Agency: In economics, psychology, social cybernetics, sociology and philosophy, agency is the capacity of an actor (a person or other entity, human or any living being in general, or soul-consciousness in religion) to act in any given environment.
Sense of Agency: The "sense of agency" (SA) (or sense of control) refers to the subjective awareness that one is initiating, executing, and controlling one's own volitional actions in the world.
I have wanted to write about this for a very long time and did not know how to approach the subject. It probably seems very philosophical and abstract to many, but, to my mind, it is very much a practical matter with concrete consequences.
Now, before I begin talking about choices I have made about my life, please understand that I am not judging you for your choices. If you have made different choices, perhaps that was a mistake or perhaps your circumstances are sufficiently different from mine that it was the right choice for you to make at that time, even if you weren't entirely happy with the outcome. Sometimes, life just doesn't give us any good options and you have to choose the lesser evil.
Part of the reason I have never entered the shelter system is because so many organizations trying to help the homeless do so in a way that undercuts your agency. In other words, they limit your ability to make choices.
This is often done with the best of intentions. For example, many programs are designed to help homeless individuals who are also alcoholics or addicts. So one of the conditions they put upon you is that you need to stop drinking and drugging.
It is their money and their program and they are entitled to put conditions upon participants. Sometimes, placing conditions upon someone that you are offering assistance is fairly reasonable.
But the problem here is that I do not believe that people drink or do drugs due to a failure of self discipline. I believe people drink and do drugs primarily as a means to self medicate what are very often unidentified medical problems. See, for example, this article: Diseases of the Mind (2003)
I do not drink or take drugs. So I am not saying that this particular condition impacts me directly. But I do have a really serious medical condition and I would have died if I had not taken things into my own hands and done my best to retain control over my life while the world around me tried to tell me what to do.
So I am very sympathetic to the fact that most organizations don't really know how to get you clean and sober and if you are drinking or drugging to self medicate for an undiagnosed health issue, they are actively interfering with your ability to protect yourself from worse things. At the same time, they will vilify you for trying to self medicate. This goes really bad places and they usually don't actually know how to fix the underlying problem that you are self-medicating.
It is no wonder to me that many shelter programs appear to be a revolving door that have the same people go through them again and again without ever genuinely getting their lives together. The fact that they fundamentally vilify poor people and assume them to be making stupid choices and feel that the only way to help these supposedly stupid people is to "protect them from themselves" is a crux of the problem.
I think this is a very bad model for trying to help people and I do not want help given to me under that model. It is very often counterproductive. At best, it is of limited utility and you need to leave it behind as soon as you can arrange another option that is less crappy.
The other thing I have so far not accepted is offers of a free place to stay from other people. In some cases, these were online friends who clearly meant well. In other cases, they were men who were looking to shack up with me.
Due to my medical situation, I need an unusually high degree of control over my environment. I react really badly to a variety of chemicals, allergens and so forth. I am really sensitive to such things. Getting healthier has been a long, hard battle. It would not be hard for someone to completely unintentionally undo a lot of the progress I have made, and for that to occur in a relatively short period of time.
So, since I do have alimony and I do make some money doing freelance work online, I feel I am better off trying to work it out myself and not accepting such an offer, even when it is well intended but the housing is just such that it does not meet my needs.
But especially in cases where it is clearly a man looking to prey upon a vulnerable woman, no, I do not want to move in with such a man. There are just too many ways that someone can entrap you and cut you off once you do move in with them. Additionally, predatory people are often very talented at arranging that quietly such that you aren't sure they are really doing this on purpose.
Then you talk about wanting to leave and they talk up how that makes no sense, you are too sick, etc. And if you really are sick, it can be very hard to stand up for yourself and very hard to feel clear that you are being played. Meanwhile, they continue to undermine your health in ways that are nearly impossible to track down and utterly impossible to prove to other people.
Don't get me wrong, it isn't that I wouldn't accept an offer of housing or even an offer of living with a man. But it would have to occur in a way that I felt didn't threaten my health and welfare and didn't undermine my personal agency -- which is both my right and real world ability to make choices for myself.
The odds are long against that happening. So, in the mean time, I will continue to try to solve it myself.
I am writing this on a particularly crappy day. Just yesterday I told a so-called friend to stop writing me who was apparently a man looking to prey upon a vulnerable woman. His closing paragraph of his hopefully last email to me made it clear that he feels his current problems are my fault for failing to shack up with him last year. This was a man who recently had been talking about needing money laundered and kind of hinting at the idea that he might "help me out" by giving me some of it.
No thanks. I don't want to have such a gift.
Additionally, yesterday, I checked my mail and one of my creditors has tracked me down. I owe them nearly $10,000 and they say if I will cut them a check for more than $4000, they will forgive the rest of it.
Oh, 'tis to laugh. I simply do not have that kind of money and cannot promptly come up with it.
Today, I went and repaid a Payday loan I had taken out to get through the end of last month. This leaves me short for this money. My finances are dire enough that I am wondering if I need to look up local soup kitchens and food pantries and return to that routine for a bit -- in part because, as noted in my last post, my laptop has died, my tablet is crippled and dying and this interferes with my ability to earn money.
On the other hand, my health has improved enough that when I do have a good day, I do more paid work than I have ever done before. It is at a point that if I could have about 3.5 good days a week, I could make enough to keep us fed for a week.
Which means I have more capacity to rise to the occasion than I have had previously. This capacity is very hard won, both in terms of working to improve my health and in terms of working to improve my earning ability under very difficult circumstances.
The reason I am telling you of my current woes is because I want to make it clear that I am firmly convinced that my personal agency matters. This is not just my opinion on a good day when things are going well and would disappear if I were in a real pickle.
This is my opinion on a crappy day when just about everything seems to be going wrong. When it seems like it would be hard for things to get any worse than they are today. If I were going to cave, this would be a good time to do so.
If life has it in for me, I may not be able to overcome these obstacles. I am only one person. The road needs to rise up and meet me halfway. If you just do not have opportunity and some support, you simply cannot succeed, no matter how brilliant or virtuous you are.
But I would rather die trying than to throw in the towel and agree to be some man's bitch or some homeless shelter's bitch. To my mind, that is a slow suicide. If I were going to commit suicide, I would want it to be quick and painless.
I will add that one reason I continue to blog is in hopes that this website serves as support for needy people that does not interfere with their personal agency, that, in fact, supports their ability to choose and helps them to grow it.
I am well aware that even the best intentioned people can offer you support that is well-meaning, but ultimately counterproductive. My hope is that this is a uniquely useful resource because:
- I have spent more than 4.5 years on the street, so I am speaking from firsthand experience. Hopefully, that means that my thoughts are pragmatic and informed. My experiences will be different from yours, so you may need to modify what I have done, but hopefully I am not simply talking out my ass.
- This website is not a charity. It has ads and a tip jar on it. I don't make a lot of money this way, but I do make some money. For me, this is a business. I don't need you to remain a charity case for me to have a purpose.
You should always be leery of anyone treating you like a "charity case." Seeing other people that way tends to be self-fulfilling prophesy. It amounts to other people hanging their shit on you and needing you to fail and remain a loser so they can feel good about themselves.
If at all humanly possible, I have found it is best to take an attitude of "Fuck that noise" when faced with such treatment.
That does not mean I do not accept help from kind strangers. I do accept help at times. But I do my best to avoid letting them hang their shit on me and thereby make my life worse and my problems harder to solve.