Kelly Salasin, a longtime prolific blogger, is currently in the throes of writing a memoir. She originally posted this piece, a work in progress, on Facebook.
MARLBORO-We're seeing more and more unhoused people in downtown Brattleboro, many with mental health challenges and substance use. It can be a disturbing sight.
"It's a shame what's happening," many friends say, especially those returning for summer visits. "So much homelessness and drug use on the streets."
My husband, Casey, often poses a question in moments like this: "Is it the drug use or the visibility that is the issue? Is it that we prefer it in the privacy of their homes? What if they don't have homes?"
His questions are usually met with silence and then a pivot.
"So many businesses are closing," they say. "It's a shame."
The implication is that the unhoused people and their drug use or their mental illness is to blame. Not the high rents that make it challenging for many to sustain a business or the inflated cost of goods that makes it harder for customers to afford them.
Still others find it almost impossible to find an apartment to rent, let alone afford it and meet other basic needs like utilities, food, and health care.
* * *
I think back on the last century. My mother grew up with very little, but her Irish Catholic family of 10 could afford to buy a home and a car on a single blue-collar salary.
Our youngest son lives in Burlington. Works full time. Lives with five other people in order to afford a room of his own that grows mildewy at times.
Once, when he was in between rentals - which seemed to happen every year - he resorted to spending nights in our second car in the parking lot of Walmart in order to keep his job, and then on his days off, he returned to live with us, a five-hour-round-trip drive.
Soon he'll age out of our insurance coverage. With his recent diagnosis of type 1 diabetes, he's already figured out that his life-saving pumps and insulin cost about what he makes in a year.
* * *
I am sitting in the passenger seat of our EV vehicle while Casey runs into the Co-op for organic mushrooms for our first garden pizza of the summer. To my dismay, he's parked the car with a direct view of the begging spot at the bridge, of an older woman with a disability. Her suffering is a distraction to my audiobook on complex PTSD.
I look away. I look back.
Enter a man and woman hollering at each other across the promenade in front of the parking lot, walking away from each other, heading back toward each other, throwing a bag, picking it up, coming together, separating, screaming.
I give up on my audiobook and lower my window. I want to make sure everyone is OK. Is he threatening violence?
Passersby pause, assess their own safety, too, and continue across the bridge with their groceries. One man turns back to the woman asking for change. They look toward the fighting couple, shake their heads.
The fight takes a quarter turn. I can see the man is still mad, but he is listening. I can tell the woman is still mad, but she is explaining. It's clear they both care about the relationship. They come together and separate a few more times and then walk together across the parking lot toward Main Street.
I recognize the whole public display. The push. The pull. The trying to make it right. The anger. The resistance. It's the kind of dance I might do with my husband in the privacy of our home.
But what if you don't have a home?
* * *
I write into my life's trauma publicly not because I don't have a journal or a therapist but because I am a lifelong educator. Suffering needs to be seen to be tended. It's too easily ignored otherwise. Suffering doesn't belong to one person or one group. It is universal.
As a culture, we prefer that suffering remain invisible. We silence it. Shame it. Ignore it. Marginalize it. Tuck it away. Think of what we do with those who are aging and dying. Think of what we want to do with people who are unhoused and the addicted and mentally ill.
Suffering made visible is at the very least an inconvenience. It gets in the way of a pleasant afternoon, a shopping trip, a dinner out, a concert, an audiobook.
Perhaps as Americans, more than anywhere else, we feel entitled to our pleasure and distractions.
* * *
I think of the way some of my relatives feel about what I write. The way they want me to stop writing publicly about pain just as they once wanted me to stop talking about it.
My voice got in the way. The suffering of my siblings got in the way. In a multitude of ways, spoken and unspoken, I've learned that I don't belong - not in the same way I did when I swallowed the pain.
Others simply admit that it is too hard to face or feel or know the pain that exists in our family, the pain passed down through the generations, the unmet and unaddressed suffering that led and leads to addiction and abuse and abandonment, hidden inside our homes.
To face pain is hard, and speaking into pain triggers others unmet pain, or it disrupts what others are trying to enjoy or ignore or pretend doesn't exist.
* * *
When I find myself bristling at the sight of those who are suffering on the streets of Brattleboro (or Burlington or Northampton or New York City or Philly or in the women's bathroom in the airport in Boston), when I am annoyed at being asked for money, again, or when the sight of suffering sours another outing, I practice enlarging my sense of who and what belongs, even as my heart aches.
I notice the kindness among the people who live out their lives on the streets.
More and more, I see it as a positive. Not the suffering itself, but the seeing of it. The belonging of it. The knowing of it.
I volunteer. I vote. I donate. I say, Hello. I breathe into my discomfort, allow it, allow others to simply exist.
On rare occasions, I give cash or food or make pleasant conversation.
Sometimes I write into what I see. I wrestle with it like I am doing here.
I don't know how this is supposed to go, but I know that suffering itself can't be the problem.
The criminalization of suffering must be the saddest thing of all.
This Voices Essay by Kelly Salasin was written for The Commons.
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