Buddies

I had an email exchange today with someone inquiring about how one might find "sane, clean and sober" homeless "buddies" for purposes of safety. This is part of what I said in reply:
I am a woman and I am on the street with my two adult sons. So, I have firsthand experience with the fact that there is safety in numbers, but I have never had to try to arrange such connections and women face special challenges in that regard. They seem to sometimes hook up with a guy -- basically, getting a boyfriend as a form of protection from other homeless men, as far as I can tell. Homeless men seem to sometimes buddy up, but I have no idea how that occurs.

I have never had a really useful, in depth conversation in person with another homeless person. I do have homeless friends online who occasionally exchange emails with me and that has been a completely different experience. So my thought is it might be better to try to connect online.

The homeless friends I have are people I met through online forums, so we have a social connection unrelated to our current lack of housing. It has been my observation in life that people bonding over having the same dire problem in life tend to not be very useful to each other.

The only exception is if they have at least two things in common: Their dire problem and a desire to solve it. This is why support groups are sometimes useful.

However, I have been a part of a number of support groups over the years and they tend to be a lot of drama. They are often more a place for whining than for problem-solving.

I personally have a history of moving the focus away from whining about how we all have pitiful lives and unsolvable problems "and someone please pray for me" -- aka give up, there is no real hope, it would take a miracle to fix this -- and towards sharing useful tips and information. But then that makes me the focus of a lot of ire because not everyone wants to work on solving their problems (or people get jealous because that makes me too well liked or whatever). Many people want pity and want to be excused from making an effort. That doesn't fly with me and that fact attracts a lot of hostility.

So, I am not currently on any support groups -- or, at least, I am not an active participant on any. I nominally still have a membership in at least one health group.

I will suggest that if you need some kind of supportive social network and are homeless, you try to find some way to reach out to people based primarily on something other than your current lack of housing. The internet is completely awesome for doing this! No one online has to know you are homeless unless you tell them.

So, join an online forum. It doesn't matter what the topic is, as long as you are genuinely interested. Make friends based on "We both like this genre of fiction" or "We both are into video games" or pretty much anything else, no matter how trivial.

I have been really open online about my lack of housing. This has caused me a lot of friction at times, but it also has changed the conversation in some places and made it a bit easier for other people to be open about "I am homeless and I need help with yadda."

So, you do not necessarily need to hide the fact that you are homeless, but when that is all anyone knows about you, it is hard to have a constructive conversation that leads to positive stuff. If, instead, they know you have x amount of education and grew up in y place and you have a love of (hobby), that is much easier for other people to relate to and it is much easier to base a friendship on.

Real friendships can lead to really good things. In contrast, people pretending to try to be nice out of pity tends to be far less constructive.