I am writing this daily blog about being homeless to try and process my emotions around it. I am also writing this to take out the lessons from the experience so that I can grow as a person. And, if it helps someone else, then I would be tremendously happy.
The longer this situation continues, the more I feel as though this experience has been about me relinquishing control. About me trusting the flow of life and learning that the universe really does have my back if I release the control. If I let go of the need to know the minutiae of how something is going to happen which is how I have been reacting to my life the past few years. It is teaching me that I should stop resisting the flow and enable things to come to me.
I am not going to lie, this experience is difficult. My husband and I are staying somewhere courtesy of a very kind friend, but a friend who has a lot of mental health issues and is approaching a difficult anniversary. I think having us staying with him is actually helping him in a way, but it isn’t necessarily helping my husband who is more sensitive to other people’s emotions than he realises. My husband is now desperate for certainty, for security, and to be in his own space again and I completely get that. It’s safe to say that he has had enough and there isn’t currently an end in sight to our situation.
We could, potentially, enter into an emergency housing process with the Local Authority and be placed somewhere temporarily. We spoke to a couple of people the other day who have been placed on this – and it sounds, frankly, horrific. Admittedly they don’t have children or a pet which would be taken into consideration for us, but I know that the chances are we would at best be in a hotel for a period of time, at worst a B&B which would only impact my husband’s mental health even more. The next stage would be, in all likelihood, a tiny flat in a horrid area. Now, I know we should be grateful for that and of course I would be. But. I am feeling massive reluctance to do this.
I do feel conflicted about this because I know how much my husband wants some certainty – but I know deep down this route isn’t going to provide it. I think he feels we will automatically be placed in a house or somewhere, I know that won’t happen for a long time. That’s just the state the housing system in the UK is in at the moment. I just know that I don’t want to get into that doom loop of living somewhere awful, constantly hoping for something to happen. For something to break. It feels the wrong answer to me.
This may seem ridiculous given I am not enjoying not having my own roof over my head and feeling that where I am sleeping is temporary. But I have the strongest feeling that I just need to get into the flow of life. To stop trying to force something to happen but to just allow it to happen. To focus on my goals, what it is I want from life and to allow it to come to me.
Maybe that sounds hopelessly naive, but I spent a lot of time trying to make things happen, to realise a positive outcome…and nothing happened. I spent a lot of time trying to get the minutiae into place for a positive outcome, to have a measure of control, and at best we remained stuck. I tried to line things up so that something would happen in an expected way rather than surrender to the process and allow things to happen. I shut off all the myriad different ways things could have happened which meant I was also blind to the possibilities and opportunities that were all around me. Just because I didn’t see them, doesn’t mean they weren’t there.
Perhaps it is incredibly selfish of me to take this route, because I am not feeling as bad as my husband is. But I feel that, probably for the first time in my life, I need to follow what feels right rather than what I should do for the sake of other people.
I did have a wobble this morning because, again, I was concerned about how I was going to afford lunch for my son. And, yes, a wobble about the roof over my head. But I have a new mantra that I recite when this happens – ‘the universe will provide’. And so far today, it has. Lunch was free again, as was breakfast. I have not spent any money at all for the past two days. And I still have a place to lay my head tonight. I am accepting the help as it comes and feeling truly grateful for it in the full and certain knowledge that a longer term solution will soon present itself.
I have felt no yearning for our old house and the life we had there. I don’t miss it one bit, and I spent so long clinging onto it that it’s quite a shock. I thought I would miss it terribly, but there is nothing in me that wants to return to that house. If anything, I am pleased to be away from it, something I have just now realised.
I know in my heart that everything will be well. That we will bounce back in ways we could never have imagined before. I don’t know what that looks like, I have to trust implicitly every day that things will work out. I have to follow my gut on what feels like the right action and what doesn’t. I have to do a lot less doing and a lot more being.
Because that is the way in which I will soar.
Louisa Simpson 