The good thing about this project has always been what I call ‘VIVE LA DIFFERENCE’. It gives us a platform to freely express ourselves. To report on issues from the heart, with emotion and passion and without the limitations imposed by journalists who work for commercial concerns funded by vested interests.
To change the narrative about the way that we report on homelessness we have to be able to speak about our experiences openly and with passion. We have to be able to hold organisations to account for their failings and point out when and where they are doing the right thing so that other organisations can see what to do and what not to do.
It has to be raw to be understood in a true light or it might as well be reported by a reporter from the Times. We’re not being paid to do this and so it isn’t the same as journalists reporting for commercial concerns. it comes from the streets and everything from the streets has got to be emotion led or otherwise you are not getting it out of your system, which is half the thing.
You have to remember that when you suffer from mental health problems bottling it all up and keeping it all in regurgitates it like poisonous bile into your system. But when you let it out it gives it that relief. It’s the pressure valve that lets it all out.
But it has to have the rawness and it has to have the emotion in order for you to let go of it and also to get the message across. Unless you have the rawness and the emotion you don’t get the message across in the same way. People don’t see the issue for what it is and they don’t see our humanity if we don’t produce raw reports fuelled by emotional passion.
If catharsis is one very important element of this type of reporting, informing and educating people is the other, be it case workers and services providers looking to improve how they communicate with and advocate for their clients or helping the public to see that we are humans just like them. I always used to say it is a tug at heart strings but it isn’t that at all. Pulling at heart strings is kind of like the film that has the violins playing to direct your feelings and anyone can do that.
What I’m talking about is a tug at the reality string. It has to be rational, yes, but it has to be delivered with passion. My point is that you have to feel it and mean it to let go of it, to colour it in for people, to make it more than just words telling you about something. This is our lives, these are our experiences and we have felt them intensely.
There is no way we can share them without revisiting that feeling and by sharing them we often make peace with the experience and the difficult feelings that came with it. A normal journalist has seen it happen second hand but hasn’t felt it. We have been there and feel it and so that feeling is what makes our reports different from anything else. It’s what gives them their authenticity and impact. Sometimes you get the best people in the world talk about us, people with lived experience of homelessness, in a way that I call the third person syndrome.
They talk about us like we are a different species. They don’t give us the trust that is essential to really seeing and truly understanding the issues that we face. They don’t give us respect as human beings just like them, who for whatever reason, ended up homeless at some point. They see us as different somehow, like there is something broken about us and something broken that is unfixable because it doesn’t matter how long you have been in recovery, they still talk about you like you are different somehow.
If people who work in the homeless sector talk about us like that then so can the public. This type of reporting, unfiltered and honest, is the way that people are going to see us for what we are – People who bleed red, like everyone else [except for Spock obviously]. We are just the same as other human beings in that none of us are the same. At the end of the day I talk a lot about the good things that organisations do and I don’t think people do that enough. But sometimes I need to point out that we are being let down by the government and some of the charities that have been tasked with helping us in one form or another. If I couldn’t do that freely and without fear of being censored then I wouldn’t want to do it. This project is part of something that has the potential to be really special but it needs to be brave to do that. We need to be able to challenge the way things are done and let people know how we feel about it all if we are going to change things.
