Homelessness Can Also Mean Timelessness
AMANDA EVANS of Homeless Pembrokeshire spoke up recently about her own experience of homelessness while working to help others. Here she says more about the experience of having nowhere to live for two years. Amanda is a remarkable woman – she highlights how homelessness can destroy people’s lives.
Image courtesy of ractapopulous at Pixabay
When I became homeless in 2020 my life as I knew it stopped. When I managed to find a flat to rent in 2022-23 I knew it was just going to be a temporary base and I managed the best I could. At times my life felt as if it was in limbo, and other times it felt as if I was in a war and I just had to keep going until the battle came to an end.
This year I have managed to find my forever home. What is strange – and which others may have experienced – is that during the two years that I was homeless things that I took for granted disappeared from my life. Television programmes I was watching, things I ate, things I did, things I bought… in fact almost every aspect of what might be considered an ordinary life seemed to disappear.
Of course, these things did not disappear – they were still there for everyone else. But when you become homeless, you enter a bubble where access to these things become closed off and you focus on just getting by. During that time it did not seem strange, it just was, but when I found a home again and was not homeless, these things gradually became available to me again and that is where the strange starts.
Programmes I was watching on the TV I expected them to be where I left off… but they had either finished or moved on by two or three seasons. Prices of things I did and bought had hugely increased.
That bubble you exist in when you are homeless seems to freeze time and you become excluded from the normal course of events. I suppose this is like being incarcerated in some institution or in a coma even… and when you wake up everything has moved on and there is a scramble to catch up.
It is disorientating and creates a deep anxiety sometimes. My experience of homelessness lasted two years, but a lot of the clients we help have been homeless for decades.
