Help Allen C. Get From A to B

(art is messy because the stress has been keeping me awake and the lack of rest exacerbates my movement disorder.)

Summary: My landlord is kicking me out with a 30 day warning and staying in New York is no longer financially feasible. I'm moving to Chicago for lower cost of living while maintaining the same minimum wage and as I'm being kicked for rent issues, I don't have the means yet to make that happen entirely on my own.

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Hi, I never thought I'd be on this end of one of these campaigns so soon, especially so suddenly, but I'm in a desperate sort of situation that demands I put my ego aside and grovel.

My name is Allen and I moved to NYC at 19 to attend the School of Visual Arts. It's been seven years since, having graduated in 2021, a Zoom broadcast I watched alone in the dark of a Brooklyn apartment. After a short stint working in grocery order fulfillment, I began a wonderful and fulfilling three years scooping ice cream at local small business I could walk to within the length of two songs. As one might assume, winter cut my hours and therefore my pay drastically.

Each year I would go on partial unemployment for a few months to make up for some of those missing shifts, but each year rent got higher and those benefits stayed the same, so beginning October 2024 I had to pay each month's rent in parts, whatever I had, the moment I'd get it. Incrementally, due to weeks of illness in addition to the inevitability of winter holidays, those parts inched later and later, smaller and smaller, creating a sort of neverending game of minimum wage catch-up in an atmosphere that couldn't support someone without his, as my landlord put it, "act together."

I'm shy to admit my disabilities do actually hinder me in a way that's difficult to handle gracefully, if these drawbacks can be handled at all. They're all neurological, it is literally "all in my head," including an expression of combination-type ADHD one professional I'd spoken to described as "the worst severity [she'd] ever seen," in addition to a myriad of other comorbid conditions that lead to emotional dysregulation, sensory processing issues, even an abnormally premature case of Essential Benign Tremor that will only worsten as I age. All of these things together place me in the odd gray area separating disability benefit elligibility and the functional capacity necessary to safely handle the workload I'd need to take on to remain here.

These things about myself are my own responsibility, just because a lot of things are especially difficult for me does not undo my own adulthood. They're my limits to navigate, which means the consequences of when my efforts fail fall on my shoulders alone and all I can really ask for is compassion.

That being said, I missed a single text on March 10th, 2025. I saw it, I saw something else, as I far as I was concerned, that text ceased to have ever existed.

14 days later, my landlord requested a meeting with my roommate and me the same evening, and that mistakenly ignored text was seemingly the final straw. The last time we'd spoken, she'd given me the deadline of August, when our lease was up, to recover a consistent and complete rent payment pattern. On March 24th, I was told I had 30 days to collect four years of tenancy and vacate the premises.

By April 24th, my belongings will be in self-storage and I will become functionally homeless and entirely dependent on the kindness of others, much like the existence of this campaign itself.

Assuming everything goes according to plan, I will continue working at my current job at the ice cream shop I'd mentioned earlier for another 2-3 months to save up as much as I can of the goal stated above to get where I'm going, which I will "donate" to the campaign accordingly for both safe keeping and full transparency.

COST ESTIMATE BREAKDOWN

Storage: $125

Rental car: $150

Gas: $125

Rent: $2700 ($900 x 3)

Utilities: $450

The remaining $450 is both emergency padding as well as an effort to keep me fed in the meantime until I have Illinois food stamps figured out.

Thank you for your time!