The last two years took almost everything I had — and most of it hit in a single six-month stretch. I moved to Michigan when my mom's Alzheimer's got worse, leaving behind my home, my car, and a ten-year relationship. For a while, things were really good. Then it all came at once: Mom died on December 31, 2024. I lost my job. I left an 18-month abusive relationship. And I had a stroke. Six months. Grief, upheaval, and recovery, all on top of each other. Between the stroke, the grief, and what the abuse did to me, I lost things I didn't expect. My executive function is largely gone, and the brain fog is ten times what it was. I spent three months in speech therapy, and I now work with two therapists, two caseworkers, and several agencies, trying to get help with basic daily tasks I can't reliably manage anymore. I'm also in the middle of new diagnoses and specialist referrals for several chronic conditions.

Unemployment carried me through October 2025. Since then there's been no income while I wait on my SSDI claim — a process that can take many months or more. Many of you know me from ten years in this world: rescue transport, fundraising, the hard cases nobody else would take. I've been there for the euthanasias, on the floor hugging them at the end, and I've sat with you after, when the fur babies we both loved were gone. This is my community, and these are my people. It kills me to ask — ever — but especially now, after some of you already answered when I reached out these last months. Coming back again is the hardest part of this. I'm not asking for a handout. I'm asking for a bridge: a way to get from here to there without losing the ground under me, my home, and the three animals who depend on me. Rocky has been my failsafe since 2011, and a lot of you watched him grow up. He and Winston are seniors now, mostly blind, in kidney failure, a little dementia — and still happy. Sebastian's nine and still runs the house like a boss. They've held me through every bit of this, and I'm asking for help so I can keep holding them. Your support covers my essentials — power, water, trash, phone, internet, vet care — and lets me start paying down the medical bills this left behind. Surviving is the work right now, and so is the memoir I started as part of my healing. Every dollar helps, and so does sharing this — sometimes that matters even more. Thank you for being part of the net under me.