"Survive the Remainder of the Year"
Donation protected
THE SHORT VERSION
My name is Erica, I am a 27-year-old artist from Washington state and I am currently foundering in an incredibly rough patch in my life - I've been recently diagnosed with clinical depression and I am seeing a therapist regularly and am on medication. I've been unemployed for roughly 8 months and have been looking for a job but have been coming up empty. I have absolutely zero income. I am having a hard time paying rent and I end up scrambling to scrape together just enough each month to get by only to do the very same thing the next month. Every penny I manage to come into goes directly into saving for the next month's rent. I am on foodstamps. My student loans have been deferred for yet another 6 months. I haven't purchased anything for myself that wasn't rent or utilities for the last 8 months.
I am really hoping to reach $500 for rent for September as I have enough money for rent next month (August).
My ultimate goal is to reach $2,500 to cover rent and utilities until January 2015 to give me breathing room and peace of mind to really focus on getting better and finding a good job.
THE LONG VERSION
I was trying to think of how to tell you my story in as few words as possible but if I'm going to be asking for help, I feel that people generally like to know details so they know who/what their money is going towards, so, here it goes.
My struggles reached its worst point around December of 2013 - though I've been told that it had probably started when I first began working a call center job for a large and high-end type retail company which I started in October of 2012.
I quickly found the job itself to be incredibly unrewarding (i.e. soulsucking) and it caused a massive amount of stress and unhappiness in my life due to nasty entitled customers and terrible management that encompassed 9 hours a day 5 days a week of my life (with split days off and no chance to change your schedule until management held a shift bid, which always managed to land on one of my days off). I stuck with the job and continued to give it my all as long as I possibly could (I was actually really good at my job) in hopes that I'd be able to move to a different area of the company (ideally being moved to Customer Service via Chat instead of Phones) and also because $14.00 an hour was the most I've ever made in my entire life.
The job was making me absolutely miserable and it didn't look like they were ever going to move me - much to my despair - and despite constant encouragement from my family and friends to try and find another job while still working at that place seemed impossible and I worried I'd never find one that paid as well as what I'd found in this job.
In the end it didn't matter though, I was let go December of 2013 about a week before Christmas because I had managed to miss one too many days due to illnesses that ran rampant through the workplace at least once a month (my work buddies call it "The Call Center Crud" and everyone gets it because you are in a small confined space and everyone gets sick if that one person doesn't stay home). I have reason to believe that wasn't the entire truth behind my being let go because a work buddy of mine accrued more "absent points" than I had and they just decided to overlook that and kept her...
ANYWAY! On top of that whole mess - getting fired and all that jazz - I was also going to be moving to a new place. And it was a place I've never even been to in the entire 9 years I've lived in Seattle.
Moving is expensive and stressful, as I'm sure almost everyone reading this knows, but I ended up moving to a new place with no job and no ideas of what kind of jobs were even out where I was moving to, no ideas of what kind of transportation - oh did I forget to mention I don't have a car nor do I know how to drive? there's that too - I literally had nothing to go off of which was insanely stressful. I cannot handle not knowing things. Jumping into something without having an idea is so outside of my comfort zone it has the potential of making me physically ill if the stress is bad enough.
On top of moving to a new place, my roommates and I would also be adding another person to our home, someone I barely knew which added more stress to the whole situation.
As we were trying to find a new home that accommodated everyone's needs, one of my best friends whom I had lived with for about 6 or 7 of the 9 years I've lived in Seattle ended up deciding it'd be better for them and their significant other if they split off from the group and found their own place, which was pretty devastating for me. I was pretty heartbroken over it and didn't like the fact that so much was changing in my life so quickly and I wasn't able to keep up with it much less cope with it.
So to recap a little bit: I was fired, I have zero income, I am moving to a place I know nothing about, one of my best friends is leaving to live with someone else and this is all pretty much happening in less than a month. It messed me up pretty good.
With my friend and their significant other leaving we had to find new people to fill in their spots, so we ended up acquiring my other current roommates/friends' friends and one of their siblings - that sounds a little confusing but essentially it was just a bunch of people I didn't know and I was just freaking out. What if we didn't get along? What if I hated them? What if they hated me? There were just so many variables and I didn't know anything and it was ridiculously hard on me.
Finally we moved to our new place at the end of January 2014 and it is smack dab in the middle of suburbia hell. Just to reiterate, I don't have a car or driving capability, so even if I had access to a car, I couldn't drive myself anywhere anyway. I now have to rely on the unreliable bus system we have here, which not only is it unreliable but it takes roughly an hour by bus versus 11 minutes by car to get to where I need to go. It is ridiculous and incredibly frustrating and also very upsetting.
I feel like I have lost all autonomy. I have to rely on my friends to come get me if I ever want to see them or hang out at all and I have to have my roommates drive me to the places I need to go... It's awful. I hate having to be so dependent on people. I feel like I am a burden to the people I care about in my life and it kills me to constantly need money help from my family and just needing any sort of help at all...
So I began isolating myself and hating myself and also became overwhelmingly emotionally dependent on one of my closest and dearest friends. I needed them around constantly so they could distract me and give me attention so I could function and be happy and when they weren't around I just sank into these awful pits of misery and it was the absolute worst.
There was a lot coaxing and urging from my friend to seek professional help but I was scared - I didn't know what to expect if I did. I was worried that it'd cost too much money and that I'd have to ask my parents for more help - which would mean I would also have to admit to them that I needed mental help. What would they think of me then? What if I have to take medication? That means even more money... What would my friends think of me?
So I didn't do it. I didn't go. I barely even tried. Instead, I medicated myself with my friend's presence. When they were around everything was great. I felt fine and I felt happy. That's all I needed, right?
February came and my friend couldn't take it anymore. I was selfish and I was smothering them and I didn't realize what I was doing to our friendship. They had reached their breaking point and we had a long, miserable, emotionally draining and stressful talk which consisted of essentially what I described: I was smothering them.
They told me they needed space.
My world just crumbled. To me it felt like they didn't want anything to do with me ever again. That everything we used to have was over. They were everything to me. My rock. The only thing I could turn to now that my life had been flipped upside down and now I didn't even have that. I felt like I literally had nothing anymore.
I can't recall a lot of what was going on in my head at that time but I know I isolated myself further and cut myself off everything while also desperately trying to keep up appearances even though I was seriously considering taking my own life. I remember looking up ways to do it. I weighed the pros and cons of various methods of suicide. I know I self-harmed multiple times during that period of time and also lost upwards of 30 pounds from not eating because I was so depressed.
Finally, I came to the conclusion that I could not cope with all of this on my own. I was too scared, ashamed and embarrassed to reach out to anyone that I knew so I finally looked into speaking to a therapist.
I have been seeing a therapist since March 2014, I am still seeing her now. She is amazing and wonderful and I'm so glad I met her. Things are still very rocky right now for me - it's an ongoing process. Some days are okay and other days I don't have the energy or will to even get out of bed or if it's a really bad day I go back to thinking about killing myself which leads me to the whole reason I am creating this GoFundMe.
I have been looking for jobs on my good days and have still found nothing - at least nothing I could do that will not make my mental health even worse - so I still have zero income. I used to be able to pull in a small amount from freelance commission artwork but due to the depression I haven't had the desire or will to draw much less have the heart to charge anyone for the crap I've been barely managing to churn out - not to mention I have a massive backlog of past commissions I still have to finish before I would even dream of asking for more...
So here I am. Asking you amazing and beautiful people if you would consider donating some money so that I can pay rent and bills. My half of the rent is roughly $500 a month including utilities and I think I'd be able to breathe a bit easier and be able to get my life back on track if I could just stop worrying and panicking about getting enough money for the next rent check.
I have enough money to pay for next month (August) with help from my family but I am hoping to raise enough for the next five months to really help me get back on my feet. But honestly, if I get enough for one month of rent that would be such an enormous relief.
/end of story
For those of you who have actually read this whole entire thing - thank you so much, I'm so sorry that it is so long and so involved and messy and crazy but, I felt that a full disclosure would be the best way to go about this and just kind of... explain my whole situation. If I was able to, I'd give you all a cookie... or whatever delicious sweet thing you prefer for getting through it.
GOLD STAR FOR YOU! ☆
A Disclaimer For Family, Friends & Awesome Roommates:
I am not at all pointing fingers or calling out or blaming anyone or anything and none of this is your fault. This is all me. This is all just how I perceived things and how I thought and felt at the time... Things are much better than they were so don't fret. I'm working on it.
I love you all. ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥
My name is Erica, I am a 27-year-old artist from Washington state and I am currently foundering in an incredibly rough patch in my life - I've been recently diagnosed with clinical depression and I am seeing a therapist regularly and am on medication. I've been unemployed for roughly 8 months and have been looking for a job but have been coming up empty. I have absolutely zero income. I am having a hard time paying rent and I end up scrambling to scrape together just enough each month to get by only to do the very same thing the next month. Every penny I manage to come into goes directly into saving for the next month's rent. I am on foodstamps. My student loans have been deferred for yet another 6 months. I haven't purchased anything for myself that wasn't rent or utilities for the last 8 months.
I am really hoping to reach $500 for rent for September as I have enough money for rent next month (August).
My ultimate goal is to reach $2,500 to cover rent and utilities until January 2015 to give me breathing room and peace of mind to really focus on getting better and finding a good job.
THE LONG VERSION
I was trying to think of how to tell you my story in as few words as possible but if I'm going to be asking for help, I feel that people generally like to know details so they know who/what their money is going towards, so, here it goes.
My struggles reached its worst point around December of 2013 - though I've been told that it had probably started when I first began working a call center job for a large and high-end type retail company which I started in October of 2012.
I quickly found the job itself to be incredibly unrewarding (i.e. soulsucking) and it caused a massive amount of stress and unhappiness in my life due to nasty entitled customers and terrible management that encompassed 9 hours a day 5 days a week of my life (with split days off and no chance to change your schedule until management held a shift bid, which always managed to land on one of my days off). I stuck with the job and continued to give it my all as long as I possibly could (I was actually really good at my job) in hopes that I'd be able to move to a different area of the company (ideally being moved to Customer Service via Chat instead of Phones) and also because $14.00 an hour was the most I've ever made in my entire life.
The job was making me absolutely miserable and it didn't look like they were ever going to move me - much to my despair - and despite constant encouragement from my family and friends to try and find another job while still working at that place seemed impossible and I worried I'd never find one that paid as well as what I'd found in this job.
In the end it didn't matter though, I was let go December of 2013 about a week before Christmas because I had managed to miss one too many days due to illnesses that ran rampant through the workplace at least once a month (my work buddies call it "The Call Center Crud" and everyone gets it because you are in a small confined space and everyone gets sick if that one person doesn't stay home). I have reason to believe that wasn't the entire truth behind my being let go because a work buddy of mine accrued more "absent points" than I had and they just decided to overlook that and kept her...
ANYWAY! On top of that whole mess - getting fired and all that jazz - I was also going to be moving to a new place. And it was a place I've never even been to in the entire 9 years I've lived in Seattle.
Moving is expensive and stressful, as I'm sure almost everyone reading this knows, but I ended up moving to a new place with no job and no ideas of what kind of jobs were even out where I was moving to, no ideas of what kind of transportation - oh did I forget to mention I don't have a car nor do I know how to drive? there's that too - I literally had nothing to go off of which was insanely stressful. I cannot handle not knowing things. Jumping into something without having an idea is so outside of my comfort zone it has the potential of making me physically ill if the stress is bad enough.
On top of moving to a new place, my roommates and I would also be adding another person to our home, someone I barely knew which added more stress to the whole situation.
As we were trying to find a new home that accommodated everyone's needs, one of my best friends whom I had lived with for about 6 or 7 of the 9 years I've lived in Seattle ended up deciding it'd be better for them and their significant other if they split off from the group and found their own place, which was pretty devastating for me. I was pretty heartbroken over it and didn't like the fact that so much was changing in my life so quickly and I wasn't able to keep up with it much less cope with it.
So to recap a little bit: I was fired, I have zero income, I am moving to a place I know nothing about, one of my best friends is leaving to live with someone else and this is all pretty much happening in less than a month. It messed me up pretty good.
With my friend and their significant other leaving we had to find new people to fill in their spots, so we ended up acquiring my other current roommates/friends' friends and one of their siblings - that sounds a little confusing but essentially it was just a bunch of people I didn't know and I was just freaking out. What if we didn't get along? What if I hated them? What if they hated me? There were just so many variables and I didn't know anything and it was ridiculously hard on me.
Finally we moved to our new place at the end of January 2014 and it is smack dab in the middle of suburbia hell. Just to reiterate, I don't have a car or driving capability, so even if I had access to a car, I couldn't drive myself anywhere anyway. I now have to rely on the unreliable bus system we have here, which not only is it unreliable but it takes roughly an hour by bus versus 11 minutes by car to get to where I need to go. It is ridiculous and incredibly frustrating and also very upsetting.
I feel like I have lost all autonomy. I have to rely on my friends to come get me if I ever want to see them or hang out at all and I have to have my roommates drive me to the places I need to go... It's awful. I hate having to be so dependent on people. I feel like I am a burden to the people I care about in my life and it kills me to constantly need money help from my family and just needing any sort of help at all...
So I began isolating myself and hating myself and also became overwhelmingly emotionally dependent on one of my closest and dearest friends. I needed them around constantly so they could distract me and give me attention so I could function and be happy and when they weren't around I just sank into these awful pits of misery and it was the absolute worst.
There was a lot coaxing and urging from my friend to seek professional help but I was scared - I didn't know what to expect if I did. I was worried that it'd cost too much money and that I'd have to ask my parents for more help - which would mean I would also have to admit to them that I needed mental help. What would they think of me then? What if I have to take medication? That means even more money... What would my friends think of me?
So I didn't do it. I didn't go. I barely even tried. Instead, I medicated myself with my friend's presence. When they were around everything was great. I felt fine and I felt happy. That's all I needed, right?
February came and my friend couldn't take it anymore. I was selfish and I was smothering them and I didn't realize what I was doing to our friendship. They had reached their breaking point and we had a long, miserable, emotionally draining and stressful talk which consisted of essentially what I described: I was smothering them.
They told me they needed space.
My world just crumbled. To me it felt like they didn't want anything to do with me ever again. That everything we used to have was over. They were everything to me. My rock. The only thing I could turn to now that my life had been flipped upside down and now I didn't even have that. I felt like I literally had nothing anymore.
I can't recall a lot of what was going on in my head at that time but I know I isolated myself further and cut myself off everything while also desperately trying to keep up appearances even though I was seriously considering taking my own life. I remember looking up ways to do it. I weighed the pros and cons of various methods of suicide. I know I self-harmed multiple times during that period of time and also lost upwards of 30 pounds from not eating because I was so depressed.
Finally, I came to the conclusion that I could not cope with all of this on my own. I was too scared, ashamed and embarrassed to reach out to anyone that I knew so I finally looked into speaking to a therapist.
I have been seeing a therapist since March 2014, I am still seeing her now. She is amazing and wonderful and I'm so glad I met her. Things are still very rocky right now for me - it's an ongoing process. Some days are okay and other days I don't have the energy or will to even get out of bed or if it's a really bad day I go back to thinking about killing myself which leads me to the whole reason I am creating this GoFundMe.
I have been looking for jobs on my good days and have still found nothing - at least nothing I could do that will not make my mental health even worse - so I still have zero income. I used to be able to pull in a small amount from freelance commission artwork but due to the depression I haven't had the desire or will to draw much less have the heart to charge anyone for the crap I've been barely managing to churn out - not to mention I have a massive backlog of past commissions I still have to finish before I would even dream of asking for more...
So here I am. Asking you amazing and beautiful people if you would consider donating some money so that I can pay rent and bills. My half of the rent is roughly $500 a month including utilities and I think I'd be able to breathe a bit easier and be able to get my life back on track if I could just stop worrying and panicking about getting enough money for the next rent check.
I have enough money to pay for next month (August) with help from my family but I am hoping to raise enough for the next five months to really help me get back on my feet. But honestly, if I get enough for one month of rent that would be such an enormous relief.
/end of story
For those of you who have actually read this whole entire thing - thank you so much, I'm so sorry that it is so long and so involved and messy and crazy but, I felt that a full disclosure would be the best way to go about this and just kind of... explain my whole situation. If I was able to, I'd give you all a cookie... or whatever delicious sweet thing you prefer for getting through it.
GOLD STAR FOR YOU! ☆
A Disclaimer For Family, Friends & Awesome Roommates:
I am not at all pointing fingers or calling out or blaming anyone or anything and none of this is your fault. This is all me. This is all just how I perceived things and how I thought and felt at the time... Things are much better than they were so don't fret. I'm working on it.
I love you all. ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥
Organizer
Erica A. Walker
Organizer
Bellevue, WA
