For a start, the date on this blog being a notable milestone American date, but I don’t feel like going into the nuances of that subject. Suffice to say, it’s not something black or white, so describing my feelings there is complicated.

I’ve said before that every single holiday celebrated in the western world, in particular every American holiday, is rife with material for fueling both cynics and optimists, for being pessimistic or optimistic, depending on perspective of the holidays and which aspects of them, their history, their meaning, their representation, their iconography, etc., you choose to focus on.

The same holiday which can promote arrogant imperialist superiority and the assertion of world dominance, control, and loss of cultural history and identity in favor of a forced unity,
Can also be promoting the ideas of no one person or perspective or way of life being inherently right, and can be used to celebrate progress and the right to live.

The same holiday which can be used by bigots to justify bigotry as their divinely and according to them Constitutionally protected right,
Can be used by minorities to celebrate their validity and right to exist equally to others.

Many things, including holidays, are arbitrary in what capitalism opts into investigate in monetizing en masse, but while those events which get merchandised lead to merchandise being available everywhere, they also shift the focus of the holiday away from creativity and the spirit of the holiday and instead into buying the most expensive display available as the accepted token to celebrate.

In general I am heavily critical of capitalism as a system, and while I recognize in modern civilization there’s a need for a universally recognized equalizer between goods and services, between time and products, I wish money were a secondary, only-as-needed, tool, rather than the default, especially given how late-stage capitalism creates billionaires on the way to becoming trillionaires where a hundred people control more wealth and resources than 99% of humanity combined. 

I’m equally critical of these mega corporations and their effective monopolies having handshakes with politicians where just enough are bought and paid for to prevent any real change despite a majority of people desiring those changes, with politicians not even bothering to debate how to tackle implementation of these things and just refusing to ever try.

But all of that is a given. It’s not what I’m here to talk about. 

Nor am I here to talk about how dire and critical life currently is, with me being on the verge of homelessness and losing everything, again, with no guarantees of current plans working out.

I’m here instead to talk about the hope of my writing, because despite everything, I am increasingly drawn to it.

Part of me has always said, "I’m not ready to present my work, it’s not complete enough". Especially since I can only work on it in the small windows my job isn’t working me to death, which is every workday without fail.

But what if I can actually sell my vision to someone who can advocate for me and get me the resources I need?

It’s just a matter of finding the right person with the right connections.

I know I have a potentially billion dollar franchise idea. I have the plan, I have the world begging to be made, I have all of the tools I need. I just need to present them to the right person.

I haven’t done much writing, but I have done some, so I want to invest in it. I’ve been told, for years now, by my spirit team to be a writer, to embrace my creativity. I just haven’t thought I have had enough to present.

But they've also told me not to doubt myself, and to believe in the improbable, to believe that what I’ve written off as impossible is in fact possible. 

So, if it’s possible...It’s just a question of finding out how.

There’s a lot of parasitic companies who are scammers or have incredibly brutal unfair contracts.

And even legitimate people have entry costs more often than not. 

So, I have no idea how to find a legitimate, fair, non-parasitic, person to pitch my novel to...

...but I know that they must exist, and I want to find them, and then sway them into giving me what I need. 

I’m never going to get the life I want on my current income, especially when renting eats it all up. But I also am largely unemployable, as my failures to land either promotions or new jobs show, in this nightmarish job market. 

Something has to change. Living situation doesn’t look like it’s going to improve, so that won’t magically fix my issues. So what if I just go for it, in finding who to talk to about my idea, and with my passion, providing them the belief I can make it if they help?

I am tired of becoming less and less the person I want to be, of shrinking, of going down a path in life looking worse and worse, every day more grim than the last, every week harder to survive, the struggles only growing over time, and no way out, no hope, no help which actually helps.

I’ve got to find a way which provides that, and it won’t happen if I don’t make it happen. 

After all, the worst which could happen is I waste time and money. But the reward outweighs the risk. After all, when I’m on the verge of potentially losing everything, I’ve got nothing to lose by trying.

So Let’s fight for that better future.

Wish me luck.

I believe in myself enough where I want to try, but keeping it up is something I have never been strong at. But now, I’ll need to be.

I can do this. I have to. Here's to hoping. <3

And it feels like there’s a crossroads at hand.

Down the good path, years from now our future daughter will eventually look back at my lifetime of blogging before she came into our world and have a flood of emotions witnessing the struggles in these years, and how it kept getting worse and worse. 

But this good path, the one I seek, eventually would lead to my wife and I having a daughter together through some means. There’s a past blog describing it, but basically, my wife and I at the same exact time had nearly the exact same dream about a future where we were raising a daughter together. It felt like a much-needed premonition of the future we need to fight for, hold onto, and figure out how to manifest. 

And it is that future which is one of the few things giving me the strength to keep existing despite how much has gone wrong, continues to go wrong, all the injustices endured, the exhaustion, the hopelessness, the lack of clear path forward.

That I can still see her, at least some of the time, fills me with the hope she’s still a possible future for us, and that it’s not too late, we haven’t gone down the wrong/bad path YET, and eventually, by some means, she can come into our lives.

...But then there’s the other side of the crossroads. 

Where we just fail.

Where I can’t find the way forward. 

The reality I feel is closer day by day.

And this reality, the one where there’s the death of dreams, is the one which feels increasingly all-consuming.

I did write and perform a song about it (it's on my YouTube, but I can’t quickly easily link it so just look for the song Cry of the Soul matching the publish date of this blog), and I might even write more because I am inspired even further by my misery, apparently. 

But suffice to say...It’s not looking good for us.

It’s looking pretty terrible, in fact.

I can’t see how to manifest my miracle of miracles. 

I’m too tired to fight.
And fighting makes me too angry in ways I swore I never would be again.
And I am too exhausted to try.
And too filled with self-loathing for "wasting time" on a song nobody will listen to and a blog nobody reads, especially since even if people did listen and did read...all it would do is make them depressed. 

I've been isolating myself preparing for that final defeat, because it feels like I shouldn’t be burdening others with my suffering. All reaching out to them does is give them pain, or so it feels like. 

I'm trying to break that mindset. Reached out to one friend yesterday. Gonna try and keep reaching out to more, and reconnecting as best I can. 

It might not help me. It might not help them. It might even further drain me and be a further "waste of time".

But if I can’t find the good path forward, and lack the strength to fight for it...I don’t want to have died on the bad path sad, isolated, alone, in pain and agony, with all my joy dead and gone long before I go.

So, if I am to be in my final moments...then I at least want to try and make them good ones.

Especially if said good moments keep going as life finds a way.

No reason to not live life just because of the possibility of it ending. <3

It’s hard not to be, when I've consistently failed.

There’s good things happening! My wife literally just hit affiliate on twitch, and it’s quite likely they'll start their seasonal job soon(TM).

But on my end, I have precious little in the ways of successes and an endless list of failures.

I failed to send a letter to management in the 10 day deadline.

We're going to get evicted either next week or in 2 weeks.

I've done zero advocacy for myself at work. 

And I have done none of the work to find a place to go after we lose our current place.

Creativity wise, I keep thinking up new things, but making none of them. Heck, I barely write them down.

Instead of pursuing anything productive, I'm wasting time writing this blog. The time spent writing this could be spent writing to an aid group, researching, searching for homes...literally anything which gives a chance at a future.

Instead, I'm wasting my time on this.

And when I get home, I'll waste my time on a combination of sleeping, watching my wife, and maybe if I'm up for it, gaming some more.

Mind you. Spending time with my wife is never a waste. That’s genuinely what I want to spend my life doing in every free moment. Vibing with my wife.

Nor is the rest excessive and wasteful, because my body needs it.

But it’s objectively true we're heading towards the end of our current lives, and I am doing absolutely nothing which is productive towards pursuing whatever our next chapter could or should be.

So it feels like the end of the line. A dead end. The final defeat. Where there’s no path forward, because I failed to make one.

And it’s getting harder and harder to see any. To view the world where we get what we so desperately want and need.

Bills are taking up 60 - 80% of my paychecks.
Groceries and gas eat up 35 - 50% of my paychecks.

There’s no saving money even skipping out on rent, we don’t have the credit + funds/down payment/assets/assurances for buying a home, we can’t afford a hotel yet alone a pet-friendly one, nor can we pay for boarding and we probably can't even afford a storage unit.

Just the car, the internet, the phone, and various monthly insurances? Are costing over $1000/month.

And Groceries plus gas? Easily $600+ per month, often closer to $800 - $900.

And I make $1600 - $2200 at the job which is doing everything it can to kill me, and despite working more than I can handle, it's not enough, and neither myself nor my wife have been able to land second jobs despite aggressively applying, nor can we get more aid than we have gotten.

We don’t have anywhere to move, we don’t have any plans, we don’t have any funds, and we don’t have any time.

So I'm struggling just to live, because I just feel like giving up when I get like this. I’m wasting away, despite how I know I could be doing so much more. 

I could be doing laundry, cleaning the dishes, cleaning the apartment, pursuing the various creative ideas I have, resuming daily check-ins, reconnecting with communities I just abruptly stopped being a part of circa January when this crisis was beginning to become critical...

...I could be pursuing dreams and making the world a better place through my extremely innovative ideas, my sheer creativity, my passion, my joy, my perspective, my various talents.

Instead I am...not streaming, not recording, not writing, not keeping up, not...doing anything. 

And I wish this wasn’t so depressing. Again, there’s good things happening! We've had lots of fun! There’s been plenty of joy!

...but it does feel like more and more, all that is good in my world is going to die very soon, and leave only the consequences of my inactions to show my worst side, if there’s anything left of me to show at all.

I want to believe love will win, and we'll find a way, as we always do. 

But it hasn’t manifested yet, and I currently don’t see how to. 

Sorry for wasting your time the same way I'm wasting mine.

I will genuinely try to inject some joy into lives as I can tho. Is the one thing I'm even remotely good at. <3

I won't share exact details for safety but this trip is going to take until mid-April.

What I can share is the reason why; it's a last-ditch effort spearheaded by my wife to save us having a life together.

Because we're running out of time and resources and likely to get an eviction notice...again. Because we're a month behind in rent and don't have $3400 (and nobody we know can pay that amount or even remotely close to it) to pay two months' rent.

I firmly believe Washington State, especially on the west coast, is the best place to live in the United States, and arguably the entire world.
There's a natural beauty here not found elsewhere.
The weather is wet, of course, but is otherwise mild in comparison to the extremes elsewhere. Our weather might be bipolar, rapidly swapping from cold to warm to sunny to rainy and so on and so forth, but at the same time, these swings aren't to an extreme that makes them insufferable. Quite the opposite, they're kinda inviting, a nice surprise, a welcome change.

We have some of the richest culture of art in the entire country, and are a prominent place for the entire world in terms of the culture of the arts. While we don't have the same hundreds of years of culture as elsewhere in the country, the culture we have developed is one of high appreciation for the arts, for creativity, for expression, for experimentation.

We have one of the best healthcare plans in the entire country, with constantly proposed legislation to adapt healthcare modeled after that of the majority of civilized nations, where every Washingtonian receives free healthcare paid for by taxes.

We have some of the best trans healthcare policies of any state in the country, with the barriers to receiving gender-affirming care lower here than anywhere else and trans people eligible for three months of hrt medicine free of charge.

We have programs for assistance not found elsewhere, and even those with national versions, our state is better than most or all.

We have one of, if not the highest, levels of innovation in the entire country, which as an innovator myself, makes it my backyard.

We have the best coffee in the entire country, and the highest diversity, too, with independently owned and operated coffee stands literally everywhere.

We have one of the highest incomes of any state, with generous policies in place for work conditions and worker rights.

We have great natural wonders including just about every biome on the planet, including rainforests!

The outdoors are unbeatable in what they offer, and how they are largely safe.

It's got great growth in terms of connection and infrastructure.

Music here is arguably the best in the country with many of the biggest artists in alternative and rock getting started here.

The problem is.

The cost of living here keeps on going up.
And the wages for jobs like mine...don't.

We're drowning in debt, and we can't get more money, more resources.

We're being priced out of the state because it's such a good place everyone knows it and wants to be here and that gives the people setting prices for things like places to live and jobs like mine...leverage. They know they can replace me as a tenant, they know they can replace me as a worker, so they drive rent prices up and keep wages low, and that means...we...can't afford to live here anymore.

We're being driven out.

And my wife is placing hopes on their home state of Michigan having a lower cost of living.

So the trip there is largely scouting things out, talking to people, and seeing if we can swing a move there somehow.

So. You're not likely to hear from me a lot, if at all, going forward.

​I wish I had more to say, more to explain, but I'm tired, and got so much to do before leaving. Hopefully, see you on the other side.

And as is usually the case, that probably means I'll end up talking about each of them, but none to the level I want to, especially the later I go and the longer this takes.

I'll start with the follow-through on my last blog. It's overall worse, but at the same time, there's a reality of somehow making it through and that reality provides hope. At every stage, I feel like there's more and more setting us up for failure and less and less providing a path for success. But at the same time I still do cling to the hope my wife is right and that everything they dream of is possible.

That we can pull off a cross-country move.
That where we will live will be cheaper.
That where we live will have employment.
That where we live will allow us to finally progress in areas of our life that have remained stagnant for years.
That where we live opens up the avenue for building a future family together and starting the rest of our lives together.

After all, there's a lot going for us. For a start, my line of work is more likely to have openings because there's fewer who would qualify for and have the certificates I have, with my experience providing me an edge over other applicants.

We have tangible places to look at we know the general pricing of, which don't price us out or breed restrict us out.

We have the potential support of who knows how many others, from potential friends, family, loved ones, and maybe even coworkers.

There's the potential to maybe have transitionary housing with a relative.

We might even be able to use credit cards in this transitionary period to pay off big bills and then make gradual payments off on said cards even if it's only a small amount over time and accrues a huge level of interest.

All we need is the help getting through the door, and we would likely be good.

The hope-crushers are all getting more problematic for me to try and ignore though.

This would mean that for the second time in a row, we can't pay for the full lease of a place we're currently renting. We know the old management for our place would definitely have been willing to work with us, but at the end of last year our apartment complex was bought out by a more parasitic toxic management who is immediately violating state law in refusing to offer payment plans. Which is funny because we learned about said state law being a state law from the current lower management who helped us move in in the first place. The lower management is great and would love to offer us the accommodations we would need, but the higher up company policy overrides their sanity.

And we might not be able to meet their insane demands, despite actually desiring to pay them what they are owed. (We like our current place enough where we WANT to pay them the full amount of our lease, plus any moveout costs, plus any fines and interest that are reasonably accrued. For instance we would fight them on a charge of repainting the walls because nothing about any of the walls was damaged by us as tenants, but there's definitely some upkeep cost we would likely be responsible for.)

Moving half-way across the country loses all of the benefits of my current state. I don't think people understand just how many programs we have here that are helpful, and I genuinely believe my state offers some of the best public and semi-public and non-religious private education in the entire country across every level of education from pre-K all the way through college up to master degrees at a minimum. We'd be closing ourselves off from being eligible for state healthcare, from my state's education, from my state's culture and diversity and education and from being in one of the few places to have the ability to opt out of shopping at a big corporation like Walmart.

We would have to begin paying for things we currently receive through my parents. AAA membership and car insurance being the big ones.

We would have to somehow pull off a move of all of our stuff with me as the only driver, and to also get our car to our new place too despite my car and the rental truck likely being half the country apart.

Employment isn't a guarantee, it's just a hope--and there's no guarantee I receive gender-affirming care of any kind in a state which is less blue than Washington State would be. Not only on a social level (would I even be able to use the women's bathroom, locker room, etc.?), but on a medical level as well (here as long as you have medical insurance of just about any kind, you're eligible for all the services needed to transition pretty much for free with the maximum copay being $60 or so at the most expensive, with most cheaper ranging from free to $15 or so).

We have no protections against something going wrong. With our car for instance, or with moving vehicles.

There's less support available from family and the support available more likely to be toxic and come with conditions. I know I can rely on my family for any services they can afford to provide. They can't pay thousands per month, which is why we're in as dire a straight as we are, but they can provide a lot of help for things like food, transportation, storage, etc., all without conditions. My wife holds hopes of receiving that, but I don't think that the family in the area we would be going would be able to provide.

We would lose all of our social connections in the area and need to start over, when getting the few we have was difficult enough already. No friends in the area we would be going, and far less programs we'd be interested going to. I genuinely love going to Sapphic events and to Witches Markets. While I've gained some level of cynicism for both (Sapphic events overbook for their venues getting too crowded and provide too few protections from drunken ladies becoming too drunk to have spacial awareness aside from parking being paid; witches markets have poor parking availability, vendors outside are ridiculously cold, vendors inside don't allow dogs, and a lot of the vendors don't feel properly vetted), I genuinely love both and they have provided me enrichment and fulfillment in my life that I never thought possible going out in public.

Where am I going to get that in a place with far fewer people and far less diversity and far fewer outside of the cult of Christianity? There's probably still LGBTQIA+ events a plenty to be found, but would there be Sapphic events specifically? I doubt there's enough sapphics to generate the demand for monthly events the way we have an overabundance of Sapphics here. (Demographically we have a disproportionately high number of queer femme-presenting people here, our state is probably one of the top five in terms of queer ladies being openly queer.)

And even if there is...what would there be in terms of witchy events? Maybe, maybe, there would be some form of yearly market that is witchy-adjacent. Here we have a nerdy market which is technically focused on nerdy oddities particularly focused on Dungeons and Dragons and D&D-adjacent topics, which runs four or so times a year, and has a good 60 - 80% of the same vendors as the eight yearly witch markets.

And here we also have gothic markets covering darker things, loosely of the edgy hail-satan variety, but not really. The type of market covering metal music, and emo music, and similar genres, black clothing and lipstick and makeup and all types of things with spikes, bones, and similar.

And here we also have krampus markets, similar to the above.

Between the three of those, nerdy D&D-adjacent markets, gothic markets, and krampus markets, there's probably one or two that would run at least once a year...but I would be shocked to find witches markets for all eight witch events anywhere outside of where we live right now because as far as I know...the pacific northwest is the only place in the country with the level of diversity and cultural identity to have the level of demand to fuel these events being run rain or shine year-round.

Basically, as far as I'm concerned, in terms of cultural identity, social acceptance, in basically every way except for the cost of living, we already live in the best place in the entire United States for queer disabled neurodivergent witches. We live in a place where queer folk, disabled people, neurodivergent folk, and witches, are all at a level of unusually high percentage of the population. Anywhere else in the country isn't going to have the same amount of "our people" locally, at least not as openly so.

We have no real plan to get all of our stuff moved. We have only the hopes of it being cheaper and the cost of living actually being reduced lower than the increased amount of things we'll have to pay for and the likely decrease in comparable pay.

All of that is building up to be a weight because I'm on the verge of receiving all of the care I need here. I'm going to physical therapy and making huge strides in not being in constant pain. I qualify for behavioral health being given to me. My depression could get proper medication, as could my ADHD, and I have the access to medication for my disabilities, and I have access to HRT. I lose all of that when not here.

And those took me years to get, here, in the place considered one of the easiest in the country. How long would it take for me to get them in a place less queer-friendly, less neurodivergent-friendly, less disability-friendly?

My depression is getting to the point where with all of my anxieties, with all of the pressures, with all of the weights of the bills we're liable for and responsible for, with all of what we are likely to be dealing with...I'm just feeling hopeless and defeated.

I'm at the point where I feel like I am the obligatory sibling who never amounts to anything and is a total failure in any family of four or more kids. It's to the point where I feel bad enough where I've contemplated ending my life for only the fourth time in my entire life and only the third time since I got with my wife, for the third time since July 2023. (The other two being December 2023 and then around June 2024 if I recall correctly.)

Now, to be clear, I'm not actually suicidal, yet. If I were at risk, you'd know. I'll say that the best way for you to keep an eye on it is that my enemies should really be praying for my success and not my downfall because if I do go down I'm not going quietly into the night. I'm not going to be radio silent and then end my life. If I go down I go down swinging and will mince no words about any of the traumas, any of the abuses, any of the injustices, I've faced, my wife has faced, etc.

I've held back from ever lashing out like that because at the end of the day, as long as I have a hope for living a life, I don't want to live a life with hate. So if I succumb to hate, if I succumb to lashing out, then you'll know that I'm close, because if I am going to air out every secret I have, it's only because I don't want those weights to drag me down in whatever comes after my current life.

Again, why I say my enemies should be praying for my success, because I know enough to take them down with me and the only reason I don't take them down already is because I don't want to. As long as I have a hope for a future, I will never want to. But if they pray for my failure, and then it turns out I do indeed fail and lose my last reason for living...then they're gonna find out the hard way why they should've been wishing me well because the things I know are things I would be willing to go to the grave with if I live a long life but aren't things I'm gonna let be left unsaid and secret if my life were to end early.

Now, granted. I use the term "enemies" here mostly to invoke the stock phrase of enemies wishing success. I forget the exact phrase at the moment, but you probably know it well enough. I personally am of the Vinland Saga of "no person has any enemies". As I said in my last blog post, I'm slowly becoming the worst version of myself, the version of myself I least want to be. And that's the version which would retaliate against people who I know aren't bad, by and large, and deserve to live their own lives of prosperity. The worst version of myself would forget that.

But the me that I am, the me that is the best of myself and my life, believes that most humans are good, and that very few people deserve to be condemned. I believe in us all sharing a lot of the same desires in life and being owed the chance to pursue those things.

I believe in building people up rather than tearing people down. That to find common connection and to find the ability to empathize with each other and help each other is far better a life and future than a life where we're dunking on people for their worst sides and excluding them for their shortcomings. A life filled with joy and with awe and with passion is one far more fulfilling than a life filled with paranoia about the people you know secretly being terrible, more fulfilling than a life tearing down those around you, than a life of hatred and dividing and excluding those who don't meet the standards set.

I have this belief that "childlike awe, childlike wonder, childlike joy, childlike idealism, childlike passion", are not in fact traits of children but rather innately the inherent nature of humanity. That what makes humans be humans is that we have a natural innate awe and wonder of the world around us, we have an innate desire for the joys of both laughter and happiness, that we have an innately positive view of the future and of the world around us and of others, and that creativity is arguably the most human thing which is human above all else.

And that any association with those things being childlike is an artificially enforced view by an artificially built modern society that encourages conformity over individuality, but also selfishness over community, when it should be individuality over conformity and community over selfishness.

Yet despite how strong I am...I'm not so strong as to hold these beliefs so strongly I would rather die for them wordlessly, silently, in a young age. The pressures of society are enough, I know, to break me, and while in my better moments I believe all of the above...in my worst moments the amount of pain and suffering I've lived through on a daily basis is enough where I know I would lash out in hate, in bitterness, in despair, in destruction.

It takes years to build what can be destroyed in seconds. While that makes the efforts to build all the more sacred, all the more precious, all the more things we can and should appreciate for lasting as long as they do...that destruction is something I actively have to suppress, because the worst mistakes in my life and the fuel for the things I need the most therapy for are from not having been strong enough to prevent from lashing out as I did.

All of the lost friendships.
All of the burnt bridges.
All of the things I destroyed from anger, from desperation, from apathy, from asking too much and giving too little.

That's what I don't want to continue to be. And you'll know I've given up on life if I give up on not being those things and actively am throwing them away--and I'm dangerously close. I'm dangerously withdrawn. I'm in far less spaces than I was last year. Ever since January, I've been shrinking myself to be less and less out-there, to the point where I've stopped being involved with many of my closest friends.

I've stopped providing daily check-ins.
I've stopped talking to friends.
I've stopped coming to streams.
I've stopped keeping up to date on discords.
I've stopped visiting websites I've had as a core part of my life since I was 13 years old despite my age now being a flip of those two numbers. (31 going on 33, because I haven't felt like the last year has had anything really noting me as having a birth.)

I've largely lost my passion for games, given up entirely on content creation and streaming, and while my passion for writing was recently reignited...it chose the worst possible time with me unable to really put any time or energy into nurturing it. Most of what I'm passionate about right now is organizing my notes and making them more coherent, connected, and consistent. All of which there's secretly an ulterior motive for, in that it's also one of those suicidal ideations, where I have this idea that if I were to note every aspect of my work then it would be okay for me to not make it if it were released publicly in a way anyone could follow and make.

Now, I know better from experience. ComicFuryians literally lost one of their most beloved members to a suicide where the person gave up on life, released their work, and took their life. To this day, nobody as far as I know has continued their work and nobody likely ever will. I am the only one who actually will make my work and logically I know that. But suicide is never logical and illogically, it feels more okay to have my life end if I have the potential of a legacy after, and releasing my work in a way where anyone could pick it up fuels that.

Butstill. At the end of the day, that wasn't what fueled the reignited passion. In fact, quite the opposite. It was me just...wanting to. To have this pure passion, this unbridled joy to share my work with the world, reignited. I had a fire lit under me to show what the world of farn is really like, and I want to share it with everyone, in full, which is something requiring me to be there to work on it.

So that's one of the few things keeping me alive right now, and it's something hard to keep. I've been creating stories and ideas and games and such since I was 13. To date, nearly 20 years later, none have been realized, because I can never see them through.

​And I do have a lot of ideas.

My most recent idea, which is both kinda political but also kinda not, is that I think websites should stop being lazy with their filters for content in terms of age being largely a binary setting tied to maturity, and that for all content filters it shouldn't be a strict binary but rather a sort of slider, which both posters/creators can set appropriately and readers/viewers can filter for also appropriately.

As I see it, this should be a universal thing for websites, because it would also help create further protections for children.

"I never make content with a target audience of children", "I very rarely make content with a target audience of children", "I only sometimes make content with a target audience of children", "I make content with a target audience of children about half of the time", "I often make content with the target audience of children", "my content is near-exclusively targeted towards an audience of children", or "all of my content without exception is targeted towards children".

A filter would then be for what is defined as children. "12 and below", "14 and below", "17 and below", or "20 and below".

Set that as the first setting. "I never make content with a target audience of children" would automatically skip the following filters based on mixed audience targeting in favor of focusing exclusively on more mature ones, whereas "all of my content without exception is targeted towards children" would automatically skip every mature/adult filter. Those filters would note why they are disabled by the above.

From there, the next filter would be:
"None of my content is suitable for all ages; all of my content is inherently 18+ and for mature audiences", "I very rarely make content suitable for all ages; the majority of my content is inherently 18+ and mature in nature", "I only sometimes make content suitable for all ages; most of my content is 18+ and mature", "about half of my content is suitable for all ages; I don't try to be mature but don't shy away from 18+ material", "I often make content suitable for all ages; the majority of my content is not mature, but I have occasional 18+ material", and "all of my content is designed to be suitable for all ages; I never have mature or 18+ material in my content".

There would likely be a similar filter for the maturity range of the content. "My content is 18+", "My content is 21+", "My content is late 20s and above", "my content is young 30s and above", "my content is 36+ and above", "my content is 40+".

Similarly, "none of my content is suitable for all ages" and "all of my content is designed to be suitable for all ages" would disable most of the following filters by and large, with the disabled filters explaining why they're disabled.

"I am an adult whose content involves adult material at all times", "I am an adult who frequently covers adult material", "I am an adult who often covers adult material", "I am an adult and about half of material I cover is adult in nature", "I am an adult and some of the times I cover adult material, but it's not my focus", "I am an adult, but I never cover adult material", and "I am not currently an adult", or something approximately close to that.

There would also be a filter for definition of adult. 18+, 21+, late-20s, early-30s, late-30s, and 40+, potentially both for the age of the individual and for their target audience. There might need to be an option for "my material has aged as I have".

Obviously children, as well as those selecting that they never cover adult material, would be locked out of describing the filters for various types of adult material, and this would be a list of trigger warnings and essentially how often they are shown.

Nudity: "I show full-frontal nudity, including sexual acts", "I show full-frontal nudity, but no explicit sex", "I show breasts and butts, but any lower frontal nudity is partially censored", "I show breasts and butts, but lower frontal nudity is heavily covered or censored", "I show butts, and heavily suggestive near-nudity, but full nudity is avoided or partially censored", "I show butts, but heavily suggestive nudity is avoided or heavily censored", "I don't show full nudity, but lewd body parts may be prominently featured and/or near-nudity is displayed and/or nudity is heavily implied", "I don't show full nudity or near-nudity, but lewd body parts may be prominently featured", "I don't show full nudity or prominently focus on lewd body parts, but near-nudity may be present", "I don't show full nudity or focus on lewd body parts, but nudity might be implied", and then at the SFW end, "I don't show or imply nudity, near-nudity, or prominently display lewdness".

Maybe breaking the above into two filters, one for nudity and one for lewdness.

Sexual content: "I show sexual content, including explicit sexual acts", "I show sexual content, including implied explicit sexual acts", "I show sexual content, but don't show explicit sexual acts", "I show sexual content, but it is limited to lewdness and kissing", "I show sexual content, but it is limited to lewdness", "I don't show sexual content". This one I had a better version of in my head, I'm running out of momentum on how to explain it.

Adult topics: "I always talk about adult topics and themes", "I almost always talk about adult topics and themes", "I frequently talk about adult topics and themes", "I talk about adult topics and themes about half of the time", "I talk about adult topics and themes occasionally", "I on some rare occasions will talk about adult topics and themes", or "I never talk about adult topics and themes". 

This would probably have subcategories for what constitutes adult topics.

Always/almost always/frequently/about half/occasionally/rarely/never for:
Death,
Depression,
War,
Genocide,
Abuse,
Finances and Employment,
Living Conditions and Situations,
Food Struggles,
Life Skills,
General Darker Themes,

Probably more, I can't think of everything which would constitute an adult topic.

Violence would require at least two filters. The first:
"I exclusively focus on violent content", "I heavily feature violent content", "I frequently feature violent content", "I often feature violent content", "I feature violent content about half of the time", "I feature violent content sometimes", "I feature violent content on rare occasions", or "I never feature violent content". This filter would mention that it explicitly ties into any of the sub-filters.

The one I can think of being,
"I show the most gruesome form of violence including extreme gore", "I show heavily bloody content, including some light levels of gore" "I show heavily bloody content, but avoid gore", "I show bloody violence, but avoid extremely realistic and/or over the top levels of blood and violence", "I show bloody violence, but stylized and/or in moderation", "I show violence, but avoid extremely bloody content regardless of how stylized it is", "I show some blood through violence in weapons and fighting", "I show violence in weapons and fighting, but blood is kept minimal or nonexistent", "I show weapons and fighting with minimal extreme violence", "I show weapons and fighting but there's no violence", and at the lowest end, "I occasionally show weapons being displayed and discussed but never used and/or I occasionally show characters hitting other things".

Or something to that effect.

​To give an idea of how these filters would apply to, say, my blog?

I never make content with a target audience of children.
Arguably (and what I would do for safety), none of my content is suitable for all ages; all of my content is mature and inherently 18+.
Similarly, I am an adult whose content involves adult material at all times--even my earliest 2014 blogs were made after I was already an adult, albeit a very young one.

As such, my content is aimed at 21+ adults at minimum, with the content aging as I have. This blog is not designed for young-20s anymore, but the earlier 2014 entries were. I don't know what the minimum age for current blog entries would be, but it ain't 18-year-olds, I can confidently say that much at minimum. You could say anything 21+ is okay, my personal definition is usually "if you were born after 9/11 you're probably too young to be here", but you could go up to saying the youngest allowed age would be my wife and anyone younger is too inexperienced to really be dealing with the heavy topics my blog has delved into at times.

I never show nudity, and very rarely do I talk about nudity, but I do talk about kinks and lewdness on occasion (probably need to refine the filters for that).

I am extremely lewd, with lewdness almost always mentioned (deez nuts and hardly know her jokes in particular but also pickup lines a plenty and innuendos of all kinds), so sexual content isn't shied away from whatsoever.

I almost always am talking about adult themes and topics.

​Literally all of them have those themes, in heavy levels.

I feature violent content sometimes.
But it's in moderation, with me not going into gruesomely detailed versions of things, I'd say.

Then from the perspective of a viewer/reader, you would have filters.

First being selected age range.
"I am currently considered a child", with filters for "12 and under", "13 - 15", "16 - 17", "18 - 20". This would lock the user out of the majority of content regardless of selection, but based on the filters of the creators of content it would have some more available. (For many websites, arguably 12 and under being selected should auto-ban the account.)

"I am an adult", with filters for "18 - 20", "21 - 25", "26 - 29", "30 - 35", "36 - 39", and "40+". This would lock the user out of content which their age range makes them ineligible to view. Namely it would lock them out of content exclusively made for children and content heavily targeting children, as well as content they are too young for.

I think that mandating filters of this sort to be implemented on all sites offering content would make the internet a safer place for everyone. Does it stop people from lying? No. Does it stop people from misapplying filters? Not entirely, but these would be things that people would try their best at, with small misapplications corrected and punishments only for those who are wholly and entirely in very obviously extremely wrong classifications.

You might not know the difference between some violence and moderate violence, but if you're showing extreme violence with a filter set to showing almost no violence, you know your filter isn't properly applied.

These might be somewhat variable in being applied to specific content or to the account or to both, depending on the medium. Artists for instance might have filters for their content in general, but specific pieces might have filters that are different from their general filter. Streamers might have some filters for things that change, but likely less things change stream to stream than for an artist piece to piece. Posting on social media is something that likely wouldn't be viable to set most filters for most posts, so that would rely heavily on the profile filtering.

The specifics there are less important than their existence in general existing.

And this was my latest idea.

The third thing I wanted to talk about is religion, specifically how I believe that Christianity is arguably the only false religion in the world and arguably the only one to not be intrinsically tied to specific cultures, but also going into why many of the beliefs of Christianity are arguably applicable to nearly any culture and any religion and any belief system despite the religion being invalid.

But I don't think I have the energy to cover that in detail.

What I'll say there is basically that to accept the path of Christianity as valid requires first a belief that Christianity is not put on a pedestal above any other mythology. From the onset, the idea of "God" and Angels should be taken as no more real than Zeus and the Olympian pantheon, Odin and the Aesir and such from Norse mythology, Ra and the Egyptian pantheon, etc. You get the idea.

There should be the understanding that the universe wasn't made in 7 days, that evolution is real and there was never a real Adam or a real Eve, that there was never a Noah's Arc that contained literally the entirety of all life on earth in pairs of two, you get the idea. Science comes first, and that includes things like a virgin birth and the parting of a sea and the presence of mythological divine plagues and divinely striking down enemies and instantly vaporizing those who touch an artifact.

These should be considered as having the same basis in historical fact as any other piece of mythology from any other culture, in that whatever truth there may be behind these accounts has been heavily filtered by the mythology of numerous isolated cultures through countless generations of oral tradition that changed the tales and were eventually attempted to be written down long after they happened and were attempted to be unified even longer after they were written.

That in the same way there's no unified singular Greek Mythology or Egyptian Mythology or Norse Mythology with the mythologies of them being from countless different cities/tribes/etc. told over centuries or even millenia, the stories told throughout Christian lore are from countless different groups over a period over a thousand years, and as such, they have the same level of variance with there being no one singular truth above all others.

And that also, there needs to be a viewing of things as they would have been seen at the time, not as we have reimagined them over the millenia, before we can truly apply a modern lens on those ideologies. Jesus was understood to be a Jewish man (a man of color), and while it can safely be assumed he genuinely thought himself to be a man of reform, a man divinely inspired by God to reform the Jewish people, Jesus did not view himself as being born from a virgin. Jesus did not view himself as having mythical origins as being literally born from a supreme deity.

The phrase "Son Of God" was, in the historical context of the time, seen as a phrase for one enlightened by God, more or less. Someone with divine inspiration and backing. It was applied to all prophets from my understanding, not specifically Jesus and Jesus alone above all others being just Jesus. It was understood to not be an indicator of literally being the child of a divine being, of not literally being fathered by a divine being, of having no mortal father and only a divine one, but rather to be in the metaphorical sense of being divinely chosen to be divinely empowered to have a divine fervor, divine favor, divine spark, to be divinely empowered to deliver divine messages and miracles.

That Christianity culturally appropriated YHWH, the God of the Jews, and artificially elevated YHWH to be a supreme deity that is omnipowerful and omnipresent in ways that YHWH is always displayed in Jewish material as not actually being, because YHWH was The God Of The Jews, with The Jews as YHWH's chosen people, the two intrinsically being linked with a symbiotic relationship.

That even in the time of Moses, it was understood that other gods were as real as YHWH, but that YHWH had power over The Jewish People, and that YHWH's power over The Jewish People allowed YHWH to be more powerful than those other gods in service of The Jewish People, but that YHWH's domain was not so absolute as to totally trump those other gods. That those other gods were not in fact demons in disguise, but were in fact genuinely gods and recognized as such.

Including how witches were at one point consulted as mediums, in ways which no servant of YHWH was willing or capable of providing, meaning that explicitly there were limits both on YHWH's power and scope of knowledge and reach and ability.

That there is in fact no unified message or truth in The Bible because it is filled with contradictions.
Lucifer/Satan/The Devil (not even really named as such as we tend to think of) could never have successfully led a rebellion against an all-powerful all-knowing supreme true ruler, because by virtue of being all-knowing and all-powerful, God would be able to know of this plan in advance and instantly quash the rebellion before it began.

This would also require God to have known Lucifer/Satan/The Devil would create this evil, and willingly let it happen. God would have created Lucifer/Satan/The Devil knowing Lucifer/Satan/The Devil would create evil in rebelling against God, and God still made Lucifer/Satan/The Devil knowing this and let it happen without either stopping it or discouraging it or preventing it.

There's contradictory narratives about how humanity was given free will by Adam and Eve eating from the fruit of knowledge and by virtue of being the only creatures with souls being the only ones with free will, and how Lucifer/Satan/The Devil and a third of all angels rebelled against God. If they had no free will, then that would mean God literally designed them to become evil in a deliberately designed failed rebellion.

God would know Adam and Eve would have chosen to take the forbidden fruit, yet still commanded them not to, despite knowing they would violate the command.

God would have known everything was going to happen, and yet still have created those circumstances and let them happen, despite being supremely powerful and able to stop these things by virtue of being supremely knowledgeable about all that would happen.

These actions make zero sense under a God that is actually all-powerful and all-known as is Christian doctrine, but are perfectly in-line with depictions of deities that are extremely powerful and knowing but not quite all-powerful and all-knowing, akin to Odin from Norse mythology.

It is commonplace in many cultures for a deity to rebel, to resist, to kill, to fight, another deity in their lore, to varying degrees of success. In Greek lore Zeus was the THIRD-generation ruler. Not second, that'd be his father Kronus (might have spelling there wrong, but not to be confused with Chronos, they were two different titans I'm pretty sure but are often combined to be one), and not first, that'd be a deity I don't remember the Greek version of but I think the Roman name for that first-generation ruler is Uranus.

If memory serves, Uranus + Gaia produced the titans including Kronus and Rhea (by the way a big part of many mythologies people tend to forget is that literally almost every religion is heavily laced in inherent incest), and Kronus and Rhea then produced the next generation of Gods (both Olympian and those of the Underworld which I forget the exact term for), including Zeus. Just as Kronus and Rhea and the titans overthrew his father, Zeus and the Gods overthrew Kronus and the titans.

In Egyptian mythology you've got the struggle of Sett after murdering Osiris with Osiris's son (whose name I can't remember at this exact moment).

In eastern culture you've got some arrogant rebellion in the form of things like Sun Wukong.

And so on and so forth. Across countless cultures and religions, you've got tales of rebelling against the divine, to various levels of success. In terms of Jewish folklore, it would make total sense for a failed rebellion of a servant of their Jewish God to take place, because with said Jewish God not being all-powerful or all-knowing, the rebellion stood at least a chance of succeeding. With a third of all angels being involved, it was a genuine threat and one that almost was victorious, because of how close the two sides were in power.

But that doesn't work if God is all-knowing and all-powerful because that would mean that Lucifer/Satan/The Devil, knowing that God is all-knowing and all-powerful, deliberately entered a rebellion against God, knowing God knew about it and knowing God could end it at any time by virtue of being all-powerful. And that also only works if Lucifer/Satan/The Devil shares the gift of free will with humanity, because without the free will to rebel in the first place, then it wouldn't be rebellion; it would be a divine command from God.

In short, in order for Lucifer/Satan/The Devil to have rebelled, it either requires Lucifer/Satan/The Devil to have free will and a third of all angels also had free will to join (in which case, free will is not in fact unique to humanity), or if they lack free will then God literally designed Lucifer/Satan/The Devil to rebel and a third of angels to join, because that was God's plan, meaning God by virtue of programming them to do what they did would be the one who created those evils in the first place.

The entire mythology doesn't hold up to scrutiny, either scientifically or as a continuous narrative. It is filled with hole after hole, and even someone as casual as me can point these out. Christianity for two thousand years has spun narrative after narrative to justify these contradictions, rather than just admitting that they are contradictions. Or when they do admit there's contradictions, they pick and choose which parts to follow.

Any religion which you have to pick and choose which parts to follow could not be that of an all-knowing all-powerful God, and that requirement to pick and choose which parts to follow demonstrates why the religion is built on a temple of lies, inconsistency, and fabrications that people blindly believe to be truth despite their logical and rational brains being capable of noting how this shouldn't make sense.

But I'm not covering this in the detail I wanted to. In short I wanted to both deconstruct the flaws behind Christianity, while also rebuilding the strengths of it.

Jesus was against organized institutionalized religion because he knew the harm to come from it. A good belief to hold true to.
Jesus believed religion should largely be a personal practice kept to an individual, private. A good belief to hold true to.
Jesus was against deification of humans, because he knew the harm to come from it. A good belief to hold true to.
Jesus was against hoarding of material wealth, because he knew how pointless it was. A good belief to hold true to.

Jesus preached about how what we do to everyone is what we do to God (you all know the full verse for this). How we treat others is reflective of how God will judge, essentially. That means treating to the poor and needy, showing empathy, etc., are all good things to do, and that's a good belief to hold true to.

Jesus was a pacifist, teaching nonviolent resistance, but 'nonviolence' was defined as not hurting others, with him perfectly willing to flip tables and cause property destruction and damage so long as no humans were harmed. A good philosophy to ascribe to.

Jesus preached love, empathy, and forgiveness, pointing out humanity is inherently imperfect. Nobody is without sin, nobody is without their faults and flaws. A good philosophy to live by.

And so on and so forth.

Christianity also has an excellent grasp on many spiritual practices, which have been adapted by the religion over the centuries, including an understanding of what many in the witchcraft community believe to be an understanding of the nature of "the universe", our role in it, and what follows after we die.

There's certain interpretations of Christian scripture which portray 'Heaven' and 'God' as one and the same, a state of everything everywhere all at once. Everything that ever was, ever could have been, ever will be, ever could, all existing simultaneously in one space happening all at once, and that we reach our highest self by joining with that whereas we experience 'Hell' by rejection of it, and punish ourselves.

And there's many other examples on how Christianity touches on many good spiritual practices.

But the religion itself is arguably built on cultural appropriation and the only religion to have been built without an existing culture it is inherently innately integrated with. (I would argue that even Islam, a religion which took from Christianity, is inherently tied to the Arab people at the time of Mohamed. Although by that logic it might also be possible to argue that certain branches of Christianity, such as the Eastern Orthodox version, do have the culture of their people integrated within. I'm not too concerned with defending my argument since my argument is mostly a combination of clickbait and a thought experiment more than it is a viewpoint I really want to defend. It's mostly a way to engage in the subject rather than a core belief if that makes sense.)

That makes it one of the religions easiest to apply to everyday life and widely broadly giving it appeal to billions across the globe even in this age of skepticism and science.

But it also makes it a religion fraught with issues from the get-go. The Bible was made 400 years after Jesus by a council arbitrarily deciding what to include. The books included were all written 60 - 120+ years after Jesus lived, and translated numerous times. That's a lot of men involved and no proof of divine, yet there are far too many who to this day still believe The Bible to be the Word Of God, despite their bibles being translated and transcribed numerous times and compiled and recompiled by men who had an agenda fueling their decisions.

So I do wanna delve into how to deconstruct the religion and why I do believe it's possible to reconstruct it. I personally don't follow Christianity, since I am very much a witch believing in no specific religion but with my brand of spirituality pooling from my own experiences, beliefs, and what resonates with me from numerous cultures and research, but a lot of my beliefs are Christianity-adjacent so I have an interest in showing how while the text of Christianity doesn't hold, part of the spirit in the most important messages does.

Jesus might have just been a man, but he left a legacy that could arguably be called divine, and I would love to delve into it more.

But alas.

For now, that's it. I've been writing this blog for five hours. The first subject about me, I covered pretty well. The second about my idea of reform for a better internet, kinda got across. The third about religion...didn't really get done, but I've done my best to at least touch on the subject, with the hope of doing more some other time.

​Thanks for reading.

I'm booting the game up special just to grab some final screenshots because while the game isn't over, it's as good as over. Egypt is basically destroyed, and Scythia is in shambles, Carthage is losing territory, and we're inching towards the conquest mark I set despite having hit the city limit--the limit I chose was set high enough to be something nobody could accidentally trigger in the middle of their fun, but low enough to actually be feasibly possible to achieve, and with me having run through Egypt, we're at that mark pretty much.

We've got a few territories that don't have 100 culture which when they expand will expand my percentage of the world area that final percent. Even if not, it will only take a city or two captured to get there.

The percentage of the world population is a little less controlled or predictable. I'm probably slowing it down by drafting every turn to try and contain the Persian Pillager Problem. But it'll be something that I get to just from my natural cities growth outpacing that of the entire rest of the world, and again, every city I take and build an infirmary within will help skyrocket that further. It's already close, so that will be within the next five turns or so, I reckon.

Two spearmen, both conscripts, in one of Egypt's two remaining cities.

I have the manpower where I could wipe them out, just like I can the Celts. Their continued existence is sheerly by virtue of my mercy.

And while the Scythians are technically better off, it's not by much.

Now, I might not actually have the manpower to brute force a taking of Tanais, but with even a light dusting of save scumming, I easily could.

They've got three tier two spearmen and some Scythian Riders, but that's it. The main reason I'm not attacking Tanais is because I don't want to risk the Persians taking it yet, and I actually find the idea amusing of letting them try. Again--mercy, on my end, to let them continue to live. Because their only other three cities? One has only one tile to its name, with Melitopol better off destroyed and only existing because I don't want it razed yet.

Ereen is surrounded on all eight sides by swamp, and I don't want to bother clearing eight tiles of swamp yet. But Ereen is undefended, like Giza, and could theoretically be captured at any time.

​The Horde Spearman is up in the Scythian's newest city, which is raw forest on all sides, no roads. Not as much a pain as Ereen would be, and more valuable, but at the same time, is much the same. I have the power to take it; I'm not because it's not worth it, honestly speaking.

Ditto for the Celts. I can walk into both of their remaining cities which have no remaining units. I left Burdigala to give those warring with the Celts the false hope they can gain something. Ditto for them sending all of their naval forces towards Ireland to be disappointed they can't reach Caiseal.

And Carthage, despite spamming War Elephants every single turn (how do they have so many galleys and war elephants, I didn't give them that many and I didn't think their production was good enough to pump them out that quickly), is rapidly reaching its ultimate end as well.

I have some Cataphracts in Malaca and Carthago Novo. Easily enough to storm Carmona.

I have an army of Cataphracts in Nora (plus Tarraco). That's enough where I wouldn't even need to save scum to take Madrid, I could brute force it, tank/accept the loss of Cataphracts that die, and still run through the Carthaginian defenses.

​I've got three Legionaries in Cadiz. Given a Galley to transport them, that's easily taking Lagos.

And even if I had none of those?

From my learnings against the Goths, Celts, Scythians, and Egyptians?

I know that with a sufficient level of save scumming, I have a sufficiently large enough pillager horde to overwhelm their defenses despite Tyrian Guards being a 3/6 unit defending against a 4/1 attacker. If my pillagers have 4 - 5 HP against one HP, I only need to hit them once. And let me tell ya as someone who had to save scum when my 4/1 pillagers with one HP kept being killed attacking units with only 1 defense...sometimes it's not the bigger value in attack/defense which wins but rather just which unit has more HP. (Also the reason why Armies are so good at brute forcing their way through, and also why quantity of units matters a lot more than quality in terms of advancing a conquest.)

Carthage continues to exist in the Iberian peninsula because I'm taking my time, not because I can't end them.

Sooooooooo.

I've effectively won. There's nothing that can bypass my defenses. Even the Persian Pillager Problem is gradually being contained. It's the main area of concern, to be sure, but a lot of their cities are surrounded and a lot of my borders are being secured and my forces are building there. I forgot to take screenshots before closing my game, but as it turns out even conscript Praetorian Guards with their 4 HP and 7 defense are pretty good at stopping 4/1 pillagers from escaping.

Yeah, it's the area I'm most vulnerable, sure. But I'm not as concerned as I was before.

So this time for real--there's nothing left to really share. The only thing from here is to officially end the game.

But being honest...that's not the reason why it's a final update.

The reason why it's a final update is because the worst is looking like it's going to happen. I don't want to dare share the details, but know that what I'm sharing isn't the worst, it's just scratching the surface of just how bad things are getting. And I don't see a way out.

Back in January, I made a letter, a final call for help. I posted it literally everywhere I could--in every discord I'm in, in every forum I'm in, in the social media platforms I partake in, on my YouTube channel, on the webcomics I've made, and on every platform I write my blog on. Everywhere I thought it wouldn't be against the terms of service, everywhere I could place it, everywhere I thought I could post it and it wouldn't instantly be taken down/deleted.

I posted it.

And then...silence.

I went largely dark.

Because I was, quietly, trying to fight for my future, for my life.

Every time I've blogged about this let's play, there's been a section, a dark section hinting at bleak undertones. And the reason why?

...Because that final call for help...reached...nobody who could.

All of the issues that I mentioned in that letter are still there...some worse, and some new ones not mentioned.

I have no money in my bank account--and we're two months behind in rent, which is $3400.

I've been trying to have some fun before life falls apart, because I don't see how to stop it from falling apart. If I did, then I would have been fighting harder. I've done little things here and there. And some of them have helped keep us afloat for this long. Stalling, delaying.

But it's been just that. Pushing back and ignoring what can't be pushed back and ignored indefinitely.

There's...still a few things left to potentially try.

But as much as I hate to say it...this...might be it for us.

I don't like sharing this bad news. Heck, I alienated some of my best friends back in January, the communities I was closest in, from asking as I did. I've been doing nothing but burning bridge after bridge after bridge and becoming a worse and worse version of myself in pursuit of trying to survive. In trying to do whatever it takes to live life with my wife, I've done...whatever it took, including losing things I never wanted to lose, and doing things I never wanted to do.

And despite those efforts it's looking like it's still not going to be enough. We need another miracle or two, and we probably used our last one last week.

I prefer to Bree a Breeacon of joy. I prefer to share my nerdy hyperfixations, to ramble about things going on in my life, to share events we've gone to, to talk about things I've done, ideas I've had. Heck, today saw me come up with a million-dollar board game idea!

But I've been closing myself off because...I've run out of energy.

So this is likely the final let's play because...I probably won't be gaming in any future. I've got a few things I can try fighting for, but those will take the time/energy I've spent relaxing playing my for fun recharge game.

I don't want to be bleak, I don't want to have people worry, but the unfortunate reality is...this is my reality.

I made a final call for help and I didn't get help, so I have no...no real ability to ask for help again. Because who's left to help me? Everyone who could, already did and has. And it hasn't been enough. So now what? Can't be anything good. All I can really do is hope for a miracle.

We have one week to pull it off. I get paid this week, and I have to get $1740 paid to my apartment complex before the 18th. My paycheck will get me half-way there, albeit leaving me about $600 - $900 short. Who knows what we can maybe pull off? Only time will tell. And if I end up never blogging again at some point...well, that's what time will have told you. But we're not there yet, despite being close. So here's to hoping we never will be.

I always have said I intend to live forever. I know it's not possible, but at the same time, the sentiment is there. I enjoy life, and I'm a fighter. Let's hope that can carry me through what's to come.

I mean, historically, my blog has been a blog about...literally whatever I felt like talking about. A lot of it sharing a lot about what's going on in my life, a lot about games I was enjoying at the time, a lot reflecting the corners of the internet I was in at the time, a ton about my various ideas for video games, stories, and songs, and a lot about my evolution of personal beliefs.

A lot about my health, a lot about my neurodivergencies, a lot about my journey through life and self-discovery. A lot about my current hyperfixations. You get the idea. But I'm both running out of interest in my current Civ 3 hyperfixation (a third Carthage playthrough might revitalize it, but the double long turns is kinda draining my interest especially given the amount of save scumming), and there's other things I want to talk about.

I want to share a lot more of my beliefs. I know a fair number of those beliefs can be heretical, can be slightly alienating, can be radical, but I want to share them all the same, despite how I know smarter people than me who do more research than I do can likely give better breakdowns of those things.

Namely I have a lot of things that I feel like could help challenge the, so to speak, 'programming' of many of the demographics who typically hold beliefs that are largely detrimental to people like me. I wanna give out, for instance, a 'cure' of sorts for the male loneliness epidemic by giving a breakdown of what these men who have been poisoned by toxic masculine podcasts can do to help reconnect with humanity. I've mentally had a lot of ways to break down the walls there in a calm, gentle way that can help ease them into it, and I wanna follow through on how to basically hand them the instruction manual on how to improve themselves to be the actual best version of themselves.

​I wanna give out breakdowns of Christianity and spirituality and religion, laying out how basically the teachings of Jesus are incompatible with Christianity but at the same time the heart of Christianity through the messages given mean that there is good beliefs within, but they come only after deconstructing an entire religion that was never designed to be a religion in the first place.

And I wanna also tackle the mindset of those who think they follow logic and science but have poor choices in sources that lead them to believing conspiracy theorists and worldviews. The people who have this genuine belief they are in the right, that they know the way the world works, but have these glaring blindspots in their sources and their information and lead to some warping of facts to fit the worldview rather than adjusting world view for the ever-evolving information.

​I know nothing I do will be the best, and I know I have no platform and no reach. I love being a content creator even if I've stopped really making content (although I still plan on making music and songs regardless).

But at the same time, these are ideas I've had to talk about for the better part of three years at least, I just thought I'd never be able to do them, I'd never do the research for them (to be fair, I probably won't, this will be a lot of talking out of my ass), I' never have the energy to, I'd never have the words to, etc. I made reason after reason for not pursuing talking about it, despite how in private I would freely share these ideas over discord and thoughts and lay out these trivia and beliefs and so on and so forth.

And I also wanna include my spiritual beliefs, and my view on healing, on communities, on helping people and oneself, on growth, on all of the things.

But for the time being.

You get one more blog about Civ 3, and my playthrough of a modded Rise of Rome scenario. I'm once again playing as I'm blogging, but the tl;dr of it is, I've found out that with enough pillagers to bombard the 3/5 defenders down to one hp and then another pillager to kill them, that I actually was able of capturing a whole lot more than I realized. I'm pretty sure I've mostly done what I can for Egypt this turn, but suffice to say even if they do produce pillagers they're not gonna be able to snowball it into retaking much territory at this point. They've got only seven cities left in Africa, Heliopolis will fall next turn, Kahun and El-Amunra will fall next turn, and while not certain, Pi-Ramses and Heirancopolis are both vulnerable and potentially enough to be taken.

Bubastis and Alexandria, the two I really want, are gonna be harder to take, with Bubastis taking at least two to get my troops there and Alexandria requiring a proper siege unless Egypt actually sends their forces out to try and retake cities (which is likely to fail, barring pillager snowballing).

Scythia is where I'm mostly finishing up this turn right now. Sadly, Asiopolis (iron) and Saka (horses) are two cities I lack the resources to take, and are connected to two to four other cities I can't take this turn. It's the last bastion of Scythian strength, so they might launch a counter-offensive, but at the same time, they can only field swordsmen (3/2/1) units that have 5 movement and their cavalry with 10 movement and they can only produce a maximum of 5 and they only have 10 horseman units right now, so I'm not too worried about a counter-offensive. I've got like five cities which might be vulnerable, but those cities are not going to give them momentum.

The main problem I'm going to be facing is actually going to be from one of the two civilizations I'm not at war with.

...Yeahhhhh. That's...a lot of pillagers being produced. I've basically swapped all of my cities in the area to pillager/Praetorian Guard production, because my only real recourse is to surround all their cities, then create a wall around my borders. Normally I make the wall first, but I don't have the time to build it up, it takes eight units to surround a city but it takes 12 to surround boarders.

I could be mentally mathing that wrong, but yeah. Persia is on basically pure Pillager production. I need to try and contain the pillager production, which will have the side-effect of limiting Persia's angle of attack for the Macedonians to be purely by sea. (By the way, I buffed the Macedonians' supply of naval power because Persia is overwhelming the Macedonians with their fleet which should be the other way around.)

Now, there's probably a lot more I can say, but I have two options at the moment. Option one is to leave this blog to be completed later, option two is to post it as-is and if I wanna make more go make it later. If you're seeing it as-is, I chose the latter, which makes sense, because I badly hurt myself when taking our puppy out. Again.

I don't think I blogged about how I badly fell and SLAMMED my back, slightly on the right side, back in December.

This time I slipped and got dragged down concrete stairs, and have scraped myself very very very badly in three different areas.

I already needed to run errands, but now said errands involve getting medical supplies because while we have medical alcohol and while we have band-aids...these are some GNARLY wounds. Like, we're talking, my left thigh is scraped badly enough to have instantly swollen up and it's covering nearly the entirety of the thigh (bad enough I would never take a photo to share how disgusting it is), my right heel has a deep cut, and my right hip also has a deep cut. The right side wounds are deeper but cover less surface area, the left side is something no bandaid can cover because we're talking a scrape about the side of two hands at least. Soyeah. Gonna need to get treatment. Not hospital-visit-worthy, but I'm badly banged up rn.

​Gotta go.

Now, part of that is because all I have left to do is to grind out the bits remaining. Once I've save-scummed my way to defeating the RNG gods (so far, I've been reloading bad luck I ought to have won, but I'm about to enter into the zone of luck I have no right winning so any time I do is actually good luck), then there won't really be much left to report on. I might give a final after screen and show off Persia and the Egyptian pillager to show the next challenges, but the main challenge of effectively taking out all of the barbarian civilizations who betrayed me will be completed.

And the other part of it is because life is going to get busy regardless of whether it's in a bad way, a good way, or as is usually the case a mixture of both. I'm in this weird zone where I actually have a lot of hope of things improving, of being able to negotiate for the things I am most concerned about, of working things out, of getting the small bits of help, and of life improving. I completed a training that increases my value in my field of employment by a considerable amount. I've applied for four positions that are higher up in the chain of command, positions that are considerably rare to land but which I feel I actually for the first time in my life have a reasonable chance of landing them.

My current boss actually recommended I apply. Promising sign. I got an email from HR which mirrored the email I first got when I first applied for my current job. Promising sign number two. I have updated my resume, gotten a stronger cover letter, and improved my voice in my workplace, and I have a lot of people who have seen this change in me where I am performing exceptionally.

Plus on a sidenote, my bosses have actually had to work the current shift they assign me to work regularly in the last two weeks, and their struggle to actually work the shift they expect me to do every day? Presumably gives them a lot of perspective on just what I have been capable of in terms of what I accomplish. In short, I feel like they've, through actually experiencing what I go through, gained an amount of appreciation and respect for my workload previously not found. Which I feel will translate into them realizing I've been doing a lot more than they realized, been keeping things running in ways they didn't know, and that I am more valuable than they were giving me credit for, all of which translates into...presumably, advocating for me.

My medical health has improved significantly since getting physical therapy, and while it doesn't solve all of my health issues, it's making me less in pain and less sore in my back, neck, shoulders, and right side, so I'm slowly healing and improving.

Regardless of whether we end up moving or not, I feel like I've got a good chance of getting things to work, and I feel if we did end up moving, we have the resources available to make it work.

All of that is where I have the hope of things continuing to improve.

But at the same time, I'm also in a zone where I also have lost hope of things going well, and am just waiting for a death blow to be dealt to my life, to my dreams, to my chance of getting going. It could be anything. Something happening to my car which can't be covered, something happening to my income, being unable to get severely out of debt, being evicted from our new place because of an inability to pay on a reasonable timeframe, losing health insurance...again...being unable to go to the food bank...again...not getting access to food stamps...the list goes on and on.

In order for life to improve it takes nothing going wrong and at least one or two things to go right and continue to go right;

In order for life to collapse and go beyond shambles into actually being ended, it takes only a single thing going wrong with no ability to find a way out, to pivot, to fight, to recover. There's been so many close calls. Every month since December or so has had at least one if not multiple and we're probably a day or two away from another. I'm not sure what will happen but it can't be good things.

Soyeah. If things go well I'll be really busy. Either with a new job or with efforts to move, hopefully.
And if things go poorly...I'll...be...unavailable, to say the least.

And if it's a mixture of both, doubly so.

But in the unlikely event even all of those don't remove my free time, I'm not sure what's left to show. After Scythia falls, and after I clean up in the Iberian peninsula, there won't be much left to share and victory will be around the corner, likely only requiring one final war to wage against whoever first pulls the trigger on peace with Carthage. Then it's on to the next, playing as Carthage, to see if they're as viable to play as and have the playstyle I'm aiming for. (This'll be the first time on either version of this mod I'll be playing as Carthage since I've only gotten far enough to play as Persia and Rome on either version of the mod.)

​With all of that said, here's the current Scythian city army distribution.

Now, this doesn't give the full picture of the units, but you can at least get at least some idea of where their unit strongholds are. Ereen and Melitopol are going to be their last bastions, Ereen because I don't want the swamp until I can clear it (so I need to pre-load a bunch of units there to have available for that), and Melitopol because it's possibly where I limit the Scythians to, one of three cities I'm considering with Ereen as one of the other two. (Iazygia is the third.)

Now to give you an idea of what those icons are, lemme show you (the majority of) their unit breakdown.

The Scythians don't have their tier three horseman units yet, limited to their Scythian Riders. The three Scythian Scouts you see there are all in Ulksy, because Ulksy produces a Scythian Scout and Scythian Spearman every turn (which is also why Ulsky has like ten Horde Walls in it, because the Scythians gained access to the resources to upgrade said spearmen produced every turn).

Not all of their Scythian Riders are in cities, but they've still got an uncomfortably large amount. I'll be trimming the amount they have by reducing Melitopol and Ereen, but that'll still leave 30ish around their cities, all hiding behind Horde Walls and Numidian Mercenaries.

Not shown; they have a lot of Horde Warriors (the tier 1 swordsmen) and a few normal Warriors, as well as like 20 regular spearmen, too. All of those are annoyances, but not really concerns. The concerns are their warlords which are their 5/3 tier two swordsmen that treat all terrain as roads (meaning 5 movement for each of them). The horde raiders are their all-terrain-as-roads swordsmen, 3/2, but they're not much of a concern.

The advanced infantry, generic 5/3 units, aren't a threat because they can only kill units inside of Scythian territory or on the edge of my boarders, not able to penetrate deep.

The area of greatest concern is actually the Horde Walls being used offensively. They're 3/5, with the same treat-all-terrain-as-roads buff of the other Scythian units, and while Scythia can't make anymore as long as I hold onto the territories on the eastern shore of the Caspian Sea, they also have a large amount. Now, I'm relatively confident the Scythians are always going to keep at least one in each of their cities with one. That keeps 27 of them out of concern. And despite the save scumming required, I intend to breach Ulsky this turn or get it in breach range for next turn, taking an additional 10 of them out of concern. (Make no mistake, that's gonna be the majority of save scumming because it will require my pillagers who have only 4 attack not only winning against the horde wall but producing enough pillagers to keep the assault going. It's the area I'm most likely to be forced to give up in.) But that's only about 37/57 horde walls guaranteed to be locked down. The rest are at risk of being used offensively, and might kill units and are gonna be pains to take down.

And that brings me to my next show--of how all the easy work has been done pretty much, leaving only the hard parts left.

Every. single. city. is protected by a minimum of one Horde Wall (with the points of greatest pain being 2 - 3), with a couple having a Warlord as well. (Warlords, despite technically having one less defense than my pillager army, are still a pain and often take me 3 - 6 times to kill.) My pillagers have 4 attack and can sometimes retreat at 1 HP without killing the target, and in order to take these cities I need to not only kill the horde walls but also enslave at least once to create a pillager capable of mopping up the leftovers underneath of the horde walls. And the Scythian cities also have catapults making the attacking pillagers often start with 1 less HP, against an opponent they already have the disadvantage against.

Like I said. This is the section of the game that is going to take the longest and require the most save scumming. Gaimonov is more lightly defended and I have two pillagers there whereas I only have one pillager at the other cities, but none of them are going to be easy to take. All of them are going to take RNJesus rolls for me to actually have a chance of taking, so my hope is to get really lucky, and/or do enough damage that even if I get burned out/frustrated and give up, I cripple them enough to prevent any counter-offensive.

Sarsae is going to be difficult. Phasis might be impossible. I can't reach Oblia this turn with any of my units so Oblia is gonna stay under Scythian control for one more turn regardless, which really sucks because Oblia is one of their sources of horses. Shibe will also be very hard to take. And it doesn't get any easier on the northeastern front.

Here I'm running into the issue of just not having the manpower to advance, and unless I can capture Great Bulgar this turn (which will require snowballing one pillager into three against multiple Horde Walls and a Warlord), my cities in the corner are cut off from all resources except horses, meaning they can't actually produce my advanced units. No Praetorian Guards, Legionaries, Cataphracts, or Pillagers. (I forgot to swap them over before the declaration of war, whoops!)

​Now, Ulliastay has one Pillager, which can be used to easily attack Paratae or potentially the other border cities here.

And Kelermes has one pillager that can be used to kill the horde raider and Scythian Rider near Asiopolis and potentially attack it and/or Chersonesus, and as you can see, I do have a pillager poised to assault Saka and assuming said pillager can kill the Horde wall I can probably capture Saka, too. But at the same time, I don't have the manpower to actually plow through these cities. I can devastate them enough where they won't be able to effectively mount a counterattack, or so I hope, but I can't actually stop them.

​I do need to capture Asiopolis though. If I capture Asiopolis, that means the Scythians lose access to iron, which cuts them off from producing Kheshiks (the name I opted for their tier three horsemen), swordsmen, and horde raiders. (They already lack the means to produce warlords since those require gold and silver in addition to iron, but losing iron also guarantees no more warlords, too.)

I can probably reinforce my weakly-defended cities and I can probably prevent them from reclaiming dangerous territory, but while I might be able to capture Kimmeria with sufficient save scumming, you can see how vulnerable a lot of my defenses are, here. The best defense I can think of is convincing the Scythians they don't have the manpower to mount an offensive and providing shinies to distract them from higher-profile targets. I'll temporarily lose a few workers if the tradeoff is not losing any cities.

Which brings me to the area of greatest annoyance.

Tanais has three horde walls plus a fourth 3/5 in the form of a numidian mercenary, aided by a catapult, and I don't have any units with 5+ attack in the area. All my legionaries and cataphracts got deployed to cut Scythia's ivory supply off on the other side of the Caspian Sea. So I don't really have the manpower except by brute forcing to potentially get through, and my terrain is not properly defended. My hope is that the Persians focus on Tanais and the Scythians focus on the Persians, but without that it's going to be very, very rough.

And then you can also see Ulsky. I've got two or three Cataphracts there, but I've also only got about three pillagers available--meaning in order to breach into Ulsky, said three pillagers need to multiply into one or two each for a total of six to nine that each have enough HP to attack twice.

That's...ah...not very likely to happen, so I might be forced to give up on my aspirations of capturing Ulsky this turn. I do have enough Legionaries in the area to easily capture it next turn tho, so here's to hoping. (Also you can see one of Persia's Immortals II armies in Khazar, courtesy of the Scythian-Persian conflict prior to the Scythians declaring war against me.)

Now, it should be noted; a lot of the poorly-defended areas can have their defenses bolstered, I haven't put in the time to move all of my units to where they need to be and set up my logistics to protect my units and cities appropriately.

But at the same time, you can see why I tend to not like warring with the Scythians. I have the first strike, with a unit capable of theoretically snowballing and creating momentum, but they have such a strong defense, such a strong attack, an overwhelming horde of units, and they're rich enough in resources to use them. And their units can all pierce deep into enemy territory, my territory, to attack at will. (There's a reason that the first barbarian civilization I'm going to play as is the Scythians, because I think in my hands I could genuinely take over the world using them, the easiest of the barbarian civilizations to do so.)

It'll take a LOT of work to neuter them effectively, and I'm 2 - 4 turns from wiping them out. We've got a lot of save scumming to do, and then the pain of after. But once they're gone, I'm pretty much left just dealing with Persia, who I'm hoping will be my next foe. Both because it guarantees my conquest victory, I don't want them to expand further, they're the greatest threat, and they stole a wonder from me so I want to steal all of their cities. But obviously that will also be the hardest foe to fight, so not looking forward to it.

The challenges of being a conqueror, I suppose.

Anyway, that's it. Gotta go to bed and tackle the challenges of being an impoverished married disabled neurodivergent queer witch trying to start a lesbian family in a capitalistic society designed to prevent people like that from ever succeeding.

Here's the full google doc.
And in raw link form: ​https://docs.google.com/document/d/17PaBV_42y3S5WL_h7gbHiE0HpBNAqgNoib-g3EdMHf8/ 

I’m writing this to show people a bit of who I am, and to explain my current circumstances. This might end up as my final call for help. 

Because…I’ve reached the point where either this call gets me what I need and I hopefully never need to ask again,

…Or this message never reaches the right people in time, and it becomes too late to ever help me. 

In either case, it’s certainly the end of my 2025 cycle of continuously being in need of help. So I either get the help I’ve needed for a long time, or I am left so badly off there’s no help left to give.

So with that, a little about me.

My name is Brianna Danielle Lewis, albeit not yet legally. I prefer Bree Lewis. (Although in circles understanding plurality, I also go by The Range of Bree System.)

I’m a lifelong Washingtonian, born and raised here in the beautiful Pacific Northwest my entire life. Currently, I’m renting a place for my wife in Everett.

I’m 6’2”, a Leo (although I don’t know my full birth chart), born in the year of the Rooster, type A+ blood, and an INFP, if such things are of interest to you.

The elevator pitch I have for myself is I’m a queer neurodivergent disabled witch with plurality in my young 30s coming from an upbringing ignorant to all of those communities. (The knowledge about plural, queer, neurodivergent, disabled, and witchy folks was not as abundant and readily available during my childhood as it is now.)

To go into more specifics,
I’m a transwoman lesbian, married to a nonbinary bi demisexual witchy wife, who is equally as disabled as me.

My wife has severe levels of ADHD and likely related conditions, and is currently unmedicated. 

They also deal with severe back pain, among other issues, and describe themself as blind without their glasses. Even without the dysphoria they suffer from, their breasts are largely enough to cause agonizing pain and are in a desperate need of a reduction for an increase in quality of life.

Additionally, they suffer from endometriosis and/or a similar condition which makes seven days a month absolute misery beyond the normal for those who undergo a time of the month. They have also been suffering, rather consistently, from extreme migraines as of late, which persist throughout most days.

On my end, I have equally as severe ADHD, I definitely have Cognitive Disengagement Syndrome, I’ve been clinically diagnosed as having Bipolar Disorder, I suffer from severe anxieties, and I have autism under its old outdated archaic name listed on my medical chart because I am very obviously, notably autistic.

Many of these were inherited from one or both of my parents.

That, aside from how I am a polyfragmented median system, a form of plurality. (I use ‘I’ for convenience, but it’s more accurate to say I am a ‘we’.) Who is around to front vastly impacts my ability to function.

But beyond those conditions, I have numerous physical ones as well.

I have pectus excavatum, a caved-in chest. It’s very obvious to anyone who has seen me bare-chested, and is on my medical history.

I have inherited thyroid issues, inherited from my mom’s side of the family. 

I have sleep apnea.

I have minor dyslexia. 

I have GERDS, inherited from my mom’s family. Namely some acid reflux which is incredibly present after most meals.

I have some pretty notable astigmatism, and presumably other vision deformities, presumably inherited mostly from my dad’s side of the family. I’ve dodged wearing glasses my whole life mostly because I am good at pattern recognition, so I could pass every eye exam by guessing correctly things I actually couldn’t see clearly.

I have relatively severe POTS, which has gotten worse every time I have caught covid. And in recent times, it keeps getting worse no matter what. The risk of passing out keeps escalating higher and higher. I lose vision when standing up, and balance, and get dizzy, and suffer from severe lightheadedness which doesn’t go away for at least five minutes. 

And I have extremely high levels of lower back pain when standing. I can sit, I can lie down, I can walk, I can run, but if I stand still, I get increasingly debilitating painful back pain, some of the worst pain I’ve the displeasure of living with daily.

My family has poor circulation, which I inherited.

I have pretty extreme IBS flareups.

From a lifetime of use, I have some form of tendinitis or carpal tunnel syndrome or similar in my wrists, especially my right one on the pinkie side, and I was told I had “skater’s back” as well. 

I also have some form of chemical imbalance causing a hyperactive metabolism. If I’m not eating around 4,000 calories per day, I end up sluggish with a brain fog, feeling unable to think fully. I feel sleepy and tired, more than usual, and have zero energy. I was told my hyperactive metabolism would go away when I got older, but it’s still there, and it’s really bad because eating that much per day is nearly impossible, and I am left constantly at risk of losing weight if I overexert myself.

A lot of this laundry list of conditions is shown both through my family medical history on both sides of my family (with most of these conditions diagnosed in at least one half-sibling, aunt, uncle, niece, or nephew, and often in multiple members of the family), and through very easy observation. 

It’s obvious I have a caved-in chest. All it takes to know I have chronic acid reflux is to watch me eat meals. My family history of snoring myself included just requires we fall asleep and be observed. My difficulties socializing and picking up on cues are apparent just from trying to talk to me. And so on and so forth.

A lot of these aren’t as extreme as the most extreme cases, but are still bad, crippling and debilitating me on a daily basis. And while some of them are minor enough to be mere nuisances, they add up. Five minor inconveniences can collectively form a greater problem. 

For instance, a bad flareup of IBS and POTS at the same time has a genuine risk of being one of the most embarrassing and humiliating ways I could die, yet the risk of that combo killing me is very much real.

These conditions both have worsened with age and from catching long-covid repeatedly, and the current stress, frustrations, and anxieties I’m dealing with are likely worsening them.

My body feels like it’s falling apart, just like my life, but it’s important for people to believe that I have these conditions.

I’m a ridiculously tough gal, I’m a natural at masking. I pretended to be normal for 20 years, and a lot of conditions I lived with daily, I just thought everyone had to deal with those.

“Everyone sees long pillars of light from light sources at night, right?” (Those pillars are called halos.)
“Everyone deals with debilitating back pain when standing still, right?”
“Everyone has a chest like this if they suck in enough, right?”
“Everyone loses vision when standing up, right?”
“Everyone deals with dizziness, lightheadedness, etc., after standing up, right?”
“Everyone deals with needing to clear their throat repeatedly after eating a meal, right?”
“Everyone goes days between going number two then deals with backups, right?”
“Everyone snores a lot, right?”
“Everyone has multiple thoughts in their head at once, right?”

And so on and so forth. A lot of the things I took for granted as universally part of life as a human, are in fact Not Normal.

I don’t want to give my whole life story though. I mostly just want those conditions established and understood as what I suffer through daily. I’ve gotten good at masking, I’ve gotten good at hiding them, I’ve gotten good at powering through my limitations temporarily, even though doing so tends to backfire longterm and cause burnout and me shutting down. 

So a lot of the time, it’s easy to ignore them, it’s easy to somewhat pretend I’m “normal”.

Yet they’re a large factor in my current limit, so I need to describe some of the history just a little bit more. 

As a kid, I was considered a prodigy. I was grades ahead in math, and I also had a strong interest and investment in multiple other subjects. I loved literature, history, and science in particular. I had a fascination with the stars, with rocks, with nature, and sought out bonus credit assignments for those subjects because I was bored when not focused on the areas I had hyperfixated on.

For media, from books to films, there were a lot of things I didn’t understand, but I faked knowing what they meant and used them anyway because they were considered funny. I was slow on the uptake for understanding jokes, but once I got it, I would be the one repeating the joke fifty times. 

Eventually, this would lead to a focus on wordplay, among other interests, where I would seek out connections to words, dissecting them, their multiple pronunciations, and tying those different pronunciations together. 

I would understand quickly for instance that ‘the’ and ‘The’ are pronounced differently and technically can mean ever so slightly subtly different things, but are considered to mean the same thing.

I would do this for every word I could, for instance insisting that there’s plenty of words which rhyme with ‘orange’ if you focus on the ‘enj’ pronunciation of orange rather than the ‘rahnj’ one. (First to come to mind, syringe.)

I became a poet and a writer by the age of 13.

And I felt like I could become anything which I applied myself to. 

I could have made an excellent astronomer.

I would have been a great environmental scientist. 

I would’ve been a good geologist. 

I would have been an amazing historian. 

People have told me my whole life I would make an excellent politician because despite how lousy a liar I am (I can’t lie, I really can’t tell a believable lie and freeze when I feel compelled to with the lie being very obvious), because I am a master of half-truths, technically correct information, of deflecting, of redirecting, and in general have had a lifelong talent for words.

If you’ve read this far, chances are something I wrote drew you in, and even if you’ve only skimmed, something made you look enough to see this much. I have always had a way with words.

Anything I became passionate about, I became an expert at for my age, and even several grades above. I could handle middle school and sometimes even high school material while still in elementary school.

…But I felt like even then, there was something different about me. I knew I wasn’t normal, but I also knew I couldn’t be everything I was dreaming of being, and to really become the best, I would need to devote myself to a craft, dedicated to it and forsake the rest.

I felt a divide between living a “normal” life of partially pursuing everything I wanted and excelling at nothing, or abandoning most of my fascinations and interests in favor of a profession in one.

As this continued, this feeling eventually became a sense there was something “wrong” with me, or wrong with the world, or both. I went from super talkative about everything especially my interests to silent. I went from having fun with dozens of friends to drifting apart from all of them.

To me, it felt like everyone else was growing up, but I was still just a kid. And because I was feeling like I was still just a kid, I ended up never really learning most of the skills “adults” should know. 

I went from a child prodigy skilled at anything I really committed to, to the exact opposite, struggling with everything no matter my commitment. The divide, the tear, between wanting to embrace being different, being talented, being skilled, being ‘special’, versus just wanting to blend in, wanting to be ‘normal’, suffering because I could tell my experiences weren’t a match to those of my peers and I wanted to not be alone. That rift in direction with mutually exclusive at the time desires left me burnt out and crashed out, and my development suffered significantly. 

I certainly managed enough, getting a driver license, getting a job, getting through college, getting a passport, and getting some diagnoses, but…
…It took me until I met the love of my life for things to really start turning around. 

So let’s talk about the last two years, and the better part of who I am now.

I confessed to the love of my life, my wife, on August 16th, 2023. At the time, we were long-distance, but we spent every waking moment together. We fixed our sleep schedules and synchronized them perfectly, and we got to meet at the end of September 2023 going into October.

After one meeting, we knew that we couldn’t remain apart. So later into October, I went again, and this time, we returned together, beginning a life in one room together on November 3rd, 2023.

My wife inspired me and drove me to embrace parts of me I had forgotten, or never really thought about as talents. 

After the flashdrive which had my current passion project novel broke without a backup somewhere in the 2017 - 2020 range, I had fallen into a depression where I gave up on ever being a writer. Having lost effectively everything, I was crushed. However, my wife gave me inspiration to keep going, to work on my new passion project, which I continue to work on to this day. I’ve made 2,000+ pages of notes for my current novel project and am actively working on writing it!

I got back into poetry and songwriting. I had fallen into a slump where I couldn’t complete any rhyming project I set out to make, but my wife gave me the light, the life, I needed to write and perform multiple songs!

I’m no musician, but I have a long list of songs I’ve performed despite my lack of skills, emboldened and encouraged by my wife. Dozens of poems and songs, written and performed. 

I’ve realized I have a mental map of a significant portion of Washington State. From Marysville to Renton, from I-5 to Stevens Pass, I have a map which functions better than Google Maps, with both a mental street view and an overhead view, where I can perfectly place where two locations are in relation to each other.

I know just about every road, so I don’t know just one route. Any given point A to point B, I know at least three, often up to six or more possible routes. I know how to navigate detours, delays, and traffic.

From Mount Vernon down to about Exit 130 or so, it’s also ridiculously accurate, albeit not quite as quick and accurate, with smaller gaps.

Heck, pretty much from northern California to British Columbia along I-5, I have things mostly memorized, albeit more hazy the longer it has been since I last visited. 

I’ve repeatedly out-navigated my GPS. When it recommended routes with tolls, I found ways without, which just so happened to be faster an eta anyway!

When it wanted me to take the HOV lane exits when I had no passenger, I found the route without and still arrived at the same time I would have via the GPS suggestion.

Inversely, when it recommends a route and I have a passenger, I can take a diamond lane route which is faster than the recommended route.

I’ve shown on numerous occasions an understanding of traffic patterns superior to the GPS, where I anticipated traffic the GPS didn’t, and I know backroads the GPS doesn’t. 

It’s not even a uniquely Pacific Northwest talent! One time visiting the upper middle mitten of Michigan, and I memorized the routes everywhere from Detroit to Traverse City, mostly able to navigate from Point A to Point B by memory, even a full year after last being there. Roads in areas I spend so much as a single week driving, become muscle memory to me.

I not only remember the route, but also common traffic patterns for the route. I understand the flow of traffic, where there’s buildups, where there’s gaps, where things slow down and speed up.

Just once driving to Michigan from Washington let me memorize the route, including which areas to stop at for gas and rest stops. I memorized a 2200 mile road map from driving it only once!

I’m basically a human GPS. I almost always can go to a place only once, then retrace my steps perfectly, and be able to navigate there again. And it took being with my wife to realize this.

I’m not a trained singer the way my sisters are, but when I’m not letting my anxieties and insecurities mute my voice, I’m a better singer than I ever gave myself credit for, and can belt out bars with ease when in the presence of my wife.

I’m pretty good at dancing, better than most, able to identify the rhythm and beat, then adapt to the song and create a pattern of movement which harmonizes with the music.

I’m a ridiculously good worldbuilder, and I am a genius for coming up with ideas. Not just in developing an endless supply of stories, but also in many other creative endeavors, where I can point to something and go, “shoulda done this instead”, or “they should do this next”, and encouraging others.

I can inspire the creativity and passions of others, by not only giving them ideas they wouldn’t have thought of, but also encouraging them to follow through and actually go for it. 

I’ve embraced speaking up again and being less mute, even joining in on banter at times. I’ve gotten really good at wordplay and jokes and memes, throughout it all entertaining my friends, my wife, and the communities we’re parts of.

I’m actually a ridiculously good driver, all things considered, despite my reputation. I got an enhanced drivers license, and I even obtained a passport! And I’ve picked up a lot of the skills for independence I hadn’t mastered in my 20s.

I know how to hand-wash dishes now, and do so often. Somewhat frequently, I both load and unload the dishwasher, and can even run it! I’ve often become the one putting clean laundry away. I’ve almost always become the one who takes care of the garbage.

I frequently clean up my home, putting things away, where they should be, or if not, in a place where they’re at least not in the way.

I’ve a higher investment in hygiene, in bodily upkeep.

I can move things into the dirty laundry, and from the washer into the dryer, and from the dryer to appropriately stored. In theory, I can theoretically start the washer and dryer, too! (Although of my skills, this is the one I still need the most work in.)

I’ve gone from having zero knowledge in areas such as spirituality, the queer community, plurality, and neurodivergencies, to being the one teaching others about those subjects! In my youth I had no information about any of those things, and was confused and lost because I couldn’t find anything which matched what I felt was my experience. 

And then in my 20s I began to get teachers in subjects such as queer culture, different forms of plurality, spirituality divorced from religion particularly in the form of witchcraft, different forms of neurodivergencies and how they can and frequently do overlap, and various disabilities which I hadn’t heard of before. 

Once I met my wife in my 30s, I encountered folks younger than me, in their young 20s primarily, who were reflections of my younger self, in lacking the knowledge I had since gained. Despite still feeling like I have a lot to learn, I gradually have transitioned from a student ignorant to all of these things, into a teacher who can impart my learned experience to those who need the guidance from me.

I’ve gone from “baby neurodivergent queer witch” to “elder neurodivergent queer witch” without really realizing it, helping people accept the past, attune to the present, and start building a better future with my lived experiences, learned lessons, and random trivia I’ve picked up.
 
I’ve embraced a role in communities I’m a part of as being a healer and a teacher. I help people find a path towards forgiving themselves for their past, providing reminders they were doing the best they could with what they knew and had, and they have become better since.

I’m a source of joy, making people laugh, making the days of others better just by being a part of their lives. I give my support, my wisdom, my time, my energy, to those who need it, and do my best to be there for them. I give perspective, providing alternative more favorable views, giving hope, and introducing humor.

Whether it’s eyerolls or groans or sighs or genuine laughter, I have a way of finding what to say which provides people with a smile, because they enjoyed it no matter how much they might facepalm at the wordplay I provide them with.

I know exactly the right thing to say at the right moment to make the day better than it was before, more often than not. And even when I can’t, I can still help and support just by my presence, by choosing to give my time and energy to just listen, and be there for those in need. 

I’m good at giving advice, at being a pillar of non-toxic positivity, a beacon of light, spreading joy and helping heal through learning perspectives previously not provided.

I have given over 300 affirmations in what I call my “daily check-ins”, where I give little boosts at the beginning of the day. I constantly try to check in on people and encourage them to do the same, to focus on what’s truly the most important parts of life it’s sometimes easy to forget are what matter most.

I have also come to accept that I’m really good at my job. I’m only outranked in seniority by my Aquatics Coordinator, who has been at my facility for twice as long as I have (me, over five years; her, over ten), and my experience shows. I have over ten years of experience at working my job, and I am quite possibly the best employee other than my Aquatics Coordinator. 

I know how to fairly effortlessly do most tasks with a high level of efficiency, and am competent in demonstrating these skills and knowledge and tasks to new hires. I have perhaps the best track record for showing up to the monthly in-services, because I’m pretty sure I’ve actually attended more than either my Aquatics Coordinator or Aquatics Director have. (Each of them typically has an excused absence an average of 2 - 3 per year each, whereas I tend to average missing only one a year or less.) And I almost never miss a shift, communicate actively, advocate for the employees, and rotate efficiently, and perform my duties to a textbook degree.

I have found my vibe when I choose to create content as a content creator, with some competence in short-form content, longer videos, and livestreaming. I can educate, I can entertain, effectively, and I provide a space to just vibe.

And I am sitting on what I genuinely believe is a potentially billion-dollar franchise. Not that I would ever want to make that much. I don’t even want to make a million dollars, yet alone a thousand times that amount, but I think that my idea is able to generate that level of revenue in total.

I have the plan for how to create it, how to market it, the merchandise, how to repackage it as deluxe, as remix, as containing commentary, and so on and so forth, not just selling new material but also continuously updating and refreshing the old so that people can keep rediscovering the material from different angles while also exploring the new material, too.

I didn’t develop 2,000+ pages of notes for nothing. That’s enough material to last a lifetime, and yet, this is just my first series I want to make of many!

I am a creator, an artist, a writer. I technically am a musician and a dancer and a choreographer too. I can plan how to turn a franchise into the next big thing, with a start to finish plan on how to pull it off. And I do all of this not because I want to profit off of my work, but because I want to share it with the world and give everyone the ability to experience the same level of fulfillment, of joy, of enthrallment, which I do for this world. 

I want it to become a world others want to continue, to make fanfiction of, to create works within, to want more of, to show their love of it, to make fanart, to create works of it. I want what started as my own fantasy world to become a world our entire world is welcome to visit, in one form or another. 

And I genuinely believe I can pull it off, too! My wife has given me the confidence to believe in the dream of my work being shared across the world and seen by all.

And all of this and more began snowballing from November 2023 onwards.

On December 3rd, 2023, exactly one month after we started living together, my wife proposed to me. 

On December 4th, 2023, the very next day, we got approved for our first apartment.

Around November 7th 2024 or so, we decided we wanted to get legally wed immediately, so that no matter what tribulations 2025 would bring, we would at least know for the time we could, we were legally married. 

On November 15th, 2024, we got our legal marriage, becoming legally Wed, and became a married couple, collectively called by all of our friends “the wives”.

At the end of January 2025, the beginning of this year, we decided to pull the trigger on adopting a puppy, a White German Shepherd mix, believed to be with Husky, named Parker.

He has been iconic, being a very pretty dog, beautiful, and funny. Smart, full of energy, and ridiculously funny. Talkative, but also incredibly loyal and loving. 

And together, we have talked about the potential of having human children. We’ve started a life together and have the beginnings of a family together. 

We have ambitions. Dreams of a future. 

My wife wants to become a baker and eventually open a bakery to sell baked goods for a living. They love cooking, they love baking, they pour their magic into their food, made with love, care, and spirit. They put their soul into it and they want to share this food with the world.

They already enjoy handing it out to family, to my coworkers, to our apartment management, to any friends we can have over, and so on and so forth. They want to elevate this passionate hobby to a full career, sharing their delicious creations with all they can.

I want the worlds I’ve had the pleasure of viewing and building to be shared with the world. I have all of these wonderful ideas, these wondrous, rich, diverse worlds, and I want others to see and view them as I do.

And I want to give back to the communities I’m a part of. I want to contribute, to help, to strengthen them and support them. I want to help the spaces I dwell within thrive. Part of why I pursued working and volunteering at the YMCA was because I knew what they do for communities, but I have always wanted to take a more active, a more proactive, role in this communal support.

I want to more directly be making an impact. Reaching out to people, directly providing my aid, giving time and energy towards uplifting others. My job has been a small way to contribute, but I want to more actively be involved in serving my community and helping people live better lives.

We both want a life together, a family, to have a home we call our own and to raise the next generation. One or two children, if we can, and presumably a full household of pets.

But we’ve run into our troubles, too.

And those troubles have reached a point where we might be broken, our lives might shatter, before we have the chance to see them through. We’re on the verge of losing everything, potentially even each other in the worst of worst case scenarios.

And that brings me to why we need help.

Since 2023, we have run into a large number of difficulties, starting primarily in 2024.

In 2024, the apartment complex my wife and I signed a ten-month lease for on December 4th 2023 ended up pulling a bunch of sketchy, and we would later learn actually illegal, maneuvers on us.

They failed to provide advanced notice that our rent would be increasing by $100/month, an increase we couldn’t afford because my pay at my job remains mostly stagnant year to year. We only learned about the increase when we got the papers to sign for the lease renewal.

The increase in price was never mailed or emailed to us, so we were never properly informed about an increase in monthly rent.

When we renewed our lease, we were also given a $100 lease renewal fee, equal to the increase in rent. This was not disclosed anywhere in the paperwork and we weren’t informed of it in advance. 

The increase in price was definitely near the maximum allowed increase in rent, and depending on the math involved, may have potentially exceeded the legally allowed rent increase percentage. We would need to track down the paperwork involved to confirm, which we couldn’t manage at the time. 

Then there was the hidden additional monthly cost.

For our initial lease, the only utility we paid for was the power. We received all other utilities for free. Sewage, trash, and so on and so forth, all were included in our rent initially for no additional monthly charge.

Nowhere in our renewed lease was any change to this disclosed. 

However, on our first bill for the renewed lease, in November 2024, we got the nasty surprise of the hidden additional $200 in utility fees. Again, this was never disclosed to us, anywhere in our renewed lease, but it effectively meant instead of a $100 increase in our monthly rent, we were given about a $300 increase in rent.

Our rent went from in the range of ~$1750 per month including all expenses (carport + PUD + processing),
To $2000+ per month, sometimes $2100.

It got worse, because the utilities were mandatory to be paid at the same time as rent, or face an ever-increasing late fee.

Even when we paid the rent itself with the only unpaid expenses being the utilities, Breckenridge Apartments (owned by Weidner Apartments) would tack on the same late fee they would as if rent hadn’t been paid at all.

We were told when we signed the initial lease all the utilities except power were covered in our rent, but the new lease had nothing covered by the increased rent.

This added monthly cost put an ever-increasing burden on us. We could maybe have handled the $100 increase in monthly rent. We definitely couldn’t handle the effective $300 increase in monthly rent, with no information on why the utilities weren’t included anymore and no leeway in late fees regarding the utilities. 

This eventually reached a point where we couldn’t pay the full month’s rent all at once in July 2025. We asked for a payment plan. This is required to be an option provided by Washington State law.

When we brought this up with management, we were told, verbatim, “that might be how other apartment complexes do it, but our company policy is different”. That was their EXACT wording. 

We reiterated this wasn’t a company policy issue, it was State Law, but Breckenridge Apartments management reiterated their company policy was not to provide us with the option of a payment plan. They clung to policy, which was that we needed to pay the full month’s rent, all at once, or they would begin eviction proceedings against us. 

They repeatedly threatened these eviction proceedings if we didn’t pay the full month of rent plus late fees all at once, and promised to put us on a “Do Not Rent” list. They repeatedly tried to intimidate, harass, and bully us, and were unwilling to accept a partial payment of our rent or offer any form of payment plan.

Since we knew the eviction process involved taking us to court, and we knew they were breaking the law by not offering us a payment plan, we intended to fight them in court by bringing all of this up.

However, presumably because they knew that they would lose, and because we were just wanting to move on with our lives, we came to an arrangement with Breckenridge Apartments. 

We would have moved out by August 18th, and turn our keys in the first thing on August 19th, 2025. In exchange, they would not charge us anything. 

When August 18th rolled around, we had managed to move out our belongings, but the apartment was still messy. We offered Breckenridge Apartments the opportunity to save themselves the money of cleaning it by cleaning it ourselves, it would just take us one day to go the extra mile and clean the unit for them.

Breckenridge Apartments declined our offer, sticking to the original arrangement; we were to be gone from the apartment unit and turn the keys in once the office opened on the 19th.

Since I knew there would be cleaning needed and they declined our offer of letting us clean, I made sure to get their word they would not charge us in excess of our security department. This arrangement was noted on our file, an email was sent so we have it in writing somewhere, and it was repeatedly verbally stated, including once when my younger sister was assisting us.

Breckenridge Apartments agreed to not charge us in excess of our security deposit in exchange for us leaving after turning the keys in on the 19th of August. 

We kept our end of the agreement; when the cleanup cost ended up as $3600 and our security deposit was only $1000, Breckenridge Apartments broke their end of the agreement by charging us the $2600 cleaning costs.

Since we have refused to pay because we have it in writing somewhere that they wouldn’t charge us, they have sent us to Collections. And this won’t go away on its own.

We haven’t had the time or energy to sort through all of the paperwork, all of the emails, all of the letters, and to contact legal help. We got close, once, by going to a lawyer’s office, but they were closed on the day/time we went, and we haven’t had the chance to find a lawyer who will advocate for us when we can’t pay them.

We know they exist, and we know that we have a good case especially if we can find the smoking guns in terms of mail and email which prove everything I am writing here. But, again, we have just been tired, overwhelmed, exhausted, and attacked from every angle. 

The most I’ve managed to do is partially report Breckenridge to the state, including how I suspect they had a sewage leak onto the grounds between buildings left untreated for the duration of our lease, but my ability to file a report was limited, I’m currently the only one reporting them, and the government can’t assist me legally; I need a non-government lawyer.

I know that, ultimately, if I can get legal help, I will need to be the one sitting down and talking to a lawyer, but getting to the talking to a lawyer has been an impossible struggle for me. The amount of struggling has left me unable to navigate to this stage of help.

Another area of grief has been medical. At the end of December 2024, Premera, or as it was known to me, Lifewise, increased my monthly insurance bill by $400, going from $160 / month (an amount I could afford to pay) to charging me $560 / month, an absurd increase in monthly cost I very much could not.

This increased amount per month had no explanation. I didn’t add my wife to my plan, nor did my wife get automatically added to my coverage, nor did I do anything to modify my yearly plan.

I had been on Lifewise as my insurance plan ever since I was no longer legally allowed to be a dependent of my parents. I had done nothing to change any of my information or my plan. Automatically every year, my plan would renew with no issue, and require no action from me.

I tried to contact Lifewise about this, asking about why there was a $400 increase in monthly cost for no additional coverage. I tried to contact Lifewise and ask if this was a mistake. I received automated replies, but no answers and no contact with a human.

Especially since I was already struggling with the $300 increase in monthly rent from Breckenridge Apartments at this time, I couldn’t pay. I couldn’t even contact Lifewise to ask for a cancellation with them.

When the $550 bill for January came in, and I had $1100 unpaid to them, they mentioned my coverage would be terminated on January 31st 2025 if I didn’t pay. They warned that the health insurance marketplace for the year had already closed, so if my plan with them was terminated, I wouldn’t be able to find a new plan until Fall of 2025. I would later learn this isn’t true in Washington State for low-income households like my own, but at the time I took them at their word.

I went to the doctor in January, before the 31st, because I knew I was still covered until the end of the month. I paid my copay, and my health insurance provider paid the rest.

Then from February 2025 until September 2025, I was under the assumption I was uninsured. The cost of my medication certainly seemed to suggest it, going from $30 copay for all to me paying $70 and then $200 for all of them. Because of the cost increase in medication, I assumed I lacked health insurance coverage.

This meant I avoided going to the doctor from February 2025 onwards, despite a desperate need of medical intervention at times.

Around June or July 2025, I was informed that I was misled about the health insurance marketplace being closed until Fall 2025, and that low-income households in Washington State can apply for coverage year-round.

Thanks to all of the events happening, I was too exhausted to apply at the time, but by September 2025, I was able to apply for Apple Health Insurance, and get approved. Me and my wife collectively are low-income enough where we qualified for free health insurance, and I signed us up for the first plan we had the options for. 

Shortly after I did, Lifewise took back their payment of my doctor visit in January, leaving Optum(previously The Everett Clinic) charging me the $250 which Lifewise had previously paid.

I reached out to Optum, asking them why I was being charged for what Lifewise had already paid. Optum informed me Lifewise claimed my health insurance coverage hadn’t begun at the time of my January visit, but it was the exact opposite; my coverage under Lifewise had not yet ended.

That $250 bill was due mid-December 2025, and my failure to pay it carries late fees. I haven’t been able to initiate the process of talking to Lifewise because that’s a level of struggle to even get in touch with a human, and I don’t know what to say, and I have had larger issues which have been a higher priority. 

But it’s not going to go away and is only going to get worse. Unlike with Breckenridge Apartments, I have no idea if there was any violation of the law, but it’s a bill which I don’t even have the ability to pay off on a payment plan, and it feels like something had to have gone wrong, but I don’t know what to do. 

The main problem all of this caused is my disabilities have been getting worse all year long, and I have had no treatment, no medication, no therapy, for anything.

Even after getting on Apple Health Insurance, there’s been a difficulty in managing to schedule a doctor appointment. I’ve been trying to find the time/energy to schedule an appointment at a location we’re covered at, for three months by now, and have yet to succeed.

I know that ultimately, I need to be the one actually meeting a doctor, but I have struggled so badly with even getting to the point where I can schedule one.

Another large struggle me and my wife have faced is food insecurity. We go to the foid bank nearly every week, but it’s never enough. It keeps me from starving to death, but it can’t provide enough food to prevent hunger from setting in, and we don’t have the funds to buy more food to augment the food bank food.

That often leads to me having a hunger-induced brain fog. I’m slow to think, I’m slow to process, I forget things, I struggle to mentally function, and I become more lightheaded and dizzy than normal. I often feel an increased risk of passing out, just trying to function on an empty stomach while working and trying to handle everything. 

The inability to have energy thanks to not getting enough food, adds up. My wife and I easily would qualify for SNAP benefits, if we could actually navigate through the process of applying and getting approved. 

Half a dozen times, I’ve gotten half of the way through. I’ve filled out the online application, and the online portion was passed to proceed to the phone interview. 

Yet that’s where I have been unable to get through. They have very narrow hours where you can call, and I am often working those exact times. On non-work days, I usually am so exhausted from work I end up waking up too late to hop onto the phone and get in queue for the application, and the queue is far too long on work days for me to handle it in 20 - 30 minutes. 

The typical wait period for the phone portion of the application is 2 hours. Since their hours are so narrow, closing at 2 pm, that means to get to them before they close, I would need to call at 11:30 then hope and pray my phone doesn’t disconnect, because any disconnection resets my position in line.

And I have had exactly that happen to me multiple times. Almost like clockwork, my phone will drop after 30 minutes on the line, waiting. They don’t offer the option to call back when it’s my turn in queue, so I have tried, and tried, and every time, despite how I should easily qualify if I could just get through…I can’t actually get through.

The last couple of weeks I have been blessed by bountiful family meals and holiday food bank hauls, but because I couldn’t get a food bank appointment for December 31st and the holiday food is running out…I am about to be really hungry. Again. We’re already burning through all of our food surplus. We’re about to have nothing left, and no ability to buy more.

And this is just for baseline SNAP benefits, not including disability benefits. I have had a free consultation on if I would qualify for being legally disabled, and I was informed that if I could demonstrate I was receiving treatment currently and provide documentation from my primary physician demonstrating the treatment I receive isn’t enough, I would very easily legally meet the definition for disabled and be eligible for all the disability benefits coming with that legal definition.

Ironically, I easily could have done so in 2024 or before. But because I was under the belief I had no health insurance and no ability to see a doctor for over half of 2025, I haven’t been able to pursue it. It’s not lost on me the irony of how navigating the barriers of bureaucracy to receive the relief of disability aid, requires resources often denied to the disabled like easy access to Healthcare.

And I want to pursue it, but it requires a level of effort beyond what I have been able to. It again starts with needing to see a doctor, but has the additional barrier of navigating bureaucracy. The government frequently denies disability claims, and the best chance to get a disability claim approved is to hire a lawyer for it–a lawyer who then takes a cut of the benefits as the fee for securing them.

That’s more for me to navigate, when I am exhausted, tired, and overwhelmed by everything. I know that, at the end of the day, I will need to be the one visiting the doctor, receiving the confirmation from the doctor, and likely the one to talk to a disability advocate lawyer who can help navigate the process for getting approved. But I haven’t been able to do any of that on my own.

Me and my wife have had to pick and choose our battles the last two years to the point where we have given up on pursuing things we wanted to press on. 

As one example, when we boarded our puppy at the Woodinville PetSmart back in June 2025, we were promised they didn’t use punishment for the dogs. Yet when we went to pick our dog up, we saw a handler carrying a spray bottle.

Our puppy went in filled out, yet left visibly more skinny. Personality-wise, he was muted. He was silent, and his anxiety worsened significantly. He picked up the habit of begging which he previously hadn’t had. And this was after we had provided them with a food supply for him, including some excess.

Ultimately, we had to abandon pursuing any actions against them, because this was the same timeframe where we began to be dealing with the much larger issue of Breckenridge Apartments. 

A lot of these things are legal and/or financial and/or health-related, but my problems aren’t exclusively in that domain. My desktop shut off and won’t power back on as of December 27th. If I’m lucky, it’s “just” the power block having failed. It’s not a cheap thing to replace, especially if I need one specific type, but it’s relatively cheap and harmless compared to other potential problems. 

I’ve tried everything I can think of on my own, so in order to get a better diagnostic, I’ll need to take it to someone more technologically savvy than I am. In more worse-case scenarios, this is the situation with my flashdrive containing my story all over again, where the contents are lost forever with no backups.

The irony being that the very day it broke was the day I was about to use my Christmas gift to back things up. It literally shut off and broke the day I was going to make sure it doing so wouldn’t be a bad loss. But because I was one day too slow, it is a big loss, if I can’t get it working again with the files still there.

My wife needs their legal address changed from the old apartment to be at our new place. We meant to do this back in August, because we wanted them to be receiving any mail they ought to be receiving, but we haven’t found the time to. 

But there’s still higher priority issues.

Despite my reputation, I am a very safe driver. I have a natural feel for the road and my car. I can tell when things are good or things are wrong, and I am very good at reading traffic patterns. I deliberately drive with more distance than needed between cars. I make sure to avoid going too fast. I make sure intersections are clear. And so on and so forth. I have gotten really good at driving good, and safe, and sane, and slow overall. But despite my precautions, I’m apparently not good enough. 

At the end of June 2025, I got pulled over for going 47 mph in a zone with a speed limit which was either 35 mph or 40 mph. I was shaken, because on that day, I had left for work early, so I repeatedly told myself, “I have the time to drive extra carefully and to not exceed the speed limit at all”.

I thought I was going the speed limit. I was absolutely sure I was. But I also don’t doubt the officer accurately clocked my speed. I don’t know how I thought I was going the speed limit while being either 12 or 7 over. I only have a couple of theories. 

The only two things I can think of happening;
I might have misread the speedometer. I have dyslexia, it was dark, and I was driving. As all good drivers do, I keep my eye mostly on the road. I only take brief glimpses down to read the speed, and when I do it’s in my peripheral vision. I might have seen my speedometer with it as actually just under 50, and believed I was seeing it as being just under 40.

Or,
My drinking a coke caused me to accidentally accelerate after I had correctly read the gauge. If this is what happened, then I was going under 40 mph, but in the process of taking a drink from my coke bottle, I accidentally accelerated an additional 10 mph while not realizing I had increased my speed. Since I didn’t know how to use cruise control and had to manually adjust my speed to account for hills, and that area does have small elevation changes, it’s possible. 

But ultimately, I don’t know how I got to that speed. All I know is that I genuinely thought I was being extra careful, I legitimately believed I was going the speed limit, but no matter how it happened, I ultimately wasn’t, because I don’t doubt the accuracy of the reading from the radar of the officer.

I opted for a mitigation hearing on September 23rd, because I couldn’t pay for the $220 ticket. There, I was given the option to take a class for driver safety to have the ticket be removed from my record, and to pay for it with 10 hours of recognized community service. I would have three months to complete this.

It should have been easy. It hasn’t been. Between the worsening conditions at work, my chronic illnesses getting worse and all of my disabilities getting worse, the struggle to find food, the grief Breckenridge Apartments has been giving, the struggle to handle my health, and to get in contact with recognized community service options and get approved and scheduling the volunteer work…I haven’t been able to. 

Three months passed on December 23rd, and the community service hasn’t been done, nor the required driver safety class. And this is for something I actually really wanted to do!

I’ve wanted to give back to my community in a more active way. Having community service should have been the perfect opportunity to open the door to me doing exactly that. I could continue volunteering even after the hours mandated. It’s everything I wanted.

And I haven’t been able to do it, despite being given ample time, because of everything. I have sent an email, asking if I could get an extension, but doing that has caused me to not read my emails for two weeks, because I am just…so scared, afraid, overwhelmed. I failed, I don’t know if I’m going to have a life.

I’m trying, but I am scared, overwhelmed, tired, and feeling the full weight of depression and anxiety. I don’t know if I have a future. 

My job has been getting worse and worse on draining the life from me, and my efforts to find a job beyond my current one have not been fruitful so far, despite my efforts.

I became a lifeguard back in 2014 at my hometown Y. I chose that career both because I knew I was good at the job and had gotten certified, and because I was aware of all the community work the YMCA does.

I was mostly happy, with my only issues being the low pay, lack of pay increase even when I was among the five most senior staff in all of my branch in Aquatics, a lack of opportunities for job advancement at the Y where despite working there for over five years I was still just a lifeguard nothing more, and the long 2 hour solo guarding shifts where I was expected to solo-open in less than 15 minutes while also helping membership. 

When covid hit, the Y let the majority of their employees go, so they could qualify for covid unemployment benefits, but promised they would rehire us once covid restrictions were lifted.

My faith in the organization was broken when that promise turned out to be a lie. The Monroe YMCA initially told me my point of contact was the then-Aquatics-Director, but never informed us said Aquatics Director no longer was one, leaving me with no point of contact. I repeatedly tried to get in touch with them to resume working once restrictions were lifted, and was met largely with radio silence.

One source told me to apply via a website, where I filled out a form. I did this for the better part of six months, applying on that website over a dozen times, to all Snohomish County YMCAs, to all positions. I received a call only once, where I had a phone interview, and was promised follow-through within 3 business days.

Two weeks of continued silence later, and I reached out to who I talked to, and was informed that they had selected another candidate.

I felt betrayed and misled by the Snohomish County YMCA organization, because I was their third-most-senior Aquatics employee, had been working there longer than either the Aquatics Director or Coordinator, was an incredibly loyal reliable and consistent employee with a stellar track record of attending more in-services than any other employee. 

And despite wanting to work there again after covid, despite trying to reach out nearly two dozen times, I got nothing. For an organization whose core values include Caring, Honesty, and Respect, I felt uncared for, lied to, and disrespected.

But while my faith in the Snohomish County YMCA remains dubious, I had my faith restored in less than 48 hours once I applied for a Lead Lifeguard, later renamed Aquatics Lead, position at a Greater Seattle YMCA.

They instantly accepted me as a girl, rather than it being something I had to fight for. They instantly were willing to give me a second chance, even after I accidentally botched my first because I mistakenly believed an in-person interview was a phone interview. 

I got hired at the rate of $20/hour, at the time higher than King County’s minimum wage, so I was making a rate reflective of my position and Aquatics experience.

The work environment was immediately better. Instead of 2 hours on the stand solo, I learned the maximum allowed before a forced break was one hour of continuous lifeguarding. Instead of having rotations every 15 minutes or 60 minutes, the standard was 30 minutes, which hit the magical balance of rest time to time lifeguarding. 

Down guards were, instead of being sent into the locker rooms and expected to use all of their downtime working, mostly allowed to spend their downtime resting, recharging, and relaxing, provided they were rescue-ready and a minimum threshold of work was being done.

Staffing was such that any time we were busy enough to require two lifeguards guarding simultaneously, we had at least three scheduled at minimum, sometimes even four, to account for one down guard wristbanding children and the other resting and recharging. 

The mindset for the downguard was, first and foremost, to be as ready as possible to respond to anything and to take over lifeguarding. For them to take whatever actions would be needed to retain alertness once on the stand.

Workouts, food outside of lunch breaks, hydration, and frequent restroom breaks weren’t just tolerated; they were encouraged. And using phones to remain mentally sharp was something that was encouraged, because there was an understanding that in this day and age, phones are an essential tool in the lives of employees and could help reduce stress and improve focus. 

Instead of being distracted while lifeguarding due to my anxieties mixed with overstimulation and depression, I could ease my mind by using my downtime to let out my worries, allowing an increase in my vigilance. 

The approval of roving also opened up the door to increased mental acuity while lifeguarding, because moving while lifeguarding provides a higher level of alertness than remaining on the chair does.

Seeing how much better the work environment and culture was, I felt truly appreciated and cared for. I regained my faith in the YMCA, because I felt they actually cared about me as an employee, that I was more than a replaceable asset, that I was a part of their team, an investment. 

During all of my YMCA trainings, the same things kept being emphasized. The Y was meant to empower their employees, to give them confidence, to give them a career path, to give them the opportunity for growth and improvement, to set them up for their better future, and to invest in them.

We got told our opinions mattered, our feedback was valuable, our input made a difference. We weren’t just employees, but leaders. I believed it, and felt like the Y was living up to its core values. They were honest, they valued the community, they respected me and other employees, they seemed to truly care.

I’ve had my opinion sour in the last year, where my opinion has become that while certain staff who I have nothing but praise for live up to all of what a YMCA employee should be to fellow staff, the organization itself is still exactly the same one which I had grown disillusioned with due to covid.

It started with a realization about my pay. When I was hired, minimum wage in King County was below $20. By 2023, however, minimum wage for a large business, the YMCA included, had increased to $20.29 per hour. That was the amount I was making after two years of merit-based increases.

I am pretty sure there was one or two years I didn’t receive a merit-based increase despite being eligible for one, and even with my merit-based increase, my wage as a Lead Lifeguard (which now as of 2024 is renamed Aquatic Lead) was identical to the wage of a freshly hired brand new lifeguard. 

Despite having over eight years of experience working in the YMCA, and two years as a Lead Lifeguard at my branch, I was making minimum wage in 2023, and this didn’t change until the rebrand of Lead Lifeguard to Aquatics Lead in mid-2024. While I received a merit-based increase to the rate of something like $20.69 per hour in the first half of 2024, it was still a rate just barely above the minimum wage after nearly three years of employment as a job with increased responsibilities compared to my peers. I was doing more work yet receiving no additional compensation for my extra jobs.

When the rebranding of Aquatics Lead happened around July 2024, I was ecstatic, because I felt like the YMCA was recognizing the problems with having higher positions and not receiving higher compensation. 

The increase to a base pay of $24 per hour was disappointing, though, because I felt the rate didn’t account for any of my past merit-based increases. It felt like I was being hired at the rate a brand-new Aquatics Lead would be hired at, rather than the rate of an Aquatics Lead who had multiple years of merit-based increases.

I was on board with the new job responsibilities, involving Aquatics Leads being first and foremost, Pool Deck Supervisors. Where our role as an Aquatics Lead would be to be a leader on duty for the Aquatics staff scheduled.

I was promised that instead of being scheduled as if a swim instructor or a lifeguard, the Aquatics Lead would be scheduled as that pool deck supervisor. We would be the ones calling if any staff didn’t show up, able to sub for them. We would be able to make calls like approving employees leave early and entering the rotation if it was viable.

We would have an increase in Lead tasks, but our focus would be on Lead tasks, rather than on lifeguard or swim instructor tasks. We would be primarily responsible for communication with patrons and employees, able to make sure things on the pool deck were working as they should.

There would still be certain shifts where, thanks to a shortage in employees willing to work the shifts, I would be working as if a lifeguard, namely at opening, but after 8 am or so, additional staff would come in and I would be taken out of the lifeguard rotation and into the role of deck supervisor.

That didn’t end up being what actually has been happening, especially from around February 2025 and onward. Instead of being an Aquatics Lead dedicated to being a deck supervisor handling Lead tasks, I was given two or three jobs and expected to do all of them at the same time. 

I was expected to be a swim instructor, at times with it seeming like there were no efforts to fill the gaps in the schedule with it just assumed I would be getting in the water. I was also expected, after teaching lessons, to immediately get into the lifeguard rotation, acting as a lifeguard. But then on top of those duties, I was still expected to be doing additional Aquatics Lead tasks, beyond the tasks of a lifeguard I was responsible for, and beyond the tasks of a swim instructor I was still responsible for. 

Despite this increased workload, there was no increase in compensation. When I did eventually get a merit-based increase, it was to (if I remember correctly) $24.60/hour, where it remains. The increase in my monthly rate wasn’t even a fraction of the increase in living expenses. 

More work for, in all effect, less pay, a problem which has only gotten worse and worse over this year due to all the reckless corner cutting. And as part of the changes made over time, it has felt like there’s an unrealistic standard being applied to me which isn’t applied to others.

For the last couple of years, I have felt like my current Aquatics Director is not a good boss for me. I don’t think she’s a bad boss, but I don’t think she’s equipped to handle being my direct supervisor, given her experiences and background are radically different from my own.

I am the second-most-senior employee in Aquatics for my facility, with only the Aquatics Coordinator having worked at our facility longer than me. That entire time, I have first and foremost been working primarily from the background of a lifeguard. 

In contrast, my Aquatics Director wasn’t even hired for the position of Aquatics Director. She was initially hired as an Aquatics Coordinator meant to specifically oversee swim lessons. Her background is as a promoted swim instructor, and as an Aquatics Coordinator, she was promoted to the position to handle swim lessons. In that role, she was incredibly competent. 

However, when she was thrust into the role of Aquatics Director, she got the position without any experience dealing with the day to day operations from the perspective of a lifeguard. She also presumably received the promotion without having already completed the extra trainings an Aquatics Director receives about the increased role in handling their employees. 

I feel this negatively impacted my work experience because my direct boss was now someone who didn’t understand my own job as well as I do. I believe I received some unfair treatment, no matter how unintentionally, due to this conflict in background. This treatment only seemed to improve after three things happened. 

The first, I talked to the current head of our facility albeit before he received a promotion to that position. He has been my greatest advocate and ally for the entire time I have been an employee at this YMCA.

The second, I underwent the training to become certified as a swim instructor. I felt my Aquatics Director treated me notably better after I was a swim instructor myself. 

The third, my Aquatics Director actually had to work my shift once. She was shocked at how exhausting and tiring it was from just a single day of doing that shift. Yet that was what she was asking me to do every single day. She had me there to help, which meant she got the assistance of the person who best knows the shift, but I work every day with lifeguards who often don’t. 

Despite this, while I feel the treatment of me as an employee has improved, I still feel like she’s not a good match for being my boss. There have been numerous challenges in communication, largely born from my neurodivergence, in particular, a lack of understanding of my autism and the clarity sometimes required.

I often have been dealing with seemingly contradictory instructions from her, and certainly have had conflicting instructions from her compared to our Aquatics Coordinator. They have often told me two different things, and left me needing to say something along the lines of “perhaps you should communicate with each other on this and then get back to me”.

There’s often been a feeling that I am given different treatment. When other employees give advanced notice they can’t make a shift, to my knowledge, they aren’t threatened with corrective actions. But my Aquatics Director has done exactly that for me. 

When other people are unable to show up on the day, with good reasons, then it’s something we basically just have to deal with. But when I am unable to show up on the day, no matter the reasons, then I get a barrage of questions, often chastised for doing things wrong in contradictory ways (sometimes being told to do one thing and then being asked why I did it that way), and the threats of corrective actions remain. 

This would eventually culminate in the events which resulted in me needing to buy a new car because of trying to not lose my job. 

My car was experiencing issues with the oil which made it unsafe to drive. I needed 48 hours to fix the problem. Because I was scheduled, the only subs I could get were fellow Aquatics Leads, and I couldn’t get either of them to sub for me, my boss threatened corrective action if I wouldn’t show up. My car was undriveable.

On the way to work, my car stalled no less than four different times (maybe more), experiencing stuttering and kickback dozens of times more. The experience of driving the car in this state caused damage to the cooling system, and required me to attempt an immediate emergency oil change at work. 

In the process of this emergency oil change, I succeeded technically, but because I wasn’t prepared for this and was in an environment where I didn’t have access to the proper tools (which I had at home), oil spilled from my car onto the Y parking lot. Again, this was a journey to work I didn’t want to make. I knew the state my car was in. I knew that driving it there would require emergency maintenance if I managed to arrive. I had explained all of this to my Aquatics Director, but she still threatened me with corrective action if I didn’t go to work.

This was my only means of transportation at the time, since I had absolutely zero money in my bank account at the time. I had already spent the last bit of money on the needed things for maintenance for my car, and I had explained that as well. I explained my only means of transportation was the car, and that I needed time to repair it, and couldn’t safely travel to work.

Then, when the consequences of forcing me to drive to work in a broken car resulted in the oil spill, my boss threatened me again. She said that if the oil from my car were to go into the drain, then the city could fine our YMCA, and I would be involved and be seen as at fault. I would be required to clean up the spill.

Because I had no money (this was around June 2025, so Breckenridge Apartments was bleeding me dry by that point), my Aquatics Coordinator had to purchase the supplies for cleaning up, with me promising to pay her back (which I did). I then had to, with no help, spend the next two days after my shift, cleaning the oil spill. 

All because I was forced to drive my broken car to work, despite knowing that it couldn’t make the journey safely. The threat of corrective action if I didn’t show up meant I felt I couldn’t not drive.

This would have long-term consequences for the car. No less than three times, I had to take my car in to get repairs. Initially, these were for an oil leak. Then, the problems with the cooling system began, with my car frequently experiencing overheating problems.

My car being in need of maintenance happened during a time I had scheduled a vacation to Michigan, so without my car, I was forced to rent a car for the trip which cost $2000 by the time I returned it.

And eventually, the heating issues got bad enough to damage the engine, requiring the entire engine to be rebuilt. This proved to be something that I couldn’t afford, so ultimately, I had to give my car to my family, and buy on a payment plan a new car, which is a monthly bill that adds to other costly monthly bills.

The entire time, I would even be showing my boss videos and photos of the damaged state of my car. Of how it had overheated, of how steam was coming from the engine, of how the coolant was literally boiling because of the damage, and yet, despite it all, I was continuously pressured to further damage my car, or risk corrective action, because I couldn’t stop my car from being damaged after the damage was done. 

And that doesn’t even go into the last six months, from June 2025 onwards in particular from the policy changes made by higher ups who have never worked the job at our branch. They don’t know the culture of the facility they are enacting policy changes for, and how detrimental they have been to the employees, and my faith in the organization. 

The full list of changes is basically a removal of most of what I listed above as the very things which caused me to love working there in the first place. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that nearly our entire staff quit over the summer, and even after a job market, our facility has struggled to recover the work force we had, leaving us constantly short-staffed. I believe that the policy changes made were directly detrimental to retention of staff by violating the culture we previously had, and each change has placed additional burdens upon the employees to the point where most just quit.

Aquatics Leads are now in the rotation by default, again permanently expected to do 2 - 3 different jobs worth of work. The number of Lead tasks has increased as well, placing an additional burden on all Aquatics Leads, as we’re meant to be taking a more active role in managing the staff while having our feedback largely written off and ignored when we report staff are dissatisfied. 

The higher ups have placed such a focus on patron satisfaction and retention and risk management for something happening to patrons, they have completely neglected employee satisfaction and retention and ignored how their policies are now beginning to work their staff to exhaustion and frustration. 

I’ve given my feedback, but this feedback saw no changes being made, and nobody ever got back to me about my concerns about these changes and the direction these policies were taking the organization and how I strongly felt they were diverging from the values and promises that the YMCA has given for years.

Changes include having removed for six months our ability to rove (when most employees myself included had roving as our preferred method of lifeguarding), threatening to confiscate our phones if we weren’t doing enough work during downtime, preventing us from doing workouts during our downtime, vastly cutting corners on staffing to make less people work at assigned times, a rather confusing-to-most-employees change in rules involving permitted music, the removal of allowing 30 minute rotations, and now the expectation of the down guard about to rotate to be on the pool deck at nearly all times.

Down time has been cut back from being anything restful to being additional mandatory work which is often extra exhausting. By implementing these changes, they’re asking employees to work themselves to exhaustion and I genuinely believe that if they haven’t already, they’re setting themselves up for an employee to have the very emergency these changes are meant to increase vigilance in for patrons. 

There is going to be a lifeguard, and there’s an incredibly high risk said lifeguard is me, who ends up passing out or similar from being worked too hard with no period of rest provided. There’s a mandatory 30 minute unpaid lunch break every 5 hours, but my work has effectively removed the ability to take even ten minutes of break time in any given hour, when our staff has been used to, for years, effectively having 30 minutes of rest time where, as long as they weren’t needed to do a task, they could do effectively whatever they wanted. 

There was a change where policy became to not allow napping in the break room, and all of this is adding up to additional stress and frustration for the lifeguards. This, for a job which is minimum wage, and yet carries a bunch of mandatory trainings which makes us have a level of medical knowledge and need to put constant practice into maintaining those rescue skills.

I, as the coworker to these employees, got to talk to them. The feelings were all negative towards these changes, and the sentiment was universally in opposition to the changes. Many said they would quit the moment a better opportunity came for them. Most of them followed through, and some didn’t even wait for another opportunity to quit. Many without notice, a lot on short notice.

The level of staff turnover for our Aquatics department was record-high this summer, and it wasn’t the normal “high school kids graduating” that is the standard. We typically have around 3 - 6 employees leave, and about 8 - 16 stay. This summer saw the inverse. Approximately three lifeguards, myself, one other Aquatics Lead, our Coordinator, and our Director, are all the staff which remain from June; the rest, about 8 - 16 lifeguards and swim instructors, have all left.

And I have talked to at least one former Aquatics employee who has said that these changes mean they could never work in Aquatics again. They could handle one or two of these, but being bombarded by all of them, largely all at once, was too grueling, too soul-crushing.

Even my bosses are not fond of these changes. The actual people working at my branch, know how these changes are bad for our branch specifically. Even if they work as a generic mold, our branch has always been different from the standard mold in culture. The atmosphere and the environment at my Aquatics facility has always been one of a more lighthearted fun nature. Employees understood that we were still working a job, a very important life-saving one, but there was a large sense of connection and a bond beyond simply competently working together.

My Aquatics Coordinator has been in opposition to most of these changes, and to her credit, even my Aquatics Director has been quite unhappy with what these changes have done to the workload of employees. I will give them that credit, although I feel like my Aquatics Coordinator doesn’t feel like she has the sway to implement the policies she knows would be best, and my Aquatics Director has taken a kind of silent “okay, they’re going to FAFO” approach where she will express her opinion of how these changes will negatively impact her staff, and then be ignored, overruled, and silenced, and rather than continue to fight for her employees and advocate for them, she just silently withdraws and washes her hands of the consequences, because she knows when something ends up going down with our staff, she can rightfully go “I did warn you” and point out how her feedback was ignored.

At least I want to give her that credit. Obviously, I haven’t been invited to attend any of these meetings, so I only hear about the aftermath by and large, and I felt like I could sense the displeasure and the dissatisfaction and the attitude of “well, we can’t stop them from finding out the hard way” from my leadership. 

The head of my branch, my greatest advocate, I know has also left many of these meetings absolutely fuming, upset about how things are going for us. I know that he cares, and that there are people who care, and who advocate for us. But I also know said advocacy hasn’t translated into any tangible results of an improved work environment in line with the long-standing culture of our facility. 

Our identity, what made us special and unique among Greater Seattle Aquatics facilities, has been slowly stripped from us, and replaced with corporate policies in line with that of any other conglomerate. Instead of empowering employees to be leaders who have the authority to make judgement calls, we are being forced to do things in very specific ways which accomplish the exact opposite of the intended goals.

Instead of promoting innovation and encouraging diversity, these blanket policies with increasingly rigid enforcement shut down the creative spark and kill any desires to actually give to the organization more than the bare minimum. 

And I have let them know exactly this, and received radio silence. I was always taught, as an employee at the YMCA, that we were community leaders, that working at the Y would provide an opportunity for career advancement, I literally have gone to an orientation which said effectively verbatim, “this doesn’t have to be a starter job”. Where employees would be that investment, where each employee was valued for their ability to uniquely contribute in ways embracing their unique talents. 

And until these policies, I had genuinely believed, mostly, that this remained true. Except it isn’t. The Y has been cutting every corner it can, including falling into the same corporate pattern of treating their employees as expendable. Instead of being alarmed at the number of employees to walk out and quit, they instead have taken an attitude of “if we just replace the lost labor, nothing else needs to be done”.

They have ignored employee feedback, they have disregarded the unique culture at the facility, they have removed agency from their staff, they have put extra work on staff by scheduling the absolute bare minimum and often not even that amount, and pile on more and more work for everyone, with higher expectations of work performed for no higher level of compensation. 

That, aside from how the company swap to a new timekeeping system has been messy. I requested and got approved for over two weeks of PTO at the end of October 2025 going into November 2025. This PTO was removed from my balance, but not reflected in my October or November paychecks. I thought the PTO had just been refunded, where my scheduled time off was removed in exchange for me having the PTO hours returned. But no, the PTO time simply vanished, neither applied to my balance or reflected in my pay.

To my organization’s credit, if I were to bring this issue up to HR and/or tech support and bring the receipts, I am confident they would in fact fix the issue and give me that lost PTO time. They certainly would be legally required to, but even if they weren’t, they likely would regardless. 

My main hiccup has been, as always, a lack of time and energy to actually provide the receipts. I need to gather the emails where I initially submitted the PTO, then demonstrate this submitted PTO was approved, then demonstrate it didn’t show on my paychecks, then point to my PTO balance, to show that I did in fact have two weeks of PTO vanish from the system, eaten by some form of technical glitch because of how new the system is. 

And because this has taken me five days longer to write than intended, I can share a brand new development of how that same system didn’t show me as working on Friday when I checked on all of Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday. 

It should be noted, I was given the resources to apply for disability accommodations, but in order to get those disability accommodations approved, I require a doctor, my primary care physician, to sign off on some paperwork. 

I was informed about this at the end of July 2025, meaning at the time, I believed that I had no insurance and no ability to actually visit a doctor without accruing a medical bill in the hundreds of dollars range, a cost I couldn’t afford. So because I thought I couldn’t afford to see a doctor, and because I currently haven’t been able to find the time or energy to schedule a doctor appointment, I haven’t been able to actually go forward with these disability accommodations. 

The process is both highly bureaucratic and incredibly obscure. I had to send two or three emails and get in contact with the leave of absence department to even learn there was a form that I could fill out. The form also requires a lot of conditions to submit, and the confirmation from a doctor is also required. 

For an organization allegedly valuing Caring and Honesty, they sure don’t seem to have a lot of trust and faith in their employees. Especially given how ludicrously hard it was to actually obtain the form and then print it out and the steps to submit it, they’re not going to have anyone who goes through that entire process lie about their need for accommodation. It feels like it’s deliberately designed to technically be there so the Y can’t be sued for not having it, but so out of the way and hidden and bureaucratic as to intentionally never be actually used. It felt like the requirements being so stringent were the Y deliberately discouraging the already-obscure application process from ever being used.

And, again, I shouldn’t have even needed to do any of this, yet alone fail at actually getting it due to the red tape I couldn’t cut through. I shouldn’t have needed to apply for the accommodations of essentially just returning the work environment to where it was from 2021 - 2024; the work environment shouldn’t have been changed without the employees actually working the job providing direct feedback and being listened to. 

I shouldn’t have needed to send multiple emails in order to actually find the ability to request a work accommodation; the information should be readily and easily accessible and reinforced yearly in trainings, with all employees made aware of how to access it, especially higher ups.

And I shouldn’t have had to suffer for six months and counting because I couldn’t successfully navigate the final steps in this bureaucracy. 

I’m currently dealing with a back injury, either sustained at or around the December in-service or agitated by it. Yet while I have noted that I have it to my bosses, I dare not ask for any accommodations for it because I have lost all my faith in them actually caring to help me recover. 

I have felt failed and betrayed by the Y for a second time, because I genuinely believe in their cause. I genuinely believe they do a lot of good in communities, especially in acceptance of everyone no matter their background and in promoting diversity. They accepted me as a transwoman, consistently defend me from bigotry, and hired me with my autism fully on file and other disabilities well-known. They are amazing at promoting empathy and services for everyone. 

Yet they have seemingly forgotten that their employees are their most important patrons. By prioritizing patron needs above employee needs and making decisions to maximize patron retention at the cost of employee retention, they have failed their core values.

The Y is meant to nurture body, mind, and spirit, but in the last year in particular, my spirit has been sapped, my body has been drained, and my mind has been broken. 

I’ve tried to pursue higher positions, but none of them got me to even be emailed back anything other than a near-automatic rejection. There’s no job advancement past Aquatics Lead, nor are there many opportunities to even become an Aquatics Lead. 

The Y left one Aquatics Lead position vacant for nearly six months because instead of promoting existing staff, they hired new staff who needed more training and vouchers to work. (Which left two leads doing the workload for three.)

I would love to continue working at the Y, but it’s not paying my bills, while consistently adding extra to my workload in an environment I feel is increasingly hostile because every time I try to advocate for the staff, every time I try to stick up and point things out, instead of feeling rewarded for having expressed my concerns and confusion, I feel punished. 

The Y, especially in tandem with all of the other stressors in my life right now, is genuinely working me to death. Every day, I feel like I am closer to collapsing in the middle of my shift. I’ve twice fallen asleep already when not meaning to, and countless dozens of times beyond I have gotten close to. 

And it would all be worth it, if I was making a livable wage. Despite all the difficulties and all of my issues, I love my job enough where if I could survive off of it, I wouldn’t be pursuing anything else, despite my misery thanks to the increased stress and anxiety and frustration and overstimulation and exhaustion and how easily I am getting overwhelmed.

But it’s not paying the bills. $24.69/hour at a capped maximum average of 32 hours per week (usually closer to 20) adds up to about $2000 - $2200 / month after the withheld pay. Each paycheck is $800 - $1100 bi-weekly.

The monthly cost of living, between rent, internet bills, phone bills, insurance bills, gas, and groceries, among others? Adds up to about $3600 - $4000 / month.

And that’s after already cutting costs and corners as much as I can realistically pull off. So I’ve been trying to apply for other jobs. Part-time secondary jobs, or higher-paying full time jobs.

I would work myself to death if it meant providing for my family (namely my wife+dog rn), but the sad part is, I already am, and it’s still not enough to provide for them.

I keep burning more and more resources and am left with less and less. I’ve run out of time, money, and energy.

I don’t even know if we’re paying January rent, and if we somehow do, then I don’t know how we survive the inevitable bout in the red with all the overdraft fees that entails.

My dad always told me a story about two men. It went something like this.
One kept making good decision after good decision, and the more good decisions he made, the more options, the more decisions, he had available to him.

The other kept on making bad decision after bad decision. And by the end, he had his decisions reduced to only two. Death by hanging, or death by lethal injection.

I feel like my dad probably told that story to me more than my three siblings, because somehow, even when I was young, he knew of his four children, I would be the one most likely to fail, the one most likely to make bad decisions one after another. I always have kept that story in mind, trying to not prove it right. But it’s hard to believe I’ve done anything except prove I am exactly the failure predicted from a young age.

Both my sisters are actually trained musicians and singers, whereas I have only fleeting dreams of both. My older sister is a better artist and writer than I am, studied classical history and arts more than I did and even got a degree, a linguist I could never pull off, a great fencer, and is actually a teacher, which I still consider to be a dream job, despite how I have utterly failed to obtain a job as one.

My brother has a masters degree in programming, and has a high-paying job to match.

My younger sister is highly social to a degree I could never manage yet always desired, has a great job, is married, has a house, and is in the beginning talks of potentially starting a family beyond just their three pets.

And I have…effectively none of what they do–what little I do, I could lose any day now. I know I have accomplished things they never could, but when those accomplishments don’t actually support living a life, it’s hard to feel like I have done anything remotely successful, because I am on the verge of having nothing to show for all of my struggles. 

My apartment is a mess of my making through negligence. It’s my job to put laundry away; I haven’t in months. It’s my job to put trash littered throughout the apartment in the trash; I’m weeks behind. Taking the trash out is my responsibility, but I often am taking days or even weeks longer to do so than I should. Hand-washing dishes is something I was frequently doing, but I’ve mostly stopped. Loading and unloading the dishwasher was my responsibility, and I have mostly stopped. Organization and cleaning up the apartment was largely my task, and I haven’t been able to stay on top of it. Or anything. Everything is falling further and further behind. 

I’m on the verge of losing everything, my job, my car, my apartment, my life, and I am fighting every angle against it. I keep on trying and trying, and by now I think I just need to try something else. 

So that brings me to this request. 

I’ve asked for temporary financial support for over a year now, under the increasingly obviously false hopes that “I just need help for this month, if I get help financially, then I can focus my efforts towards getting my life together”.

But even after having received the financial help, a combination of my disabilities and sheer exhaustion and being overwhelmed has stopped me from actually “getting my life together”.

So what can I actually get help at which I haven’t gotten help in already?

That’s what I’m here to outline as my final call for help. 

I’m basically asking for the ultimate network campaign. There’s eight billion people on this planet, and among them are those who can give me the help I need. The problem is accessing them.

I’ve used the emergency helpline to get the resources available for free, and the resources I was given through the Y. I’ve even been given some resources through friends. But all of them have had the same barrier to entry thusfar:

They all require my time.

They all require my energy.

And I have run out of both.

So what I need is for people to do the things I previously have said only I can do.

Maybe ultimately at the end of the day, only I can talk to a lawyer for a final consultation, but that doesn’t mean I need to track down a lawyer and schedule the appointment for talking. 

I want people to send this letter, in its entirety, to lawyers, to see if they can help, or to have those lawyers forward it to lawyers who can. Somewhere out there, there’s a lawyer who can help and would be willing to. But I have run out of ability to be the one to initiate contact. I need help to get there.

I want people to send this letter, in its entirety, to every aid organization they can think of. Somewhere out there, there’s programs to help. Heck, Goodwill from my understanding allegedly funds local job training, and I am wanting to get a different job.

Loans, investments, something, somewhere. There’s going to be someone who knows how to give me a more direct line to help. 

I want people to send this letter, in its entirety, to doctors, to clinics, to see if there’s any who are able to help us more. 

I want people to send this letter, in its entirety, to any news outlet that they can. Spread the word by any means which will help.

I want people to send this letter to anyone who has a job open, and to all businesses which might potentially meet our needs, and to ask them to reach out to me. 

I want people to send this letter to any church that they feel will help. I might not be a follower of their faith, but I am very much trying to live by the lessons of love, generosity, and community among other things and would happily partake.

I want people to send this letter to anyone who is a life manager of some kind, if such people exist. Someone who specializes in turning failing lives around especially neurodivergent messes and can provide a reliable structure we can’t get on our own.

And I want people who don’t have the ability to do any of this to spread it to everyone they know. Everyone has a network, even if they don’t realize it. Even if you yourself can do nothing. 

Maybe your friend has a business or a profession which can help.

Maybe you don’t think you know anyone, but you actually know someone who can give things like coffee powder, lactaid milk, Gatorade, and Ramen, as examples of things we could use.

And if you pass it on, and they pass it on, maybe a friend of a friend of a friend would have what you yourself don’t. 

Spread the word everywhere. 

Because I’m desperate, and well and truly out of time, energy, money, and really, options in general. 

I know I’m asking for a lot. But I also know I can give back a lot. I might not be an instant master of a task on my first try, but by my tenth I’ll be competent and by my hundredth I’ll be a top performer. If given the freedom to experiment, I will innovate and create new ways of achieving things, just because I casually like to. I’m incredibly loyal, arguably to a fault, and if I feel like I am getting positive experiences, I will do just about anything to keep going on them.

I would happily work myself to death if need be, despite how I basically already am and it’s not enough. 

I need a New Years miracle, because at this point, hundreds of dollars in debt by the time I actually finished writing this six days after starting it…if something doesn’t immediately change for the better, I probably won’t have a 2026.

I’ve tried. I really, really have. I’m tired, exhausted, overwhelmed, lost, scared, defeated, battered, broken, and ashamed. 

I know how beautiful and wonderful life can be. I know how many wonders this world has. I believe in the innate good of humanity, I believe in our collective future being better despite how much bad exists every day. I love life, humans, this world in general. Despite everything I’ve lived through, despite all of what I am going through, I am so in awe of all we humans can and have done. 

But the sad reality is, despite all of my inner strength, despite my hope for a better future, despite my idealism, my optimism, despite seeing all of the good in all of humanity and all of the people…I am at my limit. I’m at my wits end.

So please. Help. Reach out to me. I need it, to survive. Because me and my wife aren’t going to on our own. 

I've got oh so many things I should update people on but blogging isn't a priority in my life.

Still, tonight I decided to kinda just...express a few ideas and I figured, hey, these ideas might be stupid, but I still wanted to share them with my audience.

So, without further adieu; 

Stupid political ideas I personally would love to see tried, despite the flaws:
-Cap rent at 30* the minimum wage per month for Studio apartments, 40* the minimum wage per month for one-bedroom apartments, 60* the minimum wage per month for two-bedroom apartments, and 90* the minimum wage per month for anything larger.

My idea here is that if you assume someone is working 30 hours at minimum wage, they should pay no more than 1/3rd of their monthly wage for a one-bedroom apartment. So, if they're working 30 hours a week then that's 120 a month. 120* the minimum wage would be their entire monthly paycheck, so 1/3rd of that would be 40* the minimum wage.

If the minimum wage is $10/hour, then that would mean monthly rent is capped at $300/month for a Studio, $400/month for 1-bedroom, $600 for 2-bedroom, $900/month for larger.

The law could be worked to offer incentives for landlords to make rent cheaper than these amounts, too.

-Make it illegal for phantom job offerings to be posted. If businesses advertise they are hiring, they must fill the position listed after they have candidates apply within 30 days of the posting. They may not take the posting down and then re-post it. Require every business listing a job to actually hire for the job they are listing.

-Make it illegal for businesses to throw away products that are still good. Require they go through a process of offering them at a discount and if they still can't sell the product of giving it away. Potentially provide incentives to businesses to donate these products.

One particular area to target for this would be food products and similar living products that come with expiration dates. Make it so that half-way through their shelf life they're discounted and offer incentives for them to be given away before the end of the shelf life, so that places like food banks are receiving food that isn't already past its expiration date. (I admit I don't know how to handle the particulars of this or the logistics involved, but the idea is to increase the amount donated and decrease the amount wasted and to make sure the donated products are still usable.)

-Make it illegal for businesses to hire externally before offering internal promotions. We were raised on the false pretense that anyone could work their way up the capitalism chain to the very top, but these days instead of promoting employees to higher positions companies vastly prefer hiring externally to fill vacant higher positions. Force them to work the way we were promised they would, and make it so they can't hire externally until internal options have all been expended.

This would pair really well with the phantom job offering being illegal, too.

-Make it encoded in law minimum wage increases by the expected amount inflation will. This wouldn't work perfectly, but would prevent minimum wage from remaining stagnant for decades/generations while inflation and the cost of living continue to increase.

-Make it illegal for anything to be resold unchanged for higher than 200% (double) the price it was originally bought for. This one would likely need fine-tuning to account for items that are of extreme historical significance, things deliberately designed to be limited in number, etc. But for every-day goods, make it illegal to price gouge past a certain point. Vendors need to turn a profit but they shouldn't be able to make that profit 500-1000% the amount they spent to get the product.

-Make it illegal for anything to be sold for higher than 500% or so the combined price of its components. This would similarly need fine-tuning to not stifle hand-crafted artisans' products, it would need to be targeted towards big businesses and corporations and industrial mass-produced items, with the aim being the same, to prevent them from large markups in a way bypassing the above.

(I do have more ideas for tackling inflation, shrinkflation, etc., but I don't have the words for them tonight.)

-To handle internet safety, instead of requiring IDs (coughcoughUK) in a way which is universally despised and leads to authoritarianism, make the law instead require companies/websites/games/etc. to recognize devices/internet connections/etc. which are in "family mode"/kid mode/have parental guidance controls turned on. We have the technology to do this already, they already collect that data, this would just require them to regulate off of it rather than allowing them to collect data on everyone. (I might not be wording this well but I hope you get what I'm going for.)

This would also pair well with education reform in making it mandatory for kids to learn internet history in an age-appropriate manner similarly to how sex ed is done in age-appropriate stages. Stick to really basics at younger age, scale it up to more details for tweenagers, as kids become young teens give them more info, etc. (Again, not worded well but I think you can catch the drift.)

Make it mandatory for places to also give this information and make it available to the adults/parents. Meetings, as public service announcements, etc.

Are these ideas pragmatic? Probably not! Good? Who knows? Unrealistic? Very likely! Incredibly naive and overly simplistic? Undoubtedly! I called them "stupid ideas" for a good reason! I'm not a lawmaker!

But I'd still love to see things like this tried, because I personally like the ideas.

Now granted. These don't touch on a lot of other areas which probably should be.

How to help local communities, particularly farmers. (I have ideas for that, too!)

How to help disabled folks who can't work a minimum wage job for 30 hours / week.

How to make sure media is preserved.

I've got a lot more stupid ideas for those and many more, too.

But I figure, hey, what harm is there in expressing these ideas? They've been sitting in my head for years now, I figured I might as well voice them as things I would love to see tried. Despite how stupid they probably are.