I am writing a daily blog about me and my family being homeless as a way of processing my emotions on this and taking the learnings from it. If I help someone along the way, that will make me very happy.
I am operating on little sleep again today. I woke up at midnight having gone to sleep around 10.30pm…and stayed awake until 4am. I read a lot in those four hours but as soon as I tried to close my eyes to go to sleep, something about my life at the moment would pop into my head and wake me up. Issues like where did I put birth certificates, did I pick them up out of the house at all? Did I pack away the photo albums particularly the one with the only photos of my brother in it? Those thoughts were only drowned out by reading until I was so exhausted, I fell asleep. Then my son came into my bedroom and woke me up at 7.45am. I could have cried as I couldn’t get back to sleep again! So, I feel very spaced out today.
I’ve realised that it is things like birth certificates, marriage certificate, photographs that mean a lot. Before being homeless, they were just there and I paid them no real attention unless I had to. The albums have photos in them of my natural father and while I’m not sure it matters to me that I don’t have them anymore, I know my son is sometimes interested in the man he shares some DNA with. Then there are all the birthday and Christmas cards I carefully kept that I no longer have because, frankly, they are extraneous when you have nowhere to keep them. Space for storage costs money, and you have to be quite ruthless about the things you put into boxes. It’s amazing how much stuff you accumulate in life, let alone the decade we lived in that house for.
A decade is actually the longest I have ever lived in a house continuously for. When I lived with my mother, we moved fairly regularly because she is a frustrated interior designer and gets bored easily once she has shaped a house into what she wants it to look like. When I was a child, by the time I was sixteen we had lived in four different places. By the time I was 21, we had lived in three more. The house my mother and step-father had at that time was a place they lived in the longest, around 15 or 16 years, but I lived there on and off choosing to live with my grandmother for extended periods of time, going to university, and getting my own place during that period of time. The longest I lived there continuously was around two years, I think.
I don’t know why that feels important to me, but it does. Those 10 years went by in the blink of an eye, and yet so much happened in my life there. I fell in love with the house when I went to view it, hence moving into it, but I remember when I was unpacking after moving in feeling really, really cold. And I never truly warmed up again. I can’t explain it, I just rarely ever felt warm in the house. We had an oil based heating system which was hideously expensive and I realised the other day that from the first time we had to purchase heating oil, I felt poor. I paid a monthly amount, which in itself wasn’t cheap but was the top amount payable, and when it came to purchasing oil, it was nowhere near enough money. So, for the first time in my life, heating was rationed. And I always felt cold. Even in the summer, the house was never warm.
I honestly don’t know why this is all coming out, it wasn’t what I intended to write at all. But for some reason, I feel the need to get this all out. Maybe it’s about releasing some of the attachment I still feel for a house I grew to hate living in long before we left it. I remember sitting on my bed looking out the window over the garden on more than one occasion thinking that I wanted to leave, to move somewhere else. I felt trapped there, as though I wasn’t allowed to leave. We became prisoners in the house. And I can’t bring myself to even drive past it again.
I am glad to be out of there. I know what I want for my future now, where I want to be and how I want it to look. I don’t know what this is all saying, really, I just feel the need to say it. Perhaps it’s that we can have a completely fresh start. That we can leave all the things of our previous life behind and start again. Stop dragging our past around with us with the stuff we accumulate as I have said before. It takes strength and bravery, though, to be able to do that. Sometimes, as with me, we are pushed into such actions. Some people are brave enough to just do it. And when you do, the world really can become your oyster because it’s all there, laid out in front of you.
Who said we need a fixed abode? It is the right thing for some people but not for everyone, yet we are told if we don’t have one we have in some way become failures. People look down on you I feel, as though you are less than because you have decided that when everything has been stripped away, you don’t want to bring it all back again. That you have the chance to view things differently and approach things differently. Why doesn’t society allow that? This was actually the point of the blog I was going to write…I’ll do it tomorrow perhaps. I just know that I am seeing life through a very different lens which is uncomfortable for a lot of people I am finding. But liberating for me.
Because I am soaring. I am thriving. I am successful. I am grateful.
Louisa Simpson 