Life As Performance Art 13

It's about moving forward, relentlessly forward. Taking rest pauses as needed, of course, but not giving up. I became ill when I gave up. I didn't feel that I could go on. I don't know, maybe I could have kept going, but I had really lost my direction. And there were no supports available, just my difficult father to stay with part time in Robert's Creek, and equally difficult friends with whom I was also couchsurfing in Vancouver. None of them were stable and I have to say that I am no longer friends with any of them, and that my father has now been dead for ten years. My life had come to a full stop and there seemed nothing that I could do about it. I had full blown PTSD, or that's the narrative, anyway. I had quit my job as a home caregiver in July 1997, and tried to throw myself into painting and promoting my art full time, but there was no support base to see me through. I refused to go back on social assistance, because that had already been turned into a bureaucratic and shaming nightmare as to make Kafka proud. I decided to throw my lot on God, since it was really hard to find suitable work, and no one seemed interested in hiring a man in his early forties with a limited skill set to offer, nor was I physically strong enough for labouring positions. On top of everything else, I had just come through roughly ten very traumatic years, including my mother's death from cancer. I spent a lot of that time navigating a very dysfunctional Christian community, and we were simply immersed in tragedy, deaths from AIDS, suicide, overdose and murder, as well as tending to the ongoing needs and psychic and spiritual wounds of the many marginalized people seeking us out for care. This isn't also to mention how damaging we as a community were to one another. The community had come to an end and I was living alone in a bachelor apartment and barely able to pay the rent. I did have a lot of friends at the time and we were all loosely connected in some form of community or other, but everyone was unstable, unreliable and usually broke like me and I was generally considered the least screwed up and the most sought out for support. No wonder I ended up tanking. So, I embraced homelessness and my uncertain future, knowing that Jesus was walking this labyrinth with me. There really should have been more supports in place for me, just as there need to be for others going through this kind of fall, but our society and governments still tend to take a sadistic pleasure in punishing the weak, and I certainly was not exempt. I happen to know that God has been with me through all of this, and that it was God who brought me safely through, relatively unscathed, that it was God who opened the doors for affordable housing, psychiatric help and vocational support and now because of God's many eleventh hour interventions, I am now facing retirement and this next stage in my journey in good health, in a decent apartment that I can pay for and with rewarding and enriching employment, all the while enjoying the privileges of foreign travel. It has never been this good in my life. And I am not ready to gloat.