Homeless Sweet Home
My last published piece here was an article written in 2019 about my experience of being hidden homeless in Ireland during one of the country’s worst housing crises in decades. At that time, my husband and I had been without a home for eighteen months and we were only housed at the start of this month, a blessing that we fought persistently for and which came at a time when there was not a shred of hope. It is everything we could ever have hoped for and yet I just can’t feel settled, relax, or feel like it’s ours. Being homeless does something to your brain, three and a half years of having no stable accommodation, the non stop scramble of trying to find somewhere to stay, tears, synapses constantly firing with no reprieve, cortisol pumping through your body - these things don’t just leave your system when you jot your signature on the dotted line. We feel so unbelievably lucky and are truly grateful for what we have, and yet there is an overwhelming fear that the rug will be pulled from under our feet, a residual effect of being on unstable ground for so long. We got something that amidst an ongoing and worsening housing crisis is like gold dust, a key to our own door, a bedroom to sleep in instead of a couch, a space that we can make our own and decorate as we like, and yet it does not feel real because our brains have been hardwired to not having a place to call home. If you’ve never experienced homelessness, the non stop scramble or trying to find a place to stay or living out of a suitcase, it’s extremely difficult to explain. I fear when I say these things that people might think we don’t appreciate what we have when people are living in tents and sleeping in doorways which is absolutely not the case. I feel a deep sadness and strange guilt when I pass people sleeping on the street that we have somewhere and our battle is over. Friends and family lovingly tell us we deserve this and yet I can’t bring myself to start unpacking, living in a space cluttered with boxes, because I fear that if we start to settle in, I’ll get a call to say we’re out. We have not rested or felt comfortable in three years and as a result my brain is in a learned state of constant readiness to pack up and go because that was my daily existence for years.