Week 8: Wrapping Up Research on the Barriers to Overcoming Houselessness

Welcome back readers to “The Barriers to Overcoming Houselessness.” I hope you all have had a wonderful past week! As we come to the last couple weeks of the project, I begin to wrap up my research.

According to my original plan, I should have been done with interviews long ago, and was supposed to be doing completely different things. Unfortunately, that’s not how life works, and I learnt how to adapt and change plans when research didn’t go as expected. Originally, the barriers were just a small part of my project, and I planned on working on other things too, but I didn’t anticipate how much there was to the barriers to overcoming homelessness. That says something in itself!

I had to quickly adapt and realize that I needed to split the barriers into three, and all ten of these weeks needed to be dedicated to writing about barriers. BUT! That doesn’t mean I’m giving up on the rest of my project, that will just come after this ten week period is over. 

Anyways, onto my updates! This week I spoke with Tyler, who lived in Simply Shelter’s micro-shelter a while back, and now lives in his own place. After talking for a bit, we decided that it was easier if he just sent me an email with his thoughts, and I could go from there. From what he shared so far, I’ve learnt a lot. He says that he despises the word homeless, which I found early on in my project. It’s characterizing a person into a single category that can be so toxic and dehumanizing. When we say, “a homeless person,” we characterize the person’s identity as homeless. In fact, many people experiencing houselessness aren’t homeless as they have a home, a community that surrounds them. Tyler explains that the way he beat being houseless was by developing community. Though much of his community was under the influence of drugs and mental health illnesses, he developed a network of people around him that helped him become sheltered. Tyler is very busy with his job, so I didn’t get too much more, but I’ll definitely expand on what he said in my paper.

I also worked on transcribing all of the other interviews I had this week because writing my paper will be much easier once I have all my information down in words. I’ve got a lot to get done next week, so don’t forget to come back.

Thank you so much for tuning in, and I’ll see you next week! Sadhwani, out.