Chris, an Olympic Peninsula resident who requested to remain anonymous for this piece, has worked in the post-secondary education and business communications industry for more than 25 years, including 15 years of management consulting experience doing business as a business consultant.

For more than 10 years, he has worked as an independent infomediary by being a management consultant, trainer and facilitator. Since 1993, he has worked on dozens of business projects on the North Olympic Peninsula and taught in the Washington college system.

Within the past three years, Chris and his family have slowly fallen below the poverty line and have struggled since to find a stable job or place to live.

Chris shares some of his story on becoming homeless in hopes that others will come forward to express similar struggles in falling below the poverty line.

“I have been living on and off the Olympic Peninsula since 1992 and my observations come from a great deal of adversity that has put my family in a position to not have the means to barely stay alive.

We have found that the difficulty has come by trusting people who have not paid their bills or contracts, which brought about our physical fatigue, financial hope and spiritual demise.

We have found that we do not have employment, enough Social Security retirement income or investment in a return on relationships that we expected, so we have fallen well below the poverty line.

People may wonder how a middle-class person in Washington state and on the Olympic Peninsula, who may have been earning $40,000-$100,000 per year could become homeless or lose everything; perhaps they are not improvident today, but merely one paycheck away from homelessness.

I have lived where people have known me when I had an office in a new, multi-million dollar building, or worked at a full-time job teaching for a local community college or as a consultant to the senior director of a Clallam County service organization. I was doing jobs that paid quite adequately and had my own place in the community with a job that gave me a fair profile and a certain responsibility.

I now circulate among people who recognize me from past years, but do not know I am homeless, impoverished, in ill health and going to the local food bank. They do not know we may now be living in a motel, but have lived in a tent in numerous locations or have slept in our car.

My past identity was completely different in attitude, confidence and outlook. What has happened over time has been a debilitating nightmare.

We have been able to realize firsthand that by falling into homelessness we needed to go to social service agencies to find help. Many of these government sources were inadequate and some nonprofit groups were well-meaning but dysfunctional enough to serve their own religious guilt and only shamed those they sought to serve.

There may be many other people living in this county and this state who earned above a median income but are now homeless, frightened and merely trying to stay alive on a daily basis.

For example, have you met other older folk in their 60s who have four or five college degrees between them and have not been able to find jobs? Their job-search paperwork also has been set aside by ageism’s prejudice, over-qualification or under-qualification for an open position, even at minimum wage, and the final accepted interview never comes.

We still have not come to a stable, resolved situation after years of going through this turmoil of moving from place to place. It has been a maddening roller-coaster of stress, not just of displacement but of guilt and shame and rejection by supposed God-fearing people.

Having worked full-time recently for a year-and-a-half at a position that we thought was going to have continuity and also bring us a home, I found venal selfishness again worked against our stability.

These mitigating circumstances happen to many people. It is adversity, not so-called bad luck, but is part of a post-Christian culture that has fallen in upon itself.

We are trying to get beyond survival so we can give the humane and spiritual gifts we own back to the community and help other people who are suffering. Our experiences have certainly made us more conscious of the sufferings of others than than ever before.

We are out there on the streets of your town fighting for our lives to find permanent housing, new employment, and wondering what we are going to do for food tonight.

It has now been nearly three months and any money saved or kept has been eroded because we cannot live in a storage unit, the car, the hospital or put up a tent in the cold weather.

We have no finances, family help or angel capital to come to our rescue although recently we have had some blessings from one poor but prayerful and conscientious friend.

We do not really want the hand-out or the hand-up but something viable for the long-term so we can help other people like us who have gone through this sorrow.

Hopefully, we will keep ourselves alive enough to serve you at the same time.”

Everyone has a story and now they have a place to tell it. Verbatim is a first-person column that introduces you to your neighbors as they relate in their own words some of the difficult, humorous, moving or just plain fun moments in their lives. It’s all part of the Gazette’s commitment as your community newspaper. If you have a story for Verbatim, contact editor Michael Dashiell at editor@sequimgazette.com.