Support Alex's Journey to Stability

Hi, I'm Alex! I'm a 29-year-old trans woman living in a toxic environment that I've been unable to make it out of on my own. I've been living with my parents or under their roof for my whole life, and for the past 11 years of my adult life, I've been struggling to find a way out of it to no avail. Prior to this, I was given ill preparation for becoming an adult. The environment was abusive and manipulative. My mental health issues came to a head at 17, but as soon as I became a legal adult, that responsibility to "just figure it out" was placed on me.

I suffer from several mental health disorders. They stem partially from my upbringing and cause me to invariably become incapacitated to a level where employment isn't really feasible. I have been struggling against the systems put in place to "help" those with disabilities since being diagnosed and told that I qualify for help. I've made multiple attempts to make a life for myself outside of the avenues of traditional employment and social services, but have managed to make none stick.

One of the limiting factors for me is that I struggle to ask for help, so even making this GoFundMe and requesting assistance is a huge step outside of my comfort zone. If you've made it this far, I'd like to thank you for taking the time to read this. If you're wondering how you can help, then any small donation would be greatly appreciated. I'm hoping to gather enough funding to get my own place so that I can escape the toxicity I've been steeped in my whole life and become stable. Once I have my feet under me and I can get into a stable routine, I'll have a better chance at making things work, but the environment I'm in makes that infeasible as things currently stand. My current living situation amounts to indentured servitude, which interrupts my attempts to leverage my skills to support myself.

In order to get out of here this is what I've calculated is needed:

Estimated monthly cost of living:

Median rent: $2138

Food cost: $300

Car insurance cost: $65+ (raises over time)

Phone bill: $60

Internet bill: $75

Average medical insurance cost: $420

Toiletries: $20

Hobby: $200

Gas: $150

Unexpected costs: $200

Subtotal: $3628

Estimated yearly cost of living

Median rent: $25656

Food cost: $3600

Car insurance cost: $780+ (raises over time)

Phone bill: $720 ($500 if purchased in one year increments)

Internet bill: $900

Average medical insurance cost: $5040

Toiletries: $240

Hobby: $2400

Gas: $1800

Unexpected costs: $2400

Subtotal: $43536 ($43316 if buying a year of phone service at once).

I set the goal at $65k so that if I manage to reach it I have a bit of extra margin in case prices go up suddenly in that time. I'm hoping that one year is enough time to get stable.

A bit more about me personally, I'm a technology experimentalist and I work within the means available to me, whether by working a job until my mind imploded or by repurposing thrift finds and literal junk.

Unfortunately the lack of stability has made this nearly impossible to advantage for becoming stable. It's been a loop, and I'm hoping to break that loop but the stability is a foundational step for that.

Some things I've done in past under these constraints are as follows:

Homemade Soldering Iron

I put this together in a pinch but I actually ended up using it for quite a while. The heating element on my soldering iron died and I didn't have the money to replace it, even with a cheap one.

I did have spare parts for 3D printers from when I was working. Those were (and are) planned to help with maintaining my fiscal stability once I have the flywheel going.

So because I had what I had, I made a custom heat block with threading for a soldering iron tip mounted onto the old soldering iron to use it as a handle.

The results speak for themselves.

(Mostly) Scrap Computer

This was built from almost entirely salvaged components. I took the CPU from an old fish finder, the logic chips and terminals from my scrap bin, and had some boards that I got for free.

The only things I purchased were the RAM and flash memory. I would have used other options I had available, but the work would have been more than finding an odd job to buy them.

It's not much, but this light is entirely driven by software which proves it works.

The plan is to extend this with a screen and some peripherals, but it's just a hobby project and is currently on the shelf.

Speed Printing on Cheap Hardware

Remember the 3D printers I mentioned? A bit back, I got soft challenged by a friend to try and beat his speed printing times knowing full well that I had hardware that was about a tenth of the cost.

So naturally, I accepted the challenge and put in about three weeks of software and hardware tuning. I got to double his time, but it was still way better than either of us expected.

I unfortunately don't have one that times the whole fastest run with a stopwatch in frame, because my fastest results weren't repeatable. I did, however, make it a way better machine simply by putting in work.

Now if you're at this point and wondering why I haven't made these skills support myself, that comes down partially to mental health issues, and partially to the environment causing those issues to amplify. I'm confident that I can do much more if I can bootstrap that stability.