Rising from Homelessness: Journey Home to Self

This piece describes a woman’s journey from homelessness to a room of one’s own. It shows the process of negotiating obstacles on the path to shelter created by policy practices that punish and prevaricate rather than nurture and protect.

My aim for this piece is to flip the patriarchal narrative from “she is homeless because she made bad decisions” to “she is strong and brave and persistent in seeking secure housing for herself”. 

The questions I was driven by were: “How does each woman find the rest she needs, in such a threatening and hostile situation? When she lays her head down each night, what gives her the sense of being able to keep going for one more day?”