In this written piece, Dan, who has just started as a project worker at Groundswell, offers a response to a recent report done by our ace roving reporter Steve from Manchester.  Steve’s gift as a communicator is to give deeply textured snapshots of life through his eyes and in the original account he wrestles with the fresh challenges thrown up by full time work, the demands of responsibility and the anxiety of cutting the safety net [if you haven’t, then please take the time to listen to or read it before you read Dan’s response below]

In his response Dan let’s us know that…well, read on and find out… 

This morning I listened to the latest audio story from Steve, one of Groundswell’s ‘community reporters’ sharing their experiences to help create change.

Steve speaks eloquently and openly about the weight of responsibility he feels in his new job. Following thirty years of addiction, when his only duties were to show up for menial tasks at rehab or to take a shower, people have started to expect things from him – things he should be able to do, things he’s pretty sure he can do – but doubt and anxiety are creeping in.

Steve asks a very reasonable question: “I just wonder if other people in lived experience positions go through this or even just, just, just muggles, just normal people. I wonder if they go through it. You know, non-heroin-afflicted people.”

I thought that deserved an answer.

I’m now in my third week working as a Project Officer at Groundswell. Being Groundswell, a requirement of the job was personal lived experience of homelessness. In my interview, I talked about how I’ve been living over the last year in a cabin in a friend’s garden with no tenancy  agreement, unreliable hot water and no job. I talked a little (but only a little) about the period in my twenties when I was sofa-surfing, a time when a combination of a minimum wage salary and growing debts meant that I couldn’t find a home I could afford to rent. I also mentioned what I now understand to have been a struggle with mental health which I tried to resolve with an expensive weed habit.

But since then I’ve been building a career. I’ve got two degrees now. I’ve worked as a homelessness outreach worker, a support worker, an administrator. I even spent a summer in the Civil Service. Grown-up stuff.

There have been times in the past few weeks when I’ve felt like a fraud. I mean, I haven’t really experienced homelessness, have I? Not proper homelessness. Not begging-in-a-sleeping-bag-in-a-shop-doorway homelessness like my old outreach clients did. Surely my new colleagues are thinking that, right?

But I’ve also felt like a fraud because, despite the master’s degree and the CV, sometimes I still doubt my ability to do the job. I still see myself as the underdog, the minimum wage earner with ideas above his station. And now people are expecting me to do stuff. Like Steve, I put pressure on myself. I feel like I should be able to do the job better than others expect me to, better than a person with proper homelessness experience could. And yes, I know how that sounds.

And the funny thing is I know that I’m being irrational, that I have the full support of my line manager and my colleagues. I also know I’m not the only one going through this. It’s been estimated that at least 70% of us experience imposter syndrome – the feeling that everyone around us is overestimating our competence – at least once in life.

Steve talked about wanting to push the ‘f*ck it button,’ an escape route from responsibility. If everyone expects you to fail, to succumb to addiction, to spend your life on benefits, then you have little to lose but everything to prove. But if everyone expects you to be a successful professional then the idea of not measuring up is terrifying.

So maybe that’s the difference between ‘experienced professionals’ and people going through homelessness or addiction. Us and them. It’s just a question of what we fear the most: failure or responsibility.

, least of all to those who are new to the professional world.

One of the things that got me through the lonely monotony of lockdown unemployment was listening to the wise words of the addiction specialist Gabor Maté. He’s become one of my heroes. Gabor argues that addiction isn’t about character or genes but that it comes from trauma and emotional loss. In a talk I watched on YouTube shortly before Groundswell hired me, he spoke about how universal that is, about how he found himself hooked on the buzz of being good at public speaking and about the withdrawal symptoms he experienced after finishing a lecture tour.

This is something that happens to most of us when we do a job we care about. When we do something well, and especially when our colleagues recognise that we’ve done something well, it’s a great feeling. Like any addiction though, when we don’t get that feeling we start to crave it and, sooner or later, we start to hear the nagging voice of self-doubt. I’m feeling it right now. I mean, I’m being paid to write this. Is that fair? Is this a good use of charitable funds? Will it be good enough? What will people think?

And perhaps the most challenging thing that each one of us has to deal with in life is to work out how to quieten that nagging voice.

So Steve, in short, the answer is an emphatic yes. Speaking as both someone with lived experience of homelessness and as a muggle: that doubt, that anxiety and that weight of responsibility, we feel them too. You said yourself that fundamentally we’re all the same, a sentiment shared by Groundswell and by me. There is no us and them. That weight and self-doubt are what makes us human. But, I promise you, you can learn to live with them. You learn how to forgive yourself for not being perfect all the time.