I Helped Free A Man Who Was Trapped In His Car For 3 Days. I Don’t Think I’ve Recovered From What Happened Next.

I found his body, his mouth agape, his skin pallid. I touched him. He was cold. It was the first time I had discovered a dead body of one of our participants on outreach. I felt shattered with self-blame, guilt and something akin to loss of faith. 

After that discovery, I lost interest in relationships, sexuality and my work. It was challenging to eat and sleep, and I lost a lot of weight. I had traumatic, haunting and discursive thoughts similar to those with PTSD, sensitivity to light and sound, migraines, stomach problems and suicidal ideation. It became painful simply to exist. 

After witnessing so much suffering, I felt a complete abandonment of hope around all systems, especially social safety nets and systems of care. Everywhere I looked, I saw barriers for the most vulnerable, and it felt like I was complicit in enforcing these barriers.

The cognitive dissonance between the general public’s view of a civil society versus the reality of what many people experience felt maddening. Many are feeling that same dissonance today.

“That lack of awareness is going to set the country up for a real fall,” Brian Castrucci, president and CEO of the de Beaumont Foundation, said in a recent University of Minnesota study, citing the Department of Health and Human Services cutting 10,000 jobs and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention cutting up to 90% of its funding to state and local health departments.

Trump’s executive order on civil commitment creates the conditions for many more unhoused people to perish without dignity, without addressing the root causes of homelessness. Poor and unhoused people will die in even greater numbers the more government-funded services continue to be cut. The broad impact will be devastating to unhoused people, their families and our culture as a whole.