what being a homeless teenager taught me about finding community

dark shit, with light at the end

dressed up as Natalie Portman in Black Swan the Halloween before I ran away from home, did my own makeup it was so good, have no close-ups so this is all you get

Back so soon, Shannan, you might say? To which I don’t say anything because the distended collective “you” doesn’t actually exist and we all in fact are fucking individuals no matter HOW MUCH anyone, anywhere tries to sardine us into an amorphous blob with money-tits so they can drain our little hearts dry with their greedy capitalist—

woof okay chill out, me.

Anyway, reading all your comments on this post here —

— made me think about that word we toss so much at this point it’s kind of becoming a shapeless blob itself.

Yeah, community.

I doubt I have much profound shit to share about community, seeing as I’ve either dramatically left many or been kicked out of them in my 32 long years. But you know sometimes losers and failures can impart great wisdom, so I guess here’s mine.

• after running away from home at 17, I thought I’d escaped a hellish situation but lesson number 1 is that escape doesn’t equal freedom

• before that, I remember the most community I felt was with my grandfather who used to take me to the library almost every day and tell me to “pick the books with awards on them because life is short and you want to read the good stuff first”

• community was him and me reading our own shit in a public library so lesson number 2 is that community doesn’t need to be a gathering and doesn’t need to involve active interaction

• when my grandfather’s visa was refused due to my father’s irresponsibilities (more on that later maybe) and he couldn’t come back to live with us anymore, I was once again left alone with my parents

• that was the day of my first suicide attempt and by all accounts it was a poor attempt but thank god right, ha. ha ha.

• I tried after that to make it work with them because I was in a super weird “situationship” with my parents.

• if you didn’t have emotionally/physically/sexually abusive parents you probably will flinch at my using that word in connection to my parents, but unfortunately if you did, I can bet my butt you get what I mean

• trying to make it work just made it worse

• lesson number 3 is two-fold, one is that children’s first real encounter with community is their parents and them and when this is fucked, it takes a whole lot to unfuck and lesson number 3.5 is tho you can fix broken communities you cannot force community out of thin air (remember what I said above, we are all-caps INDIVIDUALS)

• lesson number 4 is that community is a sacred often unspoken contract we make with ourselves as well as well as with those with whom we partake in community

• so fast-forward when I ran away from home I wasn’t immediately homeless, I had a home of sorts to go to, and this home was the home of a 42-year old woman who was my yoga-teacher and who had been texting me a lot months before I ran away helping me out with whatever I needed…yeah you can see where this is going, I’m sorry to say that I didn’t, not then

• she introduced me to all her friends her family and the other girls she mentored and let me be her “model” in the yoga classes she taught and then even let me teach my own very first yoga class

• needless to say I was feeling so fucking special

• soon found out, she’d just had a miscarriage when I moved in with her and her husband

• she told me on evening that she’d be my mom now and set things right and my old life I could forget because it didn’t matter who’d hurt me, she would never, she’d love me like a mother was supposed to

• a year later post a series of escalating circumstances, I was living in Toronto’s Covenant House

• lesson number 5 is that there is a giant difference between community and cult and to be able to tell the difference is a fucking privilege and if you’re one of those people who could always do it, you’re blessed with great intelligence and if you’re one of those people who got to the point of understanding this much later, welcome to the club, and if you’re one of those people who still don’t get this…I…I don’t know what to say, good luck I guess

• the moment I started living with the aforementioned woman, she helped me get on welfare and then had the welfare cheques deposited in her account

• she kept them but I never questioned it because she was keeping me under her roof and cooked for me and taught me to cook and helped me finish my final high school courses over Summer because when I ran away from home I also ran away from high school

• lesson number 6 is fuck high school and yeah it’ s not a lesson but seriously fuck high school

• Covenant House was so fucking amazing to me. I did not appreciate it one bit. I was bitter beyond belief that I “had” to live in a homeless youth shelter. I looked down at all the other kids there. I would literally wrinkle my lips and turn my nose up at them. I watched those kids with so much fucking disdain. These were drug addicted teens scraped from the streets of Toronto. These were knocked up 13/14/15 year olds. These were kids with piercings and tattoos all over their cut up bodies. These were kids who acted downright allergic to books and couldn’t talk in straight sentences. And me!? I was HERE!? I who was writing and reading full sentences by age 3. I who finished my first novel at age 5. I who had hundreds of thousands of pages of poetry sitting in my childhood bedroom still somewhere. I who had won all these writing awards already and wasn’t even an adult. I who knew 4 different languages, had read every major religious book and most of the obscure ones. Shannan the Great. Shannan the Better Than Everyone. Shannan the One Everyone Should Have Looked Up To. What the fuck was I doing with these ugly ass slimy idiots?

• Yeah I thought all these things and worse. I said them too often to the FREE DAILY PSYCHOLOGIST given to me at Covenant House. He listened calmly. I was so rude to him. Man, fuck me. I told him I hate that you’re a man, I want to talk to a woman and that very gentle sweet old dude said I’m sorry, I’ll try to see if a female psychologist is available. And kept listening to me bitch.

• Lesson number 7 is that sometimes you are given a chance at community and even if you don’t take it, community overwhelms you and saves you in ways you only realize later, sometimes much later, sometimes never.

• Lesson number 8 is that community isn’t permanent. Sometimes community comes to you, stays with you, departs. You change communities, communities change. Life is not stasis. Nothing remains but us, the individuals, scattered across the wild world like fucking salt. And it’s a beautiful damn thing.

• Covenant House gave me a place to sleep safe and sound, they provided me my vegan meals when I told them in my holier-than-thou rant that I couldn’t believe they only served meat (how fucking privileged and bratty was I man, and I don’t even have the excuse of saying I was born into a rich family LOL), they gave me emotional, mental, spiritual care, they got me free therapy both one-on-one and group DBT (so fucking useful).

• And then I ran away from there too hahaha.

• Lesson number 9 is that the lessons you don’t learn the first time, follow you like lost dogs and they won’t go away till you take them home with you, feed them, clothe them, love them, raise them, and let them at last die peacefully

K pretty sure I have more to say about all this so probably expect a part 2 at some point. Maybe in a week maybe in a year, I don’t know. Life’s busy and good now, so I’m too happy to be on a strict schedule.

lots of love and blessings,

Shannan