It’s so hard to feel like your suffering makes no sense. To find yourself at the bottom of a pit, and have no idea how the hell you got there. It’s almost like waking up from a good dream to live in a nightmare reality.
There’s a kind of urgent desperation that comes in that place, of feeling frantic - like maybe activity or energy or something will kind of snap you out of it. But the hard part is that if you don’t really know how you got there, more energy just feels like spinning your wheels. And when you spin them fast enough, you’re just burning out. And the more you burn out, the more hopeless you feel because there’s so much energy, but no movement. It’s almost like you’re revving on sand, and the more you spin, the more you sink. Soon enough you’re going to bottom out, and then you’re really screwed.
Also your situation is really complicated. Complicated in the sense that there’s not a lot of people that can relate, and the people that can relate, usually can’t help. You don’t feel like you belong in the homeless community because five years ago you were in aerospace - but you find yourself alienated from the community you belong in. It feels like you’re too far away from them to throw a rope down, and no one you’re around can give you a lift up.
Even in writing this, I feel the kind of futility that comes with describing the issue. It’s like - cool. We’ve described the gnawing feelings that are haunting your bones. Now what?
It seems like one of the most frustrating parts of what you’re going through is not really having a targeted battle to fight. Not REALLY knowing what the leverage point is to improve your situation. If you know what the problem was, you are smart enough to work the problem.
There’s more to your story that I’m missing in this post - you were once happily employed, and then something happened either just before covid or because of covid, and now you’re experiencing this chaotic downward spiral. What did happen? What really is the issue?
For instance, if the core of the issue is work - what is it about work that’s the issue? Clearly you’ve been able to obtain and perform work before. Is it that you can’t get a job in the same line of work? Is it that now you’ve been homeless for so long that you can’t get your feet under you to get a job? Is it that you’ve lost interest or lost a sense of who you are and can’t really punch through to find what you WANT to do, so you’re paralyzed in deciding where to go from here?
But not having work could just be the surface level - if you hit some kind of depression or mental break, can you trace that back to what led up to it? If that is the core of the issue, then I’d encourage you to give yourself some grace and patience. When you mention talking your way out of the institution, it seems like that would be shooting yourself in the foot if mental improvement was the pathway out of this. Which is okay if that’s what it was - that’s honestly part of the process of improvement. We can resist, we can fight back, we can live in denial, we can bump up against our own ego. Whatever the case, if the mental front is the path forward, NAMING it as the path forward would be helpful, because then you can start to use your cunning and mental capacity to work the problem. IE - if I can heal up and get well, I can start to work my way out.
Anyways, identifying the problem will allow for focusing on and investing in the solution. – and a bonus here is that identifying the problem would allow a clearer path for others to actually participate in helping you. Because that feeling of complete isolation and alienation from community and support is brutal.
All that to say, thankful for your courage and vulnerability here. It’s an honor to get a window into your life. I appreciate you.