Thanks very much for your question and comments.
Relationship plays powerfully in my own journey. In my journey from addiction and homelessness, the starting point for me and the real tipping point was that I continually found myself in and out of hospitals and jail systems. It got to a point where I really hit some low places in life, and I tried to end my own life on more than one occasion. These weren't cries for help; these were well planned out and well thought out, and there was no hesitation.
I really got lucky that my story gets to continue based on other things I couldn't account for. A frontline worker ended up saving my life the first time I tried to end it, and she shouldn't have been there at all. She knew me very well. I went into safe consumption sites all the time, and she knew who I was. The only reason she was around to save my life was that it was a Friday evening, and she'd stayed at work three hours after she was supposed to be done because she was going on vacation on Monday. She shouldn't have been in the building at all. She came out into the alleyway—and that's another thing. She never left out the back door into that alley because it's unsafe. As a young, good-looking woman, she always went out the front exit of the building into the street lights.
That's just one of many incidents. It really took a frontline worker to make me feel valued enough, not just from being put in the position to directly have to save my life but also the countless times they showed up for me. They connected with me.
When you're living in an extended period of homelessness and suffering the kinds of things we do, you really feel outside of society. We get used to people looking at us and telling us, “Get a job. What's wrong with you?” We get used to that judgment. One of the times I ended up in a hospital, I had a frontline worker who would continually come every other day, take time away from her day, bring me cigarettes and wheel me in a wheelchair outside so I could have a smoke, and that was the only person I talked to.
There were a lot of little things like that that added up over time, but without frontline workers, I wouldn't be here to speak to you guys today.