Full Interview:

My name is Shawn Kingsbury. I'm a staff member here at Outsiders Inn and have been for about three and a half years. I'm from Vancouver, Washington, born and raised. I'm very energetic, I have firm boundaries, which I've learned the hard way, but I also have a lot of empathy and compassion. Before homelessness, I started down a pretty troubled path at age 13 and it just kept going. I married at 20 and moved up to Ariel, Washington, where I raised my kids and took in a lot of my nieces and nephews because their home life wasn't so good. I used to have a landscaping business, as gardening and construction are my passion, but now it's my therapy. If I’ve got a pile of dirt and plants, I'm happy. I lived on Lake Merwin from the end of 1980 until 1998, then moved back into town. After my kids grew up and moved out, I just picked up where I left off before I became a mom. I fell into addiction and crime. My counselor said it was empty nest syndrome. I thought I could fill it up with darkness, and then suddenly I was homeless. It was the wrong path. I think I went down that path because I suffered a lot of loss, a lot of deaths, suicides, and a divorce. I went really hard for about six years and got in a lot of trouble. But I decided I needed change. On September 17th, 2006, I stopped everything, the drug use, the crime, and it’s now my clean date. 

I’m coming up on 20 years clean and sober. In order to stay clean, I needed a lot of support and accountability. I moved into a faith-based women’s home and became a housing manager there, helping others through their needs and offering peer support. I did that for about three years. After that, I joined the advisory board and started working with Lifeline, doing all the interviews to find the best fit for the house. I did that for many years. Then I moved up to Olympia and started doing private end-of-life care for four different people. Eventually, I decided I needed to get back to Vancouver to support people like me in getting their lives back. It was one extreme to the other. I applied for Outsiders Inn and I was the squeakiest wheel. I bugged them and bugged them until finally they hired me. My start date at St. Paul was December 8, 2021, and I was just hooked. I wouldn’t do anything else. It’s kept me sober, it’s kept me very happy, and I think it’s the first job where I don’t wake up thinking, “ehh, I’ve got to go to work.” I’m like a little kid that jumps out of bed at 5 a.m. I’m kind of an oddball. 

Getting locked up so many times, I would come out and lose my house and everything in it because I’d been gone so long. So I had to start over multiple times. In fact, I got so used to getting locked up, losing everything, and starting over that it wasn’t a big deal anymore. Now I travel lightly. I’m a minimalist. It’s hard for me to put roots down. I don’t keep a whole bunch of stuff. I feel like I’ve got to let go of that and put roots down, but I haven’t been able to. If someone told me I had to move, I could put everything I own on a table. Life while homeless was a lot of couch surfing and staying up all night. I didn’t care about anybody. Obviously, I didn’t care about myself, yet addiction is very selfish. It was miserable. All the people around you aren’t really your friends. I was very hard-hearted, I would tell people, “You are not my friend.” I was a very mean, horrible person. There were two kinds of people I would blatantly lie to, my family, because I couldn’t tell them I was using drugs, and the law, you know, authority. I had a lot, but I had a lot of loss, so I hardened my heart so it wouldn’t bother me. 

After getting locked up so many times, I went into mental health court co-occurring addiction, which is mental health and substance use disorder together. I had a counselor from Columbia River Mental Health who supported me, but I was never honest with them. I never gave it a chance to work because I was still using. If I had wanted support, I could have maybe gotten it from my family or my case manager. I ended up going into drug court after they finally told me, “You’re done. You’re going to prison for five years.” That was because I had gotten some really bad charges. In court, I was very rude to the judge, so she made me sit in there for eight months to think about what I was going to do. I begged to get into a program called drug court because once you get in, they release you, but you can’t mess up. It’s a very strict program but I ended up liking it. I had more support than anybody could imagine there. They wanted me to join their team and work at Lifeline. Ironically, it flipped, when I became a manager of the women’s house, Lifeline wanted me to work for them. I would go in and interview women who would be a good fit. 

Things started to change for me when I got employment. I got people that trusted me, I was able to buy my own vehicle, and start making rent payments on my own. What helped me start moving forward was the counseling I was getting. I had to have three sponsors, because one was not enough for me. One of them is a very big person in this community and has been for 35 years. She was very hard and very strict because she knew I needed it. She really made an impact on my life. She had been down the same path, so she knew. I also have a really good support team. I mean, not only does it support me with my employment, but also with my mental health, when I make a wrong decision, because I can do all of the above in about two seconds. But I can call and tell on myself, and they'll walk me through it. Outsiders Inn understands my ADHD and anxiety. When I'm starting to spin, I can call them anytime. At the Lifeline, I used to go in every Sunday to teach coping skills and relapse prevention. I told them all, “The only thing you have to change in recovery is everything, people, places, and things,” and it works, if you want it to. If you're not ready, it's not going to work because you don't want it. You can tell someone, “Look, you got all this support here,” but the main thing you got to ask them is, “Do you want it? Are you ready? Are you ready for change?” We have that on our application here at Outsiders Inn, and everybody says yes, but you better really want it. The impact they have is the same vision I think a lot of us have: how can we support people? They're thinking of their employees as well as the people that we work with, and I like that. 

There's something nobody knows about me: I took karate for years and became a second-degree black belt in Taekwondo. It was so much fun, if you're young, grab it and go. I never had to use it here, but there were a couple times, in my defense, when I was using and just didn't care. There were even moments I wanted to see if it really worked. In karate, when you're breaking boards, you don't look at the board when you're about to kick or hit it. If you aim just for the board, your brain and your eyes will stop you there. You're trained over years to get as close as you can with full impact and stop. But when you're testing or in tournaments, you have to look past the board, otherwise, you won’t break it. Recovery is kind of like Taekwondo. You either stop hard with all that momentum behind you, or you go all the way through. It can go both ways. You can go all the way through with recovery, or with drug use and poor choices, you’re going to go all the way through. But then, what’s the end result? That’s why some things can’t be stopped suddenly, and that’s where harm reduction comes in.