Read the previous report in Andrea’s eviction series 

My update on the police is more positive today. 

I’m now on my second case number with them regarding my landlord not allowing access to the property to get my belongings. I had to report online to the police that my landlord has failed to get in touch by the deadline of Thursday the 19th of October.  

After completing my online report, I missed a call from the police and received a text message with my call reference number. I was asked to get in touch with 101 and to press 9 to speak to an operator.

I rang 101 and got through to the operator within 8 minutes. The operator goes through my notes and tells me that the police want to see me and to book an appointment with me. I explained to the officer I am moving around all over the place as I have nowhere to live, and I would need to come down to the station. The appointment is booked for Saturday 21st October at 9am, not at my local station, thank God. 

I am feeling positive that this will now be resolved even if it takes longer than expected. I don’t know what will come of this, but I just want my stuff back and to move on from this experience which has been dragging on longer than needed by a rogue landlord that thinks they’re above the law. 

Image by Mat Amp Instagram @matamp67

In this written piece, Dan, who has just started as a project worker at Groundswell, offers a response to a recent report done by our ace roving reporter Steve from Manchester.  Steve’s gift as a communicator is to give deeply textured snapshots of life through his eyes and in the original account he wrestles with the fresh challenges thrown up by full time work, the demands of responsibility and the anxiety of cutting the safety net [if you haven’t, then please take the time to listen to or read it before you read Dan’s response below]

In his response Dan let’s us know that…well, read on and find out… 

This morning I listened to the latest audio story from Steve, one of Groundswell’s ‘community reporters’ sharing their experiences to help create change.

Steve speaks eloquently and openly about the weight of responsibility he feels in his new job. Following thirty years of addiction, when his only duties were to show up for menial tasks at rehab or to take a shower, people have started to expect things from him – things he should be able to do, things he’s pretty sure he can do – but doubt and anxiety are creeping in.

Steve asks a very reasonable question: “I just wonder if other people in lived experience positions go through this or even just, just, just muggles, just normal people. I wonder if they go through it. You know, non-heroin-afflicted people.”

I thought that deserved an answer.

I’m now in my third week working as a Project Officer at Groundswell. Being Groundswell, a requirement of the job was personal lived experience of homelessness. In my interview, I talked about how I’ve been living over the last year in a cabin in a friend’s garden with no tenancy  agreement, unreliable hot water and no job. I talked a little (but only a little) about the period in my twenties when I was sofa-surfing, a time when a combination of a minimum wage salary and growing debts meant that I couldn’t find a home I could afford to rent. I also mentioned what I now understand to have been a struggle with mental health which I tried to resolve with an expensive weed habit.

But since then I’ve been building a career. I’ve got two degrees now. I’ve worked as a homelessness outreach worker, a support worker, an administrator. I even spent a summer in the Civil Service. Grown-up stuff.

There have been times in the past few weeks when I’ve felt like a fraud. I mean, I haven’t really experienced homelessness, have I? Not proper homelessness. Not begging-in-a-sleeping-bag-in-a-shop-doorway homelessness like my old outreach clients did. Surely my new colleagues are thinking that, right?

But I’ve also felt like a fraud because, despite the master’s degree and the CV, sometimes I still doubt my ability to do the job. I still see myself as the underdog, the minimum wage earner with ideas above his station. And now people are expecting me to do stuff. Like Steve, I put pressure on myself. I feel like I should be able to do the job better than others expect me to, better than a person with proper homelessness experience could. And yes, I know how that sounds.

And the funny thing is I know that I’m being irrational, that I have the full support of my line manager and my colleagues. I also know I’m not the only one going through this. It’s been estimated that at least 70% of us experience imposter syndrome – the feeling that everyone around us is overestimating our competence – at least once in life.

Steve talked about wanting to push the ‘f*ck it button,’ an escape route from responsibility. If everyone expects you to fail, to succumb to addiction, to spend your life on benefits, then you have little to lose but everything to prove. But if everyone expects you to be a successful professional then the idea of not measuring up is terrifying.

So maybe that’s the difference between ‘experienced professionals’ and people going through homelessness or addiction. Us and them. It’s just a question of what we fear the most: failure or responsibility.

, least of all to those who are new to the professional world.

One of the things that got me through the lonely monotony of lockdown unemployment was listening to the wise words of the addiction specialist Gabor Maté. He’s become one of my heroes. Gabor argues that addiction isn’t about character or genes but that it comes from trauma and emotional loss. In a talk I watched on YouTube shortly before Groundswell hired me, he spoke about how universal that is, about how he found himself hooked on the buzz of being good at public speaking and about the withdrawal symptoms he experienced after finishing a lecture tour.

This is something that happens to most of us when we do a job we care about. When we do something well, and especially when our colleagues recognise that we’ve done something well, it’s a great feeling. Like any addiction though, when we don’t get that feeling we start to crave it and, sooner or later, we start to hear the nagging voice of self-doubt. I’m feeling it right now. I mean, I’m being paid to write this. Is that fair? Is this a good use of charitable funds? Will it be good enough? What will people think?

And perhaps the most challenging thing that each one of us has to deal with in life is to work out how to quieten that nagging voice.

So Steve, in short, the answer is an emphatic yes. Speaking as both someone with lived experience of homelessness and as a muggle: that doubt, that anxiety and that weight of responsibility, we feel them too. You said yourself that fundamentally we’re all the same, a sentiment shared by Groundswell and by me. There is no us and them. That weight and self-doubt are what makes us human. But, I promise you, you can learn to live with them. You learn how to forgive yourself for not being perfect all the time.

A few days ago, I was coming from the train station and happened to bump into a neighbor who was carrying empty cardboard boxes from the local Sainsburys. I didn’t ask him what they were for and we simply talked about what was on for dinner that night.   

Yesterday, I bumped into him again.  

I had the gall to ask if those boxes he was carrying the other day meant that he was moving.  

“Yes” he said. “My landlord gave me a Section 21 notice. No fault eviction, just that he wanted his flat back.”. 

He was royally pissed off. My friend, not the landlord.  

I asked him if he had a place to live yet and he told me no. I answered with the standard “everything will be okay.”.  

He looked at me with stern eyes and said, “not until I have a set of keys in my hand.” 

This was not a unique conversation I had lately. Another friend was given a Section 21 notice too. 

This is not good. 

The increasing threat of homelessness and its impact on a vast range of people and communities, is an issue that in turn, affects all our lives to the core. 

24,060 households approached their council and were found to be threatened due to receiving a valid section 21 in 2022. This is 50% more  than the year before, being 16,030.(Shelter.org.uk). And today, I doubt very much that number has gone down.  

I genuinely thought in 2003, when I was made homeless, that the hostels would be much like what you see on TV. Dormitories with rows of beds, sharing a large space with people you have never met before and the urban legend of my neighbors nicking my shoes to leave me walking the streets of London in bare feet.  

I did not have to share a massive dorm with opportunists looking out to harm me. Instead, my room was safe and warm and I had the option of eating twice a day at the canteen. 

Anecdotal stories would tell me differently. For example, some of the large hostels in London have their own micro-communities, with sex workings, drug dealing and exploitation of those who may not stand their ground as well as others.  

In view of that, if I were in government, I think I would rethink the whole Section 21 thing and ensure that a home can truly be a home for life, rather than a convenience for profiteering landlords, which can leave tenants with nary a clue of where the next place will be for them to sleep.  

I would certainly remove the Benefit Cap so if people do find themselves at risk of being homeless, they have the security to live where they belong. In the same area as their family, close friends, and/or work.  

Hopefully, the increasing numbers of people at risk of homelessness will help lobby the government to offer a more sympathetic ear and make finding a safe place to call our own a much easier process. 

Hell, living in a homeless hostel for years is not acceptable.  

After all, isn’t having a stable and safe place to live one of the cornerstones of the Universal Declarations of Human Rights? 

Where do I come from?

1967, France, standard education.

Waiter, sailor, hospitality, support worker.

Married, divorced, pretty vagrant, addiction and recovery.

REALITY.

How did I get there?

Car, train, auto-pilot.

Flight, walk, hitch-hiking,

Running. Walking.

Any ideas. Breathing…

Inputs contributed to own journey?

Ancestry, heraldry, parents, grandparents, booze, recovery.

Marriage. Divorce. Goodness.

Madness, NVQ 3 in Care. Validity.

Most significant experience I have had?

SCT activities, creative writing,

Art, computer skill in progress.

Groundswell, Community Reporter, unreal,

Please do pinch me? Ouch. To be continued.

What is the best decision have I ever made?

Job in the UK. Marriage, divorce.

27 years in care. Ups and downs.

Understanding who am I?

Not a clue, getting there.

There is always light at the end of many tunnels.

There is always hope even if the road is blocked.

Community reporter

At Groundswell, gratitude to

You all. Never give up, never

Give in… Bravery.

Motivation?

2018 in recovery, help always at hand. Meeting the third kind,

Progression not perfection.

Integrity, drop by drop.

Gratitude. Respect.

A superpower?

Recovery, people, places. Things.

Friends, SCT. Groundswell.

Hope, experiences, strength.

Another life, another story.

My life is mine, not yours.

By Max Cavalera, Soulfly Tribe.

Gratitude to you all.

The good thing about this project has always been what I call ‘VIVE LA DIFFERENCE’. It gives us a platform to freely express ourselves. To report on issues from the heart, with emotion and passion and without the limitations imposed by journalists who work for commercial concerns funded by vested interests.

To change the narrative about the way that we report on homelessness we have to be able to speak about our experiences openly and with passion. We have to be able to hold organisations to account for their failings and point out when and where they are doing the right thing so that other organisations can see what to do and what not to do.

It has to be raw to be understood in a true light or it might as well be reported by a reporter from the Times. We’re not being paid to do this and so it isn’t the same as journalists reporting for commercial concerns. it comes from the streets and everything from the streets has got to be emotion led or otherwise you are not getting it out of your system, which is half the thing.

You have to remember that when you suffer from mental health problems bottling it all up and keeping it all in regurgitates it like poisonous bile into your system. But when you let it out it gives it that relief. It’s the pressure valve that lets it all out.

But it has to have the rawness and it has to have the emotion in order for you to let go of it and also to get the message across. Unless you have the rawness and the emotion you don’t get the message across in the same way. People don’t see the issue for what it is and they don’t see our humanity if we don’t produce raw reports fuelled by emotional passion.

If catharsis is one very important element of this type of reporting, informing and educating people is the other, be it case workers and services providers looking to improve how they communicate with and advocate for their clients or helping the public to see that we are humans just like them. I always used to say it is a tug at heart strings but it isn’t that at all. Pulling at heart strings is kind of like the film that has the violins playing to direct your feelings and anyone can do that.

What I’m talking about is a tug at the reality string. It has to be rational, yes, but it has to be delivered with passion. My point is that you have to feel it and mean it to let go of it, to colour it in for people, to make it more than just words telling you about something. This is our lives, these are our experiences and we have felt them intensely.

There is no way we can share them without revisiting that feeling and by sharing them we often make peace with the experience and the difficult feelings that came with it. A normal journalist has seen it happen second hand but hasn’t felt it. We have been there and feel it and so that feeling is what makes our reports different from anything else. It’s what gives them their authenticity and impact. Sometimes you get the best people in the world talk about us, people with lived experience of homelessness, in a way that I call the third person syndrome.

They talk about us like we are a different species. They don’t give us the trust that is essential to really seeing and truly understanding the issues that we face. They don’t give us respect as human beings just like them, who for whatever reason, ended up homeless at some point. They see us as different somehow, like there is something broken about us and something broken that is unfixable because it doesn’t matter how long you have been in recovery, they still talk about you like you are different somehow.

If people who work in the homeless sector talk about us like that then so can the public. This type of reporting, unfiltered and honest, is the way that people are going to see us for what we are – People who bleed red, like everyone else [except for Spock obviously]. We are just the same as other human beings in that none of us are the same.  At the end of the day I talk a lot about the good things that organisations do and I don’t think people do that enough. But sometimes I need to point out that we are being let down by the government and some of the charities that have been tasked with helping us in one form or another. If I couldn’t do that freely and without fear of being censored then I wouldn’t want to do it. This project is part of something that has the potential to be really special but it needs to be brave to do that. We need to be able to challenge the way things are done and let people know how we feel about it all if we are going to change things. 

This post mentions recovery from addiction

Relaxing with a group of friends around the pool at The Mar Hotel, host to Lanzarote AA convention. We were talking about this new COVID-19 Virus that came from a wet fish market in China. I remember saying with absolute certainty (like I had inside info) “oh it’ll never reach England, we’re too far away”.

That was how flippant our conversation was. Little did we know that two months later we’d be in lockdown. I wasn’t even sure what that meant, but what I did know was that AA and other fellowship meetings were closing down one by one and we didn’t know when they’d be opening again.

This was a daunting thought, and I remember how scared I felt. Would I be able to stay sober and keep mentally well without my meetings? How could I stay safe if I couldn’t socialise with my AA comrades? OMG I felt like I couldn’t breathe, but I’m not a quitter and I went into survival mode.

I had a mobile phone and I used WhatsApp so my friends and I created recovery groups which helped us keep connected and obviously we talked for hours on the phone. Also I found Facebook a great way to find out what was happening locally.

Then I heard through the grapevine that online meetings would be accessible through Zoom and Skype. Oh no, I’m a technophobe, I’m a dinosaur for God’s sake. Anyway some nice bloke sent me a guide for dummies and believe me it was aptly named. Well even with instructions Skype was very hit and miss.

I ended up in the strangest of groups and the strangest of places. It was like 2020 version of Quantum Leap. Zoom was a bit more reliable but it can’t replace the real thing. I was more interested in how many double chins and wrinkles I had on screen than any words of wisdom that might have been spoken and I was more aware of the state of my decor than anything else.

I was being shouted at that I was on mute and then got muted cos I was eating crisps and the noise was distracting, I couldn’t bloody win. The truth was I wasn’t feeling or enjoying online meetings, it was empty narrative, no emotion, robotic.

It was safe to say the novelty of Zoom had worn off, I mean we’re social animals we’re not meant to be isolated from each other. We need each other’s company, we need love and laughter in our lives. We need to see people smiling, hear laughter and engage in conversation and banter with each other.

September 2020 face-to-face meetings were opening with some restrictions but it was better than nothing. It was great to see familiar faces and some new ones but sad to hear about those who had relapsed and were struggling. Some had found other ways to recover and didn’t need AA. Nothing prepares you for the devastating news of those who hadn’t made it.

This pandemic has left its mark on so many, has ripped through families and starved them of having closure for loved ones. On the other hand I have seen unsung heroes, endless acts of kindness and communities coming together. I will never underestimate the power of a hug, the kiss from a loved one and the unity and love of AA. I am truly blessed ❤️ 

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GG reflects on reconnecting with herself and finding happiness again, and overcoming the dehumanisation of a system that only defines people by their problems and challenges, rather than seeing their achievements, good things and unique experiences.

I wanted to talk about a follow up to my piece on libraries, and I heard that it got some good responses from lots of different people. And people said lots of different parts of the story resonated with them. And these were people who don’t necessarily have homelessness experience. And I was thinking maybe it’s because I talked about my humanity, I talked about how I breastfed my children in libraries and changed nappies. I talked about how I’ve gone to use the internet. I talked about how I’ve got books for the art class I’m teaching. I talked about how I went in there to soothe my mental health. And all of those are different examples of all the different characters I play.

I’ve been a wife, I am a mother, I am a lover, I’m an artist, I’ve been homeless, I’ve got mental illness, and I’m first – and always – a woman.

And I think when we talk about homelessness it really is often the idea of people being dehumanised. When people are so caught up with different systems – they might be dealing with the police, they might be dealing with the housing office, they might be dealing with the hospital, they might be dealing with relative and family trouble, they might be dealing with drug problems, they might be dealing with mental health.

Most homeless people – and even people like myself with lived experience of homelessness – have got quite a lot of different things going on at the same time. And the systems that are set up to help you, the bureaucracies, are very dehumanising.

You become ‘x’ in a report and you’re not referred to by your name, and none of the good things you’ve ever done in your life, none of your achievements are mentioned.

I, myself, have experience of problems with my children, I’ve gone through court cases, and social services. And they wrote so, so many reports about me, page after page after page. I had one brilliant health visitor who really really fought my corner, and really was defending me. And she pointed out something in a meeting one day. She said, this woman has got a degree in Fine Art, but nowhere does it mention that.

And I sort of thought about it, and she said to me, that is a big part of me. I studied for 4 years back in the day when university was free – that’s how old I am, and that’s how I could study art – and the reports, the things written about me were not anything about me, as a person, as a woman, the artist. They were about me, the woman surrounded by violence and mental health problems.

That’s all I was, I was only my problems. I was nothing else.

So, what I’m going to ask all of you to do – whether you are someone with lived experience, whether you’re supporting people with homelessness right now, or whether you’re just doing your thing in life, whatever it is. Please – if you talk to people, get to know them – find out all the positive things about them, find out about their achievements, find out about their unique experiences, find out about what is their favourite food, and what is their favourite film. What are the things they love? What are the things that bring them joy?

Because for me, part of the journey of coming back to me, was getting back into the joy in my life. Allowing myself happiness and good things, and appreciating beauty in life and connecting with who I was. Because there are very few people in the world who’s life has always been problems, who’s life has always been heartache.

Try to connect back to that person. That woman. That child. That friend. That lover. That artist.

And let them come alive, and the fire burn again.