I’m Georgia, a queer disabled comics artist and teacher. I have struggled my whole life with chronic health issues, and undiagnosed disability (until the age of 35), making my work and finances incredibly unstable.

On February 1st, I emailed my employer asking for an HR process to resolve issues with his behaviour. On February 4th, my employer responded by heaping intense and inappropriate praise onto me, and cancelling my contract citing incompatibility.

With one email and no notice, I lost 50% of my income for the year.

The communication between us that followed is disturbing, confusing, and ultimately a massive manipulation and abuse of power.

Until this happened, I considered my employer to be a friend and trusted collaborator, as he has supported me through work and friendship as I experienced massive fluctuations in my health over the last 5 years. That relationship is irreparably broken, and so I am forced to prematurely end my other contract with him, which represents the other 50% of my income for the year.

He has not faced a single consequence for his actions, while I have had my life brought to the brink of collapse.

In 2024, I experienced a profoundly disabling autistic burnout and was

unable to work for almost a year. My finances, and my life structure, were decimated by this health experience, and this is why I signed on to work so intensively this year with a podcast and a new teaching program, to stabilize my life and pay the expenses that have grown because I missed so many payments during my burnout. It costs so much money to come back from that. But I had a plan, and set income in the form of two contracts with this employer — and I did nothing wrong, but it’s all gone now.

The stress of this betrayal has reduced me to needing friends to help with every day tasks for basic functioning, let alone the added work of trying to get accountability and justice from the people responsible for empowering this man without oversight.

While I am well-supported by my friends, the main thing I need to survive this is money.

I need…

$2,000 to get my home insurance back

$9,000 my bills paid for at least 3 months (my fees have all gone up since I defaulted during my last burnout)

$3,000 for physical psychological therapy to restore my baseline and process this trauma (over 3 months)

$1,000 to take my podcast back from this man (hosting, domain, and website fees for the next year)

So far, this experience has destroyed my sense of trust in choosing collaborators, and any sense that the world has my back is deeply strained.

I want to nurture and support myself to not carry these feelings beyond this person. I’m asking for help to get through this with a new sense of trust and capability — if you know me, you already know I’ll pay it forward beyond measure.

Thanks for being here.