Hey folks,

So, a week or so ago, I made a post about my financial difficulties, basically explaining the situation I'm in (short version: bad business deal caused me to lose out on ~7 months' pay when I was already borderline broke).

Obviously, being broke is a really difficult and very upsetting situation. No, it's not something that just happened overnight, but to wind up there right on the heels of working really hard on something for two-thirds of a year and getting basically nothing for the efforts meant I had every reason to expect I'd be in a much better position instead of a far, far worse one.

I have more work now. I have quite a bit of work, in fact, from clients who pay very well and who really like the work I do. This is great news. It means I'll be able to rebuild. But the problem is that seeing the money for that is a long ways out, and in the meantime, I was still left with nothing after this last failed venture.

Here in the U.S., we're brought up our entire lives with the message that so long as you work hard and keep a positive attitude, everything will work out. Unfortunately, there are some cases where that simply isn't true, and my situation--being months behind on rent and health insurance and having no money to pay for it--was one of them. Short of walking out on my current contracts (and, effectively, the career I've worked my entire adult life for) and getting a part-time job somewhere (or selling an organ or something), I wasn't going to see money for weeks or more, and no amount of positive thinking and working hard (I was at least doing that last one) was going to change that.

Now, we're also brought up to not give up on our dreams, and I think if I'd suggested that I was going to do that as a course of action, everyone would have told me not to (unless they wanted to be snide in hindsight and say of COURSE I should have swallowed my pride and done whatever was necessary, I guess).

So you might be wondering what I'm getting at here. Mainly I'm just trying to get people to understand three things about me and my situation. But first, let me just clarify: I am paid up on my medical insurance now. Also, while I still owe a bunch of back rent as well, I'm not going to go homeless all of a sudden, either.

But so onto my points for getting into all this:

1) Lots of people seem to think that the reason I'm upset is because of this failed business venture, or because I don't consider myself successful, or something along those lines. Or they think it's something like I'm blaming myself for the fact that it happened. That's not the case. That really does have nothing to do with it. It really is JUST as simple as, "I have no money for rent and medicine." That's fucking terrifying, and I like to think pretty straightforward, but for some reason lots of people are trying to find some deeper psychological reason for it. But it really IS that simple, I promise you.

2) I'm not ashamed of the fact that I've needed help. Thankfully, I've gotten some amazing help very recently, and while I don't necessarily feel I deserve it, I'm not too proud to accept it. But when your only real options are "beg for help you honestly don't think you deserve" or "walk away from your dreams," the idea of just calmly and casually asking for help seems impossible, and so I'm incredibly grateful that I have friends who were willing to step forward and offer to help me out in ways I was quite literally incapable of helping myself.

3) I'm not mad at anyone. I'm really not. I do, however, get frustrated and upset very easily. It is incredibly demoralizing to be in a situation where you're too busy with work to do anything about the fact that you don't have any money, and having to do it for so long has robbed me of my emotional reserves, and so whenever Yet Another Thing Goes Wrong (as it so often does), there's a good chance that my internal coping mechanisms just aren't there, and that causes me to just fall apart completely, emotionally and mentally. So rather than being mad at anyone, I'm just incredibly grateful for the folks who have stuck by me, because I can only imagine how insufferable I've been in recent months.



Allie Brosh, of Hyperbole and a Half fame, has a great bit in one of her articles about depression where she tries to explain that her fish are dead, and her friends offer to help her find them, and she's stuck trying to explain that, no, that isn't what my problem is, why aren't you listening to me? That is exactly how I've been feeling for the last several weeks, just trying to explain myself in simple terms even to close friends who seem to be reacting to a different problem than the one I'm trying so hard to explain.

I guess this post is my dead fish comic. I'm just trying to explain what's going on, in simple terms, not just so that people know what's going on, but so they know why I'm feeling and acting the way I've been feeling.

And again, I've been so lucky and so grateful to have gotten help here where I've needed it most. I'm not sure I can ever properly thank them for that, but I owe it to all of the people I know and care about to try, because once I can reach a point where I feel like what they did was worth it and that I deserved the help I didn't think I deserved at the time, I'll be in a place where I can finally be the sort of person other people deserve me to be.