Un-homed, but Not Unhinged: Achieving Homelessness
Editor’s Note: Today we introduce Joe Bright, a Honolulu resident with a life story to share. Follow his experiences on the edge in his series, “Unhomed, but Not Unhinged.”
How many steps does it take to become homeless? It depends. Remember the owl in the old tootsie pop commercial? He would ask how many licks to get to the center of the pop; take a few and then chomp down on it. Task accomplished. So needless to say it doesn鈥檛 take all that much to hit the streets for survival.
Some of the steps are subtle and unnoticed for some time. While others have a certain finality to them: Now you know you鈥檙e in trouble and your options just shriveled up.
In my case there were two major steps: closing a business through bankruptcy, and the end of a long-term relationship. Those alone are usually big disruptors in anyone鈥檚 life though they don鈥檛 usually tip the scale that far. So how did it really happen? Several smaller steps 鈥 or licks of the lollipop if you will.
Going to private school as a kid, Iolani in my case, is not the usual preparatory beginnings for homelessness. Nor was going to a prestigious art school in New York City where I successfully worked as a freelance calligrapher for many years. It also wasn鈥檛 on the curriculum at the top school for Traditional Chinese Medicine in San Francisco where I did my grad school work. No, the true decline began with the grasping for the American dream.
In grad school I was one of the best in the school: I started getting asked to assist various teachers in my first year until I had TA鈥檇 for five different professors in 12 or more subjects; classmates asked me for help with their acupuncture or formulas in the clinic; I helped revive the Student Council; I was one of the go-to guys for special presentations for visiting groups; I was even in a pilot program with UCSF (University of California, San Francisco) med students exploring our professional rapport together. Just to name a few highlights. So generally I was destined to be a successful clinician no matter what I decided to do or where to do it. But then a twist presented itself to me.
I interned with a well known Chinese herbalist who owned a small herb import company. They also sold his proprietary specialty formulas. He noticed a business sense in me and liked some recommendations I made for sales to improve. So he offered me a job to help the company grow. This guy knew how to do more than heal; he knew how to make money. So I figured why not, the clinic can wait. Though there鈥檚 much to say on this topic (I actually only lasted nine agonizing months with them) let it suffice to say that it was only the prelude to a bigger wave coming my way.
Next up was a hip new Chinese herbal product line that focused on organic sourcing. No one was doing it and the other principals involved didn鈥檛 really know the industry well enough so I saw an opportunity and stepped in. However, little did I know that the sweat equity I was to put in over the next three and a half years would amount to nada, nothing, diddly-squat. You get the idea. To sum it up it was a perfect storm of being too far ahead of a curve for people to get it (though now they do); not having brave enough investors to cough up the capital we needed to radically expand to a more competitive scale; and finally being too small of a company to have enough momentum to survive the ripples of an economic collapse that took out our two biggest customers. Four years in, all the money lost, nothing earned, lots of shame.
The demise of the company was a big bite of the lollipop. And the connectors to everything else after are complex. I tried to make the best of it and finally opened that 鈥渟uccessful鈥 clinic that everyone predicted I would. But too little too late and continuous bouts of bad karma kept flowing my way. The only saving grace was that I already owned a van by the time I was packing my clothes into the back of it thus entering the stream of newly un-homed people in Hawaii. It could be a lot worse of course, and I鈥檝e seen more of what that means up close. So for now I remain the dreamer, the mechanic, the artist, the healer and so much more. I just happen to shower down at the beach for now.
