So How Does It Feel To Be Homeless?

Exciting. Extremely liberating. Apprehensive. Occasionally terrifying.

For the last few years, about six or seven, homelessness was my primary fear. That’s the time a doctor properly diagnosed me as Type 1 diabetic. The previous twenty years saw me getting worse for the useless treatment of the wrong disease. Finally, with the correct treatment my body responded quickly (after a few months of insulin rejection) and in six months I had significant strength back. Being homeless would have interrupted the treatment and jeopardised my life.

Hence the terror. So much can go wrong, and then compound. The van could break down meaning I can’t get food meaning I go into a coma and die. Things like that. I’ve had a dozten various scenarios play through my mind and emotions most nights for a very long time.

Then there’s the sheer wastage of insulin that warms up due to fridge or battery failure. Even five minutes at 17° would render a pack of vials unusable after 28 days max.

Then of course the trouble of finding water. On a couple of shakedown trips I discovered that you can’t just pull up to a service station these days and fill up a tank of water. You can’t even pay for it.

That means showers could often, or mostly, be out. You tend to conserve. But it could also mean running out of water to drink.

After that looms the weather. Unforgiving sun, burnt, too hot in the van. Yet that would be preferable to four days of rain, closed up in it, no fresh air and wet and probably cold and certainly uncomfortable. No fun at all, rendering the following non-existent.

Liberation. Freedom. New sights. Unimagined experiences.

The feeling of liberation is amazing right now. I have no real hindrances, like a home: a house. Stuck in it. Bound to it. The house, the stationary building, governing one’s existence, directing one’s thinking. None of that, and very little left now of my personal property – I’ve thrown out six pantech trucks of stuff since Glebe and Coffs studios – and what’s left I could walk away from. Except the ebike. That thing is the best.

Out and about, too, I’m freed from mental paralysis, being locked into a thought set. In a van there’s always something to do, and I am compelled to step outside – into extraordinary air being of a vibrant, living world.

Well, today officially I’m there.