Tony’s Story
Starting a story is harder than finishing it; choosing an arc, creating a narrative, and adding a plot twist is always a challenge for a writer. When I look over my life and what I was taught about society and my place within it, I never imagined I would crash land at the River Street Shelter in 2004. When I left the lot in 2006, I wouldn’t have believed I would return twenty years later as a member of the Lived Experience Advisory Group for Housing Matters. I had been in and out of drug and alcohol treatment several times before my stay at what was then the Page Smith Community House. I had been locked in psych wards, survived a devastating automobile accident, and had been arrested enough times to convince any intelligent individual that the choices I was making were simply not working. I completed my Master’s Degree in 1996, but despite my education, I couldn’t figure a way out of my problem. I ended up a patient of county mental health and the turning point came when my therapist, Kathy Wilke, stated in a way I could hear that I needed the support of my peers in order to achieve true and lasting well-being.
This was not good news. I had no friends, and my family was finished with me. What the average person can’t quite comprehend is how feral someone becomes on the way to losing everything; no one chooses to be addicted or homeless, but I was lucky enough to meet a man in the twelve-step community who treated me in a way I had never experienced save for some fleeting moments in my childhood.
My time in this limbo period wasn’t entirely wasted; I was finally able to sit still and reacquaint [myself] with what remained of the “me” that was buried beneath the mess of whom I had become. Although I remain leery of groups, I am slowly discovering the power that exists within a community. Sharing a story like mine is not easy, but if it were easy to connect with others on an authentic level, we wouldn’t be the most addicted and medicated cohort in our nation’s history. My mother once asked me why I wanted to write, to speak, and to share my story in such a public way. What good is getting kicked in the teeth, metaphorically, and coming out the other side and rediscovering what happiness feels like if I’m not willing to use my experience to assist others who may appear as hopeless as I once believed myself to be?
I know I’ve changed some minds along the way, and I imagine I’ve changed a heart or two. Someone once told me my story was the reason they decided not to take their own life, and while I believe that they gave me far more credit than I deserved, I was honored to know that I had helped them.
My time with Housing Matters and LEAG continues to provide opportunities for me to learn the profound power of the lived experience, shared without reservation or pretense.
Recovery is possible, but it requires a community to care for and rebuild its most broken members. It seems paradoxical, then, that some of the greatest healers, truth tellers, and agents of change among us were at one time the most wounded within a culture that seems, now more than ever, in desperate need of new and improved kind of healing.
