Name: Brandy Ericksen Age: 39
Place: Dore Street
Without a home: Off and on, 20 years
“Ever since the internet and social media there’s a false sense of community when all you’re doing is so cial media. I had a really hard time finding a way to fit in community outside of being on the streets. I don’t want to mix my job with my personal life. I don’t want to bring my work home. A lot of my friends, I haven’t seen them in 10 or 20 years. I talk to them on Face book, sure, but out here on the streets there’s community, we can say hello and hug each other. I wasn’t homeless for about 10 years and you wouldn’t hear anybody say hello to you all day long. I had to force myself to make a habit every morning to say hello to people I was walking by on my way to work. I would say “good morning” to them, mostly to the workers. The people setting up the restaurants for the morning or taking out the garbage from last night. I’d say good morning and they’re cheerful and happy to say good morning back. But that’s like the most interaction you can get out of people, and it’s forced. I don’t feel so forced in the community I live in right now.”
“When it comes to interactions with men in particular, you have to be direct and upfront with what your intentions are with that person, especially if they make advancements on you. You have to be firm in telling them that you’re not OK with them, you know. You can never ever, ever, ever have a gray area because you want to be nice. You need to just tell them. But the biggest concern is when I’m sleeping alone. I’ve had men try and come in my tent a couple of times. Thankfully I woke up to my dog chasing them out but if he hadn’t been there, I’d of woke up with a man in my tent, and who knows what he’d have been doing. I’ve got friends who tell me that they’ve woken up with men and the first thing he does is offer them dope, or drugs, and some of them accept it because they don’t know what he was doing before they woke up. It’s terrible. Yeah, so sexual exploitation, and ah, …. the violence. It can be really dangerous for a woman.”
“I lost my low-income housing voucher and had to go back to the streets after 10 years of not being homeless, three years ago. It was devastating and terrifying sleeping in the Tenderloin on the sidewalk. You know life doesn’t stop just because you lost your housing. I was completely sober, the first time off all opiates in my adult life, and to find myself right back to being homeless was crazy. I remember thinking, “I can only go up from here, it can’t get any worse than this”. It got worse; my boyfriend went to jail. So now I’m completely alone and on the streets without that safety and protection to sleep with me every night. But the most devastating part of it was it pulled me and my daughter into homelessness. We were homeless from age 2. We became homeless until she was 4. I got us out of homelessness, and that was like the hardest thing I’ve had to do in my life. To go through services and that whole thing, it was like the hardest thing ever. And so when I lost my housing ten years later I couldn’t put her back into that. I didn’t have the heart to go back to Hamilton and drag her through the uncertainty of homelessness, I had to leave her with my mom. At least there’s stability there, there’s structure, to some degree. My mom works every day, and it was better than putting her back through the uncertainty of homelessness, so that’s what I did. That was like the hardest.”
“I feel like there are a lot of people that want to help us get off the streets and there are promises made,. They’re given to you like a promise when it should have been presented to you like a hope. That’s devastating when you think something is going to work out and it was never on the table in the first place.”
