Candela Place 3

In 2004 I was accepted for training as a mental health peer support worker.  This would open up new professional doors for me.  It would also stigmatize and label me for life as a person with a mental illness.  And it would strand me for the rest of my professional life in low status low wage work.  My options were limited.  I had been homeless and afflicted with symptoms of complex PTSD.  Because of some of the difficult circumstances of my life I was never able to complete my post secondary education.  I had very few marketable work skills that a lot of employers would actually recognize as marketable work skills; this cruel irony despite my many creative, intellectual and social gifts.  With the rapidly skyrocketing cost of housing in Vancouver thrown into the mix it had already become virtually impossible for someone like me to be able to live or even survive without some kind of intervention.

This intervention occurred in the form of BC Housing.  My rent was subsidized by the government.  When I went off of welfare I was paying in excess of three hundred dollars a month plus cable.  This was of course very cheap.  When I found employment in the homeless shelter my rent was recalculated to a measly one hundred twenty-five dollars.  It went up and down with my income.  Never more than thirty percent.  Sweet.

I walked as often as possible to the training classes.  It was between six and seven miles and I had to be out by six thirty in the morning.   It was June and the weather and light were magical and fabulous.  I walked over the bridge then through the lavish neighbourhood of palaces and gardens known as First Shaughnessy then I would circumnavigate the exquisitely landscaped Queen Elizabeth Park and continue strolling among graves in the reverent majesty of the cemetery, then through another beautiful park, enchanted by the golden light, the radiant green of the trees and grass, the birdsong, and the silence of the early morning.

I learned a lot about working with people who were living with mental illness in these classes then spent the summer doing my practicum for the mental health team that ended up hiring me in September.

In the meantime my therapy continued and my psychiatrist provided me with invaluable mentoring for my new career.  I already knew that my life was taking an upward arc.  Sometimes I felt nervous.  So used I had become to being sabotaged, by myself and others, and falling again to even more wretched states than the ones preceding. 

Only little by little did I come to realize that I was now playing a different game with different rules.  My life was being rebuilt from the ground up.  I was not going to fall again.