Help Andrew survive unemployment, evacuation, and wildfires

EDIT:

I’ve been unemployed for nearly a year and just had to evacuate. I have no idea if my rental unit will get burned or not or what the future has in store for me. I live in North Pasadena and my place is only a few blocks from the mandatory evacuation zone and the fire. I am currently staying in Irvine with some very dear friends.

I started this in April 2024 and it has been a lifesaver as my UI covered rent and that’s it. The market for jobs is awful and I can’t seem to get a callback. And I have no idea how things will be after the fires are put out. I wouldn’t know what I would do without this. I could have been evicted months ago after my UI ran out.

My name is Andrew and I have had a challenging five years. On Jan. 1, 2019, I found my mother and her killer dead of gunshot wounds to the head. She had told him that things were over between them.

He didn’t like that, so after they returned from a New Year’s Eve Party, he got his gun, shot her point-blank between the eyes and then turned the gun on himself.

My family in the 90s, before the divorce, before everything fell apart.

I was at home when it happened and probably missed out on getting shot myself as the gun was located near my room and I usually woke up in the middle of the night. To say that it was a traumatic experience is selling it short. In under a month, I lost not only my mother, but also my home and my job.

My FMLA was rejected and as I was about to revise it, the newspaper I worked for in town was sold and I was basically forced to quit because I was in no condition to work.

I lived with my college roommate and his wife for nearly two years and then moved to North Dakota in October 2020 to work as the editor of a weekly newspaper. I lived alone and was thousands of miles from any friends and family.

I moved to Los Angeles in March 2022 after deciding I needed a change of pace and to be in a larger city with more opportunities and closer to people I knew. This decision was accelerated by my then landlord who sold the house in the middle of February and asked if I could be out by March 1. I had 14 days to pack up and move and also find a new place. And I did so.

In Los Angeles, I found greater stability than I’d known since my mother was murdered. I have made new friends here and generally

made a life that made me feel happier than I had been in a while. I found a job in media in May 2022 and worked there since then.

In December 2023, I was informed by my boss that they would be replacing me. When he and I discussed my role, we both agreed it wasn’t the best fit for me in terms of my skills and interests. I thought he was going to suggest moving me to more of a writing role. Then he started talking about what I saw next for my career and putting up an advertisement for the role.

My initial replacement quit after one day and I agreed to stay on until they found another replacement and to train them.

And I did so, because I didn’t want to threaten any shot I had at receiving unemployment and I didn’t want to make life difficult for my coworkers, because I generally liked them all.

I believe the decision to move on from me was due to a small error I made. I left a company off a list. They had reached out to me about it in October 2022. I added them to the database of more than 3,000 companies and 10,000 individuals I maintained. But I forgot to include a point of contact. I may have been distracted by a coworker who needed my assistance or forgotten. It was a regrettable error, but one easily fixed.

It was my first year on the job and part of a busy time working on a big project that collected every list published that year. A day or two later, the company was hit with a cyberattack and we lost all our machines, so thoughts of that company were far from my mind and I lost roughly a week of time for the project. I was also in a car accident not long after that, so the company was far from my mind.

When it came time for the list, I had forgotten about the company because six months had passed and because they were not on the previous year’s list, they were out of date so I did not include them to avoid inaccuracy.

The company never contacted me about not appearing on the list, but they contacted the publisher. And he wanted answers immediately, so I had no real time to think through or research the cause, but over the course of the interrogation, I was able to figure out what had happened.

At the same time I was emailing about the error, I was on the phone with my nurse practitioner coming up with a safety plan because my suicidal ideation was high. I struggled to come up with reasons to live.

This was just before Thanksgiving and in the middle of the big end of year project, so a time of major stress. It was my fifth holiday season without my mother, so it was an especially difficult one.

The publisher made what seemed like a minor, yet regrettable error into something much more serious, so I even offered to fall on my sword to help appease the company, who I assume were threatening to pull their ads. Not the case.

I later learned the publisher had been looking through my email because I found drafts of them in my Outlook. He did not like how I responded to the company, but that was never brought up to me. A shame because I am open to feedback and criticism. It would not surprise me if he made a decision then about my future but wanted to wait until the big project was largely done before giving me the axe. It felt very unfair to lose my job over that, considering how demanding it is and the low pay. I was making what my predecessor made straight out of college in 2017 while I came in with a decade of experience and grad school under my belt. They wanted champagne results for Kool-Aid pay.

I’ve been looking for a new role for well over a year and have had poor luck, it’s rare I can get an interview and if I do, there is typically no follow up.

I am receiving unemployment, it covers the cost of my rent with very little left over for food, utilities and other key bills. It is roughly half of what I earned a month in that role and that wasn’t nearly enough to keep me going.

I have been able to survive since February thanks to the kindness of friends and strangers, but I thought a GoFundMe might be a more practical way to keep me afloat as I try to find a new job or other ways to earn money.

There is a waitlist for the delivery apps, I got ghosted on a bartending job, and I never hear back from service jobs. I have a few irons in the fire. My intention with this GoFundMe is to stay afloat, pay back bills, and prevent myself from losing everything.

My hope for this GoFundMe is that it will allow me to hold on while I find a new role in Los Angeles or perhaps to relocate if necessary. I would prefer to remain here because job aside, I’ve been much happier here than I have in a long time and I believe it is a big reason I have been able to heal from my traumatic past.

I know it is a tremendously difficult time for everyone and that there is so much need around the world, but even just sharing this GoFundMe would be a huge help. My hope is that once I am back on my feet, I can pay the kindness forward.

My mother did a lot of pro-bono work and was a very generous person and I’ve tried to live that way to honor her memory, bring meaning to my life, and to find a silver-lining to something so horrific.

I am trying to stay optimistic, but this is the most difficult situation I’ve been in since my mother was murdered.

Additionally, I started a newsletter last year and you can support me by becoming a paying subscriber to Slouching Towards McDonaldland