Updates On This Crazy Year

My life has been moving at a breakneck pace for the past couple months now, and a lot has happened since my last update. I’ll try to break it down by topic in no particular order.

Housing Situation

The “post-pandemic” (in quotes because it’s not over but businesses and the government are treating it like it is) housing issue is horrible. People in my area are getting forced out of their homes en masse now that the eviction moratorium is lifted in New York State. Landlords are ending lease agreements, bumping up rent to prices they know tenants won’t pay, and even flipping properties onto the housing market for insane prices, to be bought and sold by computers at large property firms. Meanwhile, people like me who lost stable housing because of this, are left out in the cold. Either landlords don’t respond to calls on their ads, have outrageously inflated rent prices, or flat-out refuse you because of some demographic that isn’t legally protected.

I wasn’t able to find a place to live in my own hometown because I’m still technically a college student, even if I won’t be full-time next semester. This, coupled with being denied government assistance because I saved the extra emergency COVID Pell Grant money, they told me I had “too many resources” to get housed. Eventually, I had to give up and start moving in with relatives two hours away, but their lease is ending later this summer and there’s a strong possibility that I might have to move again due to rent hikes because of a property management company from Texas buying the rentals in the area.

Up and down rural roads all across upstate, there are run-down farmhouses up for sale in the hundreds of thousands, or even millions by large firms. A few have Berkshire-Hathaway signs out front. Meanwhile, in the cities, apartment buildings are aging and being condemned or burning down, and many are homeless or living out of motels. Local governments can’t contact the people who own the properties to have them maintained because they’re all from across the country and ignore people’s pleas. Housing is so dire up here that I may be forced to move outside of New York state, or the east coast entirely.

With trans people being outright banned and forcibly detransitioned in several states now, this scares the hell out of me. New York, despite all its flaws, is one of the very few states that has protections pending in the legislature, and the only one I can see that has a chance of actually passing. New York will probably become a refugee state for queer people at this rate, and if we get forced out due to high rent and no jobs, I’ll most likely end up in a state with the worst laws on the books.

Social Media

Elon Musk buying Twitter aside, the platform has been very detrimental to my mental health on top of everything else in my life right now, so I’ve privated my account and am no longer actively using it. I haven’t deleted it so I can park my name, but I won’t be posting or checking it except in very rare cases. Will I revisit it later? Probably not, if Musk’s proposed changes go through (chief among those being charging money for quote tweeting and pulling a “free speech” like some unsavory Mastodon instances).

Twitter is too much stimulation and too much algorithmic manipulation. It’s designed to make one doomscroll, to make people believe in conspiracies, to prop up the voices of bigots and silence queer people. Me posting my artwork there is liable to get it scraped by some bot and sold as an NFT, t-shirt, or stolen by someone to roleplay. I’m tired of seeing post after post of horrible events over and over and getting overwhelmed by it all. The past few days of not checking Twitter at all have been like a breath of fresh air.

Health

My leg is doing fine, but it still pops occasionally and I’m still sorer than usual, but the pain is manageable. My main concern right now is continuing to get my ADHD medication after I leave full-time status at my college and lose access to health services there. I don’t want to go through the diagnosis process again, and I don’t know how I would be able to go back to the brain fog and cyclical burnout from before I started medication. Hopefully I can arrange something, but with housing up in the air in the medium term, I don’t know where I would go to get my scripts filled, or find a job to continue to pay for them in the event that the part of my family who screwed me over decides to completely cut me off before I’m ready.

Right now, I’ve got three weeks left before I’m probably gone from this town for a long time, perhaps even the rest of my life.

In Short

I’m fucking terrified, but I have reassurances that I won’t be left homeless, no matter what.