Last week I got to a point where I was seriously considering leaving where I live and going back to being homeless. For most people, that idea is unthinkable. I realize that. But the situation I'm living in is so negative that I had to actually spend a couple of days weighing my options on which situation would give me the best chance of getting back on my feet at some point. For three years I've been living in this situation, and not paying my way. That really pisses me off because since I left my family's house at age 20, I'd always been able to take care of myself. I never made a lot of money, but I was able to get by. Then I quit taxi driving for both health and financial reasons, and became homeless. There was no way to make a decent living once I got to that point.
One of the little known facts about homelessness is that most people don't want homeless people to get back to a "normal" life. There are hundreds of organizations that help homeless people. But most of those help homeless people... stay homeless. These programs help homeless people get through the day with food, hygiene products, or a bed in a really crowded room at a shelter. But few of these programs help homeless people get back to paying their own way in life. Even the programs that help homeless people find homes usually require the homeless person to get on Social Security disability and become dependent on the federal government for the rest of their lives. Their are people who legitimately need to be on disability, but there are also thousands of people taking advantage of that system. For the last three years, several people around me have been pushing me to get on disability, as if that's the only answer. This is something I've been fighting against.
So why don't I just get a job? The simple answer is that I haven't found anywhere that will hire me for a variety of reasons. First of all, there aren't that many jobs out there. Sure, the Great Recession has died down, but the job creation never fully came back. Secondly, my current job history is taxi driving for several companies with big gaps in employment. In today's online job hunting world, that seems to be what's holding me back. A third reason is that I spent much of my life working in the BMX, skateboarding, and TV production industries, and those industries don't exist here to any decent degree. So every time I fill out a bunch of applications, I simply don't hear back. This is where the thinking stops for most people. If you're not making money, "go get a job," they say. For most of my life that wasn't a problem. But now it is. But there is another option that most people here don't think about. It's possible to create a job.
Having spent most of my adult life around highly entrepreneurial people in Southern California, this seems like the best option to me. There are several ways to create your own job, but they ultimately come down to either doing freelance work or starting your own business. Or even a combination of the two. This is not easy, but it's what a huge number of people are doing in today's society. We're not an industrial society with lots of good paying factory jobs in every small town anymore. Those factory jobs have been replaced mostly by robots, and also by corporations taking those jobs overseas where people work much cheaper. In this weird transition period between the Industrial Age and the Information Age, most people just keep trying to get a job...ANY JOB. Meanwhile, there's a growing group of people who are creating their own jobs. This is the category I fit into best psychologically.
But creating your own job first starts with a new idea. I have to find a niche that isn't being filled, and think up a business (or freelance opportunity) to fill that niche. That's not hard, there are hundreds of niche products and services that need to be filled in this part of North Carolina. The problem with coming up with a new idea is just that, it's a NEW IDEA. That means almost everyone around will think it's a BAD IDEA. If it was really a good idea, someone would have done it now, right? Then comes the next part. Starting any new idea usually involves a lot of initial work that you don't get paid for. During that process, a person like me has to wake up every morning and immediately get past the notion that everyone else thinks I'm wasting my time. Another aspect of this is that there are two types of people around you at this point: people who support you, and people who don't support you. The people who don't support you not only don't believe in you, but they often go to extreme lengths to put you down, sabotage your idea, and otherwise work against you. So... in that case, a person like me has to wake up and get past all my own negative thoughts, then I have to deal with everyone else's negative thoughts all day long as I work to manifest my idea. That's tough. It's just plain tough.
So how does a person deal with negativity in a case like this? I have to do everything I can to not let all the negativity drag me down. I listen to music that gets me pumped. I listen to inspiring lectures and Ted Talks on You Tube. I visualize where I want this idea to go. I resort to deep breathing when someone is beating me down psychologically, and then try to move on. It's really fucking hard. I try not to cuss too much in my blogs, but that's the only way to say it. I've found one opportunity to do some work for a friend's company. It's not very much money, and it's not consistent. But it's something. I have to try to use that small amount of money to get another idea going. There's an idea I've been sitting on for about 25 years. It never seemed like a good enough idea to really focus on. But now it does. It's hard to deal with negativity day after day and then try to start this idea I'm not even totally sure about. But I guess that's what keeps life interesting. I just need to keep picking myself up and chipping away at this idea, and the other projects it could lead to. Onward!
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