Homelessness doesn’t always look like a person sleeping on a park bench. For a Mississippi woman who asked to be identified only by her first name, Sharon, it looked like years of couch-surfing, depression and a slow slide into drinking just to get through the day, until a transitional housing program in Mobile helped her find her footing again.
Sharon’s story began to unravel after her mother died in 2009. She managed for about a year, she said, but a falling-out among siblings and the eventual sale of the family home left her without a stable place to live, floating between friends’ spare rooms and couches. For the first time in her life, alcohol stopped being an occasional habit and became, in her words, the only way she could function in the morning or sleep at night.
She patched together an income by babysitting while a friend drove her to the local unemployment office to search for work, and she even filed federal financial aid paperwork hoping to finish the college credits she needed to complete a bachelor’s degree in elementary education. But her drinking kept undermining every step forward. Eventually, in what she described as an act of desperation, she called her oldest sister, someone she assumed no longer cared about her, and asked for help. That call led to three months of treatment at a facility in Gautier, Mississippi, and, from there, a referral to the Sybil H. Smith Family Village in Mobile, a transitional housing program that gives displaced families their own apartment along with access to life-skills classes and job training.
Getting in wasn’t easy. Sharon described the intake screening as exhaustive, with staff probing her history, her setbacks and every possible resource she might have overlooked. She entered the program in May 2013, and the after-care component she was required to attend introduced her to a 12-step recovery program she credits with saving her life and helping her find direction. Her first six weeks in the village were spent in life-skills classes covering everything from setting personal boundaries to budgeting, nutrition and basic household management, lessons she said forced her to relearn habits she had lost track of during years of crisis.
Weekly case-management meetings gave her, for the first time in a long while, a structured space to talk through her goals, which is how she ended up enrolling at Virginia College. She graduated in September with certifications as a medical assistant and phlebotomy technician, work she said felt more true to who she is than the education degree she had once pursued mainly to please her late mother. Nearly two years sober by the time she told her story, she was awaiting word on one of two job offers as she began mapping her exit from the two-year-maximum program.
Sharon said what frustrates her most is the assumption that homelessness always comes with a particular look. Riding the bus, she said, she has heard strangers mock someone else’s appearance or smell without knowing that person’s story, unaware that the woman sitting near them once lived the same reality. Programs like Sybil Smith, she said, exist precisely because circumstances, not character, are often what separates a stable life from a precarious one.