title: Episode 10: The Streets Change You
author: Outsiders
contenttype: podcast
publication: Outsiders
published: 2020-10-21T08:00:00+00:00
sourceurl: https://cpa.ds.npr.org/s148/audio/2021/09/outsiders-episode-10-the-streets-change-you-new.mp3
word_count: 7935
Outsiders is made possible by grants from the Dennis A. Hunt Fund at USC Ann and Berg Center for Health Journalism, Studio to Be Seattle, and Jim and Beard a Falkener of Seattle. Quick warning, this episode has adult language and mentions suicide. It's the winner of 2020, a year after we started reporting on homelessness in Olympia, and I'm looking for the first person we heard from in this series. Jessica. I hear she's been living under the 4th Avenue Bridge, and in encampment, the city of Olympia is about to sweep. I'm trying to find her before she and the others living here scatter to the wind. Jessica has no phone number, no reliable internet access. Once she leaves here, I might not have a chance to talk with her again. Hey, how's it going? At the camp, I find Opie, who's lived under the bridge longer than just about anyone else and his partner Veronica. Most people have already packed up and left ahead of the sweep. I heard you guys were getting swept. Then, Opie tells me about a development I wasn't aware of. The first Christian church. You're all moving to the first Christian church? Yes. Pastor any has just given me the word, so. He says some of the people remaining at the camp are moving on to the property of Olympia's first Christian church downtown, but it means the end of the 4th Avenue Bridge encampment. The fight, the residence waged against the city to stay here, is over. A day like today, I can see why the 4th Avenue Bridge is so useful, because it's beautiful, you know, the draining, but it's not that cold. It's not getting much stuff wet. So you guys are both lived here more than a year at this point, but how does it feel to be leaving this place? I guess it's like, anytime anybody moves, you know, we just got to suck it up and down. But I mean, there, you know, a year is a long time to live in a place, and I know there are difficult times down here. There was still stability. There was still a stable place, even with the people that were causing problems or whatever it was still a stable place to be. Is Jessica still here? She's here once in a while. Good luck with the move and everything. It was the overtake for sure. The church, yeah. All right, take care guys. Good seeing you. I leave Oby in Veronica, and I head back out into the rain to look for Jessica. Back when I first met her in late 2018, she was getting ready to move into the mitigation site, the sanctioned camp the city created in downtown Olympia. She was starting what she thought might be a new phase of her life. I have a life history with this place, and I'll be damned if it's going to break me. At the time, she had been homeless for two years, but she was hopeful. She thought it might take a year or so to get off the streets and into a home. It's six months to a year, if you can't, then what is there? Well now that year has passed, and along the way, Jessica's helped us understand homelessness and what leads to it by sharing the worst experiences of her life with us. The trauma she experienced has a child. All my nightmares and everything have happened here, and I've come back to conquer them and succeed and move on. My problem is, we've lost touch with Jessica. She got kicked out of the mitigation site about midway through the year. Staff said she clashed with her neighbors and caused drama. She bounced around Olympia's unsanctioned camps, sleeping in the woods and on the sides of roads, getting kicked out of each one, and she got harder and harder to find. And I feel like once her story changed and the possibility of a happy ending faded away, she got less interested in sharing it with us. But it doesn't feel right to end this series without finding out what happened to Jessica. I'm Will James, and that's what we're doing in the final episode of outsiders. I pick up my search for Jessica a couple days later. After 15 months of talking to her for this series, I know the best way to find her is usually to wander around downtown Olympia and look for her hair. It's dyed a different color every time I see her, but always bright and impossible to miss. On this day, her hair is blue. I see her for the first time in months standing outside Olympia's day center, a place where people can take showers and do laundry. There isn't a big hello, just a polite greeting. She tells me, yeah, she's moving to the church property. When are you moving in there? Hopefully today. Are you serious? Yeah. How does that feel? It feels good. It feels amazing. I didn't think that, you know, there was any hope, but like I said, it's not going to take my hope. So, yeah. Big comeback. She's referencing some of the first words she's had to me more than a year earlier. Olympia will not take my hope. Something's off. She seems distant, anxious. I feel like she's performing, trying to give me a happy ending to this story. I feel like there's something she's not saying. We agreed to meet that evening at the church, where I'll watch her move into her new shelter. So, I'll go down the interface at about five and look for you there. All right. You feel good? Good. I do, I feel awesome. I go straight to first Christian church. I want to see Jessica's soon to be new home. I walk into the church just as some kind of seminars wrapping up. Sure. I'm glad. I'm sure. I don't know. I'm glad. Pastor Amy LaCroix was one of the people trying to organize the 4th Avenue Bridge camp. When the city decided to sweep it, she and her congregation swooped in to host this new shelter site. But Pastor Amy deflects the credit for making this happen, giving it instead to the people who are living out of the bridge. Because they are the ones who have stuck with us even when they felt betrayed and disheartened and it would have been easy for them to just give up, you know. It's because they didn't give up and have shown their true character that we have been able to kind of wrap support around them. She tells me the 11 people moving to the church property have chosen a name for this site, New Hope Community. We step out into the parking lot to look at it. So we should say right off the bat that this is under like a covered cement garage, similar to like the 4th Avenue Bridge situation where they had kind of a roof over the camp. Can you sort of just describe these shelters? So they are 10 by 12 and they're wooden frame structures and then there's like a really heavy canvas like a, it's the type of canvas that's used for billboards that is secured bolted over the frames. There's no flooring. So we've been able to supply cats to get them up off of the ground. Your doors are just like a tent flap kind of stuff. They look kind of like if somebody puts up like a temporary car port or something in their yard. Yeah, similar to that. Yeah. So not houses, but not tents either. Definitely a step above the 4th Avenue Bridge and even a step above the mitigation site. Do you know which one is Jessica's yet? Jessica's on the very very end. I don't know if she's here. Did you want to see it? No, I just saw her actually at the day center. Oh, I don't think she's here. I look around the garage. It's quiet. Dry. Jessica will still be homeless here, but safer and more rooted to one spot. It's the closest thing she will have had to a home in three years. You know what? My real hope for them in the next few days is that they can just rest because I don't feel like they've really gotten to rest much at all for a long time. So I hope that we've created a home environment that is safe, gives them safety, warmth and security so that they can really just rest. And then they can think about like what's next for their lives and maybe dream a little. Standing in this garage, I think this might be an end to Jessica's story. It's not the one I imagined in the beginning. It's not the Olympia city government or its mitigation site that saved her. It's people who are homeless just like her, her neighbors under the fourth avenue bridge, fighting for a place of their own, and a sympathetic congregation, regular people who opened up their church property and gave them one. In this ending I'm thinking of, one of the people who helped save Jessica is OP. He and Jessica have not always gotten along, but he led the effort to save the fourth avenue bridge camp, then organized this move to the church property. OP's just been named president of New Hope community. How are you feeling today? I'm actually feeling pretty good today, I'm feeling at peace, excited. One by one people show up on pack their things at Settelland. The only thing that's missing from this ending is Jessica. I stand in the garage and wait. And wait, five o'clock comes and goes, volunteers come by and hand out food and supplies, someone brings pizza, it gets dark and starts raining. All right, so is it expecting Jessica to move into her new shelter at five, and it is now, no, my phone just died, it's now quite a bit after five. And she hasn't shown up yet, so I'm going to go buy some batteries from her recorder before that dies, and when I come back from the store, still no sign of Jessica, I'm going to go look for her, see if I can find her out here. Once I go look for Jessica at the day center, but it looks like it just closed, so everyone's gone. Back at the church, Jessica's new shelter is still empty, she's hours late at this point. The other residents of New Hope communities start settling in for their first night. As I walk to my car, I look over my shoulder, expecting to see her around the corner, but this time she doesn't. I get in my car and leave Olympia, more after the break. Hi, I'm Scott Greenstone, I work at Project Homeless at the Seattle Times, and our team and the team at K&KX Public Radio have been working on this project for more than a year. We went to Homeless Camp, spent hours with people, edited and then transcribed the tape, and then went back out and did it again and again. We wouldn't be able to do this if it weren't for our readers and listeners who support us. Here's what we're asking you to do, first, rate outsiders on Apple Podcasts. It really helps other people find it. You can also subscribe to the Seattle Times, and sign up to make a monthly donation to K&KX. You can find links that'll help you do that in the episode description. We really appreciate it. For a week, I wonder what happened to Jessica that night. Then sitting at my desk in Seattle, a message from her pops up on Facebook. Sorry I missed you the other day, she writes. I was at the Suboxone Clinic, so I can get off heroin. Her message surprises me, and also does not surprise me at all. Jessica's never talked about her substance use with me or the reporters with the Seattle Times Project Homeless Team. Once she told us she didn't use drugs like heroin because they cost money she didn't have, but there were signs here and there substance use was part of her life. I didn't want to push it. I always figured it would come up if she wanted to talk about it, and now she does want to talk about it. Here's what I know. Jessica said she started using heroin four years ago when she was still living in her apartment. She says someone offered it to her when she had an earache and a toothache that wouldn't respond to pain relievers. She says before that, she had used meth for much longer, but only uses it once in a while now. Heroin is her main drug. I think back to something pastor Amy said about one of the key factors finding the residents of New Hope community together. One of the most important things to them is a group that they have stated over and over again is that they want a clean and sober, safe place to live. And so these 11 people have committed to each other to be accountable to each other for sobriety and to be clean and all of that, which is I think pretty incredible, and part of the picture that doesn't get told. It explains why Jessica seemed nervous and evasive the day I saw her before she was supposed to move in. She was about to stop using heroin, a step that would change her whole experience of life, one of the ways she copes with stress and pain. On Facebook, Jessica tells me she did move into New Hope community after getting on Suboxone. She says it's been hard fitting in with the others, but at least she's warm and dry. She says she hasn't used illegal drugs in a week, and she tells me she started talking with her 11-year-old daughter again for the first time in three years. It's hard, she writes, but I'm doing it. By the sounds of it, things are stabilizing for Jessica for the first time in months, maybe even since she became homeless. We make plans to talk again soon in person. And then... Now to the developing news, a case of coronavirus has traveled from China to Western Washington. All the officials say the man traveled from Wuhan, China to C-TAC airport last week. We expect a large-scale outbreak in weeks, and this will be a very difficult time. It's similar to what you might think of as an infectious disease equivalent of a major earthquake that's going to shake us for weeks and weeks. Early in the pandemic in March, I spent a day in Olympia reporting on how the virus and the lockdown has upended life for people who are unsheltered. I arrive in a deserted downtown, Starbucks, the library, the day center. All the places where unsheltered people used to take refuge are closed. Some people are milling around the parking lot of the day center trying to figure out what to do. I've never seen this place empty during the day before. Usually there are dozens of people packed in here, just keeping warm or using the showers. It's a place where people can use the bathroom. Right now it's closed, and it's empty. I'm wondering where people are going to use the bathroom, where they're going to wash their hands. Staff at shelters around Olympia are scrambling to defend against the virus. With a lot of homeless people already in poor health and crammed into crowded spaces, an outbreak would be devastating. We're not wanting people to downplay their symptoms, but we would understand why they might. We've heard Meg Martin earlier in the series. She runs a shelter called Interfaith Works at First Christian Church. We're checking people for fevers as they walk in. Yeah, so we, everybody that we screen every day, we're giving a different color wristband. So party cities, thank you, shout out to party city. We've all been clearing them out of wristbands. I think today we're going to switch to orange, but we've been doing a different color every day. Meanwhile, Meg's trying to figure out what to do about social distancing. If she spreads the shelter's bed six feet apart, like health guidelines call for, the shelter's capacity would be cut almost in half. I don't have plans to see Jessica on this day, but new hope community is right across the parking lot from Meg's shelter. And as I'm talking with Meg, I hear Jessica's voice rising above the noise of the shelter. She's storming across the parking lot, and it's clear a lot has changed since those Facebook messages two months earlier. Do you want to do you want to talk to her? I'll talk right here and for everybody that never gets up right. Let's go. All right, Jessica, what's going on? Um, I'm being kicked out because people want to lie. You being kicked out? Yeah. What, what happened? Apparently I had had somebody over and I went into somebody's thing set on the original paperwork that I had invaders, somebody. She's throwing a lot at me. Eventually it becomes clear. New hope community stopped allowing visitors as a precaution during the pandemic. And Jessica had someone over. She says she missed the memo about the new rule. Residents of the camp communicate in a group chat and she doesn't have a phone. Jessica sees this as part of a pattern during her two months at New Hope community. She says her neighbors don't talk to her much and leave her out of group dinners. She says she avoids the site during the day and returns at night to sleep. Because this community is governed by the residents themselves who vote on rules and important decisions, all this leaves Jessica feeling powerless. Yeah, about it. Like I said, I'm an outsider. There's a tiny bit in somewhere that doesn't accept me. When did you hear about this? Well, um, the first one was about a week ago and then I just got with this morning. She storms back to her shelter to get the paper notice of her violation. Ready, Yopey? As she walks away, Opie walks up. This is what's happening here. She is getting evicted out of my camp because of rules. She's been breaking. She's been aggressive. She's been fighting and I didn't understand believe me. She's been with us for a sense the beginning. Now it's March 17th and I'm done. I can't help anybody is it's going to fight me. That's going to fucking wash out. A lot of what Opie says fits with patterns in Jessica's life. We've heard about the whole time we followed her story. Neighbors have driven her out of different camps when they've lost patients with her. Over the months, we've known Jessica. She's told us she's had trouble knowing who to trust and sometimes lashes out when she feels attacked. Because we've reported that's not unusual for someone who's experienced the trauma she has. So what? I'm so over it. They say that I'm family. No, the fuck I'm not. Family don't treat people like this. Family always has each other's back no matter what whether you're murder or rape is there anything. And I have a violation of a guess coming over. Why? Is this something every time? You know? Is there anyone? I have nobody. So you feel like you were never really part of that? No, I've never felt a part of it at all. I've currently clicked any drugs on the 27th. It's been two months. You know? And then like right now I want to go get loaded because I don't know what else the fucking do. And I don't want that life anymore. And you know, how many times I have to say I don't want it anymore. But people like this push people like me to go out there to do it because there's nothing more. There's no help. You want to sit down somewhere for a minute? Let's sit down somewhere. I'll just sit on these steps from the news. I really don't, like I feel like there's no life for me here everywhere I go. Then Jessica brings up the three phone conversations she had with her daughter while living at New Hope Community. You know, good that felt. It felt so good. It's just the hair of ways with amazing. I guess I won't be talking to you anymore, because without me having something showing that I'm doing something, her dad's not going to let me do anything. So when are they kicking you out, like when you have to leave? I don't, I don't know. And where would you go? I know where. Back to states. In back to square one way, you don't feel like you want to live anymore. You could just point with to live somewhere where you're not even fucking wanted. There's got to be a place. There's got to be a place. I find myself on an island somewhere with nobody. It's the way it always goes for me, something goes really good, something always not for me down. It's like the devil is like, there it is, like you can get me or something, I don't even know anymore. Did I just wait for you to be down and go home where we could call at? I don't even know anymore, I don't know. At this point, I realize I'm talking with someone who might be in danger, and I'm in over my head. Can you, I'm going to make a phone call. Can you just wait here for one second? Sorry, just one second. I call make, who's just steps away at the interfaith work shelter. Hey, do you have two seconds? I'm right outside, I'm with Jessica, she's getting kicked out of the church housing, she's really upset, I'm just really not sure what to do. Make says she'll be right over if Jessica's okay with it, Jessica says she is. She's stayed at make shelter in the past, and while I get the sense the relationship has been rocky, they've known each other for a long time. As Jessica and I sit on the steps of the church waiting for Meg, we look out on to downtown Olympia's shuttered stores and empty streets. You know, it's just, it's a really bad time for you to be out on the street. Are you still keeping up with your sobriety and yeah, so like that's the whole thing. I've been clean this whole time doing this and like, with no support. It's just that with this virus going around and with you trying to stay sober and stuff, like it's just, it's a bad time for you to be out on the streets. I mean, it's never a good time to be out on the streets, but it's like, it's really bad right now. There's nowhere to go during the day, just, yeah, I just really don't want you to go out there and like you said, end up, end up using after you've worked so hard for two months and I just don't want that to go away. I just don't want that to all be for nothing, you know. Meg walks up and crouches in front of Jessica on the steps. Jessica catches her up on why she's being kicked out and her fear of not talking to her daughter again. I just keep holding my microphone in between them, waiting for one of them to ask me to stop recording. But they don't. But I want to peel it with somebody's ears. It knows me like somebody like you or and I want somebody that could be neutral. It'd be like, no, you guys are picking on this poor girl or Jessica, you're just fucked up. You know, I don't know. I really don't know, Meg. I don't know. I'm so afraid right now. I don't even know what to do. Well, Jess, I want to just remind you that you of all the people that I've known a lot of people about you and you are a fucking survivor. And I know that it's so hard to have to constantly survive, but I just want you to know that you're going to be okay. I don't know without coming of all this is going to be, but you are going to be okay. I really don't know anymore. All I know is that I really want to just die because you just don't see another way, another way out before you just want relief. I didn't want to believe me alone. It set me for me, you know, I'm not perfect, you know, but like if I don't, if I'm not told something or I don't read it, I don't know these things, you know, I didn't know we weren't told that vidrary. Make tells Jessica she doesn't have any official power over new hope community, but she'll talk to some people and see if she can do anything to help. Thanks for talking to me, I feel the same way about you all, I know we've had our moments, but I care a lot about you. Have I came a long way or have I just not came anywhere? I need to know. You have. Okay. But just I think the reality too is that you've been through so many things that not a lot of people can understand and the impacts of those things in your life, I think there's not a lot of people that can understand and I think that you've been for a lot of years you've been living in a lot of places that misunderstand you and that's a hard thing to do. And you know, the thing is that it's not like a linear thing or like one day you're fucked up and the next day you're better or even 10 years down the road, you're better, right? It's like a thing like this, it's like you go a little bit and you come back and you go a little bit and you come back and you're a good person at your core, you're a beautiful person. You're a good person at your core. I feel like I'm like the living dead or the pink? Okay. I don't know. Can I just say one more thing that if that feeling of wanting to die turns into a feeling of making an action on that, we would never tell you, but okay. Because people would notice, I doubt that, but okay. I would notice. I would notice. You have a reason to be here and the world would be less beautiful without you. I think I don't want to have to organize your memorial. All right. All right. If I figure out anything. Jessica agrees to go back to her shelter at New Hope community and not fight with anyone while Meg works on a solution. In the meantime, I go for a walk around the desolate city with Jessica to help her cool down and then we say goodbye. That's where I leave her in March of 2020 and the last I see of her for a long time. This series opened with an encounter between Jessica and Colin de Forrest. He worked for the city of Olympia, created the mitigation site, and spent more than a year trying to revolutionize how the city tackles homelessness. In April of 2020, a couple of weeks after I sat with Jessica on those church steps, Colin surprises me with an email saying he's quitting. And for a while, I'm left wondering why he walked away from Olympia and how he looks back on his time there. Eventually, I catch up with Colin into coma, north of Olympia, where he works now. Colin tells me he left Olympia on good terms and as far as I know that's true. He says he just saw an opportunity to strike out on his own and use what he's learned about homelessness to go into business as a consultant. Here in Tacoma, he has a contract consulting for a family shelter. He's also trying to create spaces where people who live in vehicles can park safely. Colin is still trying to sell the idea he tried to put into action in Olympia. It's the idea that yes, we need more housing if we're going to get homelessness under control. But housing isn't the solution in and of itself. It takes years to build and there are lots of people who have been living outside who aren't going to move in right away. The whole thing is if you only give those people a choice between a homeless shelter or an unsanctioned encampment, a lot of people are going to pick the encampment. So he says governments and nonprofits have to start meeting people where they're at. So I'm still hammering that same stuff. I'm doing it even more now. And yeah, I mean, unfortunately, the narrative is the same man. It's still I'm still kind of saying the same stuff. It's managed outdoor camping. It's tiny house villages. You know, the safe car camping is something that we never got off the ground down in Olympia. But there's a huge need for it, right? When I ask him if there's anything he'd do differently in Olympia, given the chance, he says there are little things. The mitigation site is too big, he says. And it got unmanageable at times. He says the way to go is smaller sites of no more than 40 people each. And ideally, not in the heart of downtown where the people living at the site sometimes feel like they're in a zoo. In the end, he says, Olympia let him try something and it was messy, but he's proud of it. Any folks you still think about in Olympia? There are a lot of people that I think about and I'm really hoping that when I go down there again and I say, hey, where's someone so they say, oh, yeah, well, they're housed right now. Oh, yeah, she got into housing. Yeah, she's not here anymore. There are some amazing individuals down there. And I'm just really hoping that they will get connected to that next step, whatever that looks like for them. Here's what we know about some of the other people whose voices you heard in this series. Here we're trying to become a community and that's the only first hardest that is we're doing it. Bianca's lived at the mitigation site longer than anyone else I've kept in touch with. And she's still there as of September of 2020, still waiting for what she calls her version of heaven and opening at the Kyoto Village tiny houses. If she gets in, she's allowed to live there at the rest of her life. It's like a brand new page to a brand new book really. To step towards a new beginning. Jasmine and Travis moved to Olympia from the Washington DC area to start a new life and eventually worked their way from a tent at the mitigation site to their own apartment. Jasmine says, after a few months there, they move back to the east coast. They both have jobs. Jasmine now works in homeless services in the District of Columbia. Mark on the other hand, has lived in the Olympia area his whole life. I mean, I'm on a two-year waiting list here, two-year, I mean, I'm on a little list, but what else do you? A brain aneurysm about a decade ago left him with short-term memory problems, surviving on disability payments that didn't cover rent. We followed him and his dog Bo from the mitigation site to the Plum Street Village tiny houses. Mark eventually got that subsidized apartment he'd been waiting for. He's the only person we followed from that meeting in the very first scene of this series to the mitigation site to the tiny house village to a permanent home. I mean, I grew up a really difficult life and for me to still still be standing here today even surprises me. Bobby's the woman who got displaced again and again from her campsites as the city swept them before she finally moved into the mitigation site. I saw her there not long ago. Colin says she's one of the people who left a deep impression on him and he still thinks about her. Another one is Alan, who's in his 70s and whose life was derailed by a gunshot to the head a few years ago. The bullet hit my ear and it went in right there and it didn't hit nothing. The whole time we've known Alan, he's talked about his plan to buy a used car and start doing deliveries to make money. I talked to him recently. He says he did buy a $1,200 Subaru with his federal pandemic relief money. Because of his health problems, the city put him in a hotel and then a shelter to protect him from the coronavirus. He says he got so bored and so tired of the food he eventually left and started a cross-country road trip with his nephew. Last I heard, they were in Louisiana. Yeah, I guess you would say I'm a drug addict but I don't want to be here anymore though. I don't want to do the drug addicts thing anymore. I want a normal life. Sarah's Matthews is one reason she's been unsheltered for more than five years. She shared her insights with us into how substance use can be both a cause and an effective homelessness, something people rely on to survive. The last time I saw Sarah was January of 2020 near the bus station. It was right after the county where Olympia is stopped charging people to ride the bus. Sarah told me that allowed her to start visiting social service offices, apply for financial benefits, and take steps to get out of homelessness for the first time in years. Free bus fare, amazing, amazing, amazing, now I can actually get done what I've needed to the last four years. Is that what allowed you to go to DSHS? Yes. I've gone twice in the last week because of the bus, huh? But a little while later, multiple people tell me they saw Sarah burst into the day center with her face injured, saying her boyfriend had assaulted her. And she ran away before police got there. That's all I heard for a while. One day Seattle Times Project Homeless Reporter Scott Greenstone and I look for Sarah in her encampment in the woods along a highway. We find it strewn with garbage, the carefully constructed wooden shelters falling apart, the ground turned to mud. She wasn't there and no one knew where she was. These days, people tell me they still see Sarah in Olympia's camps. When I drive past one in the woods, I keep an eye out for her six foot four inch frame. For a long time, I wonder what happened to Jessica? Then one day, I get another Facebook message from her. She says, I'll never guess where she is now. All right, checking. So we're in downtown Olympia. I'm with Sydney Brownstone from the Seattle Times. Hey, Will. Sydney Brownstone is the Project Homeless Reporter who told Jessica's life story in episode three. We're in Olympia in August of 2020 to find Jessica one last time. There they are. For once, she's easy to find because she's back where she was at the beginning of this story more than 18 months earlier. How long have you been back at the mitigation site now? I've been here about three months now. Oh. Yeah, I didn't expect that at all. So it was shocking and a blessing at the same time because it was pretty bad out here. We sit down in a park nearby around the corner from New Hope community. Jessica tells us she was kicked out of there back in the spring. She spent two weeks on the streets, sleeping in an alcove between a new age store that sells herbs and a place that does psychic readings. What were those two weeks like? Because you were out on the streets by yourself and everything was closed. That was hell. I was hungry. I started looking trash cans for food. I never done before. Yeah. A word dirty clothes for two weeks. I smell. It smells. So. Yeah. Eventually, she says she was invited back into the mitigation site. Jessica says she's given up the hope she had early on that the site was the beginning of a path off the streets. It's just another place to sleep and attempt. But even that's a relief after trying to survive on her own. She has people there she gets along with. The problem is she says they use drugs and don't seem to have any ambition to stop right now. Last time I saw Jessica, she was taking Suboxone and on a two month streak of not using heroin. I always wanted to follow up with you about that. I never got a chance to really talk about it, but I did good until they kicked me out of here and then I stopped and then I'm back to the normal. What does normal look like for you? Maybe the normal is doing being high. So I'm at a gram a day to get high. If I just want to get well, I stay at two or three points. Getting well means doing enough heroin to stave off withdrawal symptoms. Point is slang for needle. Jessica is saying she needs two or three injections just to keep from getting sick. And that's normal for a lot of people who use heroin. And that's normally what happens is just two or three points just to get high so I can get up to go do something. So how long can you go without feeling sick or something? How long do I go? Without feeling sick. I'm sick right now. So I, I don't know, I'm sorry we're holding you up. I mean I stopped to wait so you're four hours to make money anyway, so. Jessica's holding a cardboard sign that says anything helps with some star strong on it. She's on her way to a suburb of Olympia to stand by the road and ask people for money. It's just I want it now and I can't have it and then I have to go make the money and then I have to come back down here and have a search for it and that's what they don't like. All day fucking thing just to get one dose of what I need, you know, and then I'm back to it the same. All right, after it, I figured it out where the fuck am I going to get my next hit up? All that time just trying to not be sick trying to be well. I mean, how do you think that's affected you while you're trying to meet your goals, you know, or less? I don't know if I can go at all and it sucks, you know, I don't have patience anymore. I don't have the time, I'd like there's no time perception for me or anything, it just just goes. Like I don't look at a clock, I don't ask what time it is and 9 to 10, I'm off on my days and I sit, I don't know, it's foul. What are your goals for that part of your life? My goal is to get off the streets and get my kid back, but I can't get off the damn ground long enough and have any moral support of like, you know, beating me up for something if I go get high or anything because I know it's just right down the street, I can go get it, you know. Back when I first met you, this is like a year and a half ago now. The first thing you said to me was that you came back to Olympia to face your nightmares and conquer them and overcome them. What I was thinking about is like, do you have a picture in your head of what that looks like to overcome your nightmares? Like when you imagine doing that, what does that mean, you know? I don't ever think I'll be able to accept anything or conquer my nightmares because of the lack of, you know, I just don't have to have a friend and it's all I needed to couple of friends. I've been out here by myself for a long time and I find myself talking to myself and I'm scared of that because I don't want to be like that. I want to be able to have a conversation and have a friend with me instead of just being alone and that's constantly what it is and I'm constantly alone. So I have to find something that doesn't argue with me or judge me and that's a drug. Do you judge yourself? Judge myself? Judge yourself. Yeah, I do judge myself because I'm a piece of shit. I shouldn't be out here doing any of this. I should be somewhere, getting my kid and I can't get there. It also survived. I mean, you've survived more than a lot of people I know, so to me that it shows that you're resilient, that you have strength. But why can't I just train to do it by myself? We give Jessica a ride, drop her off outside of grocery store, which is going to fly your sign and ask people for money and we say goodbye. Afterwards, Cindy and I sit in the car. I thought it was a difficult conversation. Why? It seems like when she didn't really want to have and I think she felt a lot of shame around talking about it. You know, she knows that the beginning of this story is her saying she was on this journey to getting out of homelessness and she was committed to it. And I think she knows that it didn't end that way. She's back where she started. Clearly, there's a part of her that believes that if she just tried harder, she could pull herself out of this and pull herself up by her bootstraps, which is something that a lot of people believe. And I wonder how much those beliefs have shaped the system that we are operating in, that Jessica is operating in. Once, years ago, I got to tell the story of a guy who was chronically homeless and moved from a tent into a home. He told me the first night in his new apartment, it was so quiet, he was so scared. He almost walked straight out the door and back to the camp where he used to live. But he said, as he stood in the doorway, he looked up at the icicles hanging from the roof, and remembered all the nights he thought he would freeze to death, and he stepped back inside. I still remember standing at his window with him and watching the snow come down. That's the outside, he said, and I'm inside, and I'm not out there in the elements. He seemed in awe of that fact. There was something more going on than just a person moving inside. He was figuring out a new relationship with the world. When we started this project, I thought I might get to capture a moment like that with Jessica, but at least for now, her story is different. It's a more common story about people who get left behind by the systems that are supposed to help them. About how homelessness has its own gravity. It's what she told me the very first day I met her. The streets change you a lot to where I'm so cold-hearted right now that I don't even know what nicest is anymore, and that's what I want to find. I want to find my hope and my dignity and my morals, and out here you can't keep them. The streets change you. Homelessness changes you. Your environment changes you. That's the story Jessica told us. But I still think about those months when her story was different. When she lived in a stable place, stopped using drugs, and started reconnecting with her daughter. They gave us a glimpse of another possibility. Just like the streets changed her. Someday a home could change her too. Is there anything you just want people to know? Like people who have come to know you a little bit, even though they never met you. Just like anything else you want to say. Thank you for hearing and taking the time to use it down and hear my story. Music Outsiders is a collaboration between KNKX Public Radio and the Seattle Times Project Homeless Team. This series was written and reported by Viana Davila, Scott Greenstone, Sydney Brownstone, and me Will James. Our editors are Erin Hennessy and Bethany Denton, who's also our Mix Engineer. Additional editing by Anna Susman. Our music is from Blue Dot Sessions. A whole team of people from KNKX and the Seattle Times made this possible. Thank you to Matt Martinez, Jonathan Martin, Anna Patrick, Florengela Davila, Joaquin Alvarado, Eric Hanberg, Brenda Goldstein Young, Kari Plogue, Nick Eden, Emily Ang, Parker Miles Blown, and Adrian Flores, who designed our logo. Thanks as well to Independent Producer Rob Smith and everyone affiliated with USC Annanberg's Center for Health Journalism who helped us. Including Karen Brown, Ashley Alvarado, Martha Shirk, Michelle Lavander, and the family of Dennis A. Hunt. Here's what you can do to support more in-depth journalism about homelessness. You can subscribe to the Seattle Times and follow Project Homeless on Twitter, at Times Homeless. You can also become a monthly donor to KNKX by going to KNKX.org. On Twitter, we're at KNKXFM. To mark the end of outsiders, we're hosting a virtual gathering on Thursday, October 22. It's a live discussion with me and the rest of the reporting team. We'll go into more depth on what you heard in this series, talk about what it was like to bring it back during the pandemic, play some of the tape we wish made it in, but didn't, and answer your questions. It's free, it starts at 4 p.m., again Thursday, October 22. You can sign up at ST.News slash outsiders. Finally, thanks to all of you for sticking with us through a long and winding and often difficult story. And thanks to all the people who trusted us with their stories. I hope you're okay. I'm Will James. I'm getting the sound of the rain. Ah, tape recording it. I just wanted some rain sound. Okay. Oh, that's cool. It's weird, I know. That would all be... Let's go, let's go. He just sounded any other.