I have never felt so much that "life is the thing that happens while you're making plans" applies to me as it does over the last year or so, oh my god.
April:
Oh, I'm going to move to California. AM I? I was convinced I would at the beginning of the month, and convinced I wouldn't by the end of the month.
May:
By the second week in May, I knew I would be for sure, in spite of everything. I took a week-long trip to my Dad's at this point, just making sure it was a place I could stand to be for more than a week but less than a month. It was!
Early in the fourth week in May, I moved out my my apartment in Atlanta, into the house I grew up in with my mom. At the time she was on FMLA leave from her work because her various chronic pain things (psoriatic arthritis, fibromyalgia, and trigeminal neuralgia) were getting too bad for her to work. While I was there, I did as much as I could for her. (She's now on SSDI!)
June:
Went to Outer Banks/family vacation. I finally got to hang out with my sister-in-law's sister, Abby, who is an awesome hippie girl. Who is now accepted into mom's side of the family and was invited on her own to OBX this year. Right now I'm facilitating her introduction to the kink world, muahaha. She asked, so I provided.
I also returned my dog, Puffin, to the adoption agency I'd gotten her from. I loved--and still love--her, but realistically, it wouldn't have been good to take her with me when I had no idea where I'd end up in six months, and knew finding a place with a dog would be 600% harder. In hindsight, I am
super glad that I did this and that I also left my special needs cat, Marie, with my mom. (She's subsequently adopted Marie, so I'm glad I could give her another special animal.)
July:
Moved to Oregon to live with my dad until August 1. I got to work in his legal pot garden! It was actually a lot of fun but also hard work. Living conditions not so pleasant (a shed + air mattress, though given that dad lives in a single wide trailer, I felt like I got the long end of the stick) but for one month? I handled it just fine, in spite of it being 100+ the entire time I was there and Dad nearly killing me on the level five rapids.
Met
![[profile]](https://imgprx.livejournal.net/a575938eab91f3f7a47e514b2597f240a82096c32412cc77664c70de49b29e46/P2Wkxmt6hAfgxS9woo0DAQJIremCzaw5zUnNTr9UwMPa_xObnMWgBl4vFF44C150pAxFkjqcL0FRDhBWzE9jrB9W3C-ZYPQ:3TQoKNykpSaBUXtq2wIP4Q)
theheartsays due to my new obsession with Bat Family
everything.
August:
Lived in Oakland! Stayed with a friend of a friend. I found Oakland and SF and San Jose and basically everywhere to be awesome and fell in love with all of it rapidly. Met an amazing furryperson and puppy named Mar. Signed a lease to begin on September 22nd, and I didn't have the cash to stay where I was any more, so...
September:
Back to Dad's! I helped some with trimming. Not tons, because I didn't like working with the dead plants as much as I liked working with the living ones. On September 18th, the landlord called and told me he needed to cancel my lease--but he didn't have the money to give me back right then, even if I'd been in town. So is it okay if he gives me half my money by October 1, and the other half by November 1? Not in any position to argue the law with this assface, I say yes.
This is also when I began to go way downhill mental health wise, both because of the time of year and things going wrong, but also due to lack of therapy and just
being at Dad's. It's not the right environment for me!
October:
Without Assface returning the $3k I'd paid him for first/last/deposit, I felt like I was stuck in Oregon. I didn't have any money to live on if I returned to the Bay area, so seeing no other option, I stayed at Dad's. I was absolutely miserable--it was an easy formula to figure out: feeling of not having any options + daily verbal abuse + no therapy + rural area means no way to physically get away from the abuse and into a place with people who won't hurt me = Bad Times.
Near the middle of the month and while I was still at Dad's, I started having
serious conversations with
![[personal profile]](https://imgprx.livejournal.net/1bb09f889d1a0662dbcf09341ce77c5592a34a37a147534e44f74b429c8f3fe5/P2WlxyVijxKvgWFn8cdQWEMdsf-ah7h0yFmVCbZBitHe5BHQgcnrB1ghT056GQJiv05e0zTaZg1RFEYV0g0o-lRBm3nIevQ:C5dO9dSMARO6g3EWur_SrA)
saystheheart, wherein she offered me a place to stay with her and her mom. Their place was being foreclosed on, but the auction wasn't until February 11th, so I'd have time to recoup money and get therapy and be somewhere safe. I didn't want to live in Denver, though, even if it meant living with someone as awesome as her.
At my mom's urging, in the middle/end of the month, I took the train back to SF and lived in a hostel for almost two weeks. I succeed exactly
not at all when it came to finding a place to live, and doing anything constructive besides. I know part of it was the housing market, but I also needed time to recover and house-searching just wasn't condusive to recovering. This wasn't a conscious decision on my part, but rather that my brain wasn't working. Period.
By the end of the month, I felt like the world was crushing down on me. I couldn't afford to stay at the hostel for another week; I didn't feel comfortable asking the married couple who'd helped me move if I could stay with them; I was
trapped, again, just like I had been at Dad's.
saystheheart repeated the offer she'd made while I was in Oregon, and I decided fuck it.
Fuck it. I was going to Denver. I might stay when they got foreclosed on, I might not, but at the very least I'd have somewhere to stay until February. The other factor was that plane/train tickets to everywhere else that I'd have a free bed for X amount of time were a lot more expensive--I'd be in dire straits if I bought them. So I bought the $110, train ticket for November 1st. A two-day train ride really wasn't my idea of fun, but needs must etc.
I spent my last night in town with Mar; it was absolutely magical.
(October 2013 was a huge month for me.)
November:
I spent two days on a train! It wasn't as bad as I'd thought it be, probably because at that point I probably had at least a week of time on a train, given all the train-riding I did back and forth to my dad's. I figured out a good way to sleep, and I got to see some really amazing scenery on the California Zephyr between Oakland and Denver. I got some absolutely gorgeous photos.
Beautiful. I love them. (
My instagram, btw. I update it selectively--mostly when I remember.)
Arrived in Denver! Met
saystheheart otherwise known as AJ. As soon as I saw her sitting there looking all nervous, a thought popped up:
This is the woman I'm going to get old with.
And then I thought,
fuck. But I went for it none the less.
Things have been kind of a roller coaster since then: What do you mean the auction is in mid-December, not February? Oh god, our landlord really actually is a drunk asshole! and so on and so forth. But we've gotten through it together, and it feels like it's been years, not months, since we've been together in person.
We're engaged--the big day is October 31st, 2015, but we're going to elope and send pictures. We have two beautiful, amazing cats. We're going to make it and be okay and stuff.
And
now I can write LJ entries about life since then. :D
Originally posted at Dreamwidth. Comments @ DW:
