Home truths about homelessness

Photo by Kerrie Portman

Kerrie Portman describes the traumatic impact of denying support to those needing it most

It was a year ago that I packed up all my things in bin bags and became homeless once again. It was the fourth time in my 25 years that I’d become homeless, and the process of arriving at an unknown property in an area I’d never heard of before was familiar enough from my time in Care.

Temporary Accommodation was largely an extension of the same, an occurrence I felt doomed to endlessly repeat. I slept on the floor until I got a mattress, until I got a bedframe. I turned 26 whilst sleeping on the floor. I didn’t unpack, as I knew I could get a call from the council any minute telling me I was moving to another unfamiliar location. The room was a starkly empty beige box, which, too, mirrored my time in Care.

I tried to tell the people around me I was homeless, but I don’t think I ever found the right words, because they didn’t seem to understand how homelessness was like an onerous fog, seeping into every crack and crevice of my life and growing mould in its wake. They just expected me to be able to do everything a housed person could do.

I felt too pathetic to explain how much it meant when people just had basic conversations with me

I learnt from them that I must be overreacting to my homelessness, and I wasn’t trying hard enough. So, I tried to stay at university; “a Cambridge degree will make up for all the disadvantages,” they’d tell me, whilst also telling me: “you can’t really call yourself homeless” because I was in Temporary Accommodation.

But when I got so stressed that I had severe chest pains I’ve never fully recovered from, and experienced my first bout of temporary paralysis, I got in trouble for not being engaged enough; not trying hard enough. I felt too pathetic to explain how much it meant when people just had basic conversations with me, because most people do not treat homeless people as people. But I desperately wished they understood they could easily make a difference. I wish they understood that the loneliness was silently and relentlessly strangling me right in front of them.

I stayed in a state of uncertain readiness for five months, during which I became increasingly, untenably exhausted and sick. I tried asking for help from the council and local statutory services, but the more desperately I begged for help, the more hostile they got in their rejection.

Once, in the depths of winter, I attended A&E with suicidal thoughts, and a nurse yelled at me and threatened me. I sat outside the hospital for hours in minus four degrees searching for another option before I attempted to end my life. It didn’t work. I begrudgingly survived. And all the local services continued ignoring me.

Sometimes I feel angry; so, so angry, at the services and people who knew I was homeless and did nothing to help

It has been seven months since I stopped being homeless. I covered the concrete flooring that accompanies social housing in a pink sparkly carpet, and painted my walls pinks, purples, yellows and blues so I wouldn’t need to be trapped in beige boxes anymore.

I started volunteering in my local area five days after I stopped being homeless because I didn’t want to be so alone anymore, and I wanted to help people in similar situations.

Sometimes I still feel lonely. I still don’t think I ever found the right words to explain what I went through, what others are still going through, what I could go through again, what they could go through.

Sometimes I feel angry; so, so angry, at the services and people who knew I was homeless and did nothing to help. That is not something I can un-experience. Whilst volunteering at a homeless shelter, I have learnt there are local Housing First workers, mental health workers dedicated to supporting homeless people, a GP surgery that specialises in homeless patients, and so many other services that, clearly, I desperately needed, but no one referred me to. It did not have to be as bad as it was.

The smallest acts of kindness can make all the difference to people experiencing homelessness

My life is mostly unrecognisable from what it was a year ago, with my things in bin bags whilst I slept on the floor, scared and alone. Some of these changes are good, others not so good. I don’t always remember the desperate extent of the hell I lived in. Its presence is largely contained to unannounced and uninvited flashbacks.

I am grateful to have a home now, one that can be filled with colour and personality. I am grateful to have furniture and sleep on a bed. I am grateful to the friend I grew closer to and the new friends I have made. I am grateful to have been able to start building a community in my new area. I would like to find the right words to explain to people that the smallest acts of kindness can make all the difference to people experiencing homelessness and that homelessness isn’t too scary to talk about.

In fact, it’s scarier and deadlier when left to the silence. I would like to find the right words to explain to politicians and those working in these services the impact of the ways they failed me, so my pain can have a purpose. If I do find the right words, I hope I’ll find the people who want to listen and understand them.