Amory's Soft Reset Button Fund

Hey. Name's Amelia. I'm trans in south Louisiana, and between my family, my to-be-determined mental illnesses, and my locale... I need a soft reset button on my life, and I'm taking all the help I can get.

You're probably wondering how I got in this position. I'll try to condense as much as I can.

Let's rewind to undergrad. On my way out, in the last year and a half, I was faced with a couple things. My Gender Thoughts really started revving up, and I was simultaneously unsure about where my life would go after college. For a time I'd wanted to be a professor or something similarly academic, but my family talked me into talking myself into law school - which, while I don't regret going, I knew in my heart it wasn't my calling. But I didn't know what to do otherwise, so I moved twelve hundred miles from home on an unbelievable offer. It was a double-edged sword. I was able to be out, to make connections, and to live as myself for three years - it gave me life that I had not had, that I had scarcely imagined when I really started to find myself. On the other hand, I suffered deeply traumatic relationships, strained relations with my transphobic father after being outed, and multiplied anxieties about the world to come. I was ground to dust, with no interest in anything I'd studied or worked for to that point. I also burned through thousands of dollars in savings on myself out of both a euphoric rush for gender validation in my time away, and an increasingly isolating hermitage (pre-pandemic!) that left me falling even further away from the people I'd met, befriended, and loved to that point.

The unsustainability of it all led me back home, where I moved back in with my family. I'll spare my family history, but it's been as tumultuous as it has been supportive. I can't deny everything that's been done for me, but I similarly can't ignore the history of divorces and remarriages and commotion as a child, and fights about trust and lifestyle choices and every little thing under the sun as an adult. It was undesirable, but it was flail in the ocean or crash in the nest, and I thought in moving back I would at least have some stability and room to breathe again. But it wasn't long before my mother succumbed to a stroke at the beginning of 2020, the effects of which combined with her bipolar disorder resulted in likely the singularly most emotionally-draining saga I might ever endure. The coronavirus pandemic created a new form of isolation for me in the meantime, and as things started to reopen, I fell back on an opportunity to get a certification to work at the family business (which my mother owns and my father manages).