The next 50 years

oIt's a funny place to find oneself.  Halfway between gratitude and existential anxiety with a dose of moral outrage.   So let me break it down backwards. The outrage is about how my country is failing it's people in their times of need. Ordinary people being let to fall into the streets. If you survive a life threatening ilness with disability, expect to be unable to afford housing on what is available to the public disabled.  I guess the privileged folks all have these fancy insurance packages that pay out a handsome tithe montly to let them live like humans.  How else could this stand? The anxiety.  Well the bus had a few mechanical scares.  We've been visited a few times by officious persons.  One pair of ladies came on as street outreach and for the cost of two cheap school lunches were able to draw way too much information out of me.  I'm kicking myself for it.  Now it's possible they'll get back to me in January with usefulness, a...

       We got kicked out of the parking lot at the social center.  The officer told us we'd had complaints.  We can't idle there and we can't stay overnight.  It's so frustrating.  I feel ever more paranoid and hated by the day.  I feel dehumanized.  I feel hunted.  I hunch over in tension and fear and it's giving me back aches and stomach trouble and poor sleep. The constant high speed traffic on every single street of this insane city doesn't help. Now I"m running out of fuel and money and it's only a third of the way through the month. Dan hasn't had any more interest in his ads.  He's out of funds too, I think.  He did fuel up today but I suspect he's got not much left.  I don't know his details and it's not my business but  I do know he took out a credit card with way more credit than he can afford and it's going to come back and screw him further.  Money mismanagement is honestly the reason we're homel...

 What does holding space mean?  It means giving someone the respectful permission to feel uncomfortable feelings.  Being willing to feel awkward, even sad, so someone else feels heard, felt, cared about. This is incredibly rare, I believe.  I think about all the miserable conversations I've had and how they all fall back on the other person's inability to do this.  Because no part of my life is not touched by some form of sorrow, honestly, it isn't possible to get through a conversation about myself that doesn't get stuck in the weeds.  Or maybe they're doing it by their questions?  Honestly I still don't get how it goes there every damn time. Well it seems it does.  Somehow we're talking about me and what I should be doing. In some context.  I know I don't ask for advice.  I often assert as much to the person asking them to stop doing it. They often refuse to stop. It gets to where I feel on the defensive and delivering way more self in...