter end
It has you in its grasp
You are lost, you are crazy
Life is over, life is done
In this abyss you see things which no one else will ever know.

Ignored: I do not so much as exist;
A lving person with my own story to tell,
I am someone, I am life.
To the world though as I am, my existence is meaningless.
Perhaps even worthless,
This is what happens when you live on the street

A human irrelevence:
To the eyes of ordinary life I am not a person –
I am something unnatural and vile, like disemobidied junk.
Hollowed out from the cold,
Dishevelled from the dirt,
Tired out, empty, from the sleeplessness,
Nervous, tense, frightened  from the danger of a lack of security.
The apparutus of my physiological and psychological machinery cannot adequetly function:
I am drained.
Done in,
Exisiting only to survive.
This is not life…I am kaput.

Life here pounds the senses down
My heart is not open,
My eyes have no light.
Within I am still myself, or at least I was, there will be a moment -it may be now – when I will be down and lost forever.

I doubt my humanity,
Fearful, tormenting doubts,
A meek run down rump am I, I sense the disconnect from life that is me.
No wonder no one wants to acknowledge anyone as pitiful as this.

Unhappy world, unhappy life;
To the judgements of the world I am vermin.
All I do is arouse disgust; I get in the way.
How can I be someone when I am like I am?

How can the world see me as a person when my state challenges ordinary mans secure notions of what a human life is?
Better then for the world to deny the homeless person.
Ignore them,
Don’t acknowledge their humanity
And then the guilt is negated.
If I am less than human then I can be lumped together with the rubbish of the street ~
To be discarded forever is what I feel I deserve….
This is what living to survive does to oneself.

The homeless are unsightly
The homless are a blight on societal harmony
We would be better off eradicated…would we not?
Who would notice?  Who would care?
For the majority if they could walk the street without the sight of the homeless then their lives would be pleasenter,
The homless are not easy to accept, let alone tolerate
They get in the way.
To deny them is to deny the uncomfortableness one feels as a human when the homless are there.

If only they did not exist
No risk of awarkwardness
No more uncomfortable shunning of eye contact.
No more faint stinging whiffs of revulsion.
If unacknowldged enough in the human sense  then how long before I do not exist?

I am coerced into denying my humanity.
It is easy to question it,
And I am made to do so by the sense of societal ostrafication;
It hurts,
I feel angry
But what authority do I have to express it?
My voice, like the functioning capacity of my body and mind, is too weak;
My stature is shrunken
I am not a person, my human will is gone.

One time though I may just snap,
For I want one chance to rebel at this plight before it is too late.
To feel the pain and to give it it’s justified expression: The world needs to know,
I exist, I am no island.
Who can blame me for this?
Yes who dares? ….when in virtually every interaction people either look away in hostility or disgust, or they callously ignore ;
Here there is no escaping this life revoking repudiation;
Because I am where I am there are too many people and there is too little space…….
And so its constancy logarithmically aches.
I am made less human by the ways others see me.

Going berserk finally becomes the only means left of reclaiming the momentary gold dust of human expression.
Negative confrontation with the world is better than nothing,
In full fronted antagonism there is attention,
Active hatred is something
Since it is a reminder that I still exist.

There was a lot to adjust to, but at least there was a purpose in my first actions; these gave me a healthy distraction.  I bought some cheap, efficient food from the supermarket.  I had free rein to eat a tonne of bread and cheese slices – the sportsman within me was stocking up on carbohydrates for the challenge ahead.  In the evening I bought a coffee and sat in a cafe.  An indispensable companion for me was a paper notebook and pen.  I was not in the mood to write anything of great substance…..but what I did do was to resolve to myself that I would write twice each day.  I would do poetic free writing, whereby I would write my feelings, sensations or general trail of subconscious thoughts that came from my subconscious as I had the pen in my hand.  This released any pressure I had of writing anything of coherence.  I was free to just put anything down.  I did indeed do this exercise each day on my walk, I would write anywhere between half a page and a couple of pages in one go.  I was often surprised by what came to me.  It connected me with some of my biggest fears and insecurities within.  Obscure, vague sensations began to take form in a line here or there in the free writing I did.  This then set in motion new, clearer trails of thoughts I may not otherwise have had.  It may well have given some direction to my thoughts.  Sometimes I would begin to lay down a diary entry based upon something that had come to me through this free writing.  The act of walking with that connection between body and mind, I am sure on it’s own, fed me many a trail of thoughts, and reinforced and expanded upon things I had touched upon loosely when jotting things down.  I mention this activity because it was a constructive and an immensely useful action for me.  In subsequent times in my life when I have felt down and low on energy and have wanted to write, but have to my frustration not been able to really do so, then I have often done a spot of free writing again.  It’s relieving.  There is no judgement to the quality or the coherence of the words, the words just come, they are neither right nor wrong.  Through the action of this, like with any small constructive action who can say all of what is set in motion.

The good thing about the hike I was set to do was that there was a defined route I had to walk.  The coastal path I was going to follow was one that is famously beautiful.   It would be a nice walk, and it was well marked, this was important.   I was not walking aimlessly; there was a structure within it and a direction to go for.  My nerves were in a susceptible state with the shock of everything that had just, finally, transpired.  I knew it was important, therefore, to relieve myself of as many external distracting uncertainties as I could effect.  Having a broad plan as to the structure I would follow freed me up to just go, and to focus upon the things which I most needed to concentrate on.  In knowing where I was going and what I was doing this negated the wider excessive uncertainty of my situation which I would need the time away to process and prepare for.  It was a way of searching and reconnecting with the strength I would need to take on the rigours of life that awaited me.

Also of very high importance was that I had recovered fully from illness.  I had slept a lot and my energy was fully charged.  Good, plentiful sleep had replenished me in mind and body in the weeks before.  This freshness was important in my ability to respond as best I could to all the many challenges that lay ahead.   Indeed, this period informed subsequent observations of mine regarding energy levels and sleep.  I think – because I have felt it work for me time and again – that I can stock up on sleep for a time by simply sleeping long hours,  this then gives me later, the extra energy I need, when I am busy in doing something intense, and through which I do not sleep a lot at night.  I have the energy to sail through this from all that prior sleep I have had.  Being well rested for the seismic event of homelessness, was essential to me.  I needed every ounce of strength I could utilise for the intensity of all that I was just beginning to face.

The cafe I was sat in was closing.  Evening was giving way into night, the time to depart, to start walking was, now, when the city was shutting down.  I was free to anonymously get away, on my own, to face what I could only, in that moment, face alone.

Looking out through the streets of the neighbourhood, as I lifted the bag to my shoulders, I could feel how this was the hour to be in one’s home…..but I no longer had one –  when darkness comes one feels particularly exposed to the vestiges of this status,  it had just sunk in that little bit more then for me, chilling to think I had no warm bed anywhere to go back to –  but tonight, at least, I had this challenge before me, all I could do now was put all I had into it.

Walking out of Barcelona:  The city was emptying, I had intimacy in the lateness of the hour.  The night would be mine.  The promenade beside the sea was clear, only the occasional runner or dog walker did I pass.  The night was mild.  Quiet.  Unexpectedly quiet, the sea was serene like a lake, the clear moonlight glistening unbroken upon it.  Not the slightest hint of a breeze, the air like the sea was so still.  A remarkably placid night, it was ideal for a good night walk.

These first steps would set the tone.  Through them I would feel the connection to myself and to life.  It was a proper hike my backpack was extremely heavy (I had to fill it with a lot of things, where else was I to put things without a home).  The steps how were they?….they were light…..they felt good…..I had energy.   I just went.  I did not think.  I walked; one step after another.  Using my force.   Surprised by my strength.   No need to question it – nor to doubt it – it just felt good…. I had to go with it and keep this rhythm.  Just stay in the moment and enjoy the bliss.  A second here was an eternity.   This was life.  It mattered.

I was aware of everything that had happened.   In the here and the now it just was, what had gone before was in the past.  It could not get to me, it could not touch me nor effect me when I was imo the zone doing what I had to do.   This challenge before me, was to me personally like the Olympic Games; all my focus, all my energy, went into the marathon I was currently running.  I did not care about anything else.  Nothing else mattered but the moment right now.  Life stripped down to it’s simplest form.  It was invigorating, and positively and surprisingly refreshing.

There was no question about it my heart was there and in it.  I was powering my way out of Barcelona at great pace.  I was pushing it, pushing myself, engaging my heart.  I walked like a machine.  This is the type of activity I have an innate  aptitude for, I was naturally highly capable at it, I was doing that which I was most naturally good at.  I knew my standards from times past, I was honouring these now, it was happening of itself, I felt the power of my body.  Those first 20 plus kilometres I walked non stop in three hours.  Barcelona was gone.  I felt free.

I stopped for a short while.  Sat on some rocks under the stars on the silhouetted seas edge, I looked back at Barcelona, now a dot, down the coast.  The air was clean (so much cleaner than the city) .  No one else was around, I had the night to myself, on my own secret mission.  Above all else I was satisfied.  Immensely so, what a relief,  I still had determination.   I still could care.  I still wanted to walk and walk.  While I was stopped my thoughts also too did begin to wander – I was not out of danger from my negative head.  When I thought about the bigger picture, worries began to interfere.  I began again to doubt things.  There was the impulse to question why I was doing what I was doing.  My negative thoughts, my critical self had not vanished,  it’s shadow still lurked.  This was why the walking was so good, because I could not deny what was inside me,the walking gave me a bubble of bliss just to be in with myself, doing something that felt good.  I could be with everything that was within. My mind was engaged in life, everything else could process itself with my constructive motioned action of walking.  I had space and the uninhibited opportunity to adjust.  Hiking, and the endurance aspect of it was a great way of connecting to myself.  With my natural ability for it, this talent put into use made me feel stronger and all together more capable in life again.  This was the best foundation I could have had to come to terms with things,  and to face some difficult inner truths that awaited.   One can handle so much more in life when one feels strong within.   This physical pursuit made me feel as strong as it was possible to be in this moment.   It was reaquainting me with what I most enjoyed, while reminding me of my qualities within.  These were impregnable seeds of comfort for my fragile self worth.

I continued walking.  The hiking got harder in the latest hours of night, but since I had started so well, with the right mindset,  I was able to uphold this ethos as I just kept on going because I just knew how much it mattered.   Physical discomfort I could handle, and indeed even relish a bit since it showed I was embracing the journey in all it’s ups and downs; it was a chance furthermore to engage with that will within.  I wanted some struggle, it was a way of embracing life and calling upon my innermost fibre within:  How could I really know it and value it if things were not at least a little tough?

That first day I walked 80 kilometres.   I had never hiked so far in one single day.  By the days end I was shattered,  and even a touch emotional for a lot of things had come up while walking.  Mostly I was content, perhaps even a little proud….I had taken some steps to reclaiming my self worth.  Relief and satisfaction glowed strongly within.  Intellectually beforehand I had had strong reservations and fears that I would have been unable to have done this, being tormented as I was by that fear of all my determination and fight being dead.  In connecting with my heart in doing an activity I loved more than anything else I had enabled the light within to shine forth and speak for me authentically of itself.  There still was light and hope within.  I had given it the chance to express itself, and it responded in the hour when it was absolutely needed.   With this power I knew I could handle things in life.  The future was still highly uncertain, but it was not definitively bleak, however much the darkness within my head may have continued trying to tell me otherwise.

The whole hike itself was nine days in total.  I walked 450 kilometres.   This was some achievement I knew it was.  It got very, very hard at times. The second day I walked the weather was atrocious.   After walking for half an hour that next morning it began to rain, it became heavy very quickly and it continued – accompanied with a very strong wind – all day into the night.  I was soaked and shivering when I arrived into a small town in the evening darkness.  Homelessness hurt then.  Wet and cold I had no bed and there was no warm shower I could take.   I slept the night uncomfortably in an ATM.  Fortunately every other day the weather was dry, but it got at times horribly hard.  Every other night, apart from that night in an ATM I was sleeping outside, nearly always in nature.  It was March and still accordingly rather cold at night.  There were a couple of particularly cold nights when it was at or close to freezing, it was not easy to stay mentally strong in such a state.  This was punishment, I felt very small indeed.

Many problems arose that I had to respond to.  I got lost a couple of times.  My budget was small I could not stop in cafes or eat at least a little piece of nice food.   And I was always completely alone.  The isolation hurt.  Perhaps though this needed to hurt for I did realise after one especially tumultuous internal day that I could not live like this, alone.   I needed to learn to receive and to feel deserving; admitting this to myself hurt.  I saw how scared I was in reaching out:  this helped to make me aware of some very basic and fundamental things.  This need to learn and to ask for and to receive help would, very soon, when I got back to Barcelona, stand me in very good stead.

This was a trip of light but also, in moments, incredible darkness.  The destructive side of me within would not easily give up, fighting unrelentingly as it did to assert it’s prominence.  I was savagely attacked by many a doubt and no end of furious frustrated grievances.   The darkness would have liked nothing more than for me to give up: to have collapsed, for instance, alone in the countryside, starving and in despair because life seemed hopeless.  To have given in on it all, and to have ended the horrendousness of this blind, silent fight was a gnawing temptation in moments.  For life to have run it’s course, and to have gently resigned myself to it, it would have put an end to all the potential uncertainty and shame fested difficulties that lay ahead.  Instead it would have provided reassuring simplicity of closure.  In moments the arguments put forward by my head for this seemed compelling, like an inviting voice lulling me, willing me to sleep.  When life ends there is the certainty of closure which in the simplest of senses can almost seem relieving.

And yet in spite of all this I continued walking great distances.   I could not, I would not stop.  My determination and hunger for life were too strong.  My head repeatedly questioned the point of it all as it made me doubt my determination, but it could not disprove that innate love of life that lies within.  I just kept going because this challenge to me meant the world.  I kept going because I had to –  just had to – refute it.  The first steps I had taken on this hike were proof to me of my will to do this.  I kept this inside and used it to keep on going, even in these journeys hardest moments.  Building upon all this, was to be from there onwards a new foundation for me in life.

When I returned to Barcelona I got help I got help from some kind people, and before long I had got a job in a hostel, where there was accommodation with the job.  From there I was soon taking some personally momentous life steps, as I faced up to some huge issues I had always in my life prior to this put off doing.  It was massive, but in doing it I was struck with some excruciating subconscious shocks.  The upshot was that I would in time become voluntarily homeless again.  To explain the reasoning for this is another story in itself.  And it is one I can safely say I would never be able to tell if I had not had this experience and everything connected with it that I have just relayed.

How this walk was framed in my mind – what it’s purpose was, it’s integral, essential reason – was to answer the ultimate life question: To live or not to live. It really was all about that. This may sound overly self importantly dramatic and indulgent, but it was what lay at it’s heart. Why was it that I saw it in such a way? Because I had got so stuck in my life. It may then have been that I needed such grandiosity to lift me into harnessed reason. Seeing it and framing it like this, and feeling that this is what my life had come to was a way of stripping my world, from here, into a clear cut one.

Before I was in a place where I struggled in seeing any avenue of purpose left to me in life. At the heart of everything, I had a big, big problem that everything in my life seemed to get back to. I had blockages in my mind, from past traumas, that had led onto depriving me of intimacy in life of any kind. I could not get passed many an obscure demon of fear and doubt, and it crippled me. Humiliating; it led to huge frustration and a feeling that I was pathetic. The consequence was that I felt condemned to be forever alone in life. What was the point in anything if I was to be like this…..to me it was an irrefutable argument that marred my whole conceptions of life and self. In part an excuse, because with it my life had definition, I could always fall back on things that had happened to me in self pity. But it was also a hugely big and pressurising burden to carry, and I can only think that it did take a lot of strength not to give in on everything.

Whatever was the case, I was in this time in particular, overly befuddled with uncertainty, which was all upheld so potently by my obscure fears that were me, and in which I could not see anyway around. Consequently my existence seemed one of long term futurelessness. Why do anything today? Why take small steps today in life and career to realise those big dreams of tomorrow, if there is no sensed secure tomorrow you can either believe in or see? An incapacity to this, even in the remotest tangible way, had catastrophic consequences in how I allowed my life to slide. Things fall apart in life when there is no defined action to the steps one takes in one’s daily life. The only reason to live in normal life – to live at all – seemed to be to simply survive. To cling to this for the sake of clinging to piecemeal security felt emasculating. I could not just live to survive as some kind of human non entity. There was no excitement in this, nothing to ignite the excitement for life. Nothing to engage my determination and drive……and so for all this it was that I thought it was shriveling away. I had nothing to offer, nothing I could do, my problems huge as they were to me, could not be got around, they defined everything. The prospect of homelessness had almost nonchalantly, beforehand, seemed but a small issue compared to everything else. If it was to be my undoing that did me in then so be it. If, on the other hand, I had strength to handle it and get through it, then maybe there would be something revealed to me within upon which I could build on: Homelessness was a way of irretrievably seeing whether this was the case or not. This was the only way to challenge once and for all an imbued fatalistic outlook on life that had a hold over me.

My real immense fear, greater than homelessness and any kind of material squalor or degradation, was that that fire within – my determination – would wither away and leave me. This was my worst fear of all, because it was the loss, the destruction of what I most valued within. I could not see how I could live life without this, I would be vacuous and without fight within. And if I did not have any fight I could not work my way to change my life’s most arduous internal challenges – I needed all my strength I had to do this.

The previous year before homelessness happened had been so hard because I believed, I felt, that my will was dying. It was a terrible, wasted, year in which I was disconnected from life. I was marooned in my head, weighed down by a vicious mist of negativity which poisoned me through it’s self recriminating doubts and shame. Nothing was clear, nothing worthwhile, everything was shrouded in an embittered ghost like hopelessness. I lacked belief in myself in the day to day motions of life, and so I did not engage with pursuits of any note. Everything was done half heartedly in this place, this was a rotten, hollowed out way of living life. In a state like this, that determination within felt battered, done in, gone. I thought, judging by the life I had been living, that it was leaving me – indeed it may already have left – forever. And this I was powerless to prevent, since I could find nothing constructive in life in which to engage myself with and ignite my long lost fire. This environment I had been living in over the previous year, I felt had been killing it. My worst fear now was that this determination, this fight within was dead. How I tormented myself with this fear. This, therefore, was what the hike I was undertaking now was about: it was to see whether I still had any inner fight for life. To not have it, to have lost it, I was not me…..I could no longer have lived life since I would have been dead to myself. To live or not to live depended upon whether I could rouse that fight within when I, now, needed it more than I had ever done.

I now know that this – being an innate quality as it is – never leaves one. It was unfounded, since it’s energy had merely gone into the viciousness of the harmful part of myself that darkly inflicted such abuse upon myself, the consequence of too much suppressed constructive ambition. But then I did not know this, I never knew it, I never believed it. I was terrified it had gone. The dark, sadistic side of me tormented myself with these doubts, until I was at the point, here, of believing that what I most nauseously feared had become the case. I was a vicious bastard to myself, a bastard that was scathingly frustrated at life. My incapacity to see things clearly, while fighting myself to this excessive extent, meant that I had lost all reasoned perspective on life. My self centred recriminations were destroying all my faith in life itself.

I wanted to see, through this walk, if I had the determination to walk huge distances, to go to my physical limits, to rise above the discomfort and use it to fuel me on because pushing myself beyond my limits still mattered to me. If I could still embrace and be inspired by the rigours, by the hardship – like I had once been – by the suffering of such a challenge, then that yearning, that fire within, was still determined to expand, and go beyond, my life’s horizons and limits. Pushing myself had used to be about caring for life. Suffering to me mattered, because in being able to endure it for a constructive, meaningful challenge, then in this, was the proof that life did matter. In knowing places that in the short term are hard and terribly trying, is worth it if it is for a greater purpose. If I could not do this, if I could not push myself through the short term discomforts that needed to be faced, then the desire to scale new heights in life, and to overcome obstacles that lay in my way would no longer matter sufficiently; and if doing this did not really matter to me then the light within could not shine, since my fire of determination was smothered. I needed the determination in it’s fullest potential within if – ultimately – I did want to change my life, if I were still to have hopes of, and belief in, overcoming the pain and the challenges that had dogged me in life itself. This hike was a rehearsal for life, to see what I had within, to prove to myself it was there and strong and so could get me through these choppy life waters I found myself in. Connected and reacquainted to it I could embrace life again in all it’s rich and challenging nuances.

Could I, would I do this hike with the fullness of my heart? Whenever I did things in life half heartedly I felt weak and altogether disinterested. If I could not propel myself to give my best and to care about what I was doing when I was doing something that I needed to do and which should have been important, it would feel terribly dispiriting. To not feel life sufficiently, I felt altogether reduced as a person. There were plenty of things in those recent times I knew I should have cared about doing well, but however much I tried to cajole myself into feeling it, and doing it like it mattered, my heart could just not respond. It was crushing. The standards we set ourselves are ours to live up to, they matter because they are about respecting ourselves and honouring the opportunity of life. I don’t mean in this that one has to be perfect and better than everyone else (whatever such a nebulous and limiting, ego driven notion may mean) . No, what I mean is simply in giving your best, in trying your hardest and letting the necessary fiery passion burn forth, of itself, in the moment when it is needed most. In the things I used to enjoy most I knew how it felt when I did it to the best of my ability. This is why I so like sports because in it I could feel these nuances so clearly.

I made my way towards the sea and the neighbourhood of Poble Nou. I was going to leave at nightfall. I had few hours to stop and wait and let things sink in. In leaving at night I intended to walk through the night and to walk all the next day as I wanted to walk further than I had ever done before in one single day. I wanted to cover a good distance and go to my limits. This would be sport. Good sport is a battle, an inner fight to conquer my known limits.

This condensed challenge would fill this next day of my life. The day was set. At least I was doing something that mattered to me. I could even relish the day, by relying on myself rather than being weighed down blindly with subsuming and humungous worries. It was about having the right focus, if my focus was put into something constructive and life affirming then maybe through it I would gain a more balanced perspective on my life and my problems. This challenge gave me the time and the space to do this. Time and space in life can be everything. aa

I may have been my own worst enemy, but a part of myself too did care for myself and for life. I was unable to acknowledge this and value it in the moment, but this part of me, I can see now, was still there. Perhaps it was doing more than helping me, and was in fact silently guiding me. A week before homelessness happened I read Viktor Frankl’s: The Meaning of Life. My own words cannot remotely state the power of this book. Poignant, solemn, and so very very powerful. He produced out of the very worst, and most disgusting environment of life a work that was inspiring. The sagacity of his perspectives he illustrates about life, opened my eyes and gave me a lot to ponder.

To read this book as I did, I can see now clearly, what I tried to deny then, that, yes, within myself I did care about life. Our head may convince us of something through the strident officiousness of all it’s doubts and negative self serving thoughts, but there are, actual, concrete actions of ours that we perform, which if only we were sufficiently aware of, would refute in an instant the worst excesses of our critical head. In reading this book as I did then this action proved that I did care about improving and helping myself in life. If there was one thing I took from the book it is that our faith is ours, no one, absolutely no one, can ever rob us of this. Our why, our purpose in life is ours to know and to always uphold. The book, perhaps, opened in my mind that magical, remote, door which gave me a connection to that priceless slither of light that I would now need, as I began to walk out into the city where I had lived, where I still lived, just now without a home.

At some point I had to face up to what I was going to do. I had to have a plan of action. I had to take charge of something. I had to find and create my own’ why’ . A part of me couldn’t – didn’t want to. ‘It is all pointless’ . ‘Your worthless’ . ‘You are nothing, you have wasted your life: You pathetic idiot’ . An insidious on running negative narrative within my mind gave credence to the belief that homelessness was the end of the world. Such negative beliefs were not new, they in themselves had dragged me down to this place – bad habits do not just suddenly stop. Their consequence was a shattered self worth that needed rebuilding. I could not forever destructively label myself as pitiful and weak. I had determination inside, that I always had prided myself on. I needed this now more than ever. I had to reconnect with it. What to do?

I had this fight within, I could not intellectually pin point down, exactly, what it was or how it felt, but it was a knowledge imbued within my fibre from experience. I carried this sense within. The clearest example of what I mean is whenever I had used to play sports: I never stopped running, I never knew I was beaten. To achieve a great, improbable, comeback when two sets to love down boiled my blood with sweet swelling fired up pride. To never give in, to have the determination to win was me, the child, when I did sports. Endurance activities, in particular, were something I had loved. Marathons, extreme long distance hikes were things I had once done in the past. I could really push myself, I could go on and on, I had to….it was life. It trod a fine line between masochism – as I sometimes pummelled myself as I unleashed pain and frustration – and a yearning, a quest, for the deepest depths of my spirit and the God given universal power within, that I wanted to know and to feel because it gave me a connection to something great. It took me beyond the limits of my small world and it’s constrained nature of my own life limiting problems. This is about perspective, as it is a way of grasping that I am more than my problems – when previously depressed I had lost all sense of this.

But a fear of losing this inner determination had taken hold of me, in those recent and particularly dark times. How I tormented myself with this fear – it become a sickening, self perpetuating, belief in life. This was worsened further, by the depressive state I had been in, which led onto me feeling very lost in life. I could not see anything of long term consequence to go for. I lacked goals and I lacked any excitement for the future. Having hopes and having dreams had become a poison to me. Since I had little before me in life that engaged my mind, I felt flat, there was nothing to channel myself into, and since this way of being seemed to have forever inescapably set in, I was convinced that that fight within had withered away. I feared now that it was dead. The negative, dark, critical narratives that consumed my head force fed me the conviction that this was so. And, if I did not have fight nor determination then I was hollowed out, broken; this was too despairing for me, without this drive I was not me…..I was a dead in the water non entity. Like this – with this sense of self – I struggled to live with myself. My life had run out of road.
Not having dreams. Lacking a project to put my ambition into, that could allow me to live, had created perilously slippery ground. This is what had ushered in my plummeting freefall. Constructive action was the way to connect with myself. I had to channel what lay within into something of consequence. I needed a why. But now that structured life had just freshly vanished before me, as I found myself permanently out on the streets, with security scant, no sense of direction, and with no plans of how to make anything of my life, the effort to now find such a why risked coming across as hopelessly now too late. The most important question was: what, right now, would help myself and give focus to my mind. How could I connect with my innermost being?
As I walked out into the city, familiar streets felt different, with the consciousness that I was a person who was homeless. Things seemed closed off to me in ways they had not been before. I had become in a new and more pertinent way an outsider – I had always in a sense felt like this, and now my actions had made it more starkly felt than possibly ever before. Without the security of a home and a position in the world of work I had no basic identity. I was isolated from society, I could sink into destitution, alone, and disregarded for I no longer officially fitted any structure. This was a hapless place. To lose the most basic security of shelter, and to suddenly be consciously aware of this for real felt strange and unnatural. There was guilt and shame, this position felt like a sordid little secret I had to live with, and which was so awkwardly uncomfortable because I could not, then, grasp why I had done this to myself. The notion of being a homeless person, and the disgust at myself at what I had been pitifully powerless to prevent, created niggling resentments against myself. Accordingly, I felt ostracised from the world, like a criminal who deserved to be punished. I projected outwards my imagined place in the world based upon my own inner feelings of worthlessness. I was scared. Real dark negativity was not far away. It was fighting for prominence. If it took root now, I could have been finished. I had no margin for error in such a real and perilous position. One part of me felt like giving into it, because if I did this then I could fall down, give in on life, and be free from the uncertainty of all the struggle that lay ahead.

When the unimaginable becomes real the implications suddenly carry an edge. Ex priori logic may put in place one or two integral perspectives, but it can never prepare one for the icy cold plunge that comes in the unimaginable moment itself. No it cannot be prepared for beforehand, it’s too unpredictable because the uncertainty, the doubts, the worries, the anxiety, the shame, the helplessness, and all the frustrations, the agonies, and the self recriminating sense of pity, contained within it when it is real cannot possibly be measured out in the mind prior to its happening. The shock, the adjustment was being felt here and there in little fits and starts. I had entered a completely new realm, the most integral security in life had now suddenly vanished -life without shelter is another world. Until one is in, and exposed first hand to this place, then in the psychological and emotional sense one is never going to feel all the terrible horror and pain of this place. I began to sense how complacent I had been in my self ruinous games.
For an individual becoming homeless is like on the societal level civilisation breaking down. Civic life gone, no cushioning secure structure to live by, lawlessness – every person for themselves – doubts, fear, mistrust awful insecurity, hopes of, expectations for proper justice gone. On the street was one not written off in life? How often beforehand in my life had I seen people on the street and lumped them together under the stereotyped notions of degraded, unhinged, washed out drunkards? Did I not at least judge them with some disgust and contempt? And now I was such a person. I was this, and would the world, therefore, not write me off in this same way? Had I already begun to project all this onto myself as I too readily wrote myself off? Was this, anyway, within it all not what I had wanted all along – the excuse to, finally, irrevocably write myself off? To be vermin, to not be human; to have severed my connection with life meant there was nothing to hold onto. This in the arrogant, aloof, intellectual sense was worthlessness. If I could feel it fully then I had the excuse to not struggle on. Could the last vestiges of doubt now, not just, fall away? A part of me wanted this and was willing it on. The dark side within wanted self destruction. In obliterating away the most integral of all material necessities I had nothing in the world that could redeem me from here. In breaking off from life itself and going into the underworld of chaos, the light of life itself was surely repudiated. I had nothing in life. Nothing. There was, therefore, nothing to fight for. That determination I had always prided myself on now meant nothing. I would no longer have to live with the fear of losing it, which came from the fearful uncertainty that it might not, quite, be extinguished, because now in this situation it was surely all over. All these embittered expectations I wanted to forcefully impose on this situation came from my critical, dark destructive self within.

Without something constructive to put my energy, my fight, my ambition into in these very first formulative moments of this life then this destructive self may have won out. I needed a why, a goal, something constructive to put my energy and focus into. For my embatterted self esteem I needed a challenge I could rise to. Trying merely to survive would have been too humiliating for my stubborn pride. I had to find something to do as a way of proving to myself that I still had something within. I had to do this before it was too late. My first steps in this world could define everything. A new stopwatch had begun, and this was not a ticking clock but a detonated timer counting down in fast forward. Urgency would now have to focus my mind. Maybe this was what I needed, maybe it was what I wanted all along? Maybe it was my way and what I had to do? The opportunity to go within and confront my worst fears, to find out who I was by seeing what I had within. Maybe this could be my initiation rite for living life.

It seemed thus in the broad sense that everything in my life had been stripped away. The advantage of a completely new environment is that one has to act. In a completely new place and state, whatever move that is made next will be different. This provided an opportunity for a long lost sense of freshness to things. Here the next action I took mattered. It mattered much more than in the familiar, well run motion of life, since the subsequent course of where I would go would be determined by these first formulative actions I took in this unimaginable place. The intentions which underpin our actions are at the heart of where we come to find ourselves in life. For too long in my life prior to being homeless I had been ruled by my inner dark virulent critic, his voice, his intentions were abusing and harmful. Alas, I had arrived at where I now was. It was now more important than ever that my next action came from good intentions within. I had to want to help myself. I had to learn to do this action after action, the next action mattered most. I was not worthless I had to believe this, and my actions would be the best felt means of refuting this.

What to do? Back to basics. To know, to reconnect, with one’s inner bliss one needs to return to a place where one is completely content within. In this place one is connected to life; life is even enjoyable precisely because one is at one with the world. One is not one’s problems when one is pursuing one’s bliss. How to get back there and reconnect with this again? Life can quickly make us forget it, but when we were children we knew how to be happy. Children dream, and children are frequently bubbling over with excitement. The child’s innocence allows them to play freely. Each individual child has their own unique interests and their own particular dreams. In getting back to these we can reconnect with ourself and remind ourselves of who we are. What matters and what are our passions? Remembering this is to do those core activities again that as a child we used to love. If I wanted to help myself I had to do this now. Build my sense of self from the bliss upwards with an adults awareness as I learned who I was and what those qualities were that mattered to me. My own originality was mine to discover by going back to my origins. Here was my opportunity. Everything materially in my life had been blitzed away, all I had was myself. I could be my best friend, or I could be my worst enemy. It was now more than ever, one or the other, life was simple. The implications were clear. I had to engage myself in the right way. I had to find my bliss. I had to do this to get out of my head. If I could engage that inner child within, I would be engaged and in that there would be a semblance of oneness with the world. The love of life could shine forth of itself once again. Being overly within my head had led me to homelessness since my problems defined everything, I could not get past them and so they turned life crooked; I did not live life, and so they disconnected me from myself, and in that I was not in touch with all that I had to value within. There used never to be any point in doing anything because the negativity I felt in the now was always projecting itself into the future. Why do anything if tomorrow is certain to be despairing, since those bloody problems will still be there and will never go away?

Now that I was really here, things were different. Since everything had fallen away, the future was in one core sense refreshingly uncertain. This uncertainty was positive because it could not get at me in the same way in the here and the now. I didn’t know where I would be, how I would be, or what I would be doing, I had no environment or place to project the future into. It was frightful, but also this new life I was in left everything open, the future and it’s worries melted way because I had to get through what I was confronted with in this very moment. To stop all this uncertainty becoming overwhelming (which it so easily and very quickly could) and being my ruin I needed to do something that could give me a short term focus. One condensed challenge before me, that engaged my mind. Something to relish, so that this uncertain place I was in could be defined upon solid structures.

The key was not to be overwhelmed. I had to connect with myself. The best way to do this was by having a why upon which I could put my whole hearted focus into. Back to the child within. How to find the bliss? I always had loved sports. As a child his was when I was most happy. I loved the competitive challenge that was brimming within it. It was the means to prove myself, and that mattered to me an awful lot. It was combat, free expression and unrivalled discovery as I embraced going to my limits, of knowing those limits, and then of going beyond them and taking them further. Yes, yes , it mattered so much for when I was doing sports I was blissfully in my element.
A couple of weeks before an idea had loosely formed in my mind about what I would do. It became a silent resolution. And now it had happened and I was homeless it was certain that it was what I would do. I was going to go for a physical challenge. I would do a long, intense hike. I wanted to clear my mind, get out of the city and be in nature. I needed a structure in what I was doing so my intention was to follow the coastal path from Barcelona to the tip of France, before walking back in land to Barcelona. This would be around 500 kms long. A undertaking with a focused challenge. This was a way to connect with some of my most innate qualities, a chance to let my determination and my fight, which I valued shine forth…..I wanted to see what I had left within. Could I do justice to myself and my qualities? I had to….this was all I had.

I want to write about how exactly it was when I first became homeless.  I want to say a bit about what happened and what went through my mind.  And I want to describe my story of how I reacted and what I did in those very first days of this defining and life changing moment.

A moment of terribleness. Set in homelessness;
Trapped here: some moments are unbearable.
When everything is too much.
No way out from it, buried alive by darkness.
One shuts down. darkened. anger. voices. steaming, seething vitriol. Real hate.
Surviving it is all one can do…..
But so hard is the moment it may just be beyond all control.

If a bullet in war has your name on it you are dead.
If the terribleness, here, wants to claim you, you are done for.
And for what…..for nothing…..what a sick joke was…is…your life…..what a waste. Senseless world. Terrible is life.
Terribleness here is to give in and be swallowed by the environment you are in.
Homelessness is chaos.
Homelessness is not to be part of society.
Chaos: a person cut off from civilisation. The street as a home is nothing but unstructured, uncertain chaos…….
To succumb to this is not to be human: You are the chaos.
Ravaged, done in by darkness….. no choice in these most terrible, hellish, moments of homelessness.

Squalor; degregation; isolation; aloneness:
It, it, it echoes in your hollowed out head. It is formless but it silently and seethingly echoes.
Tiredness turns to exhaustion and into complete flat out, run down, shatteredness.
Freezing cold (not a state, but your very being); hungry; the hell of strangers unendingly prying eyes.
No true nightime darkness; no dead of night silence……no peace, no quiet, no escape:
A shivering rump: Your former light ~ you hopes~ turned to pulp;
You are slime, putty in the hands of life’s terrible forces.

Little necessities of life are cut off to the homeless person.
In society these are taken for granted, it can never know ~ you are alone in this chaos.
How terrible these worst moments are.
The lack, the absence, of fundamentals, when they are there and everwhere, in normal life, makes no sense.
Its terribleness cannot be measured…..beyond observation…..it is a strain that rips one apart…. the pressure of it all piles up within.
It is felt. A slow strangulation: no one else knows what is happening, you scarcely do.
It frays the nerves.
On edge….. to go on in such degregation before long will claim you…..
Danger, insanity is coming.
Hate at this place turns against anyone and everyone: You hate yourself, you hate the world.
Life, what is the point…..
Hate is comforting…..
So terrible are these worst moments that your hate is your rock and your refuge.

One’s fragile, emotive nerves are not made for this grinding pounding,
Quite rightly.
It is not on.
Because it is not life:
You the little child that you are cannot stand that this should be what becomes of you….
Life was never meant to be like this…
Others may ruin themselves, but not you…
And yet, you can now feel yourself as vermin.
Despicable person. Despicable life.
To give in on being human is now sensed as a release…..it is freedom….
You can let go.
Hate gives certainty.
All those little things….sleeplessness, cold etc etc, all of them humiliate you….too much too take.
Staying above this, by being aware, with consciousness is unendurably hard when in this situation….where everything, absolutely bloody everything is flat out terrible.
Why put in effort to fight this?
No point.
Go to sleep on life…
Let hate claim you
Forever hate the world and yourself
Bring on the conflict, bring on the hate: ……Here the terrible darkness, when you are shot through, tells you you have all the reason in the world.

To seethe and seethe and seethe, vileily with force is emotion….Finally the fucking world may know.

Give in on life
Go insane
Peace comes in letting go.
So terrible are these worst moments in this place, that this is you;

If one more bad thing happens, one more little setback…..
Then you are gone
Finally you obey the darkness
You have become it
It has done what was it’s right.
Such invalidation of life is a terrible thing.
I had these moments
How close I was I do not want to say: the most terrible moments here are too terrible for words.