Extended Interview:

[Justin:]

Hi, my name is Justin Prince. This is my mother, Donna, and my father, Randy.

Let's see. A little bit about myself and where I'm from…

I'm from Washington. I grew up mostly in the Tacoma area and down here in Vancouver. I've done many different jobs over the years. I've done a couple of trades and done a few different things. I started a dispensary in Tacoma back in 2009. That got shut down in 2011. And shortly thereafter is when my decline from adulting kind of began.

I ended up becoming homeless in a gradual kind of unraveling. And it's been a long, difficult process. About the first time in 10 or 11 years, I'm finally feeling like I can get back to catching up where I left off, to get caught up with my art projects and all the things that I prefer to be doing, instead of being homeless and having to deal with all of that wonderful stress every day. 

About the art projects, I do a lot of woodwork and sculpture and things like that. As far as working on pieces of wood, I prefer to be drawn to pieces that Beavers have already worked on and either blown out from their dams or, you know, just pieces that they've left behind. It adds a more relatable connection for me for some reason, having that tangible, visible, workings that something gnawed on this and they figured it out. The engineering that they put into pieces, it's phenomenal. I've got a piece over here that's about 11 feet long and it's got five different notches cut in it. And a beaver dragged that thing around! It's stunning to me what they can do.

How would I describe myself?

I try to be a person that is helpful to others, especially when they're in need. It's hard to maintain that kind of an attitude going through a lot of the things that I've been through because you start feeling a little dehumanized. Well, I did at least.

I feel a little dehumanized when you realize that people are looking at you differently, if you walk into a store with a backpack or something like that, it's an immediate shift in their demeanor and in their attitude towards you completely. It was hard to balance that and be positive and not become cynical and jaded. There's a lot of bitterness on both sides of it and it doesn't do anybody in good. It became important to me more and more as time went on to maintain that connection to trying to stay positive, trying to keep helping people. It's not like you're going to affect grand change in everybody that you come across, but at least being willing to give a hand when it actually is needed. That's a big difference.

What was life like before experiencing homelessness?

I did a really good job at adulting for a very long time. I've been married twice. I have raised stepkids from diapers to graduation. I've had businesses. I've been a tradesman, done a pretty broad spectrum of things and helped out a lot in my communities. I just tried to be as engaged as I could, and then finally had a circumstance where the blow that had dealt me was a little bit more than I had resources to bounce back from. And it didn't really matter what I kept trying to pivot to, there just wasn't anything available.

I still feel kind of like I'm flailing a lot. I don't really feel like I've connected back with, you know, the person that I want to be or who I was. But I can definitely tell that, over the course of the last year, being at the safe stay… It helped a lot to remake a lot of those connections and start feeling like an adult again.

It's really easy to forget about that. You know, you're having to worry about setting up a campsite every night. Or, are the cops coming by? Or, is someone going to drive through my tent at three o'clock in the morning? I've come really close to having that happen actually, a couple of places that I've been. I've had cars come like feet away from where I was staying and it really drives it home (haha) just how easily and quickly, whatever your plans are, are just gone. If somebody gets it in their head, they just don't like you because of your situation. So you're kind of a non-entity to them. You're not personalized to them. So it's really easy for them to treat you as less than.

Yeah, I'm not wanting to continue to explore that end of things. I'd like to get back to being a person.

What were some challenges that I faced during this time?

Trying to find a way to balance the medical needs that I've got with the challenges of being homeless, trying to make appointments, trying to keep a phone charged enough to be able to be in contact with people that you needed to. Transportation issues, food uncertainty, just the gamut of problems that people can have is what you run into. It taught me a lot about the absolute lack of survival skills that the majority

of the people just don't have. I was very, very happy that I've been in situations over the course of my life that I actually had, you know, enough basic tools to kind of work my way through it. But even with what I felt was a better skill set, there's still a lot of things that I was sorely lacking. And there's just… there's no manual for it. You know? There's no instruction book.

Nobody's really trying to get out there and really, truly help. I've seen what Clark County does, I've seen what Tacoma does, I've seen up and down the I-5 in Washington, and Portland, and random places in Oregon with different levels of outreach that are available. The help that they offer is very frequently not what people actually need or could use. It's the middle of winter and they hand you a tent that wouldn't be suitable in spring, you know? The doors don't even zip all the way up. Like, why are you spending resources on things that are the absolute wrong tools for helping someone? If you're going to help somebody, help them. And it would be nice if there was some way to-… I mean that's the other part of the problem.

It's not like you can get a consensus on the homeless as a monolithic group of people, because they all have different needs. And if they don't know what they would actually need to survive sufficiently, they're not going to be able to ask for the right things. It's a very complicated problem and every time you answer a question, you ask nine more.

It's difficult all around, but I think people tend to forget that it's hardest on the people that are actually going through it.

Day to day life when I was homeless was challenging to say the least.

Trying to get up as early as you can, (hopefully you got some sleep), figure out what you're going to do for breakfast. You don't have a refrigerator. If you're using SNAP benefits, you can't get warm food with it, so you've got to find things and then find a way to cook it or find a microwave to prepare it in.

It's constant improvisation and it's constant stress of the nagging list of things that you know you need to do, but you're not getting done, that you don't have the resources available to take care of. Just a constant catch-up game.

I always felt behind, and I very rarely was ever able to just sit and relax. That's a very rare moment that you can find.nI did manage to have situations where that just kind of happened, but it's like 3 o'clock in the morning. I'm sitting with a friend and we're watching ducks swim across a pond. Little things like that would happen along the way. You kind of learn to grab onto those. The rest of it becomes routine, but that doesn't make it easier.

One thing that was consistent amongst every homeless community that I came across…

There's a phrase that comes up, nine times out of ten within the first three to five minutes of talking with anybody new. They'll be starting to tell a story, they'll get to a certain point and they'll be like, “Eh, long story short…” and it's the only consistent thing across every homeless group that I ever encountered. And I found that really curious and, trying to figure out what the motivation was behind that, I realized a lot of people aren't listening anyway.

A lot of people, they've got a worse story, or a better story, or it's a different story, but everybody's got their own s— to deal with. And it doesn't matter. I mean, the stories just don't matter. It's all just, “Yeah, life kind of kicked me in the teeth and there you go.” So everybody kind of self-sensors… And it's strange that that's the specific thing that is the commonality.

Yeah, actually, I did have a moment of hope…

The night that I happened to be walking by 415 [Vancouver’s ‘415 West’ Safe Stay Community]. A friend of mine that I had met earlier that night was telling me about that place and roughly where it was and what they were trying to do there versus a lot of the other shelters that I'd studiously avoided. I didn't want to have anything to do with a mass collective shelter where it was like an open sleeping area, between the untreated mental health issues that you find in a place like that, or somebody being on an upswing or a down swing from whatever drugs that they happen to be on or wishing that they were on. You've got violence issues, you got theft issues, you've got disease and vermin and bedbugs and god knows what else it was. I just didn't want to have anything to do with any of those kinds of things so I just kept camping out. After I was talking with my friend, I was like, “Well that's something to at least look into.”

So I’m walking… back to where I was camping, and just happened by complete flute to walk past the fence. And it clicked, “Oh, this is what she was talking about!”

It went over and rang the doorbell, ended up speaking with one of the graveyard shift staff members and he was actually really, really, amazingly helpful. I kind of sat and talked with him for a good 20 minutes, about the different parts of the application. Yeah, so that was my first exposure to Outsiders Inn on a personal level like that.

It actually worked out really well. After I got accepted, that night shift staff member ended up being one of the people that I connected with the most out there. Because I'm a real bad insomniac, that being the time that I tend to be up anyway, we spend a lot of time talking. He's a very good guy. He made a huge difference in that entire experience.

And he was a good focal point for the things that are trying to be done on the supply side of that help versus what we look for coming off the streets. The fact that everybody that works within that organization has been in our situation, it makes it exceptionally different. As opposed to talking to somebody who has, like, strictly a university education outlook on it. There's ways that you're going to relate to those people that have been where you are. But if they haven't had those shared experiences of being out, and being cold, and being wet, and there's no door that is open to you. If you haven't felt that kind of despair at some point in your life, you cannot relate to someone else who is going through that, and they're going to be able to tell, and you're going to be able to tell, and… I found, for myself, it would have caused me to hold back, or want to try and be deceptive to some degree, or manipulate the situation, you know, finesse it to work out the way that I needed it to or wanted to because, “Well, obviously this person doesn't know me. They don't know anything about my situation. So there's no… obligation to play by whatever the rules are.”

Fortunately, being there, that wasn't the case at all. I found that a lot of the residents there, we all felt the same way. We had a lot of conversations about that. And it was nice to hear the consistency of being able to relate to it for the same reasons.

Finding the sense of community within that. That was helpful.

Once I got into 415, the main thing that changed was just being able to stop and breathe without having to be on alert all the time. And that alone… I didn't realize how stressful that was until it wasn't there anymore. 

We all came to that same conclusion. Feeling like, “Okay, I need to be freaking out about something. Something's wrong here,” but it wasn't. It's just letting your body kind of reaclimate to getting consistent sleep and having a door that you can shut behind you. Those changes towards becoming a person again. It's kind of a conglomeration of the staff that was there, acting as a good support network for helping you take care of the things that people that are homeless tend to put off for a long time. You know? Like getting your dental work taken care of, getting medical checkups done, if you need help with substance disorders, things like that, they can get you in. They're very good at helping you to get things scheduled when you have issues trying to navigate through all the bureaucracies and all the different agencies that you have to work with. It's almost overwhelming.

For myself, it's like, because of my ADD and the severity of it, if I'm making an appointment and it's not going to happen in the next few days, it might as well just never have even been made because I'm not going to make it. There's a million things that are going to come up between now and then that are either going to derail that, or I'll be in a totally different part of the state, or there was always something that would come up that would keep me from being able to make that kind of self-help progression, just appointments, let alone actually connecting with the right kind of help in the right way. They would remind you when you had an appointment, they'd make sure you got up on time. They could help you schedule a ride. They just went out of their way to help as much as they could. You still had to get up and do it and take care of it, so it wasn't like you're completely helpless within the fact.

For me, it was the exact kind of help that I needed at the right time.

It doesn't matter where you're at or what kind of a scenario you're in. Somebody who's got whatever issues they've got, those don't go away. Just because you're going to a safe place doesn't mean you're going to continue to make safe choices, or that you would even fully latch on to that in the first place.

What am I most proud of?

Being able to have gone through it. I needed the help that they offered. And I managed to find a way to get myself into it and manage to stay consistent from the beginning, trying to just stay on top of things and not do what I found that I tend to do in a lot of situations where… If it takes longer than my brain thinks it should, it's really easy for me to just check out of whatever and go back into the chaos of just being on my own and all that kind of nonsense.

It was the right spot, the right time, and for whatever reason it meant enough to find a way to actually stay focused on what I need to do. So I'm very grateful for that.

My hopes and goals for the future…

I'm actively looking forward to being able to pick up where I left off with a lot of my artistic projects. I've been doing this stuff for decades. But being out on the streets, I got a lot of strange looks because I'd be walking down the street and I'm carving on pieces of wood. People see that driving by and they can't really figure it out.

It never really went away, but it's hard to do those things and go through all this stuff. It's like trying to sand something and keep it pristine when you don't have space to do it or to set anything down, or access to all the bits and pieces of the processes at any one point in time. You can't just drag that stuff around. So being where I'm at now is going to be really nice. I've been unpacking stuff that I haven’t seen in a long time. And yeah, I'm very excited.

A lot of people that don't have any homeless experience in their own lives don't understand…

How hard it is for someone in that situation to reach out.

It's not a behavior that's rewarded very frequently, because we're used to being told no, or being told there's not anymore, or there's not this or that or the other, you can't be here, you need to get, you know?

It's always elsewhere, and being put off, and being pushed away.

If you have someone in your family or your life who has kind of dropped out, and you're not necessarily hearing about their problems or whatever, but you're aware of that going on… Be persistent about trying to reach out to people. Anybody that you've considered an acquaintance, a friend, if you care about them enough to consider that an interpersonal relationship that you would like to continue, do what you can. You don't have to go out of your way and sneak behind people's backs to help them, but just… try. You know?

Be there and try.

What life looks like today?

Today looks pretty good. Wake up, I've got a sense of the things that I need to take care of and do, and it doesn't necessarily mean I'm going to get them all done. But I can at least look forward to taking care of what I need to for my life. I don't have to worry so much about trying to accommodate a bunch of other people or not feeling like my choices or my wishes are a priority. It's like, I know they are, because I'm the only one that I gotta take care of.

It's been interesting to get back into that kind of mindset where I've got a pretty positive outlook overall. I get to have that reinforcement loop of, “This is something that I feel is important, I can take care of it, it gets done.”

It's a nice little soothing loop.

[Randy:]

In fact, he's making me a cane because he thinks I walk funny.

I was trying to work it in the right hand, and he's going, “Dad, aren't you left-handed?”

And I'm going, [switch hands] “Duh.”

So it's custom! [To Justin], Thank you.

I'm Randy, I’m Justin's dad and have been forever.

We are glad for the places that he's come and the places that fashioned his future from the past. We're proud of Justin, and from where he's come. I think he's appreciative of this place, the people that have helped him, the motivations that they bring. My gosh, they're incredible. These people are incredible. Like Justin's talking about, they reach out to people that have no one else to reach out for them.

Now, these people that are homeless are not there because they want to be. I don't believe that. They've been thrown into a stirring pot and we, as the public, simply can't elicit to that. We can't understand that.

See, we’re under the mindset, “You can do something, do something, and get out of where you're at.” They can't, if they've been beat down so badly that they have nothing left.

We're grateful for those who have come alongside and aided, helped, encouraged, blessed, motivated, and given of themselves to those who need. Some just need to be educated in the systems that there is somebody there that loves them. There is somebody there that can help them. Because you can't do this. Aide. If you don't love. You can't do it. It's too hard.

So I'm grateful for those people.

I'm thankful for Justin, who is coming out of where he was and is looking towards a future and a life. We're excited about that and we thank everybody that adds to that. I watched Justin grow. And I'm going, “Wow. He has a goal in mind and, fortunately for him, it's working.

[Donna:]

So often when you talk about somebody homeless to someone in our own situation they're like, “Oh well he should go to a drug rehab.”

And I’d say, “No, he's not having drug problems, he's having a homelessness problem.”

But they can't separate it. So a lot of it is the identification of the public. There's this other group of people that we haven't connected with, and who's helping them? Well, you are helping them, and we are so thankful.

Often you want to just jump in there and save somebody. That's basically who I've always been, you know, “Okay, come home. Do this. We'll fix it, we'll make it help.” But he has to stand up on his own and say, “I'm going to do this. This will be my home.”

We are so thankful for how things have come to pass that he's got his medical, straightened around, and he's able to move his things and open the boxes again and say, this is my life. I'm going to hold on to what I can. We're so thankful for that. And we're impressed. We're glad that we could be here today with him to hear the things he wants to share with others.

Remembering those times that we didn't get to see him…

One thing I showed Justin one day, he’d said to me, “Well, I didn't think you wanted to connect. You know, I just felt alone.”

I showed him my phone and there's like 20 different phone numbers, and a date next to each one. And I said, “Justin, I tried always to connect with you and find you and keep you, in my ability to do that as best I could.”

He was surprised by that because he didn't realize that there is somebody reaching out. And like he was saying, perhaps if there's someone that you know, that might be all they need is that you send him a text once in a while. Let them know that you know who they are. And maybe they can call you back on that number or a different one.

So we're thankful for the programs that have been allowed this day to come. Were I could call Justin this morning (and he answered!) and I can say, “Justin, I'm at your door!”

And he goes, “Oh, okay!”

And it was like-...

[Randy:] It's like heaven on earth! Seriously.

[Donna:] To even know that. That I can know where he's at and that he's safe and okay.

[Randy:] What kept the hope alive?

Well, we felt hopeless too, because you have somebody that won't reach back. And so my wife, she was incredible. Always just trying to find out, “What he's doing, where's he at, is he safe?” And let me tell you what… more times than anybody could know, this girl went to bed crying because she didn't know if her son was alive. And if he was, why wasn't he reaching out?... And we spent a long time doing that.

So, if there's anybody out there that is in this situation that Justin was, reach out to your parents.

God, give them a break. You know, we're all not very nice people. But we're parents.

[Donna:] Everybody has their own situation and they're trying to make life the best they can. You know, if you have a car, at least you have a car. There were several years that Justin was sleeping in a car. So, I had to stand back and say, “Okay he's- he has shelter… Okay.” It wasn't what I wanted. It wasn't good enough. It wasn't easy. And you don't know where to stand with that. So you have to learn what you can and can't do.

Then that was taken away.

And so now he only had a tree, and then they were kicking them out of the trees! The police were coming, and they were bringing the bulldozers and scooping up their tents and throwing down rocks and boulders. So they wouldn't put their tents up back there, to be out of the rain in the winter of the Northwest.

[Randy:] These tents represented everything that they had.

They may not have had a lot, but that was everything they had.

[Donna:] So that was their life… But what can I do?

So, Amazon has a storage unit thing. What do you call it? It's a delivery unit. And you can find one that's near where they are, and you send what you can to them in that manner. I’ve sent my son tarps, long underwear, and gloves.

[Randy:] You know, one thing was really interesting for me… My reality check when [O.I. Housing Retention Staff] brought him sheets and a curtain for his shower. He was so excited! “I have a new bed and new sheets and a new pillow all at the same time!” Yeah. He was so happy. That was one of those a-ha moments.

[Donna:] We're just very thankful for all the help and the programs that they've got going on that are giving that help to those that need it and can reach out for it.

[Randy:] The truth most people don't realize is that we are so close to being homeless, those who are prospering now… You cross the line… thin line.

[Donna:] It can happen.