The following was typed by Brianna Danielle Lewis herself. Please feel free to reach out through this GoFundMe if you wish to assist in ways that are not a straight financial donation. Thank you and please Share/Donate if able!
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I’m writing this to show people a bit of who I am, and to explain my current circumstances. This might end up as my final call for help.
Because…I’ve reached the point where either this call gets me what I need and I hopefully never need to ask again,
…Or this message never reaches the right people in time, and it becomes too late to ever help me.
In either case, it’s certainly the end of my 2025 cycle of continuously being in need of help. So I either get the help I’ve needed for a long time, or I am left so badly off there’s no help left to give.
So with that, a little about me.
My name is Brianna Danielle Lewis, albeit not yet legally. I prefer Bree Lewis. (Although in circles understanding plurality, I also go by The Range of Bree System.)
I’m a lifelong Washingtonian, born and raised here in the beautiful Pacific Northwest my entire life. Currently, I’m renting a place for my wife in Everett.
I’m 6’2”, a Leo (although I don’t know my full birth chart), born in the year of the Rooster, type A+ blood, and an INFP, if such things are of interest to you.
The elevator pitch I have for myself is I’m a queer neurodivergent disabled witch with plurality in my young 30s coming from an upbringing ignorant to all of those communities. (The knowledge about plural, queer, neurodivergent, disabled, and witchy folks was not as abundant and readily available during my childhood as it is now.)
To go into more specifics,
I’m a transwoman lesbian, married to a nonbinary bi demisexual witchy wife, who is equally as disabled as me.
My wife has severe levels of ADHD and likely related conditions, and is currently unmedicated.
They also deal with severe back pain, among other issues, and describe themself as blind without their glasses. Even without the dysphoria they suffer from, their breasts are largely enough to cause agonizing pain and are in a desperate need of a reduction for an increase in quality of life.
Additionally, they suffer from endometriosis and/or a similar condition which makes seven days a month absolute misery beyond the normal for those who undergo a time of the month. They have also been suffering, rather consistently, from extreme migraines as of late, which persist throughout most days.
On my end, I have equally as severe ADHD, I definitely have Cognitive Disengagement Syndrome, I’ve been clinically diagnosed as having Bipolar Disorder, I suffer from severe anxieties, and I have autism under its old outdated archaic name listed on my medical chart because I am very obviously, notably autistic.
Many of these were inherited from one or both of my parents.
That, aside from how I am a polyfragmented median system, a form of plurality. (I use ‘I’ for convenience, but it’s more accurate to say I am a ‘we’.) Who is around to front vastly impacts my ability to function.
But beyond those conditions, I have numerous physical ones as well.
I have pectus excavatum, a caved-in chest. It’s very obvious to anyone who has seen me bare-chested, and is on my medical history.
I have inherited thyroid issues, inherited from my mom’s side of the family.
I have sleep apnea.
I have minor dyslexia.
I have GERDS, inherited from my mom’s family. Namely some acid reflux which is incredibly present after most meals.
I have some pretty notable astigmatism, and presumably other vision deformities, presumably inherited mostly from my dad’s side of the family. I’ve dodged wearing glasses my whole life mostly because I am good at pattern recognition, so I could pass every eye exam by guessing correctly things I actually couldn’t see clearly.
I have relatively severe POTS, which has gotten worse every time I have caught covid. And in recent times, it keeps getting worse no matter what. The risk of passing out keeps escalating higher and higher. I lose vision when standing up, and balance, and get dizzy, and suffer from severe lightheadedness which doesn’t go away for at least five minutes.
And I have extremely high levels of lower back pain when standing. I can sit, I can lie down, I can walk, I can run, but if I stand still, I get increasingly debilitating painful back pain, some of the worst pain I’ve the displeasure of living with daily.
My family has poor circulation, which I inherited.
I have pretty extreme IBS flareups.
From a lifetime of use, I have some form of tendinitis or carpal tunnel syndrome or similar in my wrists, especially my right one on the pinkie side, and I was told I had “skater’s back” as well.
I also have some form of chemical imbalance causing a hyperactive metabolism. If I’m not eating around 4,000 calories per day, I end up sluggish with a brain fog, feeling unable to think fully. I feel sleepy and tired, more than usual, and have zero energy. I was told my hyperactive metabolism would go away when I got older, but it’s still there, and it’s really bad because eating that much per day is nearly impossible, and I am left constantly at risk of losing weight if I overexert myself.
A lot of this laundry list of conditions is shown both through my family medical history on both sides of my family (with most of these conditions diagnosed in at least one half-sibling, aunt, uncle, niece, or nephew, and often in multiple members of the family), and through very easy observation.
It’s obvious I have a caved-in chest. All it takes to know I have chronic acid reflux is to watch me eat meals. My family history of snoring myself included just requires we fall asleep and be observed. My difficulties socializing and picking up on cues are apparent just from trying to talk to me. And so on and so forth.
A lot of these aren’t as extreme as the most extreme cases, but are still bad, crippling and debilitating me on a daily basis. And while some of them are minor enough to be mere nuisances, they add up. Five minor inconveniences can collectively form a greater problem.
For instance, a bad flareup of IBS and POTS at the same time has a genuine risk of being one of the most embarrassing and humiliating ways I could die, yet the risk of that combo killing me is very much real.
These conditions both have worsened with age and from catching long-covid repeatedly, and the current stress, frustrations, and anxieties I’m dealing with are likely worsening them.
My body feels like it’s falling apart, just like my life, but it’s important for people to believe that I have these conditions.
I’m a ridiculously tough gal, I’m a natural at masking. I pretended to be normal for 20 years, and a lot of conditions I lived with daily, I just thought everyone had to deal with those.
“Everyone sees long pillars of light from light sources at night, right?” (Those pillars are called halos.)
“Everyone deals with debilitating back pain when standing still, right?”
“Everyone has a chest like this if they suck in enough, right?”
“Everyone loses vision when standing up, right?”
“Everyone deals with dizziness, lightheadedness, etc., after standing up, right?”
“Everyone deals with needing to clear their throat repeatedly after eating a meal, right?”
“Everyone goes days between going number two then deals with backups, right?”
“Everyone snores a lot, right?”
“Everyone has multiple thoughts in their head at once, right?”
And so on and so forth. A lot of the things I took for granted as universally part of life as a human, are in fact Not Normal.
I don’t want to give my whole life story though. I mostly just want those conditions established and understood as what I suffer through daily. I’ve gotten good at masking, I’ve gotten good at hiding them, I’ve gotten good at powering through my limitations temporarily, even though doing so tends to backfire longterm and cause burnout and me shutting down.
So a lot of the time, it’s easy to ignore them, it’s easy to somewhat pretend I’m “normal”.
Yet they’re a large factor in my current limit, so I need to describe some of the history just a little bit more.
As a kid, I was considered a prodigy. I was grades ahead in math, and I also had a strong interest and investment in multiple other subjects. I loved literature, history, and science in particular. I had a fascination with the stars, with rocks, with nature, and sought out bonus credit assignments for those subjects because I was bored when not focused on the areas I had hyperfixated on.
For media, from books to films, there were a lot of things I didn’t understand, but I faked knowing what they meant and used them anyway because they were considered funny. I was slow on the uptake for understanding jokes, but once I got it, I would be the one repeating the joke fifty times.
Eventually, this would lead to a focus on wordplay, among other interests, where I would seek out connections to words, dissecting them, their multiple pronunciations, and tying those different pronunciations together.
I would understand quickly for instance that ‘the’ and ‘The’ are pronounced differently and technically can mean ever so slightly subtly different things, but are considered to mean the same thing.
I would do this for every word I could, for instance insisting that there’s plenty of words which rhyme with ‘orange’ if you focus on the ‘enj’ pronunciation of orange rather than the ‘rahnj’ one. (First to come to mind, syringe.)
I became a poet and a writer by the age of 13.
And I felt like I could become anything which I applied myself to.
I could have made an excellent astronomer.
I would have been a great environmental scientist.
I would’ve been a good geologist.
I would have been an amazing historian.
People have told me my whole life I would make an excellent politician because despite how lousy a liar I am (I can’t lie, I really can’t tell a believable lie and freeze when I feel compelled to with the lie being very obvious), because I am a master of half-truths, technically correct information, of deflecting, of redirecting, and in general have had a lifelong talent for words.
If you’ve read this far, chances are something I wrote drew you in, and even if you’ve only skimmed, something made you look enough to see this much. I have always had a way with words.
Anything I became passionate about, I became an expert at for my age, and even several grades above. I could handle middle school and sometimes even high school material while still in elementary school.
…But I felt like even then, there was something different about me. I knew I wasn’t normal, but I also knew I couldn’t be everything I was dreaming of being, and to really become the best, I would need to devote myself to a craft, dedicated to it and forsake the rest.
I felt a divide between living a “normal” life of partially pursuing everything I wanted and excelling at nothing, or abandoning most of my fascinations and interests in favor of a profession in one.
As this continued, this feeling eventually became a sense there was something “wrong” with me, or wrong with the world, or both. I went from super talkative about everything especially my interests to silent. I went from having fun with dozens of friends to drifting apart from all of them.
To me, it felt like everyone else was growing up, but I was still just a kid. And because I was feeling like I was still just a kid, I ended up never really learning most of the skills “adults” should know.
I went from a child prodigy skilled at anything I really committed to, to the exact opposite, struggling with everything no matter my commitment. The divide, the tear, between wanting to embrace being different, being talented, being skilled, being ‘special’, versus just wanting to blend in, wanting to be ‘normal’, suffering because I could tell my experiences weren’t a match to those of my peers and I wanted to not be alone. That rift in direction with mutually exclusive at the time desires left me burnt out and crashed out, and my development suffered significantly.
I certainly managed enough, getting a driver license, getting a job, getting through college, getting a passport, and getting some diagnoses, but…
…It took me until I met the love of my life for things to really start turning around.
So let’s talk about the last two years, and the better part of who I am now.
I confessed to the love of my life, my wife, on August 16th, 2023. At the time, we were long-distance, but we spent every waking moment together. We fixed our sleep schedules and synchronized them perfectly, and we got to meet at the end of September 2023 going into October.
After one meeting, we knew that we couldn’t remain apart. So later into October, I went again, and this time, we returned together, beginning a life in one room together on November 3rd, 2023.
My wife inspired me and drove me to embrace parts of me I had forgotten, or never really thought about as talents.
After the flashdrive which had my current passion project novel broke without a backup somewhere in the 2017 - 2020 range, I had fallen into a depression where I gave up on ever being a writer. Having lost effectively everything, I was crushed. However, my wife gave me inspiration to keep going, to work on my new passion project, which I continue to work on to this day. I’ve made 2,000+ pages of notes for my current novel project and am actively working on writing it!
I got back into poetry and songwriting. I had fallen into a slump where I couldn’t complete any rhyming project I set out to make, but my wife gave me the light, the life, I needed to write and perform multiple songs!
I’m no musician, but I have a long list of songs I’ve performed despite my lack of skills, emboldened and encouraged by my wife. Dozens of poems and songs, written and performed.
I’ve realized I have a mental map of a significant portion of Washington State. From Marysville to Renton, from I-5 to Stevens Pass, I have a map which functions better than Google Maps, with both a mental street view and an overhead view, where I can perfectly place where two locations are in relation to each other.
I know just about every road, so I don’t know just one route. Any given point A to point B, I know at least three, often up to six or more possible routes. I know how to navigate detours, delays, and traffic.
From Mount Vernon down to about Exit 130 or so, it’s also ridiculously accurate, albeit not quite as quick and accurate, with smaller gaps.
Heck, pretty much from northern California to British Columbia along I-5, I have things mostly memorized, albeit more hazy the longer it has been since I last visited.
I’ve repeatedly out-navigated my GPS. When it recommended routes with tolls, I found ways without, which just so happened to be faster an eta anyway!
When it wanted me to take the HOV lane exits when I had no passenger, I found the route without and still arrived at the same time I would have via the GPS suggestion.
Inversely, when it recommends a route and I have a passenger, I can take a diamond lane route which is faster than the recommended route.
I’ve shown on numerous occasions an understanding of traffic patterns superior to the GPS, where I anticipated traffic the GPS didn’t, and I know backroads the GPS doesn’t.
It’s not even a uniquely Pacific Northwest talent! One time visiting the upper middle mitten of Michigan, and I memorized the routes everywhere from Detroit to Traverse City, mostly able to navigate from Point A to Point B by memory, even a full year after last being there. Roads in areas I spend so much as a single week driving, become muscle memory to me.
I not only remember the route, but also common traffic patterns for the route. I understand the flow of traffic, where there’s buildups, where there’s gaps, where things slow down and speed up.
Just once driving to Michigan from Washington let me memorize the route, including which areas to stop at for gas and rest stops. I memorized a 2200 mile road map from driving it only once!
I’m basically a human GPS. I almost always can go to a place only once, then retrace my steps perfectly, and be able to navigate there again. And it took being with my wife to realize this.
I’m not a trained singer the way my sisters are, but when I’m not letting my anxieties and insecurities mute my voice, I’m a better singer than I ever gave myself credit for, and can belt out bars with ease when in the presence of my wife.
I’m pretty good at dancing, better than most, able to identify the rhythm and beat, then adapt to the song and create a pattern of movement which harmonizes with the music.
I’m a ridiculously good worldbuilder, and I am a genius for coming up with ideas. Not just in developing an endless supply of stories, but also in many other creative endeavors, where I can point to something and go, “shoulda done this instead”, or “they should do this next”, and encouraging others.
I can inspire the creativity and passions of others, by not only giving them ideas they wouldn’t have thought of, but also encouraging them to follow through and actually go for it.
I’ve embraced speaking up again and being less mute, even joining in on banter at times. I’ve gotten really good at wordplay and jokes and memes, throughout it all entertaining my friends, my wife, and the communities we’re parts of.
I’m actually a ridiculously good driver, all things considered, despite my reputation. I got an enhanced drivers license, and I even obtained a passport! And I’ve picked up a lot of the skills for independence I hadn’t mastered in my 20s.
I know how to hand-wash dishes now, and do so often. Somewhat frequently, I both load and unload the dishwasher, and can even run it! I’ve often become the one putting clean laundry away. I’ve almost always become the one who takes care of the garbage.
I frequently clean up my home, putting things away, where they should be, or if not, in a place where they’re at least not in the way.
I’ve a higher investment in hygiene, in bodily upkeep.
I can move things into the dirty laundry, and from the washer into the dryer, and from the dryer to appropriately stored. In theory, I can theoretically start the washer and dryer, too! (Although of my skills, this is the one I still need the most work in.)
I’ve gone from having zero knowledge in areas such as spirituality, the queer community, plurality, and neurodivergencies, to being the one teaching others about those subjects! In my youth I had no information about any of those things, and was confused and lost because I couldn’t find anything which matched what I felt was my experience.
And then in my 20s I began to get teachers in subjects such as queer culture, different forms of plurality, spirituality divorced from religion particularly in the form of witchcraft, different forms of neurodivergencies and how they can and frequently do overlap, and various disabilities which I hadn’t heard of before.
Once I met my wife in my 30s, I encountered folks younger than me, in their young 20s primarily, who were reflections of my younger self, in lacking the knowledge I had since gained. Despite still feeling like I have a lot to learn, I gradually have transitioned from a student ignorant to all of these things, into a teacher who can impart my learned experience to those who need the guidance from me.
I’ve gone from “baby neurodivergent queer witch” to “elder neurodivergent queer witch” without really realizing it, helping people accept the past, attune to the present, and start building a better future with my lived experiences, learned lessons, and random trivia I’ve picked up.
I’ve embraced a role in communities I’m a part of as being a healer and a teacher. I help people find a path towards forgiving themselves for their past, providing reminders they were doing the best they could with what they knew and had, and they have become better since.
I’m a source of joy, making people laugh, making the days of others better just by being a part of their lives. I give my support, my wisdom, my time, my energy, to those who need it, and do my best to be there for them. I give perspective, providing alternative more favorable views, giving hope, and introducing humor.
Whether it’s eyerolls or groans or sighs or genuine laughter, I have a way of finding what to say which provides people with a smile, because they enjoyed it no matter how much they might facepalm at the wordplay I provide them with.
I know exactly the right thing to say at the right moment to make the day better than it was before, more often than not. And even when I can’t, I can still help and support just by my presence, by choosing to give my time and energy to just listen, and be there for those in need.
I’m good at giving advice, at being a pillar of non-toxic positivity, a beacon of light, spreading joy and helping heal through learning perspectives previously not provided.
I have given over 300 affirmations in what I call my “daily check-ins”, where I give little boosts at the beginning of the day. I constantly try to check in on people and encourage them to do the same, to focus on what’s truly the most important parts of life it’s sometimes easy to forget are what matter most.
I have also come to accept that I’m really good at my job. I’m only outranked in seniority by my Aquatics Coordinator, who has been at my facility for twice as long as I have (me, over five years; her, over ten), and my experience shows. I have over ten years of experience at working my job, and I am quite possibly the best employee other than my Aquatics Coordinator.
I know how to fairly effortlessly do most tasks with a high level of efficiency, and am competent in demonstrating these skills and knowledge and tasks to new hires. I have perhaps the best track record for showing up to the monthly in-services, because I’m pretty sure I’ve actually attended more than either my Aquatics Coordinator or Aquatics Director have. (Each of them typically has an excused absence an average of 2 - 3 per year each, whereas I tend to average missing only one a year or less.) And I almost never miss a shift, communicate actively, advocate for the employees, and rotate efficiently, and perform my duties to a textbook degree.
I have found my vibe when I choose to create content as a content creator, with some competence in short-form content, longer videos, and livestreaming. I can educate, I can entertain, effectively, and I provide a space to just vibe.
And I am sitting on what I genuinely believe is a potentially billion-dollar franchise. Not that I would ever want to make that much. I don’t even want to make a million dollars, yet alone a thousand times that amount, but I think that my idea is able to generate that level of revenue in total.
I have the plan for how to create it, how to market it, the merchandise, how to repackage it as deluxe, as remix, as containing commentary, and so on and so forth, not just selling new material but also continuously updating and refreshing the old so that people can keep rediscovering the material from different angles while also exploring the new material, too.
I didn’t develop 2,000+ pages of notes for nothing. That’s enough material to last a lifetime, and yet, this is just my first series I want to make of many!
I am a creator, an artist, a writer. I technically am a musician and a dancer and a choreographer too. I can plan how to turn a franchise into the next big thing, with a start to finish plan on how to pull it off. And I do all of this not because I want to profit off of my work, but because I want to share it with the world and give everyone the ability to experience the same level of fulfillment, of joy, of enthrallment, which I do for this world.
I want it to become a world others want to continue, to make fanfiction of, to create works within, to want more of, to show their love of it, to make fanart, to create works of it. I want what started as my own fantasy world to become a world our entire world is welcome to visit, in one form or another.
And I genuinely believe I can pull it off, too! My wife has given me the confidence to believe in the dream of my work being shared across the world and seen by all.
And all of this and more began snowballing from November 2023 onwards.
On December 3rd, 2023, exactly one month after we started living together, my wife proposed to me.
On December 4th, 2023, the very next day, we got approved for our first apartment.
Around November 7th 2024 or so, we decided we wanted to get legally wed immediately, so that no matter what tribulations 2025 would bring, we would at least know for the time we could, we were legally married.
On November 15th, 2024, we got our legal marriage, becoming legally Wed, and became a married couple, collectively called by all of our friends “the wives”.
At the end of January 2025, the beginning of this year, we decided to pull the trigger on adopting a puppy, a White German Shepherd mix, believed to be with Husky, named Parker.
He has been iconic, being a very pretty dog, beautiful, and funny. Smart, full of energy, and ridiculously funny. Talkative, but also incredibly loyal and loving.
And together, we have talked about the potential of having human children. We’ve started a life together and have the beginnings of a family together.
We have ambitions. Dreams of a future.
My wife wants to become a baker and eventually open a bakery to sell baked goods for a living. They love cooking, they love baking, they pour their magic into their food, made with love, care, and spirit. They put their soul into it and they want to share this food with the world.
They already enjoy handing it out to family, to my coworkers, to our apartment management, to any friends we can have over, and so on and so forth. They want to elevate this passionate hobby to a full career, sharing their delicious creations with all they can.
I want the worlds I’ve had the pleasure of viewing and building to be shared with the world. I have all of these wonderful ideas, these wondrous, rich, diverse worlds, and I want others to see and view them as I do.
And I want to give back to the communities I’m a part of. I want to contribute, to help, to strengthen them and support them. I want to help the spaces I dwell within thrive. Part of why I pursued working and volunteering at the YMCA was because I knew what they do for communities, but I have always wanted to take a more active, a more proactive, role in this communal support.
I want to more directly be making an impact. Reaching out to people, directly providing my aid, giving time and energy towards uplifting others. My job has been a small way to contribute, but I want to more actively be involved in serving my community and helping people live better lives.
We both want a life together, a family, to have a home we call our own and to raise the next generation. One or two children, if we can, and presumably a full household of pets.
But we’ve run into our troubles, too.
And those troubles have reached a point where we might be broken, our lives might shatter, before we have the chance to see them through. We’re on the verge of losing everything, potentially even each other in the worst of worst case scenarios.
And that brings me to why we need help.
Since 2023, we have run into a large number of difficulties, starting primarily in 2024.
In 2024, the apartment complex my wife and I signed a ten-month lease for on December 4th 2023 ended up pulling a bunch of sketchy, and we would later learn actually illegal, maneuvers on us.
They failed to provide advanced notice that our rent would be increasing by $100/month, an increase we couldn’t afford because my pay at my job remains mostly stagnant year to year. We only learned about the increase when we got the papers to sign for the lease renewal.
The increase in price was never mailed or emailed to us, so we were never properly informed about an increase in monthly rent.
When we renewed our lease, we were also given a $100 lease renewal fee, equal to the increase in rent. This was not disclosed anywhere in the paperwork and we weren’t informed of it in advance.
The increase in price was definitely near the maximum allowed increase in rent, and depending on the math involved, may have potentially exceeded the legally allowed rent increase percentage. We would need to track down the paperwork involved to confirm, which we couldn’t manage at the time.
Then there was the hidden additional monthly cost.
For our initial lease, the only utility we paid for was the power. We received all other utilities for free. Sewage, trash, and so on and so forth, all were included in our rent initially for no additional monthly charge.
Nowhere in our renewed lease was any change to this disclosed.
However, on our first bill for the renewed lease, in November 2024, we got the nasty surprise of the hidden additional $200 in utility fees. Again, this was never disclosed to us, anywhere in our renewed lease, but it effectively meant instead of a $100 increase in our monthly rent, we were given about a $300 increase in rent.
Our rent went from in the range of ~$1750 per month including all expenses (carport + PUD + processing),
To $2000+ per month, sometimes $2100.
It got worse, because the utilities were mandatory to be paid at the same time as rent, or face an ever-increasing late fee.
Even when we paid the rent itself with the only unpaid expenses being the utilities, Breckenridge Apartments (owned by Weidner Apartments) would tack on the same late fee they would as if rent hadn’t been paid at all.
We were told when we signed the initial lease all the utilities except power were covered in our rent, but the new lease had nothing covered by the increased rent.
This added monthly cost put an ever-increasing burden on us. We could maybe have handled the $100 increase in monthly rent. We definitely couldn’t handle the effective $300 increase in monthly rent, with no information on why the utilities weren’t included anymore and no leeway in late fees regarding the utilities.
This eventually reached a point where we couldn’t pay the full month’s rent all at once in July 2025. We asked for a payment plan. This is required to be an option provided by Washington State law.
When we brought this up with management, we were told, verbatim, “that might be how other apartment complexes do it, but our company policy is different”. That was their EXACT wording.
We reiterated this wasn’t a company policy issue, it was State Law, but Breckenridge Apartments management reiterated their company policy was not to provide us with the option of a payment plan. They clung to policy, which was that we needed to pay the full month’s rent, all at once, or they would begin eviction proceedings against us.
They repeatedly threatened these eviction proceedings if we didn’t pay the full month of rent plus late fees all at once, and promised to put us on a “Do Not Rent” list. They repeatedly tried to intimidate, harass, and bully us, and were unwilling to accept a partial payment of our rent or offer any form of payment plan.
Since we knew the eviction process involved taking us to court, and we knew they were breaking the law by not offering us a payment plan, we intended to fight them in court by bringing all of this up.
However, presumably because they knew that they would lose, and because we were just wanting to move on with our lives, we came to an arrangement with Breckenridge Apartments.
We would have moved out by August 18th, and turn our keys in the first thing on August 19th, 2025. In exchange, they would not charge us anything.
When August 18th rolled around, we had managed to move out our belongings, but the apartment was still messy. We offered Breckenridge Apartments the opportunity to save themselves the money of cleaning it by cleaning it ourselves, it would just take us one day to go the extra mile and clean the unit for them.
Breckenridge Apartments declined our offer, sticking to the original arrangement; we were to be gone from the apartment unit and turn the keys in once the office opened on the 19th.
Since I knew there would be cleaning needed and they declined our offer of letting us clean, I made sure to get their word they would not charge us in excess of our security department. This arrangement was noted on our file, an email was sent so we have it in writing somewhere, and it was repeatedly verbally stated, including once when my younger sister was assisting us.
Breckenridge Apartments agreed to not charge us in excess of our security deposit in exchange for us leaving after turning the keys in on the 19th of August.
We kept our end of the agreement; when the cleanup cost ended up as $3600 and our security deposit was only $1000, Breckenridge Apartments broke their end of the agreement by charging us the $2600 cleaning costs.
Since we have refused to pay because we have it in writing somewhere that they wouldn’t charge us, they have sent us to Collections. And this won’t go away on its own.
We haven’t had the time or energy to sort through all of the paperwork, all of the emails, all of the letters, and to contact legal help. We got close, once, by going to a lawyer’s office, but they were closed on the day/time we went, and we haven’t had the chance to find a lawyer who will advocate for us when we can’t pay them.
We know they exist, and we know that we have a good case especially if we can find the smoking guns in terms of mail and email which prove everything I am writing here. But, again, we have just been tired, overwhelmed, exhausted, and attacked from every angle.
The most I’ve managed to do is partially report Breckenridge to the state, including how I suspect they had a sewage leak onto the grounds between buildings left untreated for the duration of our lease, but my ability to file a report was limited, I’m currently the only one reporting them, and the government can’t assist me legally; I need a non-government lawyer.
I know that, ultimately, if I can get legal help, I will need to be the one sitting down and talking to a lawyer, but getting to the talking to a lawyer has been an impossible struggle for me. The amount of struggling has left me unable to navigate to this stage of help.
Another area of grief has been medical. At the end of December 2024, Premera, or as it was known to me, Lifewise, increased my monthly insurance bill by $400, going from $160 / month (an amount I could afford to pay) to charging me $560 / month, an absurd increase in monthly cost I very much could not.
This increased amount per month had no explanation. I didn’t add my wife to my plan, nor did my wife get automatically added to my coverage, nor did I do anything to modify my yearly plan.
I had been on Lifewise as my insurance plan ever since I was no longer legally allowed to be a dependent of my parents. I had done nothing to change any of my information or my plan. Automatically every year, my plan would renew with no issue, and require no action from me.
I tried to contact Lifewise about this, asking about why there was a $400 increase in monthly cost for no additional coverage. I tried to contact Lifewise and ask if this was a mistake. I received automated replies, but no answers and no contact with a human.
Especially since I was already struggling with the $300 increase in monthly rent from Breckenridge Apartments at this time, I couldn’t pay. I couldn’t even contact Lifewise to ask for a cancellation with them.
When the $550 bill for January came in, and I had $1100 unpaid to them, they mentioned my coverage would be terminated on January 31st 2025 if I didn’t pay. They warned that the health insurance marketplace for the year had already closed, so if my plan with them was terminated, I wouldn’t be able to find a new plan until Fall of 2025. I would later learn this isn’t true in Washington State for low-income households like my own, but at the time I took them at their word.
I went to the doctor in January, before the 31st, because I knew I was still covered until the end of the month. I paid my copay, and my health insurance provider paid the rest.
Then from February 2025 until September 2025, I was under the assumption I was uninsured. The cost of my medication certainly seemed to suggest it, going from $30 copay for all to me paying $70 and then $200 for all of them. Because of the cost increase in medication, I assumed I lacked health insurance coverage.
This meant I avoided going to the doctor from February 2025 onwards, despite a desperate need of medical intervention at times.
Around June or July 2025, I was informed that I was misled about the health insurance marketplace being closed until Fall 2025, and that low-income households in Washington State can apply for coverage year-round.
Thanks to all of the events happening, I was too exhausted to apply at the time, but by September 2025, I was able to apply for Apple Health Insurance, and get approved. Me and my wife collectively are low-income enough where we qualified for free health insurance, and I signed us up for the first plan we had the options for.
Shortly after I did, Lifewise took back their payment of my doctor visit in January, leaving Optum(previously The Everett Clinic) charging me the $250 which Lifewise had previously paid.
I reached out to Optum, asking them why I was being charged for what Lifewise had already paid. Optum informed me Lifewise claimed my health insurance coverage hadn’t begun at the time of my January visit, but it was the exact opposite; my coverage under Lifewise had not yet ended.
That $250 bill was due mid-December 2025, and my failure to pay it carries late fees. I haven’t been able to initiate the process of talking to Lifewise because that’s a level of struggle to even get in touch with a human, and I don’t know what to say, and I have had larger issues which have been a higher priority.
But it’s not going to go away and is only going to get worse. Unlike with Breckenridge Apartments, I have no idea if there was any violation of the law, but it’s a bill which I don’t even have the ability to pay off on a payment plan, and it feels like something had to have gone wrong, but I don’t know what to do.
The main problem all of this caused is my disabilities have been getting worse all year long, and I have had no treatment, no medication, no therapy, for anything.
Even after getting on Apple Health Insurance, there’s been a difficulty in managing to schedule a doctor appointment. I’ve been trying to find the time/energy to schedule an appointment at a location we’re covered at, for three months by now, and have yet to succeed.
I know that ultimately, I need to be the one actually meeting a doctor, but I have struggled so badly with even getting to the point where I can schedule one.
Another large struggle me and my wife have faced is food insecurity. We go to the foid bank nearly every week, but it’s never enough. It keeps me from starving to death, but it can’t provide enough food to prevent hunger from setting in, and we don’t have the funds to buy more food to augment the food bank food.
That often leads to me having a hunger-induced brain fog. I’m slow to think, I’m slow to process, I forget things, I struggle to mentally function, and I become more lightheaded and dizzy than normal. I often feel an increased risk of passing out, just trying to function on an empty stomach while working and trying to handle everything.
The inability to have energy thanks to not getting enough food, adds up. My wife and I easily would qualify for SNAP benefits, if we could actually navigate through the process of applying and getting approved.
Half a dozen times, I’ve gotten half of the way through. I’ve filled out the online application, and the online portion was passed to proceed to the phone interview.
Yet that’s where I have been unable to get through. They have very narrow hours where you can call, and I am often working those exact times. On non-work days, I usually am so exhausted from work I end up waking up too late to hop onto the phone and get in queue for the application, and the queue is far too long on work days for me to handle it in 20 - 30 minutes.
The typical wait period for the phone portion of the application is 2 hours. Since their hours are so narrow, closing at 2 pm, that means to get to them before they close, I would need to call at 11:30 then hope and pray my phone doesn’t disconnect, because any disconnection resets my position in line.
And I have had exactly that happen to me multiple times. Almost like clockwork, my phone will drop after 30 minutes on the line, waiting. They don’t offer the option to call back when it’s my turn in queue, so I have tried, and tried, and every time, despite how I should easily qualify if I could just get through…I can’t actually get through.
The last couple of weeks I have been blessed by bountiful family meals and holiday food bank hauls, but because I couldn’t get a food bank appointment for December 31st and the holiday food is running out…I am about to be really hungry. Again. We’re already burning through all of our food surplus. We’re about to have nothing left, and no ability to buy more.
And this is just for baseline SNAP benefits, not including disability benefits. I have had a free consultation on if I would qualify for being legally disabled, and I was informed that if I could demonstrate I was receiving treatment currently and provide documentation from my primary physician demonstrating the treatment I receive isn’t enough, I would very easily legally meet the definition for disabled and be eligible for all the disability benefits coming with that legal definition.
Ironically, I easily could have done so in 2024 or before. But because I was under the belief I had no health insurance and no ability to see a doctor for over half of 2025, I haven’t been able to pursue it. It’s not lost on me the irony of how navigating the barriers of bureaucracy to receive the relief of disability aid, requires resources often denied to the disabled like easy access to Healthcare.
And I want to pursue it, but it requires a level of effort beyond what I have been able to. It again starts with needing to see a doctor, but has the additional barrier of navigating bureaucracy. The government frequently denies disability claims, and the best chance to get a disability claim approved is to hire a lawyer for it–a lawyer who then takes a cut of the benefits as the fee for securing them.
That’s more for me to navigate, when I am exhausted, tired, and overwhelmed by everything. I know that, at the end of the day, I will need to be the one visiting the doctor, receiving the confirmation from the doctor, and likely the one to talk to a disability advocate lawyer who can help navigate the process for getting approved. But I haven’t been able to do any of that on my own.
Me and my wife have had to pick and choose our battles the last two years to the point where we have given up on pursuing things we wanted to press on.
As one example, when we boarded our puppy at the Woodinville PetSmart back in June 2025, we were promised they didn’t use punishment for the dogs. Yet when we went to pick our dog up, we saw a handler carrying a spray bottle.
Our puppy went in filled out, yet left visibly more skinny. Personality-wise, he was muted. He was silent, and his anxiety worsened significantly. He picked up the habit of begging which he previously hadn’t had. And this was after we had provided them with a food supply for him, including some excess.
Ultimately, we had to abandon pursuing any actions against them, because this was the same timeframe where we began to be dealing with the much larger issue of Breckenridge Apartments.
A lot of these things are legal and/or financial and/or health-related, but my problems aren’t exclusively in that domain. My desktop shut off and won’t power back on as of December 27th. If I’m lucky, it’s “just” the power block having failed. It’s not a cheap thing to replace, especially if I need one specific type, but it’s relatively cheap and harmless compared to other potential problems.
I’ve tried everything I can think of on my own, so in order to get a better diagnostic, I’ll need to take it to someone more technologically savvy than I am. In more worse-case scenarios, this is the situation with my flashdrive containing my story all over again, where the contents are lost forever with no backups.
The irony being that the very day it broke was the day I was about to use my Christmas gift to back things up. It literally shut off and broke the day I was going to make sure it doing so wouldn’t be a bad loss. But because I was one day too slow, it is a big loss, if I can’t get it working again with the files still there.
My wife needs their legal address changed from the old apartment to be at our new place. We meant to do this back in August, because we wanted them to be receiving any mail they ought to be receiving, but we haven’t found the time to.
But there’s still higher priority issues.
Despite my reputation, I am a very safe driver. I have a natural feel for the road and my car. I can tell when things are good or things are wrong, and I am very good at reading traffic patterns. I deliberately drive with more distance than needed between cars. I make sure to avoid going too fast. I make sure intersections are clear. And so on and so forth. I have gotten really good at driving good, and safe, and sane, and slow overall. But despite my precautions, I’m apparently not good enough.
At the end of June 2025, I got pulled over for going 47 mph in a zone with a speed limit which was either 35 mph or 40 mph. I was shaken, because on that day, I had left for work early, so I repeatedly told myself, “I have the time to drive extra carefully and to not exceed the speed limit at all”.
I thought I was going the speed limit. I was absolutely sure I was. But I also don’t doubt the officer accurately clocked my speed. I don’t know how I thought I was going the speed limit while being either 12 or 7 over. I only have a couple of theories.
The only two things I can think of happening;
I might have misread the speedometer. I have dyslexia, it was dark, and I was driving. As all good drivers do, I keep my eye mostly on the road. I only take brief glimpses down to read the speed, and when I do it’s in my peripheral vision. I might have seen my speedometer with it as actually just under 50, and believed I was seeing it as being just under 40.
Or,
My drinking a coke caused me to accidentally accelerate after I had correctly read the gauge. If this is what happened, then I was going under 40 mph, but in the process of taking a drink from my coke bottle, I accidentally accelerated an additional 10 mph while not realizing I had increased my speed. Since I didn’t know how to use cruise control and had to manually adjust my speed to account for hills, and that area does have small elevation changes, it’s possible.
But ultimately, I don’t know how I got to that speed. All I know is that I genuinely thought I was being extra careful, I legitimately believed I was going the speed limit, but no matter how it happened, I ultimately wasn’t, because I don’t doubt the accuracy of the reading from the radar of the officer.
I opted for a mitigation hearing on September 23rd, because I couldn’t pay for the $220 ticket. There, I was given the option to take a class for driver safety to have the ticket be removed from my record, and to pay for it with 10 hours of recognized community service. I would have three months to complete this.
It should have been easy. It hasn’t been. Between the worsening conditions at work, my chronic illnesses getting worse and all of my disabilities getting worse, the struggle to find food, the grief Breckenridge Apartments has been giving, the struggle to handle my health, and to get in contact with recognized community service options and get approved and scheduling the volunteer work…I haven’t been able to.
Three months passed on December 23rd, and the community service hasn’t been done, nor the required driver safety class. And this is for something I actually really wanted to do!
I’ve wanted to give back to my community in a more active way. Having community service should have been the perfect opportunity to open the door to me doing exactly that. I could continue volunteering even after the hours mandated. It’s everything I wanted.
And I haven’t been able to do it, despite being given ample time, because of everything. I have sent an email, asking if I could get an extension, but doing that has caused me to not read my emails for two weeks, because I am just…so scared, afraid, overwhelmed. I failed, I don’t know if I’m going to have a life.
I’m trying, but I am scared, overwhelmed, tired, and feeling the full weight of depression and anxiety. I don’t know if I have a future.
My job has been getting worse and worse on draining the life from me, and my efforts to find a job beyond my current one have not been fruitful so far, despite my efforts.
I became a lifeguard back in 2014 at my hometown Y. I chose that career both because I knew I was good at the job and had gotten certified, and because I was aware of all the community work the YMCA does.
I was mostly happy, with my only issues being the low pay, lack of pay increase even when I was among the five most senior staff in all of my branch in Aquatics, a lack of opportunities for job advancement at the Y where despite working there for over five years I was still just a lifeguard nothing more, and the long 2 hour solo guarding shifts where I was expected to solo-open in less than 15 minutes while also helping membership.
When covid hit, the Y let the majority of their employees go, so they could qualify for covid unemployment benefits, but promised they would rehire us once covid restrictions were lifted.
My faith in the organization was broken when that promise turned out to be a lie. The Monroe YMCA initially told me my point of contact was the then-Aquatics-Director, but never informed us said Aquatics Director no longer was one, leaving me with no point of contact. I repeatedly tried to get in touch with them to resume working once restrictions were lifted, and was met largely with radio silence.
One source told me to apply via a website, where I filled out a form. I did this for the better part of six months, applying on that website over a dozen times, to all Snohomish County YMCAs, to all positions. I received a call only once, where I had a phone interview, and was promised follow-through within 3 business days.
Two weeks of continued silence later, and I reached out to who I talked to, and was informed that they had selected another candidate.
I felt betrayed and misled by the Snohomish County YMCA organization, because I was their third-most-senior Aquatics employee, had been working there longer than either the Aquatics Director or Coordinator, was an incredibly loyal reliable and consistent employee with a stellar track record of attending more in-services than any other employee.
And despite wanting to work there again after covid, despite trying to reach out nearly two dozen times, I got nothing. For an organization whose core values include Caring, Honesty, and Respect, I felt uncared for, lied to, and disrespected.
But while my faith in the Snohomish County YMCA remains dubious, I had my faith restored in less than 48 hours once I applied for a Lead Lifeguard, later renamed Aquatics Lead, position at a Greater Seattle YMCA.
They instantly accepted me as a girl, rather than it being something I had to fight for. They instantly were willing to give me a second chance, even after I accidentally botched my first because I mistakenly believed an in-person interview was a phone interview.
I got hired at the rate of $20/hour, at the time higher than King County’s minimum wage, so I was making a rate reflective of my position and Aquatics experience.
The work environment was immediately better. Instead of 2 hours on the stand solo, I learned the maximum allowed before a forced break was one hour of continuous lifeguarding. Instead of having rotations every 15 minutes or 60 minutes, the standard was 30 minutes, which hit the magical balance of rest time to time lifeguarding.
Down guards were, instead of being sent into the locker rooms and expected to use all of their downtime working, mostly allowed to spend their downtime resting, recharging, and relaxing, provided they were rescue-ready and a minimum threshold of work was being done.
Staffing was such that any time we were busy enough to require two lifeguards guarding simultaneously, we had at least three scheduled at minimum, sometimes even four, to account for one down guard wristbanding children and the other resting and recharging.
The mindset for the downguard was, first and foremost, to be as ready as possible to respond to anything and to take over lifeguarding. For them to take whatever actions would be needed to retain alertness once on the stand.
Workouts, food outside of lunch breaks, hydration, and frequent restroom breaks weren’t just tolerated; they were encouraged. And using phones to remain mentally sharp was something that was encouraged, because there was an understanding that in this day and age, phones are an essential tool in the lives of employees and could help reduce stress and improve focus.
Instead of being distracted while lifeguarding due to my anxieties mixed with overstimulation and depression, I could ease my mind by using my downtime to let out my worries, allowing an increase in my vigilance.
The approval of roving also opened up the door to increased mental acuity while lifeguarding, because moving while lifeguarding provides a higher level of alertness than remaining on the chair does.
Seeing how much better the work environment and culture was, I felt truly appreciated and cared for. I regained my faith in the YMCA, because I felt they actually cared about me as an employee, that I was more than a replaceable asset, that I was a part of their team, an investment.
During all of my YMCA trainings, the same things kept being emphasized. The Y was meant to empower their employees, to give them confidence, to give them a career path, to give them the opportunity for growth and improvement, to set them up for their better future, and to invest in them.
We got told our opinions mattered, our feedback was valuable, our input made a difference. We weren’t just employees, but leaders. I believed it, and felt like the Y was living up to its core values. They were honest, they valued the community, they respected me and other employees, they seemed to truly care.
I’ve had my opinion sour in the last year, where my opinion has become that while certain staff who I have nothing but praise for live up to all of what a YMCA employee should be to fellow staff, the organization itself is still exactly the same one which I had grown disillusioned with due to covid.
It started with a realization about my pay. When I was hired, minimum wage in King County was below $20. By 2023, however, minimum wage for a large business, the YMCA included, had increased to $20.29 per hour. That was the amount I was making after two years of merit-based increases.
I am pretty sure there was one or two years I didn’t receive a merit-based increase despite being eligible for one, and even with my merit-based increase, my wage as a Lead Lifeguard (which now as of 2024 is renamed Aquatic Lead) was identical to the wage of a freshly hired brand new lifeguard.
Despite having over eight years of experience working in the YMCA, and two years as a Lead Lifeguard at my branch, I was making minimum wage in 2023, and this didn’t change until the rebrand of Lead Lifeguard to Aquatics Lead in mid-2024. While I received a merit-based increase to the rate of something like $20.69 per hour in the first half of 2024, it was still a rate just barely above the minimum wage after nearly three years of employment as a job with increased responsibilities compared to my peers. I was doing more work yet receiving no additional compensation for my extra jobs.
When the rebranding of Aquatics Lead happened around July 2024, I was ecstatic, because I felt like the YMCA was recognizing the problems with having higher positions and not receiving higher compensation.
The increase to a base pay of $24 per hour was disappointing, though, because I felt the rate didn’t account for any of my past merit-based increases. It felt like I was being hired at the rate a brand-new Aquatics Lead would be hired at, rather than the rate of an Aquatics Lead who had multiple years of merit-based increases.
I was on board with the new job responsibilities, involving Aquatics Leads being first and foremost, Pool Deck Supervisors. Where our role as an Aquatics Lead would be to be a leader on duty for the Aquatics staff scheduled.
I was promised that instead of being scheduled as if a swim instructor or a lifeguard, the Aquatics Lead would be scheduled as that pool deck supervisor. We would be the ones calling if any staff didn’t show up, able to sub for them. We would be able to make calls like approving employees leave early and entering the rotation if it was viable.
We would have an increase in Lead tasks, but our focus would be on Lead tasks, rather than on lifeguard or swim instructor tasks. We would be primarily responsible for communication with patrons and employees, able to make sure things on the pool deck were working as they should.
There would still be certain shifts where, thanks to a shortage in employees willing to work the shifts, I would be working as if a lifeguard, namely at opening, but after 8 am or so, additional staff would come in and I would be taken out of the lifeguard rotation and into the role of deck supervisor.
That didn’t end up being what actually has been happening, especially from around February 2025 and onward. Instead of being an Aquatics Lead dedicated to being a deck supervisor handling Lead tasks, I was given two or three jobs and expected to do all of them at the same time.
I was expected to be a swim instructor, at times with it seeming like there were no efforts to fill the gaps in the schedule with it just assumed I would be getting in the water. I was also expected, after teaching lessons, to immediately get into the lifeguard rotation, acting as a lifeguard. But then on top of those duties, I was still expected to be doing additional Aquatics Lead tasks, beyond the tasks of a lifeguard I was responsible for, and beyond the tasks of a swim instructor I was still responsible for.
Despite this increased workload, there was no increase in compensation. When I did eventually get a merit-based increase, it was to (if I remember correctly) $24.60/hour, where it remains. The increase in my monthly rate wasn’t even a fraction of the increase in living expenses.
More work for, in all effect, less pay, a problem which has only gotten worse and worse over this year due to all the reckless corner cutting. And as part of the changes made over time, it has felt like there’s an unrealistic standard being applied to me which isn’t applied to others.
For the last couple of years, I have felt like my current Aquatics Director is not a good boss for me. I don’t think she’s a bad boss, but I don’t think she’s equipped to handle being my direct supervisor, given her experiences and background are radically different from my own.
I am the second-most-senior employee in Aquatics for my facility, with only the Aquatics Coordinator having worked at our facility longer than me. That entire time, I have first and foremost been working primarily from the background of a lifeguard.
In contrast, my Aquatics Director wasn’t even hired for the position of Aquatics Director. She was initially hired as an Aquatics Coordinator meant to specifically oversee swim lessons. Her background is as a promoted swim instructor, and as an Aquatics Coordinator, she was promoted to the position to handle swim lessons. In that role, she was incredibly competent.
However, when she was thrust into the role of Aquatics Director, she got the position without any experience dealing with the day to day operations from the perspective of a lifeguard. She also presumably received the promotion without having already completed the extra trainings an Aquatics Director receives about the increased role in handling their employees.
I feel this negatively impacted my work experience because my direct boss was now someone who didn’t understand my own job as well as I do. I believe I received some unfair treatment, no matter how unintentionally, due to this conflict in background. This treatment only seemed to improve after three things happened.
The first, I talked to the current head of our facility albeit before he received a promotion to that position. He has been my greatest advocate and ally for the entire time I have been an employee at this YMCA.
The second, I underwent the training to become certified as a swim instructor. I felt my Aquatics Director treated me notably better after I was a swim instructor myself.
The third, my Aquatics Director actually had to work my shift once. She was shocked at how exhausting and tiring it was from just a single day of doing that shift. Yet that was what she was asking me to do every single day. She had me there to help, which meant she got the assistance of the person who best knows the shift, but I work every day with lifeguards who often don’t.
Despite this, while I feel the treatment of me as an employee has improved, I still feel like she’s not a good match for being my boss. There have been numerous challenges in communication, largely born from my neurodivergence, in particular, a lack of understanding of my autism and the clarity sometimes required.
I often have been dealing with seemingly contradictory instructions from her, and certainly have had conflicting instructions from her compared to our Aquatics Coordinator. They have often told me two different things, and left me needing to say something along the lines of “perhaps you should communicate with each other on this and then get back to me”.
There’s often been a feeling that I am given different treatment. When other employees give advanced notice they can’t make a shift, to my knowledge, they aren’t threatened with corrective actions. But my Aquatics Director has done exactly that for me.
When other people are unable to show up on the day, with good reasons, then it’s something we basically just have to deal with. But when I am unable to show up on the day, no matter the reasons, then I get a barrage of questions, often chastised for doing things wrong in contradictory ways (sometimes being told to do one thing and then being asked why I did it that way), and the threats of corrective actions remain.
This would eventually culminate in the events which resulted in me needing to buy a new car because of trying to not lose my job.
My car was experiencing issues with the oil which made it unsafe to drive. I needed 48 hours to fix the problem. Because I was scheduled, the only subs I could get were fellow Aquatics Leads, and I couldn’t get either of them to sub for me, my boss threatened corrective action if I wouldn’t show up. My car was undriveable.
On the way to work, my car stalled no less than four different times (maybe more), experiencing stuttering and kickback dozens of times more. The experience of driving the car in this state caused damage to the cooling system, and required me to attempt an immediate emergency oil change at work.
In the process of this emergency oil change, I succeeded technically, but because I wasn’t prepared for this and was in an environment where I didn’t have access to the proper tools (which I had at home), oil spilled from my car onto the Y parking lot. Again, this was a journey to work I didn’t want to make. I knew the state my car was in. I knew that driving it there would require emergency maintenance if I managed to arrive. I had explained all of this to my Aquatics Director, but she still threatened me with corrective action if I didn’t go to work.
This was my only means of transportation at the time, since I had absolutely zero money in my bank account at the time. I had already spent the last bit of money on the needed things for maintenance for my car, and I had explained that as well. I explained my only means of transportation was the car, and that I needed time to repair it, and couldn’t safely travel to work.
Then, when the consequences of forcing me to drive to work in a broken car resulted in the oil spill, my boss threatened me again. She said that if the oil from my car were to go into the drain, then the city could fine our YMCA, and I would be involved and be seen as at fault. I would be required to clean up the spill.
Because I had no money (this was around June 2025, so Breckenridge Apartments was bleeding me dry by that point), my Aquatics Coordinator had to purchase the supplies for cleaning up, with me promising to pay her back (which I did). I then had to, with no help, spend the next two days after my shift, cleaning the oil spill.
All because I was forced to drive my broken car to work, despite knowing that it couldn’t make the journey safely. The threat of corrective action if I didn’t show up meant I felt I couldn’t not drive.
This would have long-term consequences for the car. No less than three times, I had to take my car in to get repairs. Initially, these were for an oil leak. Then, the problems with the cooling system began, with my car frequently experiencing overheating problems.
My car being in need of maintenance happened during a time I had scheduled a vacation to Michigan, so without my car, I was forced to rent a car for the trip which cost $2000 by the time I returned it.
And eventually, the heating issues got bad enough to damage the engine, requiring the entire engine to be rebuilt. This proved to be something that I couldn’t afford, so ultimately, I had to give my car to my family, and buy on a payment plan a new car, which is a monthly bill that adds to other costly monthly bills.
The entire time, I would even be showing my boss videos and photos of the damaged state of my car. Of how it had overheated, of how steam was coming from the engine, of how the coolant was literally boiling because of the damage, and yet, despite it all, I was continuously pressured to further damage my car, or risk corrective action, because I couldn’t stop my car from being damaged after the damage was done.
And that doesn’t even go into the last six months, from June 2025 onwards in particular from the policy changes made by higher ups who have never worked the job at our branch. They don’t know the culture of the facility they are enacting policy changes for, and how detrimental they have been to the employees, and my faith in the organization.
The full list of changes is basically a removal of most of what I listed above as the very things which caused me to love working there in the first place. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that nearly our entire staff quit over the summer, and even after a job market, our facility has struggled to recover the work force we had, leaving us constantly short-staffed. I believe that the policy changes made were directly detrimental to retention of staff by violating the culture we previously had, and each change has placed additional burdens upon the employees to the point where most just quit.
Aquatics Leads are now in the rotation by default, again permanently expected to do 2 - 3 different jobs worth of work. The number of Lead tasks has increased as well, placing an additional burden on all Aquatics Leads, as we’re meant to be taking a more active role in managing the staff while having our feedback largely written off and ignored when we report staff are dissatisfied.
The higher ups have placed such a focus on patron satisfaction and retention and risk management for something happening to patrons, they have completely neglected employee satisfaction and retention and ignored how their policies are now beginning to work their staff to exhaustion and frustration.
I’ve given my feedback, but this feedback saw no changes being made, and nobody ever got back to me about my concerns about these changes and the direction these policies were taking the organization and how I strongly felt they were diverging from the values and promises that the YMCA has given for years.
Changes include having removed for six months our ability to rove (when most employees myself included had roving as our preferred method of lifeguarding), threatening to confiscate our phones if we weren’t doing enough work during downtime, preventing us from doing workouts during our downtime, vastly cutting corners on staffing to make less people work at assigned times, a rather confusing-to-most-employees change in rules involving permitted music, the removal of allowing 30 minute rotations, and now the expectation of the down guard about to rotate to be on the pool deck at nearly all times.
Down time has been cut back from being anything restful to being additional mandatory work which is often extra exhausting. By implementing these changes, they’re asking employees to work themselves to exhaustion and I genuinely believe that if they haven’t already, they’re setting themselves up for an employee to have the very emergency these changes are meant to increase vigilance in for patrons.
There is going to be a lifeguard, and there’s an incredibly high risk said lifeguard is me, who ends up passing out or similar from being worked too hard with no period of rest provided. There’s a mandatory 30 minute unpaid lunch break every 5 hours, but my work has effectively removed the ability to take even ten minutes of break time in any given hour, when our staff has been used to, for years, effectively having 30 minutes of rest time where, as long as they weren’t needed to do a task, they could do effectively whatever they wanted.
There was a change where policy became to not allow napping in the break room, and all of this is adding up to additional stress and frustration for the lifeguards. This, for a job which is minimum wage, and yet carries a bunch of mandatory trainings which makes us have a level of medical knowledge and need to put constant practice into maintaining those rescue skills.
I, as the coworker to these employees, got to talk to them. The feelings were all negative towards these changes, and the sentiment was universally in opposition to the changes. Many said they would quit the moment a better opportunity came for them. Most of them followed through, and some didn’t even wait for another opportunity to quit. Many without notice, a lot on short notice.
The level of staff turnover for our Aquatics department was record-high this summer, and it wasn’t the normal “high school kids graduating” that is the standard. We typically have around 3 - 6 employees leave, and about 8 - 16 stay. This summer saw the inverse. Approximately three lifeguards, myself, one other Aquatics Lead, our Coordinator, and our Director, are all the staff which remain from June; the rest, about 8 - 16 lifeguards and swim instructors, have all left.
And I have talked to at least one former Aquatics employee who has said that these changes mean they could never work in Aquatics again. They could handle one or two of these, but being bombarded by all of them, largely all at once, was too grueling, too soul-crushing.
Even my bosses are not fond of these changes. The actual people working at my branch, know how these changes are bad for our branch specifically. Even if they work as a generic mold, our branch has always been different from the standard mold in culture. The atmosphere and the environment at my Aquatics facility has always been one of a more lighthearted fun nature. Employees understood that we were still working a job, a very important life-saving one, but there was a large sense of connection and a bond beyond simply competently working together.
My Aquatics Coordinator has been in opposition to most of these changes, and to her credit, even my Aquatics Director has been quite unhappy with what these changes have done to the workload of employees. I will give them that credit, although I feel like my Aquatics Coordinator doesn’t feel like she has the sway to implement the policies she knows would be best, and my Aquatics Director has taken a kind of silent “okay, they’re going to FAFO” approach where she will express her opinion of how these changes will negatively impact her staff, and then be ignored, overruled, and silenced, and rather than continue to fight for her employees and advocate for them, she just silently withdraws and washes her hands of the consequences, because she knows when something ends up going down with our staff, she can rightfully go “I did warn you” and point out how her feedback was ignored.
At least I want to give her that credit. Obviously, I haven’t been invited to attend any of these meetings, so I only hear about the aftermath by and large, and I felt like I could sense the displeasure and the dissatisfaction and the attitude of “well, we can’t stop them from finding out the hard way” from my leadership.
The head of my branch, my greatest advocate, I know has also left many of these meetings absolutely fuming, upset about how things are going for us. I know that he cares, and that there are people who care, and who advocate for us. But I also know said advocacy hasn’t translated into any tangible results of an improved work environment in line with the long-standing culture of our facility.
Our identity, what made us special and unique among Greater Seattle Aquatics facilities, has been slowly stripped from us, and replaced with corporate policies in line with that of any other conglomerate. Instead of empowering employees to be leaders who have the authority to make judgement calls, we are being forced to do things in very specific ways which accomplish the exact opposite of the intended goals.
Instead of promoting innovation and encouraging diversity, these blanket policies with increasingly rigid enforcement shut down the creative spark and kill any desires to actually give to the organization more than the bare minimum.
And I have let them know exactly this, and received radio silence. I was always taught, as an employee at the YMCA, that we were community leaders, that working at the Y would provide an opportunity for career advancement, I literally have gone to an orientation which said effectively verbatim, “this doesn’t have to be a starter job”. Where employees would be that investment, where each employee was valued for their ability to uniquely contribute in ways embracing their unique talents.
And until these policies, I had genuinely believed, mostly, that this remained true. Except it isn’t. The Y has been cutting every corner it can, including falling into the same corporate pattern of treating their employees as expendable. Instead of being alarmed at the number of employees to walk out and quit, they instead have taken an attitude of “if we just replace the lost labor, nothing else needs to be done”.
They have ignored employee feedback, they have disregarded the unique culture at the facility, they have removed agency from their staff, they have put extra work on staff by scheduling the absolute bare minimum and often not even that amount, and pile on more and more work for everyone, with higher expectations of work performed for no higher level of compensation.
That, aside from how the company swap to a new timekeeping system has been messy. I requested and got approved for over two weeks of PTO at the end of October 2025 going into November 2025. This PTO was removed from my balance, but not reflected in my October or November paychecks. I thought the PTO had just been refunded, where my scheduled time off was removed in exchange for me having the PTO hours returned. But no, the PTO time simply vanished, neither applied to my balance or reflected in my pay.
To my organization’s credit, if I were to bring this issue up to HR and/or tech support and bring the receipts, I am confident they would in fact fix the issue and give me that lost PTO time. They certainly would be legally required to, but even if they weren’t, they likely would regardless.
My main hiccup has been, as always, a lack of time and energy to actually provide the receipts. I need to gather the emails where I initially submitted the PTO, then demonstrate this submitted PTO was approved, then demonstrate it didn’t show on my paychecks, then point to my PTO balance, to show that I did in fact have two weeks of PTO vanish from the system, eaten by some form of technical glitch because of how new the system is.
And because this has taken me five days longer to write than intended, I can share a brand new development of how that same system didn’t show me as working on Friday when I checked on all of Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday.
It should be noted, I was given the resources to apply for disability accommodations, but in order to get those disability accommodations approved, I require a doctor, my primary care physician, to sign off on some paperwork.
I was informed about this at the end of July 2025, meaning at the time, I believed that I had no insurance and no ability to actually visit a doctor without accruing a medical bill in the hundreds of dollars range, a cost I couldn’t afford. So because I thought I couldn’t afford to see a doctor, and because I currently haven’t been able to find the time or energy to schedule a doctor appointment, I haven’t been able to actually go forward with these disability accommodations.
The process is both highly bureaucratic and incredibly obscure. I had to send two or three emails and get in contact with the leave of absence department to even learn there was a form that I could fill out. The form also requires a lot of conditions to submit, and the confirmation from a doctor is also required.
For an organization allegedly valuing Caring and Honesty, they sure don’t seem to have a lot of trust and faith in their employees. Especially given how ludicrously hard it was to actually obtain the form and then print it out and the steps to submit it, they’re not going to have anyone who goes through that entire process lie about their need for accommodation. It feels like it’s deliberately designed to technically be there so the Y can’t be sued for not having it, but so out of the way and hidden and bureaucratic as to intentionally never be actually used. It felt like the requirements being so stringent were the Y deliberately discouraging the already-obscure application process from ever being used.
And, again, I shouldn’t have even needed to do any of this, yet alone fail at actually getting it due to the red tape I couldn’t cut through. I shouldn’t have needed to apply for the accommodations of essentially just returning the work environment to where it was from 2021 - 2024; the work environment shouldn’t have been changed without the employees actually working the job providing direct feedback and being listened to.
I shouldn’t have needed to send multiple emails in order to actually find the ability to request a work accommodation; the information should be readily and easily accessible and reinforced yearly in trainings, with all employees made aware of how to access it, especially higher ups.
And I shouldn’t have had to suffer for six months and counting because I couldn’t successfully navigate the final steps in this bureaucracy.
I’m currently dealing with a back injury, either sustained at or around the December in-service or agitated by it. Yet while I have noted that I have it to my bosses, I dare not ask for any accommodations for it because I have lost all my faith in them actually caring to help me recover.
I have felt failed and betrayed by the Y for a second time, because I genuinely believe in their cause. I genuinely believe they do a lot of good in communities, especially in acceptance of everyone no matter their background and in promoting diversity. They accepted me as a transwoman, consistently defend me from bigotry, and hired me with my autism fully on file and other disabilities well-known. They are amazing at promoting empathy and services for everyone.
Yet they have seemingly forgotten that their employees are their most important patrons. By prioritizing patron needs above employee needs and making decisions to maximize patron retention at the cost of employee retention, they have failed their core values.
The Y is meant to nurture body, mind, and spirit, but in the last year in particular, my spirit has been sapped, my body has been drained, and my mind has been broken.
I’ve tried to pursue higher positions, but none of them got me to even be emailed back anything other than a near-automatic rejection. There’s no job advancement past Aquatics Lead, nor are there many opportunities to even become an Aquatics Lead.
The Y left one Aquatics Lead position vacant for nearly six months because instead of promoting existing staff, they hired new staff who needed more training and vouchers to work. (Which left two leads doing the workload for three.)
I would love to continue working at the Y, but it’s not paying my bills, while consistently adding extra to my workload in an environment I feel is increasingly hostile because every time I try to advocate for the staff, every time I try to stick up and point things out, instead of feeling rewarded for having expressed my concerns and confusion, I feel punished.
The Y, especially in tandem with all of the other stressors in my life right now, is genuinely working me to death. Every day, I feel like I am closer to collapsing in the middle of my shift. I’ve twice fallen asleep already when not meaning to, and countless dozens of times beyond I have gotten close to.
And it would all be worth it, if I was making a livable wage. Despite all the difficulties and all of my issues, I love my job enough where if I could survive off of it, I wouldn’t be pursuing anything else, despite my misery thanks to the increased stress and anxiety and frustration and overstimulation and exhaustion and how easily I am getting overwhelmed.
But it’s not paying the bills. $24.69/hour at a capped maximum average of 32 hours per week (usually closer to 20) adds up to about $2000 - $2200 / month after the withheld pay. Each paycheck is $800 - $1100 bi-weekly.
The monthly cost of living, between rent, internet bills, phone bills, insurance bills, gas, and groceries, among others? Adds up to about $3600 - $4000 / month.
And that’s after already cutting costs and corners as much as I can realistically pull off. So I’ve been trying to apply for other jobs. Part-time secondary jobs, or higher-paying full time jobs.
I would work myself to death if it meant providing for my family (namely my wife+dog rn), but the sad part is, I already am, and it’s still not enough to provide for them.
I keep burning more and more resources and am left with less and less. I’ve run out of time, money, and energy.
I don’t even know if we’re paying January rent, and if we somehow do, then I don’t know how we survive the inevitable bout in the red with all the overdraft fees that entails.
My dad always told me a story about two men. It went something like this.
One kept making good decision after good decision, and the more good decisions he made, the more options, the more decisions, he had available to him.
The other kept on making bad decision after bad decision. And by the end, he had his decisions reduced to only two. Death by hanging, or death by lethal injection.
I feel like my dad probably told that story to me more than my three siblings, because somehow, even when I was young, he knew of his four children, I would be the one most likely to fail, the one most likely to make bad decisions one after another. I always have kept that story in mind, trying to not prove it right. But it’s hard to believe I’ve done anything except prove I am exactly the failure predicted from a young age.
Both my sisters are actually trained musicians and singers, whereas I have only fleeting dreams of both. My older sister is a better artist and writer than I am, studied classical history and arts more than I did and even got a degree, a linguist I could never pull off, a great fencer, and is actually a teacher, which I still consider to be a dream job, despite how I have utterly failed to obtain a job as one.
My brother has a masters degree in programming, and has a high-paying job to match.
My younger sister is highly social to a degree I could never manage yet always desired, has a great job, is married, has a house, and is in the beginning talks of potentially starting a family beyond just their three pets.
And I have…effectively none of what they do–what little I do, I could lose any day now. I know I have accomplished things they never could, but when those accomplishments don’t actually support living a life, it’s hard to feel like I have done anything remotely successful, because I am on the verge of having nothing to show for all of my struggles.
My apartment is a mess of my making through negligence. It’s my job to put laundry away; I haven’t in months. It’s my job to put trash littered throughout the apartment in the trash; I’m weeks behind. Taking the trash out is my responsibility, but I often am taking days or even weeks longer to do so than I should. Hand-washing dishes is something I was frequently doing, but I’ve mostly stopped. Loading and unloading the dishwasher was my responsibility, and I have mostly stopped. Organization and cleaning up the apartment was largely my task, and I haven’t been able to stay on top of it. Or anything. Everything is falling further and further behind.
I’m on the verge of losing everything, my job, my car, my apartment, my life, and I am fighting every angle against it. I keep on trying and trying, and by now I think I just need to try something else.
So that brings me to this request.
I’ve asked for temporary financial support for over a year now, under the increasingly obviously false hopes that “I just need help for this month, if I get help financially, then I can focus my efforts towards getting my life together”.
But even after having received the financial help, a combination of my disabilities and sheer exhaustion and being overwhelmed has stopped me from actually “getting my life together”.
So what can I actually get help at which I haven’t gotten help in already?
That’s what I’m here to outline as my final call for help.
I’m basically asking for the ultimate network campaign. There’s eight billion people on this planet, and among them are those who can give me the help I need. The problem is accessing them.
I’ve used the emergency helpline to get the resources available for free, and the resources I was given through the Y. I’ve even been given some resources through friends. But all of them have had the same barrier to entry thusfar:
They all require my time.
They all require my energy.
And I have run out of both.
So what I need is for people to do the things I previously have said only I can do.
Maybe ultimately at the end of the day, only I can talk to a lawyer for a final consultation, but that doesn’t mean I need to track down a lawyer and schedule the appointment for talking.
I want people to send this letter, in its entirety, to lawyers, to see if they can help, or to have those lawyers forward it to lawyers who can. Somewhere out there, there’s a lawyer who can help and would be willing to. But I have run out of ability to be the one to initiate contact. I need help to get there.
I want people to send this letter, in its entirety, to every aid organization they can think of. Somewhere out there, there’s programs to help. Heck, Goodwill from my understanding allegedly funds local job training, and I am wanting to get a different job.
Loans, investments, something, somewhere. There’s going to be someone who knows how to give me a more direct line to help.
I want people to send this letter, in its entirety, to doctors, to clinics, to see if there’s any who are able to help us more.
I want people to send this letter, in its entirety, to any news outlet that they can. Spread the word by any means which will help.
I want people to send this letter to anyone who has a job open, and to all businesses which might potentially meet our needs, and to ask them to reach out to me.
I want people to send this letter to any church that they feel will help. I might not be a follower of their faith, but I am very much trying to live by the lessons of love, generosity, and community among other things and would happily partake.
I want people to send this letter to anyone who is a life manager of some kind, if such people exist. Someone who specializes in turning failing lives around especially neurodivergent messes and can provide a reliable structure we can’t get on our own.
And I want people who don’t have the ability to do any of this to spread it to everyone they know. Everyone has a network, even if they don’t realize it. Even if you yourself can do nothing.
Maybe your friend has a business or a profession which can help.
Maybe you don’t think you know anyone, but you actually know someone who can give things like coffee powder, lactaid milk, Gatorade, and Ramen, as examples of things we could use.
And if you pass it on, and they pass it on, maybe a friend of a friend of a friend would have what you yourself don’t.
Spread the word everywhere.
Because I’m desperate, and well and truly out of time, energy, money, and really, options in general.
I know I’m asking for a lot. But I also know I can give back a lot. I might not be an instant master of a task on my first try, but by my tenth I’ll be competent and by my hundredth I’ll be a top performer. If given the freedom to experiment, I will innovate and create new ways of achieving things, just because I casually like to. I’m incredibly loyal, arguably to a fault, and if I feel like I am getting positive experiences, I will do just about anything to keep going on them.
I would happily work myself to death if need be, despite how I basically already am and it’s not enough.
I need a New Years miracle, because at this point, hundreds of dollars in debt by the time I actually finished writing this six days after starting it…if something doesn’t immediately change for the better, I probably won’t have a 2026.
I’ve tried. I really, really have. I’m tired, exhausted, overwhelmed, lost, scared, defeated, battered, broken, and ashamed.
I know how beautiful and wonderful life can be. I know how many wonders this world has. I believe in the innate good of humanity, I believe in our collective future being better despite how much bad exists every day. I love life, humans, this world in general. Despite everything I’ve lived through, despite all of what I am going through, I am so in awe of all we humans can and have done.
But the sad reality is, despite all of my inner strength, despite my hope for a better future, despite my idealism, my optimism, despite seeing all of the good in all of humanity and all of the people…I am at my limit. I’m at my wits end.
So please. Help. Reach out to me. I need it, to survive. Because me and my wife aren’t going to on our own.
Organizer
