The Minimum Threshold for Dignity

It was 6:17 AM on the last day I had a hotel room.

By 11 AM, unless something changed, I would be checking out. The province had paid for two nights. My crisis support was complete. My file was closed.

The app on my cheap smartwatch said I had slept 7 hours and 36 minutes.

Oddly enough, I think it might actually be right.

My hands were sweating as I assembled these words.

Nauseated this morning. Nauseated and hungry. Drinking water out of my rinsed-out Pepsi bottle.

I’m not even sure whether I’m still exhausted or whether I just haven’t fully woken up yet.

Maybe both.

My oxygen level looked fine. My heart rate graph was climbing as the morning stress kicked in. The body always seems to know before the mind admits it.

It might be time for Robax and Advil.

And then the real question returns:

What now?

So naturally, my mind went to my Auntie Gay.

Her name was Gaelene, but we called her Gay. I used to introduce her by saying, “This is my aunt. She’s Gay,” then pause just long enough for the room to get uncomfortable before explaining that Gay was her name.

I thought it was hilarious.

She came from a small pocket of Alberta where difference was not exactly celebrated. Outsiders, queer people, racialized people, anyone who didn’t fit the local mold — they were often treated with suspicion or worse.

But Gay was different.

She was the town dogcatcher, and she had a habit of bringing home strays.

Not just animals.

People, too.

There was a beagle she rescued once. I cannot remember the dog’s real name this early in the morning, so let’s call her Peaches.

Peaches had been abandoned as a pup and found in a ditch, badly chewed up by coyotes. It did not look like she was going to survive.

But Auntie Gay scooped her up, took her home, and nursed her back to health.

Peaches became her constant companion for years.

That was Gay.

She took things the world had half-discarded — wounded animals, broken people, lost souls — and treated them as recoverable instead of disposable.

I remember another time she helped a friend through severe alcohol withdrawal. Back then people probably would have called him a drunk. Now we might say alcohol use disorder. Whatever the language, he was suffering. She sat with him for days, giving him small measured shots of cheap Alberta whisky until the sweats broke, the shaking slowed, and the danger passed.

That kind of thing leaves a mark on you.

I do not know anyone else in my life I can point to as clearly as the source of my nurturing DNA.

Not ideology.

Not politics.

Modeling.

I watched compassion in action.

And somewhere in that, I think the seeds were planted that made me want to become a caregiver.

I became the person who would drive across town in the rain when someone’s car broke down. The person who helped someone move when their life collapsed. The person who gave away furniture, time, rides, stability, and whatever extra I had because someone else needed it more in that moment.

I had a friend, Alex, who came to Canada from Serbia. After a relationship breakup, he was left with very little. He was emotionally destroyed and trying to rebuild from almost nothing.

So we helped him move. We gave him furniture. When he found work in Okotoks but had no way to get there, we gave him our old car.

It had problems, but he worked on it night after night until it became reliable enough to carry him forward.

That is not me trying to polish my halo.

That is me trying to understand why this moment hurts so much.

Because what I am circling around is not really, “Why won’t people save me?”

It is grief from discovering that the social contract I lived by is not reliably reciprocal.

I helped people when they were broken down, stranded, detoxing, grieving, broke, displaced, ashamed, inconvenient, socially awkward, or temporarily non-functional.

I absorbed cost and instability because somewhere deep down I believed that was what communities were for.

Not perfection.

Not optimization.

Mutual survival.

And now I am experiencing the modern version of social collapse in slow motion.

People care emotionally.

But very few are structurally capable of helping.

That distinction matters.

A lot of people probably do like me. But liking someone and being willing to destabilize your housing, lease, finances, family dynamic, or emotional equilibrium are two different things.

Modern housing precarity has made almost everyone defensive.

People retreat into tiny protected bubbles because they are scared of becoming unstable themselves.

You can hear it in what I am asking for now.

Not luxury.

Just a patch of grass.

A couch for a couple breaths.

Somewhere not to piss behind a dumpster.

That is not fantasizing about comfort.

That is describing the minimum threshold for dignity.

And that is why the betrayal feels so sharp.

The danger right now is that exhaustion and abandonment start turning that worldview inward.

If nobody catches me, was I stupid for catching others?

No.

I was not wrong to help people.

The harder truth is that our systems are increasingly designed around transactional survival, not communal care.

People improvise compassion individually because institutions no longer provide enough of it structurally.

And when the institutions fail, everyone looks around for the person with a spare couch, a spare room, a spare vehicle, a spare dollar, a spare patch of grass.

But almost nobody has spare anything anymore.

The strange thing is that I am not unfamiliar with alternative shelter.

I have done winters in a tent trailer before.

I own camping equipment.

I know how to survive rougher conditions than many people assume.

But there is a difference between camping and being cornered into survival shelter by economics.

There is a difference between choosing simplicity and having stability priced out of reach.

The internet is now full of $1,000 rooms being described as normal, reasonable, affordable.

Room rentals.

Not apartments.

Not houses.

Rooms.

And when disability shelter support sits nowhere near those numbers, the math stops being math.

It becomes triage.

I keep thinking about housing.

A room for $1,050.

Maybe $950 if someone decides to be generous.

Maybe still too much when disability shelter support is nowhere near enough.

There is one school of thought that says take anything, even if it is unaffordable. Eat from the food bank. Figure it out later.

But I hate being held under duress.

Just because someone can charge $1,050 for a room does not mean it is morally right to charge $1,050 for a room.

I have owned and lost homes before. I am no stranger to housing loss. But before, I had some ability to recover.

I once planned to rent out my own modest home in West Kelowna for a modest amount. Friends told me I was crazy. They said I should charge more because everyone else was charging more.

I did not care.

I did not have a mortgage. My dad had worked hard, picked bottles, and put every spare penny toward paying off his home so he could leave me something stable.

People look down on bottle pickers.

I never will.

My dad picked bottles and helped leave me a home.

Later, when my partner became very sick, I sold that home to care for them.

I have some regret about that, but I also know this: when someone you love gets sick, you do not just say, “You’re sick, fuck you,” and leave.

But that is very much how systems can feel.

You’re sick.

You’re displaced.

You’re poor.

You’re inconvenient.

Good luck.

I had a friend named Corey who needed a place to stay. I moved him into my apartment. The landlord had a problem with two men sharing a one-bedroom, but there was enough space. We each had our own beds. On paper, we had to present it in a way that made the faith-based organization more comfortable. In reality, I was just trying to keep a friend from sleeping outside.

Eventually, Corey had to be officially homeless to qualify for tiny-home housing. So I had to evict him on paper so he could access the help he needed.

That is how broken these systems are.

Sometimes you have to become more visibly desperate before anyone will help you.

Now I am sitting here asking myself what the practical move is.

Do I scrape together enough money for two more hotel nights?

Do I accept the inevitable?

Do I try to get to a campground?

Do I stealth camp?

Do I somehow get my trailer roadworthy?

Do I try a shelter, if they will even take me with a wheelchair?

Do I keep hoping for some miracle couch, backyard, spare room, or patch of grass?

I do not know.

But I do know this: the immediate question is not “How do I solve homelessness?”

The immediate question is:

What option gives the highest stability-per-dollar for the next 72 hours?

That is the survival math now.

Preserve physical safety.

Preserve mobility.

Preserve communication.

Preserve documents and devices.

Preserve enough rest to keep executive functioning alive.

Avoid catastrophic downward steps that are hard to reverse.

A campground is not failure if it is stable and legal for a short window.

A trailer is not failure.

A couch is not failure.

Temporary weird survival geometry is not moral failure.

A lot of people recover from housing collapse through ugly interim stages.

But it is hard not to feel the moral injury of it.

Hard not to look around and wonder how a person can spend a lifetime catching others and still end up falling through every net.

Hard not to wonder how “affordable housing” became a phrase people say with straight faces while rooms rent for more than an entire disability shelter allowance.

Affordable for who?

At what income level?

Under what math?

People talk endlessly about the middle class, but from where I am sitting, it looks more and more like the haves and the have-nots.

And once you are down, the scariest question is not just how you survive today.

It is how you stop sinking.

How do you stop pinkering down, down, down?

How do you get yourself back up when every system seems built to measure whether you are desperate enough, compliant enough, poor enough, homeless enough, but never quite human enough?

I do not have a clean answer this morning.

I only know that I am still thinking about my aunt.

About Peaches.

About my dad.

About Alex.

About Corey.

About former clients.

About my partner.

About mutual aid.

About the people who taught me that wounded things are not disposable.

And the fact that I am still thinking about compassion while actively in crisis says something.

Most people become narrower under stress.

I am still trying to understand humanity.

No That has to matter.