Listening to Stevie Nicks after all these years brings back memories of High School as I try and piece together my life. It's snowing in Portland Maine as I draw back the white sheer curtains and allow the view. There isn't much of a view here, but having the ocean so close is comforting and outback there is a beautiful space of Pine Trees that are like all of them here—holy like a faint calling from a long-ago romance. The water was always a way for me to connect and being here helps me move past all the pain even though it didn't start out so good when I first got here. I have to remind myself to keep moving my fingers across the page. My anxiety is an ever-present friend these days.
Who stays this long in a hotel?
Answer: another blog post "Heartbreak—fleeing from my violent mother once again"
My God—me, I'm homeless again.
Even opening my blog after so long everything is different. How nice to have my little iCloud up top and having my words being saved automatically along with grammar help, which was one reason I never thought I could write in High School. Certainly, my then 9th grade English teacher fired for being different didn't help or that because she was so different I was actually learning some grammar that year.
I feel disjointed and I can see my writing reflects that. My words aren't flowing as usual and I feel like my realities are still being slammed together like waves on the shore. I long for calm, but as each tide comes and goes, the breaking gets worse as my life is slammed in ribbons against the rocks. There is some peace now at least with so much that was always so hidden is revealed, so much that has been going on for so long. My finances were one thing that was destroyed along with all my journals the past 20yrs, so my regular writing kinda went by the wayside—too busy surviving most days to allow any kind of flow. Recently, dumping so many journals from the psych ward in Maine, but I thought I would make Maine my home and that's not possible once again. There is no place like home Dorothy, but where is that now?
I hear housekeeping outside. The talking ebbs and flows as the day begins and I have breakfast. It's cool to have another person do the cleaning. After managing so many properties over the years it's nice to be able to leave the cleaning to someone else. In the same way, I'm forced to take the bus now after cops took my car but actually love it. I realize now all those years of commuting for work were actually really hard. I use to take the bus all the time when I was in college and loved that it allowed time to read, dream and think, but after college as I was building a career I commuted all the time to professional jobs an hour away. The buses are so easy here in Maine. I can go anywhere and they arrive so easily and drop me off so effortlessly. I feel like Gloria Steinum talking about not driving and taking cabs. I have been trying to read her new book "My Life on the Road," which I'm enjoying, but it's been slow going like my yoga routine in the morning. So much in my life shifting—nothing staying the same.
Gloria talks about the wonderful adventures of life on the road and I'm in my small way finding the same although being homeless is not the way I would have chosen to travel. If I had had the choice I would have traveled like most and gone the tourist route, but not having a place to live at home forced me to live on the road in various places trying to find a home. Inadvertently, finding that I was experiencing something different than had I done the regular tourist thing. I had dreamed at one time doing the backpacking to Europe adventure as a young woman but having a professional career right out of college didn't allow for that and honestly, I would not have enjoyed it as much as I enjoy traveling now. The ability to survive by moving frequently is not something I would have found any enjoyment in back then—my goal was a home even though I was traveling for work at the time. The good wife has a home and once married having stability became my goal after moving so much as a child. I loved having a home and keeping one.
I make sure my little sign is outside the door so no housekeeping today. I only indulge a couple times of a week when I go grocery shopping not only to be sustainable but because having that much leisure still makes me uncomfortable. I never minded housework. I grew to love cooking and doing all the chores that went along with a home, I was so thrilled to have a career that allowed me to own one. At the time, not realizing the financial nightmare that was being deliberately set up for me. Part of the scheme was to leave me homeless. Even saying it out loud unnerves me, but at least the room doesn't spin and I have to sit down for fear I will vomit like I did the past 4yrs when this started.
Temperatures have dropped steadily the past couple of weeks and the thought of being on the street now was too much. I'm just starting to feel strong and centered again even though once again anxiety from checking my bank account some days renders me paralyzed—battling the panic attacks. The real bad ones have passed, but I get nervous about getting too nervous now which is kinda funny in a crazy way. Even saying the word "crazy" has anxiety as I still fight to understand how people could plot to accuse someone of being crazy to steal their money. I think of Frances Farmer a lot these days or any number of woman writers I loved as a teen who faced such hatred for just being creative, different—independent women.
Technically I'm the hidden homeless, my savings and small IRA have allowed me to move from place to place, but the violence I'm subjected to keeps me homeless—it was all planned. Abusers love to tell you what they are going to do to you, so the ones in my life at the end of my 20yr marriage did just that. The shock prevented me from understanding then, but today I have most of the truth not that I will probably ever understand it completely. After the pain and grief, the days of anger and swearing comes compassion for myself and others. It's not that you can't remember or continue to try and understand it's that you want to move on and I'm not one to harbor grudges. I remember asking my grandmother about the land that was taken from her as a young woman. Women weren't allowed to own land then and her brother acquired and sold the land from her parents. She was forced into the city with nothing to start over. She rarely talked about it, visibly upset if the conversation went too far. It was better to not bring those painful memories too far to the surface. I didn't understand that kind of pain then, but I do now. The kind that leaves scars and will always have a sort of ghost limb quality to them.
Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe lived in a hotel, I try to remember them. Saved by her writing after I was sexually assaulted and the cop involved jailed me I read, "Just Kids." I never experienced that kind of poverty after college because after being so poor as a kid I was able to start a decent career and do rather well. Being broke and homeless in my 50's was not on my 5yr planner, but then again being in trouble with the law was also demoralizing to a girl that wanted to overcome her poor upbringing and do well. It's my 40th class reunion but I won't be going. Knowing now how so many of these people were involved. People I believed and was told often, never thought of me at all. Not because I'm ashamed that I would be going back homeless, which when attending how well we are doing compared to our peers no matter how you try and transcend it, just sneaks up on us anyway—chop wood carry water, as Budda said.
No, the real reason I won't be going is that I'm homeless and broke and many of the people I went to school with are either involved or knew what was going on and didn't have the decency to tell me. Some gave me cryptic messages, but even those were bits and pieces of a puzzle it's taken me this long to put together. I'm still struggling but out of the woods, which I'm grateful for.
Little choppy, but the words are moving on the page. I have 2 weeks here and then I'm not sure where to next. The home I lived in for 20yrs and thought I would live in until I died was listed on my Birthday and my ex and his brother decided to sell it at Christmas. My pain extremely difficult seemed endless. I pleaded to be able to buy it feeling ashamed for asking, but my credit was deliberately destroyed and now I have a criminal record so it's impossible to buy something else. It's beautiful in Maine, the pine trees are so lovely here even in Winter and the light is phenomenal, but like all over America there is no housing. Plus the Pandemic is still raging. I had 5 properties and all are gone now. All given to my ex, I still wake up most days and have to remind myself how cruel this was. It's easy to believe it was something I did, rather than something done to me. Pulling myself up by my bootstraps was my mantra for so long, but there comes a time when you have to accept you were the victim of a crime. We don't like to do that in America. We don't like to talk about being helpless, weak, or the victim of anything. I still move forward each day, but I do have to take into consideration that this was not something I did to myself. I wasn't lazy or not saving or incompetent or doing drugs or drinking like they want to pretend to cover it all up, but because it was so brutal I wake up most days and forget where I am. I should be in my new queen size bed with the pretty new linens I bought, Bentley my dog by my side, instead of an empty hotel room.
I've been staying in hotels for months, I can't say it's not cool. I think of bands I loved constantly on the road and I'm comfortable in some ways. There is a nice rhythm that happens after a while as I transition from being the good wife to being me. Who am I now? What do I want? I still find myself buying groceries for two people loving the great foodie vibe here in Maine, plus the fact everything tastes so good, I'm thinking it's because Maine is so clean in many ways—I have gained like 30lbs. Menopause was awful. I had hoped for an easy private one, like everyone I knew, but like most things in my life has been difficult. Having a bunch of 30yr old cops tell you what a loser you are is not a woman's idea of a good time when at 50 you're pretty much destined for the relationship dumpster anyway. Being called a "prostitute" even worse—aging women in that profession don't have award-winning careers like everyone pretends today. Most homeless are elderly women. Sexual assault is common for homeless women.
It's nice to catch up with myself and write my blog post. I miss my daily ritual of writing 4-5 pages every morning before work for 20yrs, but like everything else was stolen. I'm supposed to be a "mentally ill prostitute" that did nothing with her life—incompetent. I laugh if I did go to my reunion. I can laugh a little today, for so long I was unable to. Hi, it's been so long, what do you do for a living? Oh, me? I'm a prostitute looking for new clients, would you like to fill out an application? Being a good girl I do have my standards. HIV, Covid, Condoms and I want to make sure you can pay without forcing yourself to be my Pimp—I'm an independent entrepreneur after all. After the strange and uncomfortable looks, I'm sure will follow and for some anger that I know now what most of them thought of me, I continue my elevator speech by saying I do activism for women forced into prostitution and Human Trafficking. Traveling is of course part of my activism and well you have some idea why I'm homeless in a hotel.
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