 | 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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The Focus of Change (Fri 30th July 04) Every morning I wake up and I remember that my life is never going to be the same ever again, I have moved from being a person that has had very little in life that has been positive or enriching, to now seeing a future that might actually be worth all the hard work that I have put myself through these last months. It has been hard for me to turn my back on the only thing I've ever known in my life, I think about all the skills that I have learned in order to survive each day and I know that I will have no use for ninety percent of them in my new life, they just aren't practical and I know that if I really want to leave my old life behind I have to leave those skills behind as well, which I think I will be able to do, though it is going to take me a while to readjust to doing things in a different way. But I think that the thing that is going to take me a lot more effort to let go of are some of the values that I have, the ones that pretty much only apply to my old life on the street and how I lived that life, these values that even though they may still apply to my life at the moment will not have the same value to my life in six months or a year but are so much of a part of who I am that I haven't yet been able to get through one day without applying them in some way, usually more then once and more then one value as well. I know that I am not flawed in the way I think or what I deem my values to be, but if I am to fully evolve as a person and change my life completely then I will also have to change a lot of the things that control how I feel and act, it was been relatively easy for me to move of the street and give up drugs and all the stuff that is associated with living on the street, but it has been extremely hard for me to give up the way I think and feel about the street and all the things that I have learned while living there. These things are what define me as a person and now that I am trying to define my life and give myself another way of living and another belief in the way life is meant to be lived I have found I also must change the way I define myself as a person or the way I now live will have no meaning to me. Sure I am a lot happier now then I was on the street and I don't have a lot of the worries that I used to but why is what I'm doing now more right then what I used to, having never known any other way of life I don't have anything to compare what I feel now to what I felt then, and this has been causing me an extreme amount of heartache, not just because I don't understand what I am feeling but because I desperately want to so that I can adjust in a way that is beneficial to me. In changing my life I have learnt to cope with a lot of things that I don't particularly like or respect and this has been part of the learning curve that I have to go through in my journey, and there are days that I have been through that make me think and feel as though this has been for nothing and I will never be able to fit into normal society no matter how hard I try, but the one thing that has kept me on the course that I have chosen to follow is everything I have gone through, the good, the bad and the really bad stuff have all taught me something about myself that I never knew. I have learnt so much these last few months about me and the way I cope with change that I know that there is a pot of gold at the end of my rainbow and right now I am on my way to finding it, and if I give up now I will never find out how rich my life can really be and that is the focus of my journey, I have been sharing with all the things that I have been trying to achieve in the hope that by helping myself I can help others which I believe is the thing that will make me feel as though I have done something that has not only changed my life but someone else's as well and by changing there life I hope that I have also enriched it somehow. Please keep checking
in people as I continue my journey of self discovery and if you have any questions
or comments please e-mail me: magishian at gmail dot com
and I will endeavor to answer all that you want to know about me, my life and
all that has happened to me on my journey and where I hope it will take me.
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