Help Elizabeth recover from 2020

Hi, My name is Elizabeth. If you know me, you probably know that I'm a singer, love my wife more than life, and come from a fundamentalist Mormon background. For my whole life, I've been on my own - when I left home, it was because I applied for college, worked my way through, and came out on the other side with a degree. My family couldn't and didn't help me financially, and while I was in school, I struggled to stay housed and struggled to keep enough money together to graduate.

I never told my friends about how much I struggled, and when I decided to apply for grad school, I went into debt to make the auditions, and I bet everything on getting into my dream school. When I was working on my masters, I barely ate, barely slept, and tried to wrap my mind around the knowledge that the student loans I was taking on would be with me for the rest of my life, but it felt like that was the only way forward.

I spent almost ten years in New York City after grad school, trying to make a life and career for myself without asking for help from anyone. In my experience, asking for help only means that people will cut you out of their life. I managed to build a reasonably successful way of life, and had finally finished digging myself out of everything except for student debt, all while pretending that I was in the same class of people as my friends and peers.

Today, I'm writing this because I never recovered from the financial disaster of 2020, and I have been trying to recover and rebuild alone without telling my friends, family, or wife. In 2021, we had a wedding, thanks to the generosity of my wife's family, and I'll be eternally grateful for that, but even at that time I was struggling to catch up and make the behind-the-scenes nuts and bolts come together. I thought that if I could make it just a little longer, I could have a hope at having a normal life without being judged. Unfortunately, I don't have anything else left, and I am at the end of what I'm capable of.

I have spent the last three years trying to diversify my income, and I have spent every waking hour trying to find extra money. I currently have job applications at multiple companies and am doing everything I can to meet my obligations. This month, my family of origin cut me off because of my gay relationship, and old trauma has been resurfacing, which has made it impossible for me to keep up the pretense that I am ok.

I am so deeply sorry to anyone and everyone that I have let down, and I will do my best until the end of my life to make amends for any harm that I have caused.

Today, I need help. I'm asking for whatever help anyone is willing to offer. The money will be used to clear old debt taken on before I met my wife and to make sure that I have a clean slate moving into whatever work I can do in the future. Feel free to ask me any questions, and thank you for reading this far.