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October – November 2026 : Express yourself READ ONLINE

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Try to be yourself

October 01 2026
Metro Twickenham Square by Minghui Yu. © Antropia Metro Twickenham Square by Minghui Yu. © Antropia

Thoughts on losing yourself, finding yourself, self expression and homelessness. By Mat Amp

“You take away from the world when you’re not yourself. Whatever is unique and special about you was designed... And when you try to be someone else, we don’t get you.” – Queen Latifah 


The experience of being homeless seemed to take away my ability to express myself. It’s not like that for everyone, I know, but it was most definitely like that for me. 


First, the stuff I had disappeared, then my means to generate cash to get new stuff, then my mate’s sofa went, followed by my highly developed sense of self and agency. Finally, if I didn’t totally forget how to laugh, I surely forgot how to tell a joke. I could take one and even be the butt of one if I had to, but my outlook and the way I expressed myself stopped really being me. 


I’ve consistently written about my journey through homelessness in this column and I’ve talked about many of these issues before, but no matter how much I look back on my journey through recovery and the inevitable ups and downs of life, there is always something else that I notice. 

With the experience of homelessness, my existence became so focused on survival that it seemed to fold me into this little group of petty criminals in north London. I was from Brixton at the time but I knew too many people in the area and I was ashamed of my situation, so didn’t want to keep having to explain what was going on in my life. At that point I hadn’t made sense of it myself, and a single drop of pity could be devastating.


You know, that look people give you when they realise you’re not doing too well. So I debunked to Finsbury Park, a place I knew the type of people who wouldn’t react with pity to my lack of agency, because drug use, theft and dysfunction was their way of life. And they didn’t really know me that well, so nobody really knew what I’d lost. 


I used to be the type of guy who would go to gay pride in a pink tutu and other places where tutus are less often worn by men. I liked that about myself. I have never thought less of someone because of their sexuality and I kind of saw dressing up like that as fun, but also a way of showing support for people who often face discrimination for the first time at home, from the people that are meant to be their shelter from hate. And often, the people handing out this type of judgement, the type of judgement that can cripple someone emotionally for life, aren’t bad people. Often, they’ve just been badly educated, traumatised or misinformed about the nature of God and man. Ladies and Gentlemen, I can finally reveal that God is not a massively spiteful, vengeful prick who burns people for eternity in the fires of fiery hell just for going with another guy. 


How do I know this? Because when you’ve truly been yourself, free from the jostling and noise, you realise that these are awful stories designed to keep people behaving themselves. Wanting people to obey without questioning isn’t just cruel, it ain’t fair and it doesn’t work in any practical sense of the word.


And don’t get me wrong, I like to think of myself as a spiritual person, but blind obedience to any set of rules just because, leads good people to engage in diabolical behaviour. Don’t believe me, just ask history. It knows. It’s a mindset that lies in direct opposition to the idea of being and expressing your true self. 


The experience of homelessness seemed to erase my ability to be myself because I was too busy surviving. I was kipping on a mate’s floor for a while, the rent – a 10 bag every two or three days, depending on what you could afford. 


Money became drug tokens and between six of us we got six giros every two weeks. We had a load of little scams going on, including these three flash Turkish guys at the bookies who used to pay us ten or twenty quid on top of the cash to buy something. That way we could steal it or not and still get the money to score. They used to sit there with bundles of cash throwing it at the horses all day and that’s how they expressed themselves. 


But no matter how much money we got, we ate toast and I got a case of severe anemia which I wrote about in the column years ago under the heading ‘Irony Deficiency’. The irony was that we were robbing bags of meat everyday from a supermarket to sell at the opposite pub. If you have time, look it up on our website, it’s worth the read, I promise you. 


There was a guy in Upper Street who would take any meat products for 70p on the pound  but it would mean walking for a mile or two from Holloway Road with a bag of stolen goods. I wasn’t known to local police but the guys I was with were. So that was me, walking 10 yards ahead with a huge bag of premium chops trying not to look dodgy, in unwashed, badly fitting clothes, coming off heroin – which, if you don’t know, makes you jumpy as a pigeon on fireworks night.


It was a world away from the character I had developed in my past life. I had a lot of agency and control over what was happening around me in those days but in many ways the experience of homelessness and the process of recovery gave me the opportunity to become a better version of myself, without the insecurities and self doubt that, I realise now, were always there, like a kind of splinter in the brain. 


But you don’t have to dress up and party to express yourself. We all have different, original selves. I try to remember that self expression is never primarily performative. It doesn’t matter if you’re dressing up and partying or quietly creating a painting, genuine self expression has to come from yourself.


Self expression is a super power and we are the only people that can express our own self. Remember the words of Queen Latifah: “When you try and be someone else, we don’t get you.”

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October – November 2026 : Express yourself

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