Amethysts story

 The first time I met Amethyst I was struck by how good she looked. That sounds way more offensive then I intend it to -please know that most women I spend my days with LOOK like they have been abusing heroin/meth/whatever their drug of choice is for a long time, they LOOK as traumatized and victimized as they are. Amethyst has somehow managed to keep her teeth, not look too beat up and be incredibly engaging, kind and knowledgable. We very quickly learned that she considers herself to be “beyond help”. She is, as she put it, “a lifelong junkie and a prostitute”...”that’s just what she is”. She continued to very calmly and eloquently share with myself and Noel that she wants to be our friend, but that she feels bad for us because she doesn’t want us to get too hopeful that she will ever change. she wont. she can’t.
She made very clear definitions of what our relationship with her would be like and reassured us that she really likes us and just does not want us to have unrealistic hopes 
for her. We listened, told her that we are just glad that she found us here and to make herself 
at home here. We also asked her to accept some of our own terms- and that was to believe us when we say that we do not have an agenda. She is not our project. She is a precious human being, just like us- and can we please just be friends? She seemed to like this idea. And, hence, from this point forward, Amethyst and I became friends. The more I got to know Amethyst, the more our lives intersected, the more I grew to love her, and her me-the more she wove herself into the fabric of life at the Commons, the more the Commons became her home- her safe place... you could feel, see, and experience that she was in fact changing. I suppose I didn’t realize how much she was changing until, as we began to work on housing applications together, procuring state id, social security info (all of these things that she hasn’t had for many years) - I noticed that she wasn’t coming to the Commons as much. When I asked her why, her answer shocked me. She shared with me that over the last 6 months her life at the Commons, her friendships, her steps that she had taken to try and procure housing- all of these have enabled her to kind of move past a need for the Commons. In essence, she didn’t feel like she could handle being around the people that inhabit the Commons anymore because she feels like she wants to move forward, heal, begin to take steps towards transitioning out of this life- out of prostitution, off of drugs, in a place of her own etc. Being around the very community that made her feel welcomed in a society that so often excludes “junkies and prostitutes”is no longer a place of belonging for Amethyst because she is, unbeknownst to all of us, CHANGING.
 
In many ways, it was difficult for me to hear that I would not be seeing her as much because I just love her so much. But, this sadness was welcomed as I came to realize that our accompaniment of Amethyst offered her space to begin to change- to suddenly find herself changed in such a way that she really came to it on her own, and we were really just her “birth assistant”.

Fastforward- Just yesterday we received news that Amethyst WAS accepted into her own Apartment!! She has been un-housed for more than 5 years. To say that we are all so excited about this is an understatement!  We can’t stop talking about what she will make for myself and Noel when she has us over for dinner! Our friendship with Amethyst is not over. Her apartment is less than a mile away, she is still using heroin and is still prostituted. But, we now have hope- all of us together- that she is continually changing, growing and, she would agree now that she is not just “a junkie and a prostitute” but rather a beautiful woman, with her own apartment and a dream of getting clean and not prostituting 
herself any more.The journey has just begun. And I anticipate many more celebrations!

Lisa Etter-Carlson