Let Me Sleep
by Kaitlyn McGlothlen & Raymond Sanchez
Infographics by Lais Conceicao
We walked into a café, a common setting in what most call the coffee capital of the world. This café has a particularly distinct Pacific Northwest feel to it, sitting tucked away in a charming alleyway with upward of 150 posters scattered on the brick walls. Mike, the third participant in our ongoing study of sleep quality and circadian rhythms in young adults experiencing homelessness, sat with his rainbow glitter nails wrapped around an orange cream soda, which he insisted upon drinking for health reasons. While the rest of Seattle overly consumes coffee, Mike sticks to the sweet stuff.
“Trying to get yourself to do a lot is very difficult when you don’t have enough sleep in your system. Trying to find the motivation to do things is hard,” he says, with a perfectly timed yawn. “And it’s annoying, very annoying, because then I have to use soda to keep myself up. If I don’t have it I just sleep and people are like, ‘wake up’… and then they have to go and get me soda.”
Besides being an avid consumer of sugary drinks, Mike also enjoys free art classes offered at the Roots Shelter, reading Edgar Allen Poe, and petting Samoyed dogs he calls “clouds with faces”. His options for late-night fun, however, are quite limited.
Staying out late is a luxury that individuals experiencing homelessness cannot afford if they want to claim an indoor bed and not risk sleeping on the cold sidewalk. “Most of the stuff that me and friends would like to do we can’t do, because it’s later on at night and unfortunately, Roots has a schedule that cuts that by a lot.”
While more privileged 23 year olds are attending late-night comedy shows and having game nights with friends, individuals who are homeless are left with few options. With a capped number of beds at the shelter it is necessary to get in line early. Not only does this negatively affect social life, but it complicates their job opportunities as well, prohibiting Mike and others needing a shelter bed from working a job that requires them to work past 8 PM. Regardless, staying at Roots he says, “is better than sleeping on concrete.”
Mike hasn’t always been in the situation he’s in now, in line every night at 7:45 to claim a bed of his own. In fact, he previously lived with family and friends, a few states to the East in Wisconsin. He has a rocky relationship with his family, however, who he says taught him to “love incorrectly”. As a result of his experiences, he finds that distancing himself from others is intuitively easier.
This difficult upbringing, coupled with his family’s inability to accept his then-partner and now-fiancé, caused many issues. “After seeing how they treated my other half, I could tell it wasn’t going to work out anymore” said Mike.
Unstable family relationships, along with 4-foot-high snowfalls and bad roommates, triggered the couple’s trek over to Seattle. Mike’s roots are now planted here, with his fiancé and his friends. Building and developing solid relationships with others at the shelter came naturally, even with the amount of insults he hurls their way, another trait he attributes to his family.
