 | Gish's JournalI'm 27 years old and have lived on the streets since I was 6 years old. Three months ago I moved into Rebeccas Community 'Hospitality House.' This website chronicles my life journey through foster care, homelessness, drug addiction, prison and my new life off drugs and off the streets. |
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Old Friends, New Friends (Fri 7th August 04) Day by day, week by week my life is slowly ticking by and I have spent a lot of the time making comparisons between what my life is like now and what it used to be, so I thought that I would do something different this time and try and talk about some of the things that I have discovered about my new life that were not really what I expected and I am not really happy with. I guess the main thing I am most unhappy about is I now have very few friends that I talk to or hang out with on a daily basis. Living on the street is very much like living with a large extended family in a very, very, very big house. We all look out for each other and we all spend time giving each other the self esteem that we don't receive from any other source that allows us to get through each day if not happy then at the very least not depressed enough to be thinking about suicide. It is the camaraderie that I miss, the knowledge that at any time there is someone I can spend time with who is exactly like me and understands my life and lifestyle and is comfortable enough with everything I do and say that we are happy just sitting around doing whatever it is that is the decided pastime of the moment. I know I made the decision to move away from my family and friends and I am happy that I made this decision, I just didn't think about a lot of the things other then drugs and crime and sleeping out that I would be giving up as part of the package of getting off the street and making a life for my self. I still class all the people I used to live with as my friends still and I still see them occasionally but on the whole they are no longer part of my daily life, and I do miss there presence. I didn't have to make this choice of having little to no contact with my friends but I knew that if I was spending a lot of time with them the temptations of what I am trying to give up would be almost impossible to fight and I know that I would never have given up drugs if I didn't limit the amount of contact I have with my friends. I know that not spending as much time with my friends is a choice I made for myself and I don't regret having made the choice; I find I now have no one of like mind to spend time with just hanging out and talking or what not. It is the feeling of being with people who have a shared understanding and common life experiences that make you friends usually and I don't have that anymore and I miss it a lot. I am trying to find ways of making new friends and I will get there, I just don't yet know when I will have enough common ground to start from. One of the problems I will have to overcome before I see myself making friends is I still don't feel very comfortable hanging out with non-street people. There are a lot of reasons for this and I am slowly working on them. I have even solved a few problems that were stopping me from interacting in a positive way, but I still have a lot of hurdles to overcome before I am confident enough to put myself out there on a level with every one else. Please
keep checking in as I continue my journey towards a better life and if you have
any questions or comments please e-mail me: magishian at
gmail dot com
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