Welcome to Stories of the Streets
I vividly remember that one San Francisco night in the Summer of 2013. Matilda had captured our hearts for the past 2 hours, and it was time to walk the 5 blocks back to the hotel. The night was eerily still, the heat of the summer clinging to our clothes. My mom’s grip on my hand got tighter, and I could sense the excitement of the musical leave her mind, soon replaced by an obvious anxiety. She kept saying how it was a lapse in judgement to be walking on these streets so late. I didn’t feel it yet, but soon I would be informed that this paranoia was caused by the rows and rows of huddled silhouettes on the sidewalk. Thinking about my mom’s reaction and her past advice for me to stay away from the homeless, my fear and anxiety set in too. We started to run, and our footsteps echoed into the night. When we got back to the hotel room, I asked my mom about where they appeared from, as they were nowhere to be seen during the day. Although I had always been taught to stay away from figures crouching in the shadows, to turn my head away, walk a little faster, hold my bags a little tighter. My childish naïveté immediately created a picture of the figures on the streets: alcoholics, addicted to drugs, lazy, bad people.
It was not until years later that the image of the unhoused that had been painted in my head began to deteriorate. I was doing a presentation on the #MeToo project in 7th grade when I stumbled upon the stories of the homeless women who ended up on the streets after years of abuse. Reading more into these powerful and beautiful women’s lives, I started to realize that they were not the dangerous threats I had always assumed them to be. They were people with stories worth telling, and they were people who deserved opportunities at a better life. Intrigued by their lives, I dug further into the stories of individuals on the streets, and came to find that my assumptions about them were motivated by a long standing societal stigma surrounding the issue. And although I no longer carry these prejudices, these terrible stigmas still subconsciously exist in the minds of many. Those who consider the man sitting on the corner, the woman holding a sign on that bench, and the rows of people lining the streets of metropolitan cities to be mere hindrances to the aesthetics and safety of a city, a jab at the real estate value, a bad review online. They have chosen to see them as their idea of the homeless, and not a human with a story, and a life worth living to their fullest potential. Not only have I come to better understand homelessness as an issue, I have also come to realize that this stigma surrounding homelessness is what prevents the existence of better resources for them. I want to break down this stigma by telling the stories of the individuals who call the streets their home.
Welcome to Stories of the Streets.
