I am writing a daily blog on my homelessness to try and process the emotions I feel around this. It’s also about learning the lessons that will inevitably come from this experience, and also highlight some of the ways it impacts you as a person.
I never expected in my wildest dreams that I would become homeless at the age of 54. It was just something that never really featured on my radar I guess because up until two years ago, I had a good career that paid pretty well. And yet, it has happened. And I am almost certain that I am not alone in finding myself, unexpectedly, homeless at this age. It’s eye-opening, it’s painful, and it’s quite something to wrap your head around.
I haven’t slept well for a long time. In the build-up to losing the house and now that I am, to all intents and purposes, sofa surfing along with my husband. I am also dealing with the fallout of one of my mother’s periodic blowouts at me which I knew would come but which I had hoped she might park for a little while. But with that, we are where we are. I have to tread on eggshells until I can get my son out of there but after that, all bets are off.
Something the situation has given my husband and I, though, is the opportunity to have a talk the likes of which we have long needed but not had for years. Because we are a close unit of three, it can be hard to have a deep and meaningful conversation without our son around, and when he hasn’t been frankly my husband has had too much to drink to have any kind of conversation. But last night, we talked as we haven’t for a long time.
We acknowledged that our marriage has been effectively on life support for the past couple of years. That he has found sanctuary in the bottom of a bottle which I have resented, and that I have clammed up and not let him in. I have to acknowledge that is something I tend to do when I feel overwhelmed, I disappear into myself. This hasn’t been helped by the process of deep introspection I have been going through in trying to address my own limitations and limiting beliefs. In trying to figure out what I want from life and how I can go about getting it. In becoming more spiritual while my husband hasn’t. All the while our financial life has been circling the drain.
He told me last night that he is in awe of the fact that, despite everything that has been going on, I have written three books and self-published two of them with the third imminent. That I finally realised a dream I had told him about when we first met. And that he was immensely proud of me. It does mean a lot to me.
The fact that we could have that conversation at all, that we could be that brutally honest with each other about how we are feeling, the state of our marriage, and do it in a way that was vulnerable, loving and in no way escalated into a screaming match even when we told each other some truths is a huge win for me. In all honesty, our marriage hasn’t been on the rocks just the last couple of years. Like all marriages, it entered a period of inertia that the busyness of life covered over. As I write this, I can’t help but wonder if all of this hadn’t happened, if we hadn’t been forced to confront a few things, would we have continued in that fashion and slowly drifted apart until the inevitable happened? That because this all has happened, we have all come to appreciate each other a bit more.
That’s another thing that’s happened. Because our son is currently living with my parents, we are not the usual family unit. Which means the time spent with Henry has to be of real quality, something we haven’t done for an extraordinarily long time, something we discussed last night as well as yesterday with our son. We were really like ships passing, doing things separately rather than as a family. Even mundane, boring things like the weekly shop used to be done as the three of us. I don’t know when that stopped, but it did and it became something I did usually alone, occasionally with Henry while my husband did something else. We didn’t often laugh together and evenings were spent in front of the TV or on devices. Weekends spent doing our own thing even if we were under the same roof.
Yesterday, we all went out together for a little while and today we will do the same. We have started playing cards together, something we have never done before and we are having a real giggle doing it. We are all competitive but in a fun way, and we’ve laughed as we haven’t in ages. I know Henry would much prefer to be with us all the time, but I think he’s actually enjoying the time we are together more than he would have done if we’d still been living in the house. If nothing else comes out of this experience, realising how we have taken each other and our time together for granted and putting that right has to be a real bonus.
I have also started to consider my own mindset. I am a believer that we create our reality so I have to take responsibility for creating this reality I am now faced with. Not alone, but I have to deal with my element of it. My friend reminded me yesterday of what a master manifester I am and that I should put that to positive use from now on. It is so much easier to slip into the negative because our negative-biased minds find that much easier to align with. But, if I want to turn this around, I have to focus on what I want. I have to put myself in the mindset, in the vision of what I do want. And to do that I have to work out, once and for all, what it is that looks like. Because, really, I still don’t know to the degree I can know the negative.
So, that is now my focus – making that positive come to life as effortlessly as I have engineered the negative.
And I will soar.
Louisa Simpson 