Hi, I'm Marcie. I'm a highly disabled trans woman living in the UK.

To put it simply, I have lived my entire life in one of the most deprived areas of England and for the past 5 years, "home" has eaten away at my mental health to the point of countless breakdowns and bouts of ideation. My physical health has deteriorated to the point of being barely able to walk even 20 meters without significant pain.

I am trying my very best to get out of this, but even in receipt of disability and other benefits, the condition of this house is actively hostile to my existence. It is my parents' home, the place I've lived my entire life. I barely am able to leave. Just getting out of my room is a multi-step procedure involving dismantling my desk. Rats actively gnaw through the walls and my bedroom. I hear them constantly and have often had to take a bat to their hiding places just to get them to shut up.

This all started in January 2021. My grandma had just come out of hospital after being diagnosed with a brain tumor (whom we called Boris, after the former Prime Minister) and subsequently also getting COVID during her stay in one of the wards. The night before Valentine's Day she passed after we reconfigured our front room for her palliative care. The grief the family suffered was enormous. We all did, that I can't deny. She helped my mother, who is also disabled, keep up with housework and helped take care of my younger brother and sister. The hole she left in our hearts was massive.

In the years after, the family deteriorated. My older sister left the house within 6 months, she had been Grandma's primary carer when the home nurses weren't present. My younger sister went through puberty, and as it turned out all of us are autistic, and she's a manipulator. Constantly provoking, arguing, even occasionally getting physical. My younger brother kept his head down, focused on school, as did my Dad, who focused on work that barely earned him enough to keep the bills paid each week. My mother began to supplement her various pain medications with bottles of Whisky.

The house deteriorated. Rubbish uncollected, left strewn about. Rats infiltrating via the connected attics of the row of houses we live in, and staying because the filth could never be permanently cleared up. The kitchen became, for lack of a better word, unhygienic and unmaintained. Even the bathroom became a changing room as we lost rooms to trash mounds. I've tried so hard to clear it up, even offering to pay for waste removal services when I had managed to build up the money. My parents refused out of stubborn pride. They refuse to let anyone see the condition of the house, even as it gets worse.

The backroom of the house

The kitchen, connected to the backroom of the house.

The single bathroom in the house.

I haven't slept in a bed for those 5 years. My room has ended up with its own trash mounds because I cannot remove the trash, and that was after it had already been growing black mould on the walls and in the ceiling due to it being converted from a bathroom (wallpaper on tile is not a good combination).

My food has been forced to be either what little I can make given the circumstances, or to be constant takeaway. I miss having food I can make in a kitchen. It becomes this circular, self-perpetuating cycle of constant piling trash that I just can't escape. I have nightmares about rats gnawing on me.

My bedroom door from the head of my "sleeping position".

Behind the head of my "sleeping position".

Above the head of my "sleeping position".

This escape of mine is something I've been trying to do for a very, very long time. Firstly, I have nobody who can act as a guarantor. My parents have their legal capacity to act as such restricted. Not only that, but they have control over my benefits, as they were originally claimed when I was a minor. It's almost like a conservatorship. They've said they would give the control to me, but they've been saying that for years.

The other thing is my disabilities, my mental health. After this long in a dysfunctional household, with ASD, cPTSD, depression, et cetera, I don't think I can live with someone else. Not for a long while. I need space of my own after living 5 years in effectively a 7 by 3 foot box.

I thought I had no escape until now. Since June I've managed to get a job, it's been stable, I have income, but I can't quite make enough to build up what I need.

So here's where we're at. I think I can get by on £2,000. Ideally I would like to raise £6,000 and get myself somewhere where I know my support network can do just that - support me. That means moving a significant distance (for me) and I can't drive. However, I will make do with what housing I can get locally if things don't work out.

£2,500 total would cover a deposit and a month's rent at the most ideal spot I've found, which is enough to get ahead of the curve. Another £1,200 (£3,700 total) would cover a guarantor company (though I could possibly work out a payment plan there). The rest is to cover moving costs, as well as keep me afloat in case something sinks.

Anything after would be shared with my partner of nearly 7 years who has been out of work for the past 18 months and has been unable to get going