Extended Interview:

I'm actually pretty excited that we got asked to do this, cause some feel like I'm worthy enough to be going through this and being able to accept all of this stuff, because I was a turd, to be nicely put. Changed everything around and in a short amount of time. It still feels surreal, but it also feels like too good to be true.

There we go. I don't deserve this, even though I do deserve this because we worked our butt off of it. But it's still hard to fathom that this is actually happening. We're graduating from outsiders, and we're we've graduated a community core. We've it's just one more stepping stone in the long journey of life. But it's still surreal sitting in the leasing office, filling out the tax paperwork and then signing our lives away as he likes to put on our lease.

That's when it became real. Then he's moving in yesterday for kung fu and everything in LA, just waiting to get furniture and everything. We got our we got a brand new bed for get out and take a hot bath, soak my back, the first bath. And how long since our last apartment back in 2024. For me, I was born for an organ.

Four days after I was born. I was raised here and washed in the, from Vancouver to within Cougar area. And I kind of reached the smart, graduated high school when I was 14. I graduated with a diploma. I went to Job Corps. I went to culinary school. I really ain't got nothing to show for all the conversations that I have had in life, but I don't know, I'm told I'm a double.

I'm a double edged sword because I'm both smart and street smart, because I've been out on the streets many times. It was all due to the choices that I made in my life, and, I didn't make some very good choices. So I raised my daughter the first six and a half years of her life by myself as a single father in recovery, and when I lost custody of her and called the state of Washington on myself, had agreed to open adoption in 2014, I lost all three things.

I lost my daughter to the state of Washington. I lost my grandfather, he who's my hero in life, and she gave birth to stillborn twins. So I really haven't been the same since then. And then I relapsing and kind of it screwed me up mentally. So I'd go I'd go through that throughout life, have visitations with my daughter, all this stuff.

But when they told me I wasn't getting my daughter back, I kind of I kind of really lost it. I kicked the doors out of the children's services up in White Salmon or whatever. Washington, stuff like that. Never saw my daughter again. And after 11.5 years and not seen her, I got to reunite with her in 2024. And, her parents brought her down from South Carolina.

They were even faster than she wanted to find me after she turned 18. Once the state was a state of Washington was out of the picture. They helped her find me over Facebook, and I don't know how to carry on a conversation with her. I do the best I can because I don't want to offend her. I don't know what to say to her, but I just I reassure her that I want a relationship with her and I.

I just don't know what to say to her. So I at least try every morning and texture and tell her, ask her how she's doing. Our family up there in South Carolina, it's done through all this. I've been with this one right here for almost 14 years. We've been friends for over 31 years, and we're finally getting married on 26th of this month.

So right here at the Tiny Home community at 415 West. Okay. So when we very first met, it was in, oh boy, a recovery meeting, and I was with somebody else, and the somebody else wasn't really treating me like any relationship should be treated. And ignoring me and just no girl wants that. So he proceeded to tell my significant other at the time, if you don't start treating her better, some guy like me is going to come and take her away and treated the way she should be treated.

Well, a week goes by and I go up to here, up in LA center to meet his family, which, it was just at that point, casual ish. I met his family. I met now deceased older brother. But the very first place we met was in a AA meeting at the ERS Club in Portland. I'll feel that one.

Hell, not knowing where your next meal is, I know you have food stamps. Not knowing where your next meal is going to come from. And on top of that, having friends who you think are friends, but they're only really out to get what you have or what you, you know, don't have. But you you have, trust is very few and far between those really people that if you start out giving them trust and then something, someway, somehow it always gets broken.

You're amazing. Not wondering where I'm going to get close, not wondering, oh, am I going to be able to take a shower today? Clean up myself being a female after that crappy time of the month? I don't have to worry about that. No, I mean, since December 13th when we moved in here, God bless the heart team and outsiders in for allowing us to even be here.

Pretty much the whole heart team bent over backwards to get us in here because they knew of our suicide attempt. They knew of our entrances into Rainier Springs for mental health, and they knew of his mental health and physical health conditions as well as mine. They were flat out. They do not have any reason to be outdoors, but it took a lot.

I mean, being homeless took a major toll, but being here when we were here at 415 and now in our own apartment, we get to make the rules and our old and our new apartment, and I feel that 415 West was an integral part of creating stability and our lives when we had none. I'm very grateful and appreciative to outsiders in and every organization that we've worked with today that we the day we decided we would both get clean and we were with our recovery navigator on the 16th to November, and we want to inject ourselves into Rainier Springs over on Thanksgiving week.

And we both went in for I went in for six days. She was in for seven days, and we ended up staying on the street two more nights after we both got out of Rainier Springs. And then we got in a shelter, three outsiders in for two and two days later. We were here seven months ago today, and we've been clean and sober ever since.

I got a sponsor that I respect out here in the community. I want to do what he's doing. And if it wasn't for the hard team, outsiders in, just, people like community court and and, Seymour, I wouldn't be where I am today. And when I decided I was going to get clean and everything, the hard team told me that she could give me an interview for a job.

And if I was to get my head right and get clean, she kept her word. Because now I work for talking trash. I'm getting ready to become a driver, and I go around, clean the city parks and make it safe for the children to play in the parks again. And this all came from this all came back from back on the 16th.

I'll try it. I hung myself off the overpass on, fourth. And in 205 I literally hung myself. Tried to kill myself that day. November November 15th, two. It was the second time I tried and we went into the Rangers range. Honestly, I have these all my pockets before I went and did it. When I went to hang myself, for some reason, I was hanging there and I just heard a big old voice telling me that there was a friggin pocket knife in my back pocket.

And somehow there was. And I, right as I cut myself down, my buddy come underneath the bridge and drove me up this hill and friggin went, got her and everything. And then, within that same week, within a couple days, I tried to do it again. Somehow, mysteriously, my rope had a slits in it. So I film busted my tailbone.

Oh damn thing. Oh, hell, you who did that? But somebody put slices in my rope so I didn't even get to. But the first time I covered the circulation up to my brain for like, two minutes in the summer months. Clean. I'm learn how to, I just brought the men's, step nine of the 12 step program to my grandfather and my brother.

Learn how to deal with those emotions and mourn over them. Yeah. I just miss my grandpa. My brother, and I know, I know, I know, they're smiling down on the crowd right now, so I'm doing what I'm doing, and I'm helping others. And I got a good friend of mine here at 415. Come to find out, he's my little cousin.

And, he's now ten and silver just right behind me with the five months other people that come in and Court of Inspired leave that inspired to go to treatment. And they went, I just tell everybody nowadays that I pray for them and there's a better way of life. There's a solution to a different way. Oh, and they all says, don't ever, don't ever, don't ever bottle stuff.

Learn how to express your emotions. Because a real man can show emotions and feelings. You don't believe that. Just don't believe that old saying that man doesn't show. Emotions are filling through the sign of weakness. It's actually it's actually a sign of, of needing help in romance. Ask for help anywhere. Who are you? And what did you do with my husband?

No. I'm kidding. When I was in that dark place. Don't be scared to open up, because you never know when somebody. You, look up to might have gone through the exact same thing. I can say that for all certainty that that's why I chose the sponsor that I have is because a she's loud and obnoxious. She's also got a heart of gold, and she's been through a lot of the same exact trauma that I have.

And and they were always telling me, you got this. You're stronger than your problems. And a lot of their positive affirmations is what got me through as well as him. But we were both in the same situation. So it's kind of the blind leading the blind when you're in that situation. But when you have an outside source to help you, it doesn't make it so bleak.

But all it takes is you to want it. And not everyone out here wants to get the help. But what I can say from own personal experience, don't knock it till you tried it. Because look where we are right now. We're not homeless anymore. We have a car. We have a dog, which is mine that I absolutely adore.

Even though she's a bed hog. Being in those dark places, I always had an animal to like during my tears and listen because they don't talk back. And so it makes it kind of easier to open up, even if it is an animal, a hamster, guinea pig, frog, you name it. Something that you can open up to. Even a stuffed animal I am in had that those times where I didn't have an animal and I had stuffed toys and opening up just made it easier.

Like just don't bottle it up, don't do it because it takes a toll on your not only your mental health, but your physical health. And I seriously doubt my physical health would. It would be as bad as it is if I hadn't bottled up those emotions from the time I was four and a half till now, I don't think I'd be sick physically and mentally as I am, because stress takes a toll on the body, so does anxiety.

And when you've been diagnosed with those for as long as you can remember, proof's in the pudding. It takes a toll, I say. I have to say my work is very is was my mental health. I always kept a lot of secrets buried from my passion until I got those secrets out. Talking to somebody at least once every two weeks.

It was it just kept me alive. And so that was all helped in my drug addiction to methamphetamines and a whole lot of pride and ego and ego. I didn't like to ask for help, but today it's, I like the old saying that my grandfather, you say? Cause now don't get fed. So asking for help is better than bundling everything up and thinking that you're too prideful or too bunch of a man to ask for help.

You're only human. Just being, just asking for help can get you a with your life.