I’ve been stuck in my head for a while. Seeing the massive problems of mental illness, addiction, and Homelessness before me, I have become deflated and unmotivated to dig deeper. I’ve seen the pendulum swing from enabling to punitive measures with Congress’s bill that makes homelessness illegal in public places. The chips are stacked against us all. The impoverished are subject to broken, money guzzling, and indifferent systems that the rest of the working class pay for and know nothing about.
I think a lot about what it means to be human. Beyond our innate abilities, we have internal drivers that direct us in life to make various decisions. Survival is the most powerful human driver. Ambition pushes us to find ways to survive better and achieve higher levels of accomplishment, happiness, comfort, pleasure, or connection. This brings me to learned helplessness. What happens when a person has low ambition? The driver for survival takes the wheel, but stops there, because a person thinks and feels they cannot get beyond their current situation. This was the mentality I saw in a lot of the homeless addicts I worked with in Lawrence. It frightened me. Learned helplessness is difficult to overcome. I realize that as more people become homeless, as more people become addicted to drugs and alcohol, we will see a growing problem with no long term solutions besides punishment, which actually hurts those who feel hopeless even more.
I woke up at my girlfriend’s apartment around 7:00 a.m. She went to work around 9:00 a.m. and stayed at her apartment working on writing.
My girlfriend got out of work at 2:00 p.m. and she and I began driving to Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital in Cambridge where my Step Grandfather was being hospitalized for a collapsed lung. My Step Grandfather Don has been more of a Grandfather figure to me than both of my biological grandfathers. He married my father’s mother and would drive my grandmother to all the prisons I stayed at while I was incarcerated for drugs. My grandmother had a stroke, and Grampa Don would help her see me, even when he had to push her wheelchair into the visiting room. I will always appreciate this man, he held my grandmother’s hand until she took her last breath.
While driving to the hospital I got a group text from my aunt and uncles. My aunt said Grampa Don was doing better and they got his lung functioning again, so they put him under.
I decided to turn around and head back to my girlfriend’s apartment. We stopped at Augustas, a sub shop in Billerica and got some of their phenomenal chicken bites.
After dinner my girlfriend and I went to her apartment and finished watching the series From.