"My First Art Gala Experience" - Artist Contribution: Kateri

“It’s an odd life living homeless. There can be so many different opposite and intense emotions running through your head at the same time. Usually a situation will bring it on that is negative, but Saturday night at the [Daybreak Arts] gala was a positive experience that evoked only one negative that was blended with extreme joy.

When you once had a “normal” life working at a job that paid your bills, while living in a comfortable apartment that met your urban needs, like eating out with your mother for Thanksgiving dinner or enjoying a movie or perhaps the simple pleasure of enjoying a cup of coffee on your porch on a Sunday morning, it’s a shock to your psyche when all of those “normal” things abruptly cease and you’re transported to another lifestyle that is foreign to what you knew.

There’s a multiplicity of hard core realities that you now have to deal with. The loss of the life you had is overwhelming. The loss of everything you once “owned” is stark. Now you only “own” what you can carry with your two-hands. The indignity of sharing with 200 other women the common bathrooms and showers, no real personal time to yourself, always living in public view of other women’s (or men’s in some instances) eyes and ears. Incumbent weather becomes your enemy to being comfortable when you live out in the elements, and there is always the fear of being robbed or raped while living on the streets. There are times (more frequent than not) when you have to settle for less than you need or want and then be “happy” that the less wasn’t more.

You’re looking for a way out of this homeless existence, a rope of hope to grasp and hold onto for dear life, to swing over to the other side to a “land of milk and honey,” the new “normal.” So, here I am holding on firmly to my “rope of hope,” Daybreak Arts, enjoying the Gala and everyone who came, giving their support and expressing their love for the creative drawings and sculptures that Sam and I worked on. Everyone was so friendly and genuinely sincere in their appreciation. I was on an extreme emotional high. It seemed like I was a “Cinderella” at the ball.

I was musing on this thought while all around me the guests were leaving, the people who had helped with setting up the Gala were putting away that tablecloths, taking down and packing the pictures, taking out the nails that had hung the art pieces to the walls. There was a buzz of activity all around me, people with happy but tired faces and quiet conversation and laughter, when the thought came into my mind that all of these wonderful people would be going to their homes. They would drive their cars to the streets where they live, park in their driveways or garages, open their doors with a key to their homes hung on their key chains and enter in, to their beds and sleep a comfortable sleep with their windows and doors locked to keep them safe.

And where would Sam and I sleep that night after the Gala? We would go to sleep on a single sleeping bag, the two of us on top of a tent that we laid down on a concrete floor at someone’s business facility, hoping that it would not rain, that we would not be discovered and be told to leave or worse, receive a citation for trespassing. So here I am, sitting in a chair and suddenly I get very sad while I’m extremely happy about the Daybreak Arts Gala. How weird and bizarre is that?”

-Kateri Pomeroy Fulks (Daybreak Arts Artist Collective member since May 2014)

Kateri wrote this blog post in Fall 2014 after exhibiting in her first art gala with us. In Spring 2015, Kateri transitioned into housing with the help of local nonprofit Open Table Nashville, Inc.