Today, after two and a half years of not using it, I plugged in my alarm clock. In those two years, it had gotten carted around to three or so different houses, but it was never quite the right set-up. I’m hard of hearing, and my alarm clock shakes not just my pillow but my whole bed; it doesn’t work so well if you’re sleeping on a mattress on the floor, you see, and it’s loud and disruptive enough that I didn’t want to test the hospitality of the man I was staying with before finally getting a real apartment again.
But it didn’t really need to take me two and a half years. I moved into this place January of last year. It’s a nice enough apartment; a bit small for me and my girlfriend and my extensive library of books. I just never had enough time to even think of it with the long list of tasks that seemed to face me every day — although that’s not really it. When I try to describe the last two and half, three, four years to people I often end up describing it as housing insecurity; if I’m focusing on 2022, I’ll skip the niceties and just say that I was homeless for a while. The moment I say that, some people start picturing me in shelters or on park benches, struggling with drugs or panhandling. (Interestingly, none of these are that far off the mark! They just look different.) But I correct them, if it comes up. I always had somewhere to go, even if I had to ask around. I always had somewhere to sleep, even if it wasn’t comfortable. I never ended up in a shelter, or outside. It wasn’t that bad.
I’ve been in stable housing for fourteen months. I keep looking in the mirror — at work, at home, at a bar or a queer drop-in or someone else’s house — and going, if it wasn’t that bad, why are you still like this? I pack cans of food in my backpack when I’m stressed. I went on a weird paranoid bender late last year where I started turning my everyday backpack into a survival kit — there’s nothing like wildfire smoke in your lungs to bring out a lot of very, very intense fear of displacement. I know how to dehumidify my hearing aids with a bathroom hand dryer. I’ve always had struggles with the cold on a mental level, but now when I dissociate when walking in the winter, there’s a part of me trying to convince myself that I’ll be out here all night.
The worst part of all this is that I was only ‘unhoused’ in the true sense for a matter of weeks. I’d have to go back and check the exact duration of time, but I was sleeping on the floor of a friend’s empty apartment for that period. The rest of the time I consider part of my housing instability are more complicated; couch-surfing complete with paying rent, settling into a new place only to be kicked out a few months in (illegally, but there are times to bother with fighting and there are times not to). I’m hesitant even to apply the term homeless or unhoused to many of these experiences, even though ‘hidden homelessness’ is an established term; and when I’ve made acquaintance with people who have lived on the street for years, it feels ridiculous.
Nevertheless.
It’s not easy to try describe my burnout to others. For one, it involves trying to describe the situation that put me here in the first place. Two, it requires contextualizing why it would even surprise me that I’m traumatized. I’ve already been through some of the worst that someone can handle, and I already put myself back together. I know what it looks like when I shatter, and this isn’t it. This is a very different kind of breakdown, and one that — while less destructive — I’m less equipped to help myself with. But how do I explain that, either? I’m not worried about myself the way I should be because I’m not drinking myself to death or trying to kill myself twice a week? — that doesn’t play well with most people, probably because it’s a bad excuse! And then there’s the bare, awful fact that far, far too many of us are in the same spot. I watch fundraisers scroll past me on Twitter and Bluesky and Tumblr and Cohost and Facebook, all for different people, and I can’t even feel anything about them anymore because if I do, I’ll start feeling everything again. I walked by someone’s eviction in the summer of last year and I remember the cold fury that sat in my chest like a stone, picking through their possessions and trying to figure out what I could save from the rain and the garbage-truck. The loved and cherished possessions of others deserve better than to be tossed onto the street below — but there are things of mine that probably had the same thing done to them, and I can’t think about them too much either. The idea of applying to any other job, doing any more interviews or trial shifts or those personality tests that are supposed to suss out your suitability, gives me the start of a panic attack that only really goes away once I’m no longer sober.
I don’t know where exactly I go from here, but I know I have to adjust to the fact that my brain works differently now. I was never particularly good at keeping to schedules with posting, for example, but now I think I have to — for a lack of better phrases coming to mind — adapt or die. At the beginning of this year, I had a grand plan for ‘getting myself back on track’, and I’m looking at it now and realizing that there is no ‘back on track’. I’m not going to be the same way I was before. That doesn’t mean I’m burnt out forever, either. It just means I need to remember I’ve been changed. The same is true of the world around me. There is no ‘back to normal’ after COVID, after Ukraine and Palestine, after the January insurrection, after the Freedom Convoy, after any of it. There is no ‘back to normal’ in Canada now that everyone I know has trouble affording groceries and rent at the same time. There is no ‘back to normal’ for writers like me, who — for a shining moment – had a potential future on platforms like Patreon and the unified net of social media, and now are realizing that the powers that be will never truly allow it.
That’s where some of this burnout really comes from. I don’t know what my future will look like. I suppose it’s whatever I make it, but we’ll just have to see. Maybe I’ll still be a writer. Maybe I’ll be something else entirely. All I know is that I’m glad to be alive and in a stable home — I just hope I can let myself believe in it soon.
Elliott Dunstan 