Turning Point

The therapist I am seeing calls it an adjustment disorder. It's dead common, she reassures. Moving across country takes its toll, sometimes for half a year or more. My bickering with my partner? Also common when things get shaken up. Housemate issues? The same. I'm just being hit especially hard because I have anxiety. The doubts and fears have extra teeth--not extra credibility.

The shame of being a blubbering mess for weeks fades a little--and with it, bit by bit, my tendency to be one.

Meanwhile, the landscape around me was turning into this. Yet until this week I wasn't really able to enjoy it.

My therapist is a free spirit. An ex squatter and single mom of a disabled son, wrestling with her own life crap visibly but with grace. She knows everything about living flexibly and by her wits. I have money, she points out. I have options. There are good social services in New York for my partner, and myself if I need it. No, things aren't going to plan, but that's ok. I can reassess and make a new one less likely to be stopped in its tracks by one setback.

Slowly I start to lift my head. There is hope. I just can't see it through the miasma of what I'm going through.

I start wrestling with New York bureaucracy while waiting for my appeal hearing for unemployment. It's saner than California's but I end up needing to know the outcome of my hearing before I ask for aid.

After multiple phone calls Unemployment agrees to let me attend the Southern California hearing by phone.  I gather witnesses. I get help sorting out what to say. Everything is in the works or in the mail. I wait, filling my time writing and looking for freelance work.

My partner and I make an agreement to take three months sorting ourselves and each other out before deciding where we will live come winter. That gives us time: counseling, driver training, job hunting, waiting on this or that bit of bureaucracy to come through. The rooms we are in, the house crammed together with three other people, won't work once the cold sets in. A trailer on the land might work. The bus might be delayed too long to get set up before the weather changes, though we haven't given the idea up.

We might move to Kingston--but that presents its own challenges. Kingston is warmer and closer to services. Kingston has jobs and more public transit. We walk the Stockade District over tilted slate sidewalks and I fall in love a little. Then I tally the potential costs of rent, utilities, car, food and other things we need, and fret. Even if I get Unemployment, moving will be a calculated risk.

Turn a corner in Kingston and you might walk by a building that's older than this country.

But then again, so is life.

A week later I agree to go with the whole household to a comic book convention in Long Island. I know it will be a test of my energy and ability to deal with crowds. I choose to go through with it, risk of a public meltdown or not.

Three hours on New York highways to drink in the scenery and think about my new life. My partner and I figure we might spend up to three years in New York. We're just not sure where yet. Every village and town and then small city between Woodstock and New York City gets considered as we drive by. The hills lower, the buildings grow, and eventually I see the New York harbor. The Atlantic. The Five Boroughs vast at our flank as we cross through onto Long Island.

So much green space even in the city. The buildings are huge, even some of the very old ones. I see my first brick skyscrapers. No fears of earthquake here. No haze of pollution either. I stare at the Bronx's Co-Op City and remember East Oakland's yellowed concrete Hell, and the bricks and industry and cavernous, greenery and graffiti-filled alleys of the place shine by comparison. And it hits me.

I have suffered, sacrificed and risked everything, dealt with setbacks and breakdowns. I have been kept up nights terrified and woke sobbing with depression countless times. I nearly left for home twice. Yet if I had, or had not come at all....

I would never have seen New York City, the Atlantic, Long Island or the Catskills. I would never have walked Kingston's slate sidewalks. Or woken to birds instead of vomiting drunks and loud music for two months straight. I would simply have crawled back into the too-tight shell of my old life and stayed until it suffocated me.

Suddenly I find myself looking forward to the Con instead of dreading potential problems at it. For the first time in a long time, driving down that highway, there is nowhere else I would rather be than where I am.

I have fun at the convention. I go home tired but without breakdowns. The next morning, I wake without tears.

Introduction: Leaving Everything I Know

View from my parents' porch in Oakland, CA

My name is Rebecca Lloyd, and this is the story of how I left my 9-5 life in the San Francisco Bay Area and ran off to the woods of New York State. Eventually, it will be the story of how I then left New York State to travel the country in a converted school bus with my partner.

I am a published writer in my forties, and have lived in the San Francisco Bay Area my whole life. The last thirteen years of that life were spent with my partner, John. I supported us with a mid-range office position that would have done the job in a sane economy. Unfortunately, the region no longer has a sane economy. Gentrification and local landlord corruption has sent rents skyrocketing. My salary, meanwhile, remained the same, and our health issues prevented us from seeking other income. We were debating what to do about a year ago when a series of violent crimes in our already unsafe neighborhood pushed the issue in the worst way possible.

I could go on for pages about what it was like to live in a place that had not only the typical problems of a slum apartment, but three break-ins, two police lockdowns, street fights and screaming domestics multiple times a week and by the end, an average of two shootings a month. But for now, let's just say that I didn't sleep much, my anxiety disorder was constantly being triggered, and all I could think of was getting out. When my partner came home and told me that he had had to seek shelter from a drive-by in progress just walking to the transit station, I knew that we were done with Oakland.

Friday I had my last day of work with Alameda County, where I had done every type of clerical and office support work possible for over thirteen years. It was a job I was happy to have, and I regretted having to leave despite its lack of ability to support us long term. I left friends, co-workers, and the illusion of financial security behind. As I walked out the door to go have a good-bye dinner with a work friend, I felt dizzy, tired, relieved, and terrified all at once.

Lucky doesn't care where we go as long as there's food and a couch.

In three days, I take my two Emotional Support Animals (aka Lucky and Velcro, the Thundercats, and/or the Flying Derp Brothers), present all relevant paperwork, and go flying across country. I'm going to join my partner of fourteen years and his parents in the Catskills, in Ulster County, New York. There, I plan to seek both part-time work and freelance assignments, and save money while we train in some skills, help my in-laws on various projects, and prepare for mid-May, when the funding comes in for the next big project in my life.

The idea to convert a school bus and live in it has been in our heads for over a year. When my in-laws offered us sanctuary at their place while we built the thing, we jumped at the chance. Our budget for the build is pretty tight, meaning that we will need to find creative ways to raise money before, during and after the build. Meanwhile, I will be chronicling the entire experience on this blog.

I'm pretty apprehensive right now, simply because I haven't been on a plane in twenty years and it's all the way across country. I have all my papers in order, I have a plan, and I still know that it's going to be hard. Pet relief areas exist on every leg of the flight, and I will need to use them a lot. I'm fending off attacks of the "what-if"s on almost an hourly basis, answering them with logic or dismissing them with the knowledge that I'm smart, resourceful and have help in my journey. I'm bracing myself to be a bit of a wreck when I get there, and for the cats to be pretty damned stressed as well. But it's crunch time. The only way out is through. We'll manage. And once the trip's behind me, the real work can begin.