Reclaiming my stories

Six years ago, in an effort to stay alive, I walked away from a decade and a half of work on the streets among the unhoused population.

It was good work, and I was good at it, if not good at being as loving to myself as I was to the people I encountered. It was, to use a buzzword, unsustainable.

I have a lot of trauma from that time. It took years to regulate my blood pressure, to sleep all night, to not have panic attacks every winter. My relationship to money will probably never be right.

Because my storytelling during that time was our primary fundraising technique, I have resisted writing about that time since I left. It began to feel exploitative of me – as if putting my wounds on display was the only way I was worthy of earning a living wage.

I imagined myself a barker, shouting, “Come see the street pastor have a mental health crisis! In exchange for donating 1 dollar a day, you too can enable his slow nervous breakdown!”

It was a wild time. I married a lot of people who spent their honeymoon at the homeless shelter. I buried a lot of people. I spent far more time in a soup kitchen and at AA meetings then I did in church. Because of my work, some folks who probably would have died did not die. Some laws got changed, and some folks in other states began to do similar work, and some folks I trusted tried to take me out, and along the way I almost died. It was a wild time.

After some discussions with my therapist, I have decided that over the next few months I will write some stories from that time – not to raise awareness of the plight of the unhoused, and not to get you to donate money to my cause and not to show you how spiritual I am – but to take ownership of my stories back.

I have essays I write each week for people who give me money – but none of those essays will come from this series. These are not stories I’m trading for money. These are the stories that shaped me, taught me, saved me, and almost killed me. These stories are mine.