Beside One's Self: Homelessness Felt and Lived

Preface

ix Preface Though there are very great impediments to expressing another’s sentient distress, so are there also very great reasons why one might want to do so. —Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain The first day of our holiday brought rain. As I stood on the balcony of the rented apartment watching the drizzle thicken along the coast I was alight with rage. I had completed the project fieldwork only to be faced with this. Three weeks of hot sun as I melted in boarding houses, trudged from drop-in to refuge, took endless wrong turns in the rental car. And now rain. I turned narrowing eyes on my partner, calmly propped up in bed reading. After being separated for three weeks, in one morning I was already sick of him. Couldn’t he see that now everything was ruined? What about the beach walks and the ocean? I’d been thinking about the ocean, about being rumbled by waves and starched by sun. I’d been thinking about salty kisses too. I was going to find the best shells yet and wait for turtles at the water’s edge. I was going to run circles on the beach, muck around in the shallows looking at tiny fish through my swimming goggles. I was going to point out the seabirds as they flew over. And now rain. I stood at the sink for a while listening to the kettle boil before climbing back into bed without making tea. I felt like a wind sock in a sudden breezeless moment, empty, tired, directionless. I felt like a draining bath, an unstoppable flow of life-force curling rapidly away. x | Preface The first day of our holiday I sobbed until lunchtime and wept until dinner. It was as though the front bringing up the coastal showers settled in at my body-edges too. The tears came in gusts, soaking heavily, patches of weak sun clouding quickly again. It was interesting really, the way I became a river widening in bad weather, bending the grasses in, even turning small stones as my heart rushed the flow. A fieldwork jumble threatened the banks. The moment James suddenly bawled in fright at his own story, the thwack of mucus in the back of his throat, his shaking hand in mine on the laminated tabletop. Sam at seventeen, weighing up for me the advantages of a prison over psychiatric cell, his dead sisters’ names tattooed prettily on slim biceps. Isabel pointing out the trouble of visits home, with her tight-lipped father and the photos of her grinning predator-brother still hanging in the hallway. And Micah’s fingers, cut down to the first knuckle courtesy of drug-plugged arteries, resting on a perfect new-moon belly. On and on they rushed. A flash flood of voices, faces, smells, a swelling torrent of lost childhoods and children, lost bodies and freedoms, lost minds and found sufferings. I should have foreseen this, the whole bodily wreckage of fieldwork, the dramatic sense of aging, the holding on through unsafe places, the escape plans impossibly perfected at night in sleepless hotel rooms. That gray day on the coast had been brewing out to sea for some time. My fieldwork experiences accumulated emotional force. The interviews developed clarity with memorial duration; they made more sense the longer they circulated through my body, titrating through fascia and marrow. And I think I mourned then for how I couldn’t go back, for how I couldn’t not know now, for the permanency of grief instilled in me through this work. Something had been done to me for which I did not remember giving permission. That sorrowful river was not my own, however. It scoured through me ever fed by a groundwater of grief rising steadily from the biographies of homeless people with mental disorders participating in the research. This was a dark, chill water seeping up through the bedrock of abusive childhoods, through bodies battered into adulthood, through major illness and multiple addictions, through self-harm and suicidal behavior, through poverty and stigma, betrayal and loneliness. It seemed those taking part Preface | xi in my research were drowning, their faces slipping under the tanninstreaked surface even as we spoke. But there were no drownings; instead it was relentless survival that had marked the life paths of those I met. What shocked me most was the familiarity of this...