The News Tribune, Tacoma, Wash., Kathleen Merryman Column: Troubled Souls Find Hope at Dome Event
By Kathleen Merryman, The News Tribune, Tacoma, Wash.
Oct. 13–Annie Wilson is frank about the mess that was her life.
She was 15 when she had her son, who was killed in a drive-by shooting in 1990 on Tacoma’s Hilltop. Things weren’t good before that, but they were hellish afterward.
Wilson was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and depression. She dove into grief and drugs.
“I wanted to feel the numbness, not feel the pain,” she said.
Six months after her son was shot, she killed someone. She did not want to say who or how, only that she had an emotional breakdown and did not remember doing it. That, she said, is no excuse. It is why she has a felony record.
Over the years, she’s been through treatment and psychiatric care repeatedly, and repeatedly relapsed. She’s found and lost housing.
“I ended up using and not dealing with my mental health,” she said.
Sitting over lunch at Wednesday’s Project Homeless Connect at the Tacoma Dome Convention Center, she said she has her best chance in years of reclaiming a productive life.
“This summer I was in an alley, sitting down, getting high. It just made me sick,” she said. “I heard something call to me to get up and go. It wasn’t the drugs. It was the Holy Spirit who spoke to me. I got up and went to St. Joseph Hospital, and they sent me to Puget Sound Hospital.”
She went from there to Sea-Mar Community Health Center for a month and into a transitional recovery house where she can stay for up to a year.
As Wilson says, the Holy Spirit said the right thing at the right time in the right way to get her admitted and linked up with services.
Now, she said, she has the support of her family and the mental health and recovery care she needs. “I want to go back to school. I want to go back to work, too. I want to feel worthy again, I want to feel whole, because I lost myself.”
She has bought herself a set of tableware in the hope that she will have her own place again, her own shower, her own kitchen. She dreams of a life in which she has her own bedroom set, and a new coat.
But even at the event, with so many professionals working to eliminate chronic poverty, she had misgivings.
She, like many who came down for the day, knows that city, county and independent nonprofit agencies are working together more smoothly than they ever have. They know service providers are grabbing at every funding source that’s popped up, thanks to the federal mandate to eliminate chronic homelessness.
They have friends who have been housed thanks to the countywide Road Home program and Tacoma’s plan to eradicate homeless encampments. They, more than most of us, know how carefully those programs were designed to meet specific needs and how many people fall outside the program descriptions.
To solve that, providers are tinkering with programs so they run more efficiently and let more people in. Tacoma’s anti-encampment plan had unused apartments. Now it has expanded to get more homeless people into those apartments and under the care of a caseworker.
Like Wilson, the people who came to the Dome are among the most difficult to serve. Eight out of 10 of them suffer from mental illness, addiction or both. They’re so worn out from fighting their own problems that they don’t have the energy to persist when this complex system tells them no.
And that was the genius of Project Homeless Connect.
Wilson went to the housing booth, found nothing, and left.
When people running the mental health booth heard about her, they asked her to come back. They interviewed her to see if she’s a fit for a new program.
There’s no word yet, but she, and they, have the information they need to see if they can get her settled into a home with the services she needs to rebuild her life.
Kathleen Merryman: 253-597-8677
kathleen.merryman@thenewstribune.com
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