The Summer Search

My Unemployment came through after months of fighting. As spring became summer, I paid off the debts from struggling along on no income, kept searching for a job or freelance work, and did my best to regroup with my therapist's help.

I also wrote, and wrote, and wrote: thousands of words every day, which I then spent hours every day dutifully polishing. I finished my novel. Then a joint novel with my housemate. I started working on edits and preparing for submission. Then I started gathering a collection of my previously published writing in the hopes of marketing it online. I hung up my shingle online as a ghost writer to try and start making money. I started slowly getting clients. I tried to focus on that, and not on the setbacks that were pushing the bus plan further and further out of reach.

The first problem came when we discovered that our housemates did not support the bus plan. They expressed little faith in my partner's ability to build or drive a skoolie after watching him struggle with depression over the winter. In addition they were wrapped up in their own projects, and had neither time nor room on their land for another. I had been waiting for my partner to get his license as the first step in the process, but with that happening so slowly I didn't have a leg to stand on when it came to changing anyone's mind.

The second came as we realized that wintering with them in that isolated place, which averages fifteen degrees colder than the nearest city and has no services, was not going to work. I started looking in Kingston in earnest, while my partner worked on getting his driver's license.  We soon discovered that Kingston has almost no rental market. The only feasible alternative was to use some of my savings as a down payment to buy a small home, with payments far cheaper than local rents.  But when I started working on this, I ran into a problem.

My partner wanted to leave the state again. He had no plan as to where, how we would live or what we would do. He simply kept working on me, over and over, to abandon my cats and most of our belongings and wander the country, on my money. The bus had been his idea: he would build and drive it, and I would be able to accompany him because it would be a roof over our heads and I wouldn't have to give up my cats. But now, with no ability to build the bus, he just wanted to go wandering anyway.

I put my foot down. I had already given up everything I knew and risked a great deal to satisfy his wanderlust, and in return he had not even learned to drive yet. I told him that if he wanted to drop everything and drift around, he would be doing it on his own and on his own money.  Meanwhile, I would be staying in Kingston a few years to regroup, build my writing career and try to overcome my driving phobia.

The choice strengthened me. I still couldn't sleep a lot of the time, but I no longer cried for hours on waking. My partner complained that I never agreed with him on anything any more, ignoring that he was making poor decisions that disregarded my needs. I stood my ground, frustrating him endlessly, as he had no sense of compromise and seemed to believe that I would cave in eventually.

I enrolled in a first time home buyer course. I started looking at houses. My partner sulked, regularly taking the opportunity to remind me that he did not support me in my decision. I informed him again that if he didn't like it, he could leave. He stayed.

There are plenty of ways to travel the country without sacrificing stability. One such way is to move from home to home every few years or so. It's not exactly what he wants. It's not exactly what I want. But as I recover from a months-long breakdown caused by my last leap of faith falling flat, time to regroup in a stable place is exactly what I need.

...And no. I'm not giving up my cats.

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.

Roadblocks

I waited for six weeks for a check from California's unemployment office. After paperwork, a phone interview, multiple mailings and a lot of waiting, I received a letter saying that I would get a certain amount per week starting ten days after I mailed their form back. I did so. Yesterday, knowing I was broke and nervous and had waited too long, my partner's mom handed me a fat envelope from Unemployment with a smile.

It was a refusal letter.

I went over it three times, stunned, disbelieving, reading words that by Unemployment's own rules made no sense. I was refused because I voluntarily left my job. The fact that I moved out of state was completely ignored. The fact that I was joining my partner, completely ignored. They were getting legal evidence that I had moved every time I sent correspondence, but none of that mattered.

In short, they had played mind games with me, making me jump through hoops and then claiming I would get the support I needed while looking for work, and then refused me against their own rules.

I have severe anxiety disorder. This situation had already caused multiple attacks as the last of my money from work slowly went away, I was cheated by a freelance client, and interviews led nowhere. The award letter was the first hint of stability and hope I had gotten. It let me relax. Just in time for them to drop me without reason.

It was like hitting a wall at a hundred miles an hour. Everything stopped. My dreams, my plans, all of it was suddenly imperiled by this nonsensical decision. I forced myself, with the last of my composure, to put in an appeal. Then I went upstairs and broke for a while.

I spent the day sorting myself out and trying to determine my next moves. I got a sunburn photographing amber necklaces to put up for sale online. I started exploring more freelance opportunities. I did chores. I did the best I could.

But what weighed on me most was the fact that my retirement money, which was supposed to go to the bus and our dream, was now at risk for being frittered away slowly by daily expenses. My partner and his family did a lot to reassure me. But a worst case scenario is never easy.

I am trying to keep optimistic and focused, and look for more income streams while waiting on the appeal. But some moments I break down a little. Like when I see a school bus drive by.

Then I get back up and start trying again.