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     Ronnie came to us from a drug treatment program. He was in his mid-thirties. He had never been homeless before. He had been a somewhat functioning alcoholic and chronic pot smoker over half his life, occasionally indulging in other drugs. Then his life completely unraveled. He had supported himself with a series of low-demand jobs, never staying in one for more then a couple of years. It is one thing to live that way when you’re twenty…and quite another when you’re thirty-six.

     In interviewing him, I asked him how he became homeless and this is how his story unfolded.

     He became homeless when he was evicted. He was evicted because he stopped paying his rent. He stopped paying his rent when he got fired. He got fired because he was always late. He was always late because he couldn’t get up in the morning. He couldn’t get up in the morning because he was closing the bars every night. He had nowhere else to go except treatment. His mother wouldn’t take him in…and none of his close friends had places of their own, a rather telling sign for a man in his thirties.

     “So”, I asked, “you became homeless because of your drinking?”

     “No, I became homeless because I was evicted.”

     It wasn’t the best first interview. He wasn’t seeing the connections between all these things. Still, he said he wanted to have his own place and be independent. More importantly, he said he wanted to stay sober. Those are two goals we always want to hear from candidates for our transitional program. He hadn’t processed everything that had happened to him, but that isn’t unusual for someone with a few weeks of sobriety whose head has been in a cloud for  twenty years. We gave him a chance.

     Ronnie went to work immediately. In no time he was working sixty hours a week. This became a problem because, within a couple of weeks, he let his aftercare program go. It is easy to stay clean in a residential program. The challenge comes when you re-enter society at large. I doubt he was thinking of backsliding, but that is just how it begins.

     We gave him an ultimatum. He could not stay in the program and not have an aftercare plan. He grumbled and moaned but complied. He was going to at least three twelve-step meetings a week and he found a sponsor.

     One of the other things we told him was to avoid his old friends and hang outs. It is not about judging them so much as recognizing a weakness in himself. This is probably the single hardest part of recovery. Building a new social world for yourself isn’t easy, especially when you’re in such a fragile place. You just can’t stay clean hanging out with all the folks, and in all the places, you’ve been getting high in all your life. Between his work and meeting schedule, this wasn’t the problem it might have been for someone else. We weren’t that close to his old haunts.

     After about six months in our program, six months of sobriety, he went to his mother’s. He got there early in the day and spent time with her. When she got busy preparing dinner, he went out into the old neighborhood. He ended up over at an old friend’s or rather an old friend’s mother’s house. Some of the old gang were there in the basement smoking pot and looking out for the “old lady.” Ronnie was embarrassed to be there.

     After six months of sober homelessness, he had sober friends. Friends who were striving for goals and achievements and supporting him in his goals and applauding his achievements. He had more money in the bank than he had ever had before. He felt dirty hiding in a basement with grown men doing exactly what they had been doing since they were teenagers.

     When he was back at the shelter and we talked about what had happened, he said he could no more go back to that than go back to high school. Six months earlier, it was normal to him. It was all he had known since before entering adulthood. He wouldn’t have hesitated to pick up the pipe and get high. The space and time we provided him allowed him to see another possibility. That possibility allowed him to hope for a different and better life, something he didn’t even know he was lacking. He had built a new life for himself. And the only thing it had in common with his old life was the same ‘only thing’ that made a difference, himself. A year later he owned his own construction/demolition company with several trucks and employees and was working toward owning his own home.

     In all these things, I always point out that the work, the accomplishment, is theirs. We provide an opportunity. It is always up to them to take it or not. Ronnie took it. He found a vision of another possibility. Finding a way to create hope is our challenge. For so many of those who are chronically homeless, their whole life has been chaos and disorder. Our challenge is to show them something that may never have entered their field of vision. Or something that left their field of vision so long ago, it is like seeking Helen Keller’s “Wa wa” breakthrough.

     Ronnie was never “chronically homeless.” He could have moved either way. He took the right turn. He had much to reckon with, but compared to someone who grew up between the Department of Corrections and the Department of Mental Health (not as uncommon as you might think), he had it easy. He knew what a “normal” life could be.

     It has been said, you can’t tell somebody something they don’t already know. I think this means you have to have the mental construct that allows something to be comprehensible. Were I to start writing in a foreign language, it would be gibberish to you unless you knew the words, syntax and grammar of that language. Most of us share some common notions of how we are to live together and relate to one another. We have ‘faith’ ‘trust’ and ‘values.’ Most of our experiences reinforce these. They are common but not universal. There are variants in all our experiences, for better and worse. For some, it has been much more for the worse. Our goal is to reach those people and give them a vision of hope for a better life.