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. 

...it will have to wait.

About my anniversary with my wife.
About what happened two years ago.
What I want to do.
Events in my life.
Etc.

But for now.

What I came to share was the result of a dream last night. (The other dream I had involved a parody-horror film where a shark was in a WWE wrestling ring eating wrestlers and having it be valid matches, with the shark eventually defeated by the satire-friendly version of Cody Rhodes. But I couldn't really build upon that dream. This dream, on the other hand...)

​So last night I had a really vivid dream which led to the creation of a new manga shounen (or, well, seinen more accurately) idea. I'll never have the free time to make it, but I wanted to lay out the basic idea.

The story would begin at the traditional half-way point in a story. Instead of following a rookie 16-year-old teenaged boy, this would start with the protagonist at 26--a full ten years after he began his hero's journey. All of the advanced concepts that a hero is exposed to (and, through the naive hero, us the audience get to learn about), he already knows and has mastered.

The story would begin after a tragedy which killed/scattered his crew. Think akin to the likes of One Piece heading into the timeskip, Andromeda season 5, etc. He, as well as all the heroes and protagonists, lost--big time. His ship was damaged and broken almost entirely beyond repair, hanging on by a thread. He lost almost everyone on his crew and who he cared about. All his allies gone, and a bounty placed upon his head and the head of his two remaining companions. Everyone is thought either dead or with a bounty high enough to guarantee they soon will be.

And that's just where things begin.

To explain some of the mechanics involved, this would be basically a cross of stories like One Piece, Cowboy Bebop, and Star Wars, along with some other shounen stories. A large portion of the populace can tap into "The Magic Field", which grants them a lot of the abilities of Force-Sensitive users, crossed with Haki users. They have universal access to telekinesis including strong push/pull, enhanced physical abilities particularly jumping, agility, nimbleness, etc., they have a form of clairvoyance which senses danger, they have a minor ability to cause incoming bullets (not blasters because this setting still uses kinetic weaponry aside from stun guns which are energy, but these bullets are more magitek in being big blasts) to miss, as well as enhanced accuracy in their shots, the ability to plant suggestions in their opponent's mind as a minor form of hypnosis, enhanced strength and toughness, increased endurance and rapid healing, etc.

Advanced users of these can elevate these abilities further, to actually sense incoming attacks well before they happen, to have an aura that suppresses opponents and encourages allies, virtual immunity to most forms of harm, the ability to inflict harm on otherwise immune targets, etc.

And these universal tools are aided by the equivalent of lightsabers, called "artifact weapons". Usually taking the form of augment gloves, but some can be customized into other forms, too. These artifact weapons have as a universal power generating a shield which absorbs incoming attacks and, on a narrow band approximately the size of a curved broadsword, deflecting projectiles towards a location.

But this is all standard equipment and powers.

Characters have powers beyond tapping into The Magic Field, called their Star Power. These powers are entirely separate and entirely unique to the individual. Think devil fruits, or bloodline powers from Naruto, or the unique powers of every individual in most shounen. You get the idea. These powers take training to use and unlock, but are innate and nearly limitless in potential.

Those who have mastered their Star Power unlock a second, stronger ability. This stronger ability can be something entirely different, and is loosely called their "Spatial Magic Sphere". It requires both a strong connection to The Magic Field, and a strong mastery of Star Power. The downside to this is all users of Spatial Magic Spheres have some ability to detect other Spatial Magic Sphere users even when the Spatial Magic Sphere user is just using their base power or Magic Field power. In short, once one accesses Spatial Magic Spheres, their usage of Star Power and The Magic Field innately channels their Spatial Magic Sphere, and because every Spatial Magic Sphere on some level can detect the presence of another Spatial Magic Sphere, tapping Spatial Magic Sphere for the first time causes it to passively always be there on some level.

The protagonist, his first mate and longest traveling companion, and his wife (again--experienced veteran protagonist, the love interest had a relationship upgrade over five years ago before the story begins) all have access to Spatial Magic Spheres, artifact weapons, and advanced Magic Field powers.

The protagonist is a former-prodigy genius mechanic, inventor, and the captain of a cube-shaped spaceship (which is not spaceworthy at the story's beginning, trapped roaming a single planet initially where all the action happens at first), officially called The Cube, and affectionately nicknamed 'Cubie'.
He was notable in how he actually got access to multiple artifact weapons (protagonist privileges!). He's got a key that allows him to unlock just about anything and interface with anything (effectively both a key and a usb stick), that also serves as a sword (lightsaber, not keyblade). He also has gloves, as well as a staff-gun (can take the form of a staff, or the form of a gun, and in its compact form is basically a lightsaber-shaped handle, or a compact-force-lance from Andromeda if you prefer).

He discovered The Cube and retrofitted it, a la a Millenium Falcon/Lagann style encounter, although this wasn't his start to his adventuring life and took place a little down the line.

His Star Power is an augmented form of Sigil Casting. Sigil Casting is technically a form of harvesting Space Magic, but rather, channeling it to do things which normal Space Magic practitioners can't achieve. The downside is it requires writing out sigils, onto a surface, in order to cast the effect. (Think FMA alchemy.) However, the upside is a level of versatility and customability. This is a pretty weak power in terms of Star Powers (especially considering this is one of the strongest Magic Field users in the setting by the time of the story's start), but he makes it seem a lot less so because of how he customizes it, and passively channels it, and how he uses it to augment his natural mechanical and invention skills. Because he can fuse his inventions with his Star Power's Sigil Casting, and he can create Sigils other Sigil Casters can't, he's the ultimate master of rune magic, earning his Star Power the name "Rune Master".

As of accessing his Spatial Magic Sphere, he can create elemental variants on his Sigil Casting. When he has white hair he can channel Ice. Red hair, fire. Black hair, pure darkness. Golden hair, pure light. Blueish-purple hair, pure energy. And his default state, brown hair, is technically both air and earth, because he is a bridge between the two innately.

But where he's truly broken is in his Spatial Magic Sphere ability, "Sphere of Influence": it allows him to vastly augment all Magic Field users, all artifact weapons, all Star Power users, and all Spatial Magic Sphere users, within his influence range (which is the size of a sizeable starship, think about the size of a modern battleship but in 3 dimensions), and critically...he can also do the inverse, vastly weakening or even completely negating all of those. His ability allows him to be able to negate a potential fleet full of opponents to some extent, while creating an entire fleet of people under his influence.

So, his title has changed to reflect that. It went from "The Artificer" to "The Stacked Deck" to "The Spirit of Stars".


His first mate, longest companion, is a cat furry, and she's technically stronger than her captain. She's a master markswoman, master swordswoman, and really shines in hand-to-hand combat in particular. She, too, has an artifact weapon of gloves (again, pretty standard), with hers having the unique ability to morph forms into swords, guns, or gauntlets depending on her need. Personality-wise, as well as power-wise, she's basically combining Vi from League of Legends, Revy from Black Lagoon, and Yang from RWBY.

She's hotheaded, antagonistic, highly abrasive, highly combative, a bruiser who loves a good fight, heavy drinker, etc. But she's also a genius commander, both in terms of strategy and tactics, is good at logistics, understands the ins and outs of storage, picks up on subtleties in others most miss, has a way of reading people beyond that afforded to most Magic Field users, etc. She's not dumb, she's actually arguably the smartest member of the crew, and she has the talents to match. She's ridiculously good at analyzing.

She is capable of detecting and deducing the powers of combatants to an uncanny level, including being the first to notice the presence of even the most stealthy of Spatial Magic Sphere users.

My dream didn't show me her powers, but presumably they involve her abilities. Guns, blades, movement, etc. Presumably, she has teleportation powers among other skills.


His wife, promoted from love interest, who he's been married to for about five years or so (young love, adventure, etc.), is the navigator, negotiator, and banker of the group (yes basically Nami), and she also is the one in charge of plants and the air circulation in the ship. She makes it so that the crew doesn't suffocate or starve, and has a skill for disabling enemy ships in specific ways to inflict that on them. While her husband and their first mate are known to be global threats, she's the scariest member of the crew.

Her basic Star Power abilities are growing and controlling plants out of nothing. What she's capable of beyond that, my dream didn't show--only that it mortified their starter villain for the series to immediately surrender despite his own broken powerset.


The story begins by showing the captain and his first mate trying to repair Cubie, heavily snarking and trying not to mention the disasters they just lived through. Then, the first mate notices the presence of a Spatial Magic User on the ship, disturbing things. A saboteur/assassin named Zeb, who has the Star Power of a total invisibility cloak making him immune to detection to even Spatial Magic Users most of the time. When he is dangled thousands of feet above the air about to be pushed to his doom (because the ship, while not capable of traveling the stars, is still airborne), activates his Spatial Magic Sphere ability, a time-rewind ability.

His time-rewind ability is two-fold. He retains perfect knowledge from a loop he initiates a rewind on, and if he dies he automatically returns to the point he began the loop on, with the knowledge he died but none of the memories for the loops since the last time he died. Encountering the protagonist's wife repeatedly and unavoidably keeps triggering his death, not giving him the ability to rewind and find out why. And no matter how many loops he goes through, he can't win.

So the end of the first chapter is him surrendering to the crew, and in a panic, begging and pleading to join them, because his failure will make him just as much as a target, and once marked as a target he knows he won't ever be given a chance to not be one. The crew, understanding that his offer is sincere, genuine, and that he legitimately has no other opportunities, accepts. They might not remember killing him or his thousands upon thousands of times rewinding to attempt to kill them, but they retained at least a sense of his honor, integrity, and genuine skill, so Zeb becomes their first new recruit and first new member of the crew, joining them on their adventure to rebuild their crew.


Potential future crewmates include an actual rookie (likely a native of the planet The Cube Crew are stuck on), who the crew would explain the mechanics of the world in, requiring heavy protection but being an investment;
Cubie, made into a hologram (a la Cortana from Halo, or Andromeda from Andromeda);
And potentially one or two children of the protagonist and his wife.

Among many others.

Any surviving crew members would likely be encountered and eventually rejoin after The Cube becomes spaceworthy again and begins traveling the stars, trying to fight back.

They'd be called The Cube Crew, which might be the name of the series altogether since the heart of the series is The Cube Crew recovering after barely surviving the worst events in their lives where they suffer a near-total defeat. (To give a scope of how bad this level of defeat is, it's basically a Whitebeard Pirates level of defeat. They lost a war and got hunted down after. Many died in the conflict. Even those who lived, many were killed after by multiple entities wanting their demise. Which also gives a scope for the protagonist's level of influence. By the time of his fall, he was one of the four strongest figures of interest in the setting, essentially, with the scope of influence that would entail.)

That's about as far as I got in the dream. But I really enjoyed the setting generated from it and the uniqueness of the starting point.

The goal of The Cube Crew isn't so much to get vengeance, or to start a resistance, or to fight back, as much as it is to survive, and rebuild, and recover, and regather, and to leave a path for future generations to have a better life, to not let the futures of the next generation be crushed. They're more looking for people to pass the torch onto than they are to finish the job.

Of course, part of this would involve them actually failing to pass on the torch, tragically so, in multiple occasions. Young people being killed, invoking their rage. Young people being brainwashed. Young people fighting against them, and them being forced to defend themselves to lethal results. Etc. But their goal, throughout it all, remains the same:
Track down all of the survivors of their crew,
Re-unite the crew, taking all who wish to rejoin and leaving those who have moved on in peace, to attain closure,
Talking to the loved ones of all those who perished, to help them obtain that same level of closure,
Inspiring hope,
Encouraging action,
Imparting lessons into those who follow,
Rebuilding, restarting, and continuing families, to have (more) kids, and raise those children. (The wife of the protagonist rambles on and on about having 12 kids, and goes into Marinette from Miraculous Ladybug levels of tangents about that plan, how it will be, etc. And she's been doing this since before the two were even married. It's a quirk of hers, part of her extensive planning capabilities and her own ruthless nature, essentially.)

I would love to make it, but alas. Because of how many projects have higher priority, I likely never will. Still going to note the idea though!

​Today, November 15th, 2025, marks one year legally married to my wife, Kelsey Marie Lewis. We were legally married on Friday, November 15th, 2024. While we effectively eloped, leaving for a vacation a week after tying the knot, it still marked what has been a defining part of our journey through life together. We're still planning to have a proper wedding ceremony down the line, but the day of our dreams didn't need to happen for us to commit to spending the rest of forever together.

The last year has been marked by many challenges and setbacks, many of which will continue, and some which will even get worse. But it has also been marked by renewed dreams and hopes. Our marriage has brought us to raising and taking care of our puppy, Parker, who brings us endless amount of joy. He makes us laugh and he is very loving and smart, giving hugs and kisses and is learning how to even cuddle with us.

We have in the last year done a lot to set the groundwork for a better future for us, and while a lot of it hasn't gone as we wanted and there's a lot more work to do, the journey has been one which I have been filled with endless amounts of happiness to embark upon. kels has made me pursue dreams I had previously given up on, and encouraged me to live as my authentic self. They have given me the strength to stand up for myself and the courage to confront problems rather than run away from them.

They have given me so many experiences I never would have even thought about experiencing, and their sense of adventure has broken me out of my shell. They are how I have begun to reconnect with things and people I love, and have given me perspective on what matters most in my life. A lot of what I had taken for granted, I have a newfound appreciation of thanks to them, and their passions are enthralling to watch them pursue.

They're nerdy, they're ambitious, and they're a great planner. They always know how to make life be more interesting, and for them, I would do anything. Their loves have become my loves as well, and they have done more than anyone could possibly know to give me a level of fulfillment, enrichment, and contentness I never thought possible. They bring me comfort and give me encouragement and life I could previously only dream of. I love them so much, and while this may be just the first year legally married, I wish it to mark a lifetime of our future together. <3

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.

​So I've been wanting to talk about this for a long while now, but I decided to pull the trigger on outlining one of the most important pieces of background lore in my current novel, Records of Farn.

Specifically, revolving around the eighteen Demon God-Lords, also known as the Abundant ARGON. Each of them is the demon of one sin, and yes, there's eighteen sins because seven is wholly uncreative.

They are the eighteen most powerful demons in existence, and by virtue of being gods, their existence is literally written into the code of the universe.

I've hundreds of pages of notes on the Abundant ARGON alone, both because I used them to figure out how divine beings work on farn and because I found them to be interesting characters.

I don’t want to spend too much time summarizing the mechanics of demons, demon gods, and the Demon God-Lords, and how each differ from the others, but I will Breefly mention that each of the Abundant Argon could desperately use therapy, but by virtue of all demons being prideful and stubborn and masking their weaknesses, none of them are likely to ever seek therapy from The Immortal Therapist (who I should also talk about at some point, just...not today).

So instead, I wanted to give a rundown on each of the eighteen.

Loosely speaking, the first demon is Belreach, The First Damned, Demon of the sin Creation, and the father of all demons. He wasn’t created as a demon, but some unknown force tasked him with creating the concept of a demon and the limits on them. He achieved this, but in his own desires, made himself the first of such beings.

He was the original King of the demon realm, ruling over all demonkind as an initially uncontested ruler.

There’s a deliberate lack of detail to him, because this is a time period predating most deities even existing, so a lot of the details to him are deliberately left undefined. However, I will say, he's not currently master of all demonkind, despite being their Progenitor, and only commands a fraction of them.

The next two demon god-lords, who technically became demons before Belreach, are the sibling-spouse duo of Bemoheth and Athaneva. And yes, sibling spouse in the Zeus Hera sense, invoking all of the pantheons which have a male and female sibling duo who are married. It’s one of the main reasons they became demons.

If you were to add an L and i to Athaneva, I think the anagrams would be clear, they're basically Behemoth and Leviathan.

They were originally proto-spirits, the form of being that would eventually coalesce to become Great Spirits, and were SUPPOSED to be the top two in the pantheon of Great Spirits. However, when Belreach began defining demons, these divine beings decided effectively "sure, why not?" And just became Demon God-Lords. Because they could.

Athaneva, The First Chaos, is the Demon God-Lord of the sin Chaos, as she is quite literally primordial chaos. She defied what she was meant to be and lives to cause as much as possible.

Bemoheth, The First Beast, is the Demon God-Lord of the sin Existence, as his very existence as a demon is blasphemous to the very universe, again because he was meant to be the top God of the Great Spirits, but as a proto-spirit opted to not become the first Great Spirit and instead exist as a demon.

Together the duo are considered the Progenitors of all monsters, because they are what birthed monsters across the land of farn.

There’s not really much to their characters, because they are self-explanatory. Their essence is simple, and their power as primordial gods unrivaled except by other primordial gods.

The fourth Demon God-Lord is Luden, the First Fallen. He is the Demon God-Lord of the sin Pride.

He is the ruler of the citadel, the central fortress in the middle of the demon realm. By virtue of the Abundant Argon meeting in his realm, he is the de facto leader of Demon Conferences.

He is considered the King of Demons, and if you couldn’t guess, he's the reason Belreach isn’t King of demonkind. He was a bit of an upstart, but gathered an army which waged a demon war, conquering land after land, built the citadel, and then resisted Belreach's siege of it.

The two, with Mastemo’s help, eventually reached a truce, which would ultimately end up dividing the demon realm into sixteen parts, controlled by the eighteen Abundant Argon.

Sixteen, because Athaneva and Bemoheth share a territory, and one of the Abundant Argon has her realm as a small portal half outside the demon realm.

You might ask who Mastemo is. I'll cover him later, because he's one of the younger Demon God-Lords. So, if he's one of the younger Abundant Argon, how was he there for the first Demon Conference? Because all eighteen were. I don’t wanna ramble too much on it, but basically, the Demon God-Lords by virtue of being written into the code of the universe have always existed and their presence can be felt throughout all of time, despite them having tangible timeframes they manifested on farn. So while only four Demon God-Lords had manifested, all eighteen were still present.

But I digress. Luden is loosely based on the concept of Lucifer as a fallen angel, who becomes the ruler of hell as the father of sin, and so on and so forth, Christian lore insert here, you get the idea. He has a rather Darwin approach to demons, survival of the strongest. If a demon isn’t strong enough to figure out how to survive, then they don’t deserve to live.

His backstory is something he deems only his equals of knowing. What's known is that he was originally a member of a different pantheon, which by the nature of the pantheons around at the time could only have been either Ellun’s Pantheon or him being among The Archangels.

He was originally genderless, and part of his sin of Pride was him becoming exclusively male, abandoning any genderless, genderfluid, or feminine forms or parts and fully embracing the identity of male.

I know the details of what his backstory is, but I don’t want to share them. I'll say he's really complicated, in a way I think is really cool, but I don’t want to reveal what the convoluted circumstances were.

I'll say he was the first Demon God-Lord whose presence had tangible consequences of ripple effects on farn though. He was the cause of one Archangel suffering a brief episode of diverging from the intended path of Archangels, which then set off a chain reaction across every pantheon including influencing the other two Archangels to suffer a temporary divergence from the intended path, which in turn would create circumstances leading to the birth of over half of the Abundant Argon.

In short, what he did was so egregious, it shaped the majority of all misfortune on farn. He might not have invented demons or been the first, but he is effectively the indirect architect of every misfortune on farn to follow. Including the fifth Abundant Argon!

And that would be Lilith, The First Succubus. She’s the Demon God-Lord of the sin Lust. Now, Lilith is a main character in Records, so unlike the rest of the Abundant Argon, she actually gets a chance to tell her backstory. I'll say she was the first mortal to ever ascend to Godhood though.

One of her secondary titles is "The Last Primordial", because she is the last, the youngest, of the Primordial Gods, the Old Gods, the gods predating the landscape of farn as it is currently known.

And the reason she is the last of them is because of her being the first mortal to become a god. She put an end to an era of various pantheons waging a divine cold war against each other, because they all had to pause and collectively go, "Oh shit. Our actions can have consequences birthing Gods equal to us in power."

Now, obviously, all of the younger Abundant ARGON still formed! So obviously, there was still divine beings intervening with consequences. But her ascension to Demon God-Lordhood represented a cosmic shift in the effects of the divine on farn, with their influence scaling back from daily and nearly omnipresent to more passive and only on occasion.

Because she showed mortals could become gods equal in power to all prior gods, there was a sudden need for caution in actions taken, because rival gods born from mortals would be likely to hold grudges against those who had led to circumstances of such extreme suffering necessary to birth a God.

The next Demon God-Lords don’t have a strict order, but formed less than 200,000 years ago but over 70,000 years ago.

Sanatas, The Destroyer, is the Demon God-Lord of the sin Wrath. He's effectively Poseidon, Krampus, and Satan rolled into one. He was a proto-Beastkin, a tribal leader, who was very angry at the oppression his people were facing at the hands of Mountain Humans (read: Caucasian Humans).

The result of this was him becoming one of the four Abundant Argon associated with The Apocalypse, as in, his presence on farn is a sign an apocalyptic event is likely to occur on a grand landscape-altering scale. Bemoheth and Athaneva are two of the other three.

Trisairo, The Exiled Fae, is the Demon God-Lord of the sin Order. She became a tyrant, ruling the fae realm with absolute order and strictness.

Now, fae on farn are pretty much exactly what you would expect them to be; inherently agents of pure chaos. Their only rule is that rules are more like suggestions. So imagine the scope of beings like that exposed to what Trisairo did. She subjugated divine beings of chaos to the very antithesis of their nature. She introduced gender to previously genderless fae, and her control over what shouldn’t be controlled had devastating effects on the fae.

It led to the creation of The Fae Arbiter, a creature which is simultaneously fae, and yet, not fae. Simultaneously has power over all fae, yet is entirely powerless. Simultaneously exists only to resolve issues of cosmic scale, while also existing to provide the best for all fae. Both mortal, yet immortal. The ultimate contradictory fae, who is everything and nothing simultaneously. (Think Schroedinger's Cat.)

Milodee, The Dragon Reject, is the Demon God-Lord of the sin Blind Obedience. To understand her, I would have to explain the nature of dragons, but I don’t wanna go into a tangent on an entire different pantheon of gods. Loosely though, Dragons--similarly to Fae and Spirits--are inherently divine beings. Milodee was the youngest of the first generation of dragons to inhabit farn.

Dragons inherently seek having a hoard. They are inherently greedy and selfish and arrogant and seek power and to assert their dominance over lesser creatures, usually by ravaging lands.

Milodee rejected her dragon nature and fought for the people. However, this rejection of her nature took a toll on her, and left her vulnerable and weak. She sought a solution, and someone promised her an answer, if she followed his will without question. And she did. But he both literally and figuratively backstabbed her, and was just using her.

The turmoil of her inner conflict, the betrayal, the loss, and the toll the horrific tribulations she suffered because of her betrayal led her to go on a Lilith-scale rampage, ascending to demonhood despite already being divine. From the ashes of what she burned down, she used the lessons of her tormentors to build her own empire.

She went from always smiling and having a wide grin to permanently wearing a stoic look, because she was just that broken. But, part of her original protector nature remained, as she now serves as the enforcer of a divine treaty whereby all of the gods of every pantheon are to keep their influence to the old world, not the new.

So that's eight so far.
The next SEVEN can all directly or indirectly trace their origins to the same place. Only three of the remaining ten formed without any direct tie to the following.

Seidonia, the farn equivalent to Atlantis, was a continent midway between the new world and the old world. Topla, the main city on the continent, was the capitol of the Toplan Empire. The Toplans (read: Atlanteans) had magical advancements loosely equal to or slightly superior to modern day farn. In earth terms, they had technology rivaling 2025 level of technology potentially slightly better than what we have now.

The Toplan Empire spanned both the new world and the old world, over 70,000 years ago. In their minds, they brought enlightenment to the primitive cultures around the world. Those who they were colonizing and conquering had a different opinion of their actions.

Eventually, zealotry, arrogance, corruption, and apathy led to the circumstances where Dabadon, The Commander, would undergo his demonic Ascension around 70,000 years before the modern day. Dabadon is the Demon God-Lord of the sin Slothfulness. He, along with Sanatas, Bemoheth, and Athaneva, form the four Abundant Argon signaling apocalyptic events, because they all together were responsible for sinking the entire continent of Seidonia, with all one billion inhabitants. The consequences of an entire continent sinking to the bottom of the ocean also sent tidal waves across the world, wiping out nearly every coastal city overnight.

However, this catastrophe still left what would be deemed The Toplan Legacy, a mythical claim to being the true heirs of the greatness which was the Toplan Empire. In short, the backing behind every colonial and imperial mindset to follow, all aiming to reclaim the lost glory of Seidonia.

It starts with Toran. Toran was the easternmost outpost of the Toplan Empire, a trade colony established to easily connect with the farn equivalent to Asia. Toran can be thought of as the farn equivalent to Troy.

Toran was, by some method, displaced in time by approximately 60,000 years. Potentially 66,666, if we wanna be extra dramatic. I haven’t canonized the METHOD of time displacement. It would either be a magical glacier of sorts locking them in place a la Dylan Hunt Andromeda style, or it would be them literally being flung forward in time, where they just were one minute an outpost of Topla, and the next find out Topla has been gone for over 60,000 years.

Regardless of the method of displacement, them being time displaced by 60,000 years or so is canonical. (Only the method hasn’t been established by me.)

Toran would go on to form the Toran Empire, spanning the farn equivalent of the Mediterranean Sea, forming their own outposts. They would expand into areas the Toplan Empire hadn’t, both further east and south, colonizing effectively the farn equivalent to Africa, Europe, and the Middle East, spanning upwards to India.

Their adventuring culture was structured largely like Danganronpa, with adventurers highly specialized to ultimate extremes, hyper-competent to Godlike extents in their chosen fields, and using those fields to accomplish great feats.

The cousin people to the Torens, the Tinians, are the farn equivalent to one iteration of Greece. Tinia was another Toplan outpost, but unlike Toran, Tinia had to take The Slow Path forward. They were ethnically and culturally identical to Toplan at the time of the sinking of Seidonia, and stories of their Toplan heritage and the displacement of Toran survived the 60,000 year gap.

When Toran reappeared, the two cousin people were happy to see each other, and established good relations with each other. Toran freely shared their Toplan technology, culture, and history with their cousins.

The Tinians, however, eventually felt betrayed by the Torens. Toran had an easy path to expand their Empire to match and in many ways exceed that of the Toplan Empire. Yet Tinia could only expand into the bitter hash northern regions, inhabited by people who were adept at pushing the Tinians back.

The inability to freely expand into the Norkan regions left Tinians feeling like the Torens were deliberately stifling their growth. The Torens in contrast felt it was best to let their cousins strike out on their own. After all, they did make progress in colonizing part of the Norkan region.

Which is very important, because the Norkan descendants will cling to that loose thread. Norkans are loosely the farn equivalent to ancient Germanic, Celtic, and Norse people all rolled into one, and Norkan raiders would through their descendants form one of the modern superpowers of farn. But that's lore for a different day.

The important part is that the Tinians idea of striking out on their own was declaring war on the Torens. The two were evenly matched in a long stalemate.

Eventually, there was a call for a truce, to be signed within the impenetrable walls of Toran. The Tinians expected the Torens to be so arrogant they wouldn’t expect it was a trap, with them planning to Red Wedding the Torens within their own walls.

The Torens, however, weren’t that stupid. They suspected shenanigans, and thought they had sufficiently prepared.

They both ended up surprised by the other, and instead of the desired decisive blow, it was closer to a mutual kill. Technically, it was a Tinian Phyrric Victory, because they actually achieved their goal and had off-shore survivors who would retreat from the scene of the disaster.

However, this was because of the birth of a new member of the Abundant Argon, Deumos, The Deceiver. As an adventurer, he was considered the Ultimate Analyst, and yes, those who know their Danganropa lore can guess that means he became the Demon God-Lord of the sin Despair. He predicted everything about what the Tinians would do, and was ignored. The Torens lost the battle because their impenetrable walls were their main advantage, and lacking it, he was their last survivor, and he massacred the Tinians who survived the bloody battle.

Tinia lost all of its military, the majority of its leadership, and most of its navy, so was left vulnerable to invasion on all sides. The Toran colonies of Ranmoa and Thyrrga briefly united in vengeance to strike out against Tinia from the south and west.

Meanwhile, the Norkans reclaimed their territory from the north.

And completing the pressure on Tinia was raiders from the east, led by Belchevore, The Consumer. Since this is one of the two dark ages in farn history, loosely akin in time and effect to the Bronze Age Collapse, not much is known about Belchevore, other than he was likely an Insectoid race of some kind whose conquests led to his demonic Ascension. He became the Demon God-Lord of the sin Gluttony.

After Tinia inevitably collapsed, the unifying force between Ranmoa and Thyrrga collapsed, and the two both laid claim to the title of Toplan Legacy, leading into The Legacy Wars. If you couldn’t guess, Thyrrga is the farn equivalent to Carthage and Ranmoa the equivalent to Rome, with this the Punic Wars. Like on earth, Ranmoa would ultimately win, establishing the Ranmoan Empire, spanning the geography you would expect a Roman Empire to.

The downfall of the Ranmoan Empire was the same factors of most empires: greed, corruption, and apathy. They wanted to continue expanding, but lacked the resources to. So, they forcefully drafted the peaceful scholar Mastemo and enlisted his help in perverting his knowledge into weapons of war. Mastemo was not amused. You may remember that I mentioned a Mastemo, The Forsaken Scholar, who is a member of the Abundant Argon? Sure enough, this is him. He destroyed the Ranmoan Empire and demonically ascended to become the Demon God-Lord of the sin Knowledge.

The fall of the Ranmoan Empire left numerous splinters, who were united by King Arnos, or King Arneros, who is basically a combination of King Arthur, Jason of the Argonauts, and King Charlemagne the Great. He was a nautical adventurer turned great King, who united these fractured people to form the Federation of Ranmoan Children. Tragically, his early death led to the Federation of Ranmoan Children having a conflict which led to private businesses effectively seizing control of the Ferachen Empire as it was now called. These private corporations effectively ran everything, including adventuring, as a for-profit venture, breaking thousands of years of traditional regarding adventurers largely working closer to socialism and/or communism in structure.

Suffice to say, this latestage capitalistic hellscape did not end well, and eventually, Zeboel, The Striker, the next member of the Abundant Argon, would destroy the Ferachen Empire in a rebellion which led to their demonic Ascension. (Zeboel being the only explicitly enby member of the Abundant Argon.) They became the Demon God-Lord of the sin Envy.

This led to the farn equivalent to the dark ages, because while the Ferachen Empire had a valid claim to the Toplan Empire Legacy, its collapse left only the distant memory of greatness, with fractured nations forming in its wake.

This led to the landscape you would expect for the middle ages through the Renaissance in Ycasia, the farn equivalent to western Europe. Nations eventually began to form mostly finalized boarders, gain stronger independent cultures, warred with each other, had kings and nobles and so on and so forth.

Eventually, this would lead to two more of the Abundant Argon manifesting as a consequence, in different parts of the world.

Bothai, The False Chosen, was a prodigy adventurer and great leader, who represented a threat to the elites of society. One of them sent Lilith to assassinate him, and much to her chagrin, she was forced to execute this, impaling him through the chest from behind.

His dying corpse landed in the ruins of a temple to Deumos. Deumos had, by this time, run afoul of Milodee and been effectively banished from farn. He tried to claim that because he was a descendant of the Toplans and there were descendants of Toplans in the new world, he could lay claim to it. His Loophole was considered insufficient, and he paid the price of having his entire following, history, and very existence erased. But Bothai, dying, bleeding out, on his temple, allowed him to connect with Bothai, and make a deal with a demon. Deumos would save Bothai’s life, in exchange for possessing Bothai and Bothai becoming an agent of restoring Deumos's presence on farn.

Bothai, already in the mindset of seeking vengeance against those conspirators who killed him, agreed. I want to turn this story into a webcomic, but the end result was Bothai becoming Deumos's equal, becoming the Demon God-Lord of the sin Ambition.

In a different corner of the world in a similar timeframe, the various nations of Ycasia were colonizing the continent of Angea, displacing the locals, enslaving them, etc. Rarma, The Ensnarer, a child of a white father and black mother, could pass as a tanned white person, but was very much a child of both worlds, with all the trauma that entailed. I also am planning to tell her story, but the short form of it is, she met a guy who became her one true love. They became warlords together and effectively declared war against all other warlords and every nation colonizing Angea. Eventually, Rarma ended up mortally wounded. Her husband kept her in stasis, fought off all enemies, and healed her enough to revive her, but in the process, he himself got mortally wounded, and a just-revived Rarma was too weak to reciprocate the stasis. The two had saved each other countless times, but she wasn’t able to save him so immediately after he saved her.

She took this quite poorly. She embraced the worst traits of both herself and her husband, expanding their plans, following through with them, and didn’t just fend off the opposition. She brutally CRUSHED them, conquering the entire continent.

She was driven to demonic Ascension by the maddening irony of how she could have everything she ever could ask for--except the one and only thing she wanted. Because not even the Abundant Argon can revive the truly dead, her lover was gone for good. So she became the Demon God-Lord of the sin Greed.

All seven of those trace back indirectly to Luden, because Luden’s actions drove the actions which created the Toplan Empire, and through the sinking of Seidonia, the resulting chain of events.

To chronologically backtrack a bit, Phaimyustazael became the Demon God-Lord of the sin Fear(also Deceit) a few thousand years before modern times. Less than six thousand, but over two thousand. You might wonder why his name is so convoluted, and it's by his design. He is the Demon God-Lord of contracts. Whenever you think "deal with the devil", it'd be him you’re making a deal with.

As the demon of contracts, he's an expert at making people who arrogantly think they have bested him painfully realize they have been tricked by Phaimyustazael, The Trickster. To understand why, you have to know how demon true names work.

The true names of demons are well-known. So a contractor or summoner knowing a demon's true name offers them no power over that demon.

UNLESS the demon ACKNOWLEDGES their true name in the presence of their summoner or contractor. If they explicitly say, "yes, this is me", then they are bound to the one who brought them to farn. This is why demons have hundreds of aliases and titles. They use those to avoid acknowledging who they are to their summoner.

Phaimyustazael, by virtue of his name and the spelling thereof being ridiculously hard to get right, weaponizes this. He will acknowledge misspoken versions of his name and typos thereof, to let contractors THINK they have been given full control.

But because they didn’t perfectly pronounce his true name, it doesn’t count as being his true name, meaning they actually hold no extra power over him, and they find this out the hard way.

The youngest of the Abundant Argon in manifesting, even though she’s been around for all of eternity, is Rothasta. I originally had her title as "The First Inquisitor", but I am realizing that all five of the Primordial Demon God-Lords have 'first' and none of the other 15 do except Rothasta, so I am looking for a new ?adverb? between 'the' and 'Inquisitor'. Currently I am going for 'Sullen', but that may change later if I think of a better replacement for 'first'.

Rothasta is the Demon God-Lord of the sin Sacrifice. She was sent by a now-long-gone nation to prevent demons from crossing through a portal connecting the demon realm with farn. While guarding this portal, she would never age, and so, she was an eternal guardian of preventing mass demonic incursion onto farn.

She did this as a mortal for at least a thousand years. She was informed nothing remained of her nation. Everyone she knew had their lineage die out, and all records of her kingdom were lost, erased, etc. In short, nothing about her mortal life remained, and she had no reason to keep fighting. But she did.

Until about a hundred years ago, when she just...snapped. She had known she had consumed the essence of enough demons where she could become a demon god for over a thousand years. She chose not to. Until one day, she just...didn’t. She just succumbed. And became the seventeenth of the Abundant Argon.

As for the eighteenth Abundant Argon, they have yet to manifest on farn. Their effect on the world has already been felt, with them a member of every Demon Conference, but they haven’t yet actually manifested on farn, so their identity is unknown because the events leading to their birth as a Demon God-Lord haven’t yet transpired.

Because of this, the eighteenth Demon God-Lord could be anyone, and be the Demon God-Lord of any sin.

Of course, I know who the five possible eighteenth members of the Abundant Argon would be, each representing a different possible eighteenth sin. While anyone COULD be the eighteenth, only five people have the circumstances where they MIGHT become the eighteenth.

The eighteenth Demon God-Lord could be the sin of Insanity, Clarity, Regret, Conflict, or Pacifism.

And you might wonder. "Why is there only 18, and not 24?"

Well that's because the circumstances surrounding these people mean that any one of them becoming a Demon God-Lord would change the landscape of farn in a way which would prevent the circumstances for the other four.

In short, it’s not that there must be eighteen Demon God-Lords, never more and never less.

It’s that it’s only possible for eighteen individuals to become Demon God-Lords. Seventeen already have. Five people could be the eighteenth, but any one of them becoming the eighteenth changes the other four in ways making it impossible for them to become one anymore.

The best way I can think to explain this spoiler-free is to ask you to imagine a hypothetical.
Say all five candidates for the 18th were friends, and the only trigger condition for becoming the eighteenth Demon God-Lord was a tragedy where the other four died.

Sure, if there were multiple trigger conditions, then it would be possible to have nineteen to 24. But because the one and ONLY trigger condition for this hypothetical is the other four possible people being killed, there can always only be one final demonic Ascension to Demon God-Lordhood.

While any of them COULD be the final Abundant Argon, only one trigger condition can ever trigger, because that trigger condition prevents the other four triggers from being possible.

Since all eighteen of the Abundant Argon have been at every major Demon Conference starting with the first, they have always known they would have eighteen in total, thus why Mastemo proposed calling the Demon God-Lords The Abundant Argon.

They knew that no matter what, circumstances would play out to have that number eventually. Not because it was set to be eighteen, but rather because it just happened the circumstances behind the formation of the eighteenth would prevent any future possibility of more Demon God-Lords.

I hope that clarifier helps explain the concept. Where it's not a rule of "there must be 18 exactly", and instead it's just "well, 18 of us form at some point".

The only other thing I want to clarify is that about half of the Abundant Argon have kingdoms on farn and permanently reside there, and the other half only dwell on farn when summoned.

The five primordials, Sanatas, Dabadon, Zeboel, Phaimyustazael, and Rothasta all have no kingdoms on farn, and exist on farn exclusively through summons and contracts. They mainly dwell in the demon realm.

Milodee, Trisairo, Deumos, Belchevore, Mastemo, Bothai, Rarma, and the eighteenth Abundant Argon, all possess kingdoms on farn. (Or in the case of the 18th, WILL possess a kingdom.) Effectively, their subjects are a form of permanently summoning and contracting them.

There’s a lot more to demons, Demon Lords, Demon Gods, and Demon God-Lords, and how each is different from each other, and how demons work, because I only touched on the bare minimum of the mechanics involved.

And most of the Abundant Argon have a lot more to their stories and characters. I didn’t cover any of their secondary domains, which is what they are usually actually worshipped for. People pray to the Demon God-Lords to provide them something, and while it CAN be their primary domain of their sin, it's usually actually their secondary traits they get worshipped for.

For instance, Lilith’s primary worshippers are slaves praying for freedom, as Lilith’s secondary domain is freedom from slavery, loosely speaking.

Each of them, including the eighteenth, have secondary aspects to them. At least one pro-something and a correlating anti-something. But I think describing all of them is best saved for a different ramble.

I hope you enjoyed this one!

Hi, I am writing this across every platform I can, in order to best reach out to everyone and give them the rundown of things.

If you don’t know me, my name is Bree, aka, the Range of Bree System, aka Ranger, aka mastina2, and in most places I go by rBree2.

My elevator pitch for myself; I’m an autistic plural(median system) transwoman lesbian witch with ADHD, Bipolar Disorder, Anxiety, and numerous disabilities both physical and mental. I’m 32 years old as of July 23rd, and legally married to the love of my life as of November 15th 2024.

Although, tangent; we're still hoping to have a wedding ceremony (we effectively eloped) in October 2026, pushed back from the initial plan of October 2025. But I digress.

Over my life, I've accumulated a fair share of interests. Writing, games, music, songs, Dancing, Poetry, art, Webcomics, and more. (I blogged daily about these things for nearly 10 years continuously!)

I've pursued all of them as a potential career casually, but never been able to get my foot fully through the door on anything. Professionally, I've been a lifeguard and later Aquatic Lead (formerly called a Lead Lifeguard) my entire adult life, for nearly 11 years (minus one missed year due to covid).

In online spaces, I am mostly known for my supportive nature. I bring joy and positivity to the spaces I choose to inhabit. I give my time, energy, and support to friends, loved ones, and even relative strangers who I happen to share a space with.

In my mind, everyone I talk to is a potential future friend, because every friend I have ever had, I got from talking. I share memes, I make silly wordplay jokes, I just vibe with folks. I provide my presence and provide that source of constant engagement. 

I talk about my passions, my interests, my life, and listen to them talk about theirs. I find their stories fascinating, and I am pretty good at remembering what they tell me, too!

Whenever people run into issues they want advice on, I give what I can. When people are down, I provide perspective. I help people see the best in them, when they can’t, and I provide ways for them to recover, rebuild, and keep going forward. 

I give my life perspective to share that they are not alone, and I give them guidance. I am in many ways a teacher and a counselor/psychiatrist/healer. I give people a way of reframing their life, in a way which encourages healthier mindsets.

One of the main ways I share small reminders and tips is with my daily check-ins. I started them to encourage everyone to check in daily to let people know they're alive and okay, and chose to encourage engagement by providing small boosts to the day, little things which can shed perspective on all their negative self-talk and allow for fighting against their weaknesses and building on their strengths. 

I want to share those with a wider audience than what I have, so I’m working to expand into other media. I eventually want to make a year-long calendar, and/or a year-long prompt journal. I've begun plans on making a series of 44 card oracle decks, too!

I've turned these daily check-ins into a webcomic, and occasionally into videos. I started a subreddit dedicated to providing them as well, and added a tag for it on the subreddit for my presence as a content creator. 

Speaking of which, I am a content creator.
I create videos of all kinds. On TikTok I primarily post memeposts, wordplay which I think of.
On YouTube there’s a variety. I vlog, I talk about passion projects, I provide longer uplifting messages, I educate people on subjects I’m familiar with particularly plurality, I provide unedited longer form recordings of gameplay for games, and I perform the various songs I’ve composed.

I stream on twitch. (And upload streams as raw vods to YouTube.) I’m a variety streamer, although lately I’ve been playing almost exclusively Cozy Farm Game type games such as Stardew Valley and Disney Dreamlight Valley.
Besides Cozy Farm Games, I primarily play RPG games, one-off story games, and childhood nostalgia games.
I also stream both art and my novelwriting process.

My current novel, Records of Farn, has as its own Elevator Pitch, "The genres of High School Hijinks/Shenanigans, Shonen, Shojo, Light Novel Isekai, and Harem blended/mixed into one, to tell an Epic surrounding around the effects the isekai’d protagonist has on the fantasy world she finds herself in."

Farn is a paracosm, with as much history as earth. It’s as old as earth in billions of years, had a planet collision to form one moon in a similar timeframe, developed primitive proto-life in a similar timeframe, sapients began forming around the same time, modern sapients appeared around 200,000 years ago, and civilizations have risen and fallen in parallel times to earth. The main difference is farn is a place where magic and religion are real, so the history of the planet is interwoven with mythological figures who explicitly had a proven tangible impact on the world.

Since this means there’s billions alive in the modern day, with hundreds of countries, cultures, and countless pop culture, I will never be able to tell the entire story of the planet, because to tell it all would be as impossible as telling all of earth’s history.

However, Records is specifically focused around the introduction of one transplant from earth, Vee, and her arrival on farn, and how her arrival transforms the planet thanks to the influence and consequences of her actions on the world stage.

Vee was designed as a protagonist to represent under-represented demographics. Namely, she’s a polyamorous plural transwoman lesbian with ADHD, autism, bipolar disorder, and anxiety. I asked the question what it would take for a person with those specific traits to be the one of eight billion sent as most qualified to farn, with her and farn evolving side by side.

I initially planned for three books covering the majority of the world. Records would cover Vee’s first three years in farn. I would write a sequel set after, and then an interquel between the two, with the interquel covering a lot of the expanded lore, filling in the gaps neither Records or the sequel would.

But I ran into a problem; I realized Records would, in its entirety, be akin to the entirety of The Lord of the Rings in length. I was effectively writing an entire series of light novels, or the entirety of a lengthy Manga like Bleach, or the entirety of an anime with hundreds of episodes, in one single book.

My first solution was to break it up by year. Year One as Vee’s first year, Year Two as her second, and Post-Graduation as her first year out and about fully in the adult world.

...Yet I've run into the problem where just Year One alone is likely to be around 2,000 - 4,000 pages in length, and the other years are likely to be equally as long.

...So my current plan is to return to the roots. I took great inspiration from light novels, so why not just have each book of Records be one or two Arcs, a la a Manga Volume, or an anime Season?

That will likely leave the first book at a reasonable 400 - 600 pages.

And I am actually pretty close to getting it written! It’s about one tenth done for a first draft, and the hardest parts of setting the framework are almost completed, with snippets of the rest written and a pretty comprehensive timeline established.

I just need to put in the work to make it.

And I have a lot of plans for the expanded farn universe. I genuinely believe that Farn as a franchise is, if handled properly, worth a billion if not multiple billions of dollars. (Mind you, I have no interest in even being a millionaire yet alone a billionaire, but I think my world has that much value.)

I think if I could successfully pitch it to a service provider like Amazon or Netflix, Records of Farn would make an INCREDIBLY good anime. We're talking, Demon Slayer or Jujutsu Kaisen levels of animation and popularity. There’s enough characters with their quirks and backstories for endless amounts of investment in the world, and with a show to provide their official looks, that opens the door up to merch. Figures, shirts, you name it, anything which could be sold and distributed to people on a worldwide basis.

Especially since it wouldn’t end there!

Records has a planned sequel and the interquel still, both of which could be adapted to be their own, shorter, anime series!

And then There’s the expanded world lore.

I have in mind a Battlestar Galactica slash Lost type live action soap opera dramafest covering the distant past revolving around the continent of Seidonia, the farn equivalent to Atlantis, and how it led to the rise of Dabadon, the Demon God-Lord of Slothfulness. I have always thought that, given the opportunity, I could successfully pull off what all the pale imitators who tried to copy what those shows did, tried to do but failed. I feel I understand what made those shows work, and how I could artificially recreate what was accidentally made by circumstances of the time.

I also have in mind a musical, covering the downfall of the Federation of Ranmoan Children, aka the Ferachen Empire, and how Zeboel the Demon God-Lord of Envy was birthed from that late stage capitalism hellscape.

And then There’s a novel covering the rise of Rarma, the Demon God-Lord of Greed, and how she conquered Angea, putting an end to the era of colonialism in the old world.

And There’s more!

I also have in mind a book-slash-anime series called "Fallen Farn", a 'what-if' alternate universe covering one possible rendition of what farn would look like without Vee’s influence, one possible way things pan out without Vee accomplishing her full potential. In essence, it shows one possible world which diverges from the canonical farn at a point where Vee easily could have failed, and shows the consequences of that failure in an alternate future separate from the canonical sequel and interquel.

That’s four to five anime series, one musical, and one live action series, beyond all of the original books to be written, all with the potential merch to match!

And the sequel I intend to write has the theoretical potential for sequels after it to be written, too!

That, aside from how there’s at least one fictional MOBA video game which easily could be turned into an actually real one.

By my estimation, I have compiled 6,000 pages of notes for farn, and there’s plenty more unwritten I’ve stored exclusively in my head. A veritable Similarian of notes!

When I say this is a potentially billion dollar franchise if properly enabled, I well and truly believe it to have that level of worth. Farn is a rich, interesting world, truly equal to earth in scale, and that provides the ability for a truly endless amount of stories on every type of media.

And farn is just my current obsession as a paracosm.
I've made more, like the Rubyverse of my webcomic Red Hood Rider of equal scale to farn. (Heck, even The Descended is sizable.)

I've been writing stories since I was 13, and that has led to dozens, even hundreds, of rich worlds I can with relative ease write and bring to life, as I aim to with farn.

And I have more passions than just farn, too!

I also want to write and illustrate a children's book series, with an illustrated picture book containing captions which rhyme, telling subtle easily digestible morals to children through the eyes of the protagonist. Messages like "you might not like going to the doctor, but it helps you stay healthy", how to play safe, how to explore, etc.

I am a talented enough artist and wordsmith to pull it off, where I could potentially write a new book every month and release dozens in the series.

...But all of this, all of these ideas, all of the creativity, all of the passion, all of the support I give others, all of the love, kindness, education, resources, and so on and so forth I provide? All that joy and positivity, all that potential?

...Is in jeopardy, because I myself am in danger by the dire straights of my current life circumstances and the desperation thereof.

My work recently made policy changes which in effect removed accommodations for my disabilities. My work already strains me above 25 hours per week, and removing the parts of the routine which made it bearable is exhausting me to the point I genuinely might collapse at any given moment.

And on top of that, I have been given extra job responsibilities without any extra pay for the compensation of the increased workload. I’m doing more work, with less accommodations for my disabilities, and getting no increase in my pay or benefits from it.

Just my one job, now averaging closer to 36 hours a week, a full ten more than I can realistically handle with accommodations, while having those accommodations removed, and doing extra work for no extra pay? Is genuinely pushing my body and mind past breaking. I very well may perish thanks to my job if conditions don’t improve.

But it gets worse. Despite all of the above, my job doesn’t cover the cost of living. Me and my wife are both employed at soul-sucking jobs which are taxing us beyond our breaking points because we both have disabilities, but despite two jobs, we still aren’t making even close to enough to even survive.

Despite how our current jobs could already kill us, we're looking for second, even third, jobs, to get four to six sources of income, because that’s what we need at the moment.

Our apartment complex illegally upped our rent by $100 last year, without any notice. And when we renewed our lease, we went from having all utilities except power included for free, to being charged for every utility. Garbage, sewage, water, all previously free, but adding an additional couple hundred dollars.

Excluding power and internet, which together are an extra $300, our monthly rent went from $1700 to $2000, without any notice. Our first indication we would be charged for the utilities was the first monthly bill after we renewed our lease.

And this extra $300 in rent has slowly been building up to drowning us to a point where we can't keep it up, and last month finally was the breaking point.

In July, we received a $2,000 bill we had to pay. That was our rent money, and since we had to pay that bill, we had nothing left for rent.

So we have received an eviction notice. We have through August 7th to pay the rent, at least $2,000 but potentially $4,000, or we get evicted on August 12th.

We've been trying to pursue every aid resource. We've hit walls on food stamps in navigating the bureaucracy. We would qualify for legally disabled and get the benefits from it if we could actually afford to go to the doctor, but we can't.

My health insurance at the end of last year upped my monthly rate from $150/month to $550/month, a $400 increase I couldn’t pay. So I've been without health insurance all year long, and even if I had it, I wouldn’t be able to afford even the copays. We've been catch-22'd price gated out of qualifying for disabilities.

If we could afford to see doctors and receive their care, then it would be shown medical intervention isn’t enough to make us fully functional members of society, that we are in fact by the legal standard considered disabled. And that would open up the resources of disability to us. But because we can’t afford doctors, we can't get those resources, when those resources would likely enable us to afford doctors. We're trapped locked out of receiving the care we legally should qualify for.

Housing resources have largely given us no leads. We've pushed cheaper housing and programs to largely no effect.

We've tapped just about every resource left, and have nothing left.

And all of this builds on top of each other. My job exhausting me, trying to navigate the bureaucracy of receiving aid exhausting me, my own body exhausting me, hunting for cheaper housing, everything is adding up to breaking me, and if I do break...There’s no fixing me after.

All of the ideas, all of the creativity, all of the joy, all of the positivity, all of what I do, all the good I could ever do, all of the passion, all of that is on the verge of disappearing. Forever. Of being gone, permanently lost to the world.

So this is a final call for aid.

And to give a tangible answer to what you can do to help, there’s actually quite a lot!
You can send items or food directly to us. Either through throne (which has surprise gifts enabled), or through me DMing you our address.

You can spread the word. Share this, in post form, in video form, however you can, anywhere and everywhere.

Advocate on my behalf to any agency you think will listen.
Legal agencies which might take up me as a client for the illegal things I’ve been enduring.
An agent and/or manager who you think might believe in me and my vision such that they're willing to take a chance on me and believe that I can actually create what I believe I can.
Aid programs you think could work with me.

Jobs which you find that could work with us and our disabilities, ideally remote work which pays a significant amount.
Fundraising organizations or individuals, who might be interested in campaigning for us.

Or even just directly plugging how to support us.
You can support me through twitch subs and bits, albeit at a low payout to me.

You can donate to my kofi,
Or even commission something from me if you want a tangible return on your investment in me.

You can donate to our GoFundMe.

And you can spread the word to others.

You can follow, subscribe, and watch my content. (Ads on twitch when I stream, potential monetization on TikTok + YouTube.)
Here's a list of my links, my carrd.

Spread my content, spread the word of my need. Spread the word of the things I've gone through, of what I am hoping to do, of what I already am doing. Tell people about me, in any way shape or form you can.

I’m running out of time.
I have so much to offer the world.
I just need some help surviving in it.

​I've previously shared I intend to make my daily check-ins span as many forms of media as I can, in order to reach as many people as I can and spread that daily dose of extra energy to as many as I can for all those who need those little reminders.

I intend to make oracle decks about the daily check-ins.

When I have a year's worth, I intend to make a calendar and/or diary/journal filled with a full year of them.

I sporadically provide daily check-ins mostly as YouTube videos (although I'll likely expand to TikToks as well), and obviously, I've begun making them as a webcomic.

Today, I made the decision to expand the places even further. I've added a flair to my subreddit for providing them, and created a new subreddit for daily check-ins as well.

Not only do I think the idea of providing daily proof of being alive and okay is a good one, but also I feel like the affirmations I choose to give are life-saving. Those small boosts might not universally help, but all they need is to help one person one day and I have done my job. So despite the increasing workload and lack of personal payout (even if I could truly monetize these daily check-ins, I don't think I would really want to and any efforts there would be born out of necessity rather than out of choice), I wanna keep expanding them out.

Everyone deserves a dose of good, of perspective, of support, of energy, of motivation, of reminders. I can't reach everyone but I can reach as many people as possible if I keep doing what I am. So here's to hoping.

And while I don't wanna monetize my efforts, if you wanna financially support them, a reminder I do have a ko-fi. Me being alive and okay is not a guarantee, but for as long as I can, I will continue. <3
 

 
I turn 32 as of today, because I was born on July 23rd, 1993.

I'll be writing my check-in for today, presumably one involving birthdays, later. As for celebrating, I...don't really have the means to, today. I don't have the money to buy anything, or the means to really go anywhere, and even things at home I'm not sure I can do since it will depend on when I need to transport my wife back from work.

But at the same time, I figured I would make a blog entry about it.

Birthdays are a time I have struggled a lot with feeling positive emotions about. I don't know at what point exactly they went from something I looked forward to, to being something I just got negative feelings about, but it was over half of my life ago. I was a young teenager. What caused the shift, I'd have to unpack a lifetime of trauma to know. Could be anything, or a combination of things.

Maybe it was my family scheduling our summer trip to visit our grandparents around my birthday every year. With mine as the first birthday to not be celebrated on the actual day. (A thing later adapted for all of us due to life circumstances.)

Maybe it was me drifting apart from my friends, who as they aged outgrew the childish things which bonded us together while I myself didn't.

Maybe it was just the decrease in meaningful gifts.

Maybe it was a feeling of the sameness of every celebration, with nothing unique about them.

Maybe it was a general sense that people didn't get me, that people were forgetting me, that I was irrelevant, that people didn't understand what I really wanted, with the gifts I got being increasingly further away from the gifts I was hoping to get.

Or maybe something else.

Who knows.

Regardless of what caused the increased cynicism, pessimism, dread, and just tiredness/exhaustion regarding my birthday, it was there until a couple years ago or so.

In fact being honest, maybe the first birthday which I didn't feel this way was last year.

I don't remember if my birthdays in 2020 - 2022 were good or not, but I remember my 2023 birthday was one of the most depressing, and it was on the cusp of one of the worst times in my life by virtue of being the worst time in the life of my wife. (Although at the time, they were just a friend of mine, and in fact, the tragedy which was my 2023 birthday was what led to us dating. So my 2023 birthday gift from the universe was the love of my life, so I can't complain too much about how bad the day was otherwise.)

The first time I can remember feeling loved, appreciated, seen, and truly felt like people "got" me, was last year. My 2024 birthday. For the first time in half my life, I felt everything "a child should" (to quote a song) on the special day. I felt loved, I felt positive, I felt optimistic, I felt happy.

And it gave me hope for birthdays in the future being like that.

My current life circumstances mean I sincerely doubt I will have that this year, unfortunately. I've been struggling to avoid eviction, to make ends meet, to try and survive the crushing weight of society, that I haven't been really able to let people know, and prepare, and set time aside to celebrate me. I've tapped whatever resources they would normally give to me as a birthday gift, by virtue of having needed to ask for help prior to my birthday.

People who might otherwise give me birthday gifts instead gave me support to survive prior to my birthday, so I am very unlikely to receive anything except words today. I might not get time, and I definitely won't get gifts. And while it sucks, that's the reality of my current situation. I don't have the luxury of celebrating me this year, so this year will be a return to the previous standard of disappointment--but crucially, not with the accompanying dread that was there before.

I recognize that my current life circumstances are, explicitly, temporary, and not the new norm. The hardships and trials I am facing right now will not be there next year. The pain, the suffering, the weight of the world, will not give the same burden next year as it has this year. As crushed as I am right now, I know it is just the one time, and that next year will be better.

So as much as it will be hard to feel as loved as I was last year given how badly things are this year...I remain hopeful that I can keep celebrating. And hey. You never know. Last year I got something I hadn't gotten since I was a kid; a surprise birthday party. Maybe I'll be surprised today, since the day has just started.

But even if not...that's okay. I know how loved and appreciated I am every day. I know I hold value to people, and that I matter. I know how much a difference I make. I know how much I am loved and the amount of support I receive regularly is a blessing. I am fortunate, I am lucky, to receive a lifetime of love every day, so why would I need extra on my day of birth? I receive the amount of attention and love every day that many only get on their birthday.

So I don't need today to be special.

It would be a pleasant surprise if it was!

But I don't need it to be. There's no bitterness, there's only a small bit of sadness, and that small disappointment is because I know if life circumstances differed I could be receiving a lot more love and support today than I actually will, but ultimately; I am okay, well and truly, because today I am reflecting on all of the love and support I have already received.

I am eternally gracious, and can never have enough gratitude.

And above all else; I am looking forward to next year. I know next year can be better than this year. While this year has a lot of suffering, hardship, and pain...next year I truly believe will be better.

So while today will be a struggle to truly have a happy birthday, I remain optimistic that next year I will have it with interest. And even if not. I don't need a happy birthday when every day I am a level of content and fulfilled to have happiness. I have the love of my life. We have a puppy. We're building a life together. I am surrounded by loved ones who I love and who love me back.

I have ride-or-die friends who actually ride with me.

And that's all I will ever need. They are the greatest gift I could ever ask for, and I have them already, so I don't need more on my day of birth. I have them every day so if the thing I most wanted was to be given only on my birthday, then every day is my birthday because every day I have them in my life. <3