IN the Simon Community Scotland there is a kind of chain. Among the workers and volunteers are people who were once homeless, who know what it is to be an addict or rough-sleeper, and can offer hope to those still out there.
Often they were given that same hope by someone like themselves. One of them is Jim Thomson, a gentle, graceful figure working on the charity’s street team, who has his own story of trauma, heroin addiction, grief and loss, of getting to the point where all he wanted to do was kill himself with drugs.
Thomson had been a heroin addict for many years when he finally found himself on the street in 2014. It wouldn’t be correct to say he was rough-sleeping because he barely slept, instead walking the streets almost constantly through the night and day. His mother had recently died, the heroin had slowly stopped working and he had not lived with his kids for years. Never in a month did he make a sleeping bag bed on the street.
“That was the last thing that was going to happen,” he says. “I would probably have gone into the Clyde before it got to that.”
Instead, he just walked and thought. What he most wanted to do was die. “I was suicidal, but I just wasn’t fortunate enough for the drugs to work and kill me.”
What gave him hope at this point were a couple of volunteers working with the Simon community, who were themselves in recovery. One, in particular, was someone he had known well.
“I used with him,” he recalls. “We were homeless together, in a temporary furnished flat, back in the day.” Seeing him now working, gave him, he says “a wee bit of hope for the first time in years”. When the two volunteers told him he should go to a drug crisis centre, he did.
“That was July 17, 2014,” he says, “and I woke up on the next morning in the crisis centre and my whole thinking had changed. I thought never again. I don’t know what happened to me. But what made a difference was I knew hundreds of people who had been where I was and weren’t doing that any more.”
Thomson now is that possible figure of hope for other addicts who have found themselves homeless, whether on the street, or in hostels or other temporary accommodation. He is part of a programme Simon Community Scotland run of peer volunteers.
He recalls what he thought when he saw that volunteer who offered him a vision of a way out. “I thought, well, if he can do it anybody can.”
It’s what he says to others now: “If I can do it anybody can do it.”
The drugs began for him with pills, dope and alcohol in his teens. “It was just what we did,” he says, “what happened where I’m from, Pollock.”
Like many addicts, his background contains elements of trauma. “My whole life was traumatic,” he says. “I was the youngest of 11 siblings, I saw lots of traumatic things in my life, things that happened that I’m not going to talk about. So, would I have become an addict if they didn’t happen? Who knows. But I did.”
At 28 he left the mother of his three kids after their relationship had broken down and moved in to a flat on his own. That was when he started to use heroin more and more.
“I didn’t need to hide it from anybody.”
During this time, he recalls, his “mental health went” and he ended up in a psychiatric ward. “Probably,” he says, “a bit of clinical depression because I’d been away from my weans.”
After he had his epiphany at the crisis centre he went into a treatment centre for six months, and when he came out, began volunteering for the Simon Community, where soon he was offered a full-time job.
“Life is good.,” he says. “I’ve got a job, I’ve got a roof over my head, I’ve got my daughter staying with me – and she was three when I left, twenty now.”
Sometimes he sees people that he feels could be himself on the streets. He would like to think he is giving them hope too. “That’s how I got the hope. Because I saw that it didn’t have to be that way. When I see people who are in a situation like I was I tell them there’s a way out.”
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