Our Journey to Tucson

Hello and happy existence to you, dear reader!

I'm Lindsey! I'm a 35-year-old mother of two, happily married to my husband of 10 years, Chase, and I'm asking for help to make my dream come true. What dream, you ask?

To nourish and grow minds.

In 2012, after my first long battle with depression, I graduated from the University of North Texas with a degree in English Literature. I loved my education, and I didn't want it to stop...but FAFSA requirements had other plans for me. Funding ran out while I was finishing up my degree, so my double major in Education fell through, leaving me with a minor and no teaching certification. My dream wasn't one I was willing to give up on, though! I applied for a program called Teach for America straight out of university...and was sadly declined an offer of employment after showing up late to an interview (on a college campus in another city with heavy roadwork--it's a whole saga, don't let me bore you with the unfortunate details).

I tutored some before entering into the corporate world of customer service in late 2013, joining the support team of a massive Fortune 50 call center machine. For 8 years, I worked there in hopes that I could move into training and become a teacher of corporate minds, much like I had once held hopes of teaching high schoolers the love of reading...but that dream, much like my Teach for America aspiration, was in vain. Time and time again, despite my consistently exceptional performance, I was denied for promotions or lateral movement within my company. I began to grow frustrated and resentful. To make things worse, my job was becoming gradually less pleasant as new policies were introduced to increase revenue at the expense of the customer experience. I was pushed into escalations and conflict mitigation, to the point that I was being paid to be a verbal punching bag by our customers. Over the years, my job had developed into a hostile work environment. Then Covid-19 happened and everything got so much worse.

Life was hard for everyone during those months of lockdown, so I won't dwell too much on that dark chapter. I worked from home before the pandemic, so my daily life didn't change a lot at first, but the attitude of the environment changed drastically. Everyone was angry, always. For 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, I sat in front of a pair of computer monitors, tethered to my desk by a corded earpiece, with my time monitored to the very second. And for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, I was verbally abused, with no support from my employer. I was allowed 30 seconds between calls to be used to finish notes about the transaction...but I used those seconds to hold back tears.

During this time, my husband, who made less than a living wage working at a hospital during Covid, left the workforce to become self-employed, working in buying and selling collectibles. A couple of months in, it hit me hard: I, like Chase, was burning out in an industry I didn't even want to be in. I had been taking time to cope with my rising depression using unpaid leave protected by the Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA), and with Chase's income, we were scraping by. I started looking for employment elsewhere. But then my mom had a medical emergency in the big ice storm in February '21, while she was traveling in Texas. Chase and I drove the 12 hours to Dallas and stayed with friends for a week while she was hospitalized, and my FMLA leave was exhausted. My company wouldn't allow any further leave for me to take care of my mom....so I finally quit.

Life became more challenging during this time. My mother, who helped tremendously with childcare, returned home a greatly diminished woman. She was struggling with alcoholism and (I would later learn) the early stages of dementia, and became difficult to be around. My father-in-law, who took over childcare from my mother when she was no longer trusted to watch the kids, started working full time, which left childcare and household management to Chase, whose new business couldn't afford the time spent away from it. Meanwhile, one of my longest friendships had turned incredibly toxic, so I was missing the support of a valued companion and grieving the loss of that relationship while also trying to learn how to take care of an elderly invalid and find time to look for a new job.

We chose to move to a small town in rural Tennessee in 2020 because I made decent money working from home. We didn't expect to need to find different employment after moving, which suddenly put us in a very tight place financially once we did have that need. I'm sure I'm preaching to the choir here when I tell you that finding a job that paid a living wage was impossible without returning to the high-stress customer service work I had just gotten away from, which I could not do. In those awful last months at that company, I had developed PTSD, and now entering my office or sitting at my desk would cause panic attacks. Talking on the phone would make me cry. Merely thinking about my old job would reduce me to a blubbering mess.

I spent the next 18 months recovering. I lived off of my savings, making sure all my bills were paid and my debts kept current, and I tried to take care of my kids, and my husband, and my mom, and the house. And myself.

I learned during that time how to take care of myself. I found the Lindsey that had been lost to those years of corporate grime, and I polished her up a bit. I lost 130lbs. I dropped my toxic friendships. I started doing a creative side hustle to bring in some money. I worked on my marriage. I sent my son to kindergarten. I took control of my budget. I started erecting and enforcing boundaries to improve my mental health. I went to therapy. I even took my vitamins, damn it! I got well enough to re-enter the workforce, starting as a loan servicing specialist at the local credit union.

I've gone into such detail to explain why it came about that we were in a house we couldn't afford anymore. Having moved where we did, I couldn't find an entry-level position that would cover the money going out toward housing and bills. Chase's business was doing well enough that he had outgrown our home office, but he now had his own rent to pay for an external warehouse space to house his stock.

We came to the conclusion that we either needed help or we needed to sell the house. But when we approached family for aid, we were turned down. So we turned to a bankruptcy lawyer.

Did you know it's possible to be so much in debt that you can't afford bankruptcy? I didn't.

Selling the house was our only option, and it was not a popular option with the family members living on the property who had earlier declined to help, but it was the only way we would have a place to live once the money ran dry. Friends helped us where family wouldn't, and we survived long enough to sell the house without it slipping into foreclosure. We bought a new house as the mortgage rates began hovering at 7%, on a very limited income. Our credit was shot from all the debt, and I was not making enough at my new job to afford a mortgage for more than $100k, in a state where the average house is something like $350k.

But we perserevered. We continued scraping by, month by painstaking month...until my mom got sick again. Congestive heart failure and dementia that had grown severe in the years since we moved to Tennessee combined to bring her down, but this time, I couldn't take her home with me. I couldn't take care of her anymore. And without her income as part of the household's, we couldn't afford our debts anymore.

I started looking for employment that would pay a living wage. I even applied for a customer service job, despite the flashbacks, because I believed in the work the company was doing. But I was primarily looking for something that offered a moving stipend to help us get out of the hole we had dug for ourselves, and in my search I came across some well-regarded charter schools that didn't require a teaching certification (looking instead for a Bachelor's in the subject matter). I sent out applications, not expecting to hear back...but I heard back from one. In my interview, I remembered all of the passion and drive to become a teacher that I felt 10 years ago. I was honest and raw.

On Wednesday, August 9, 2023, exactly one week before my 35th birthday...I was offered my dream job. A STEM charter school in Tucson has offered me a position as a 4th grade English Language Arts and Social Studies teacher. And they offer a relocation stipend! And my kids can go there too, and get fantastic educations!

...but the stipend is awarded after 30 days of employment, and I don't have a way to get there or money to pay for lodging.

This is where we get to the whole point of this entire story. Our credit is in shambles, so we can't get a loan. Our credit cards are maxed. The sale of our house will pay for all of that, but we can't sell without somewhere to go--which we now have. We just have to get there. This journey to Tucson is truly a new beginning and an opportunity of a lifetime.

This is how we will get there:

We are selling most of our furniture, and Chase is selling off all of his stock and fixtures to cover our mortgage in Tennessee while we wait for the contracted stipend to come in and to minimize what we need to move. And once I've been employed for 30 days and I have been reimbursed my moving stipend, I can turn around and put that money back into my education by pursuing a graduate degree in a field devoted to nurturing young minds.

For the first time in over a decade, I have a dream to shoot for.

Please...Will you help me achieve my dream?