Help Nyx Clear Student Debt and Thrive

Hello, I'm Nyx, but most people call me Nyxie.

I'm a 34-year-old Nonbinary Trans Femme in the Midwest United States.

And I'm drowning from past mistakes.

The short version: I am asking for $15,000 so I can clear my student loans and have enough liquidity to start tackling the rest of my debt.

If you're still reading, here's the long version:

My name is Nyx, I'm 34, an amateur photographer and cosplayer, I work in the art field with lovely coworkers, and I love my life ever since I transitioned in June of 2024.

Before that time, I struggled through life, either in career, financially, or emotionally. Before my transition, I didn't feel alive. I hated existing. Every waking moment was like watching through a TV monitor and questioning what the point of it all was and considering finally pressing the off button on the remote... I was already dead inside. There was a hole in my heart I couldn't fill, and unlike my father and my cousins, I tried to fill it with shopping instead of alcohol or hard drugs. Card games, collecting, anything to keep my brain away from the horrors that was my own miserable life and chasing the serotonin where I could get it.

In that time, I managed to move, find the love of my life, start to feel happy, but something was still missing... So I jumped from job to job, spent more, chased that feeling of being worth something. In the process, I tried for an IT career, but that didn't work out. The truth is I'm not a capitalist or a business-savvy person. I've only tried to do what was right, and I never wanted a promotion or any kind of advantage at the expense of someone else.

For that, we took out a $31k private student loan, and I graduated from that ripoff of a trade school in March 2020. Obviously, as you can guess, I didn't exactly land immediately at a job paying $50k a year like I thought I would. I make only about $16k part-time now... and it's all tied in debts. We've managed to pay half of it off during this time.

Lock-down happened, the world happened. During that time, I came out as Nonbinary but hadn't quite figured out the true thing I was missing... I should have dug a little deeper.

Since March 2020, I've been paying $600 a month for a career that didn't work out. I've since gone back to an old job that I truly love, and because of it, I finally was able to figure out what was missing: I was trans.

I transitioned in June 2024 during pride, and I've never been happier. The problem is I still owe that $600 a month... which equates to about half my income every month, literally one of my two checks.

The fact also is that in total I'm actually $50k in the hole. $15k is in student loans, the rest is effectively in credit cards. This isn't my biggest debt, but it's my biggest bill.

Lock-down and IT job hopping meant we did what we had to do to survive, rent on credit cards, etc. We could have done better, but this is how life's turned out for me.

I've tried to earn more, side hustle, more "small businesses" than I can count, eliminate what we could, but either the car breaks down again, I don't get that promotion, or things go sideways for other reasons...

My luck has not been great the last 30 years, and my upbringing didn't exactly prepare me for this world in ways it probably could, but blame of the past does nothing to assist in the present. Years of feeling nothing didn't exactly leave me with a nest egg and retirement plans.

But transitioning saved my life. I've gone from feeling ready to die and total apathy to truly smiling and loving my life and the people in it, my friends, my projects. The world is finally worth living in... There is, in fact, good in this world, Mx Nyxie...

I admit I wasn't fully prepared for the state of the world after the election... my last payment date for the student loan of Sept 2027 seems like an eternity away... the fact is I could be killed at any minute, my rights stripped away, or disappeared, just for being myself.

I still don't regret it. I never will. I'll die as myself. The last year of my life has been the best I've ever had. If I die tomorrow it was worth it.

But, genuinely, I feel like I'm just getting started.

So you might be wondering why I'm not doing a GoFundMe for fleeing or something instead, given the situation of the world.

The truth is, I probably wouldn't survive if I fled. My support network, my friends, and my family keep me going. My love and my home are here, I've obviously never been much of a hustler, my skill set is fairly niche... I'm not sure I'm of any particular desire for any country, not even my own...and even if I moved, in this modern age, the debt would still find me. No, the fact is I'm too broke to flee. So I'm just trying to stay, enjoy what time I have, and maybe hopefully we live to see a better world. I have to have hope. It's the only thing I'm flush with.

So, I'm asking for $15,000, so I can take care of my student debt, free up half my income, and start to snowball the rest of my mistakes... or at least have the money to enjoy what time I have left. Nothing in this will be spent until $15k gets made. I will not be adding any form of bank account until then.

I have dreams, of course. I want to go back to school and finish my original art degree. I want to go back again and major in photography. I want to start a small studio and focus on queer people and communities and do my part with what skills I do have to better my town and all the lovely people in it. I want to have surgeries to more align my body to how I want to be. I want to be able to afford the clothes that make me feel like myself, not what I used to be. I want to travel and visit my lovely friends from afar who make me smile and inspire me...

I want to be able to afford to live, after 30 years of wanting to die.

Thank you for reading.