July Newsletter

I was going to post this before July ended, but here we are. I’m sure my faithful readers can forgive me!

Well, I went off to visit my True Love for a few days in mid-July. We had a great time! They took me to Manhattanhenge, which was very cool. Apparently it’s better if there aren’t clouds, and we had a little trouble getting photos because the only way to see the view was by standing in the middle of a busy street. But I would rate it at A+ for adventure!!

In other news, I’ve now been at my new job at the preschool for about six weeks. I’m only two days a week but so far it’s been very rewarding. Now, the reason I’m only two days a week is because I have umpteen appointments during business hours. So, I’d been looking to add a second job in early 2027 but it has to be on the overnight shift. I found this video of what a night auditor does, and it looks perfect:

Chances Travel Production. (2021, November 19). Being a Night Auditor at a hotel [YouTube video]. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/07MWbz4Qj70

So, my thoughts were that I would do the reasonable thing and work the job that I have until about the end of the year, then add in the second job. I’m not leaving the preschool because being around small children soothes my soul. But it doesn’t pay very well.

Struggles

Well, things started getting hard when Donald Trump cut my food stamps back to like $43/month. So, now food costs are going to go through the roof for me. Meanwhile, the neurofeedback seems to be helping a lot, but I’m running out of sessions with them. So I have to either figure out how to pay for more sessions, or lose a major support. Finally, my birthday is coming up in a few months and those of you who have been following my blog for a while know that my greatest dream in life has always been to have kids. I finally have a partner which is kind of a miracle, but I’m also not at a place in my life where I can immediately have a baby. Even if everything goes well, I don’t think I’ll be ready to be a mother for at least a few years. It feels like I worked so hard for years with this primary guiding light, and now that I’m finally stable enough to be able to imagine my life dream coming to fruition, it will be too late. I talked to the doctor on Thursday and she recommended cryopreservation, but it’s crazy expensive.

So, I’ve spent the past few days researching cryopreservation, and obsessively making never-ending spreadsheets (which is typically what I do when I’m worried about money). My “baseline” for mental health is drastically higher than it used to be (which my True Love reminded me of), but I’m currently below my new and improved baseline. I’ve been wondering if I should pump the breaks on everything else in life and immediately add in a second job. The problem is, I’m already at about the maximum earning you can be at for Social Security, so adding in any additional income would mean losing those benefits. Which, you can’t go back if you try your hand at working and it tanks, so it’s a big decision to go off of benefits. Plus, my rent is subsidized and is set at one third of my gross income. So, taking into consideration that I would lose SSDI and my rent would go up, if I were to add in a second job at 40 hours a week (so going from 16 hours a week up to 56 hours a week), I would wind up with a total of about $800 a month additional income. Which works out to around $5/hour for the additional hours. It’s also not usually the greatest idea to make major decisions when mental health is below baseline.

I’m frustrated because it’s like, I did all the right things. I got my master’s degree, I worked hard, etc. It wasn’t my fault that I got hit with massive additional trauma immediately before finishing grad school. If it hadn’t been for PTSD, I would be able to afford food, therapy, and children. I really only want things that either most people have, or (as in the case of neurofeedback) most people don’t need because they don’t have the same kind of trauma. And I’m just tired of having to work ten times as hard as everyone else for everything in life.

So, I called up my contact from the Ticket to Work program, and he generously said we could meet on Thursday. I’m definitely not going to be earning what I could have been earning if I’d been able to use my degree, but $800/month is $800/month. However, I need to know how my health insurance would be affected. I also need to contact the landlord and find out what the maximum I can earn is without having to find another apartment. I’m not usually great at recognizing my own limits, but I surely know that right now, I would not be able to handle having to move. I’m barely keeping it together as it is!

Anyway, I like when I’m doing well. Then I can tell people how I’m doing and it makes them happy. It feels really embarassing when I can keep all my ducks in a row, plus it drains the people around me. Whoever coined the phrase, “It’s okay to not be okay” has never had to ask their boss for a sick day. When things start to spiral, my brain immediately worries that I’m going to end up hospitalized. Who will watch the cat? I’m pretty sure that won’t be necessary, but it’s a worry.

Another thing that’s hard is that I grew up being told that there was a monetary value to human life, and if you’re utilizing too many resources and not able to generate sufficient resources in return, you didn’t deserve to live. Which pretty much summarizes the Republican worldview. Now, my family has thought I was dead weight on society for years, I’ve been through a lot of dehumanizing experiences with the mental health system, and about 40% of the country is Republicans (who think the world would be better without me in it). So it’s like, I can’t have a crisis right now, and it’s embarassing that I even have to worry that that will happen. But I’m also not 100% sure what to do to prevent it.