Impossible Goals – Crawling Out from Homelessness – 10.8.2025
Today’s prompt couldn’t be more timely.
What was the hardest personal goal you’ve set for yourself?
Setting goals is easy, Reaching them is Harder
I’ve set tons of goals that I’ve failed tremendously to meet. I’ve also set some doozies that were no big deal. There’ve been some adventures and battles along the way.
I also find that it’s quite difficult to isolate a goal, because when you struggle to survive, surviving is tied to a lot of correlated goals.
Being a Traditional Surrogate was not only pretty easy, I had a blast with it, and I can’t tell you how many people have told me that they’d have never been capable of it.
I thought that graduating from college would be impossible as a high school drop out, and somehow I have two bachelor’s degrees.
Escaping Abuse
Escaping abuse, for my children and myself is the whole storyline in Erasing the Silence – which may be on hold for a while.
I was owned as a minor. My mother understood that the Cult of the Ego had rules that meant I was her property and she proved it over and over again. She knew it, because she had been raised to be property too.
She called us her “personal slaves,” to anyone who would listen. She meant it.
The ONLY option I had for escaping her coercive control, and the sexual abuse from my brother, was to become homeless. I knew it would be better to die than to stay.
Ever since, the world has made sure that I know I’m disposable.
I’ve slept on countless couches, and have had to pay my way with sex and cooking and cleaning more times than I can count. (I was trying to recount it, but the world spinning out of control at the moment so…)
I had to change how I understand risk.
I didn’t understand what this changed until I was writing this actually. I just now made the connection between my story, and Susan Dewey’s work on Risk. I never made the association before because I was maintaining a fiction that I’d gotten out of it while my ex-wife was actively trying to kill me.
Surviving has its own scripts.
I no longer have access to my academic work- because I spent several years homeless after getting my degrees. So I asked copilot to dig up her work on risk, because she has explained this so much better than I can.
Hey Copilot- Are you familiar with susan Dewey’s work on risk?
Yes—Susan Dewey’s work on risk is deeply embedded in her ethnographic research on criminalized women, institutional violence, and systemic precarity. She reframes “risk” not as a personal trait, but as a structural condition imposed by policy, poverty, and gendered surveillance.
🔍 Key Themes in Dewey’s Risk Framework
- Structural risk: Dewey argues that women in criminalized contexts—especially sex workers and incarcerated individuals—are not “risky” but made vulnerable by systems that criminalize survival.
- Institutional betrayal: Her work highlights how social services and criminal justice systems often fail the very people they claim to protect, creating cycles of risk through neglect, punishment, and exclusion.
- Gendered pathways: In pieces like Women of the Street and Outlaw Women, Dewey maps how gender, poverty, and trauma intersect to funnel women into carceral systems under the guise of “risk management.”
- Ethical research: Dewey’s approach to risk also includes methodological critique—she advocates for community-based participatory research (CBPR) that centers lived experience and resists extractive academic norms.
📚 Representative Works
- Neon Wasteland: Explores love, motherhood, and sex work in a Rust Belt town, showing how risk is socially constructed and emotionally navigated.
- Women of the Street: Co-authored with Tiffanie St. Germain, this book critiques the criminal justice–social services alliance and its failure to address systemic risk.
- Policing Pleasure: Examines how policy and state power shape risk narratives around sex work globally.
🧭 Why Her Work Matters for Advocacy
- Reframes blame: Dewey’s lens helps shift public discourse from “risky individuals” to “risky systems.”
- Supports survivor-centered framing: Her emphasis on lived experience and CBPR aligns with your own toolkit-building and narrative sovereignty.
- Challenges performative policy: She exposes how institutions use “risk” to justify control while ignoring root causes.
-Dr. Dewey is an incredible scholar, and I miss her greatly. She taught one of the 5 research methods courses I took. (I somehow thought that knowing people like Susan would mean that I was no longer at risk of living at risk- I needed to believe that. It was a lie.)
It still makes rounds in my head that Susan said that our greatest possible calling is research, and she absolutely embodied that.
I would add that second to that is the dissemination of well-grounded humanistic facts.
I’m 45, and this is the first time since I left my mother’s ownership that I’ve lived in a home that I wasn’t either renting, or living on someone’s good graces. This was the first time I wasn’t at immediate risk of being kicked out of wherever I was living.
This trap kept me under abusive control under rotating masters, and I was groomed for my own participation in it.
So, leaving abuse is the hardest, and the Cult of the Ego, and Housing Insecurity are why. It’s by design.
Call to Action!
Right now, the Loveland City Council (not all but enough…) combined with Loveland Police Department (again, not all but enough…) have orchestrated the displacement of our most vulnerable community members.
People will die. Our neighbors will die. People just like me will die.
It might even be me, as allowing this to continue creates a pipeline for eugenic extermination without consequence.
We need visibility. Please, be the beacon of light that shines on our unhoused, and those at risk, because we have put them there, and we are responsible.
Share these posts with your network. Use the hashtag #Floodthefeed to help us present this #humanrightsviolation to the world. They will not do the right thing unless enough eyes are watching.
Tell your own story of housing insecurity on TikTok and Instagram. The hashtag #CampHopeLoveland will connect your story to the realities of this moment in history.
We need donations! I’ll try to keep everyone updated, but please bring blankets, sleeping bags, coats, gloves, socks, boots, shoes, and warm clothes to the Loveland Resource Center. I’ve also heard that the House of Neighborly Services has also been critical to providing help.
Educate- there are so many dangerous lies out there.
Oh- Follow me on social media to share more content. Your help matters!
Operation **Reclaim** Loveland 
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