Upfront, I am not asking for money. If you see any gofundme ops in my name, DO NOT contribute. I'm not fishing for sympathy either. My intent here is purely to inform everyone of what's going on and why I'm making certain changes, most notably, that I'm closing commissions to focus on my Patreon. Also, keep in mind that the following text-wall is abridged. I've left out a lot to prevent this from becoming a George R.R. Martin-rivaling septology.

On with the shitshow…

In 2013, I bought a condo in Deep Creek Gardens, Florida. The down payment was 15K which totally wiped out my savings and then some. I wasn't worried. We hadn't touched my partner's money and my mother offered to help me if things got bad. So, at the somewhat embarrassing age of thirty, I finally managed to move out of my mother's house. I had my own place that I bought with my own money. I didn't see any way this could go awry. Call it blissful naïveté.

No Gays Allowed! My partner, JD, and I were told in no uncertain terms by the HOA that we were not welcome. "But that's not legal!" you might be thinking. And you'd be right. It's not legal to tell someone "GTFO because you're gay." It is, however, perfectly legal to tell them "single family units only." Beverly, the HOA head, told my mother they didn't want any lesbians in their complex because apparently gay people mean "drugs, prostitution, and loud parties." See, when ignorant bigots know they can't discriminate against you legally, they just find backdoor ways to go about it.

We tried to fight but they had a team of lawyers who made it clear we would not win. I should also note that I was not out of the closet back then. I'm still not. Most of my family has no idea that I'm not straight (trust me, that's for the better). And even if I had come out, we didn't really have much in the way of resources to fight with at that point. Just goes to show that bullshit can totally blindside you despite your best efforts to bullshit-proof your endeavors.

JD and I both went back to our parents. I turned the condo over to my mother so she could rent it out in hopes of recouping money. The "and then some" I mentioned previously was hers, a few thousand to help me out with the down payment and some minor repairs/updates. Unfortunately, Deep Creek Gardens only allowed us to rent six months out of the year and there were exhaustive vetting processes for renters so there really wasn't much recouping.

Not long after that, JD's elderly father took ill with stage-4 lung cancer. She was the only one around to care for him. When he died, he left her his house, a typical Port Charlotte Florida home with an estimated value of 120K. Unfortunately, around that time, my younger sister and brother in law, both of whom are intellectually disabled (IQs around 70), decided that it would be a great idea to have a child.

This threw everyone's plans up in the air. My mother had intended to buy a condo for them in the same complex as me, preferably, right next door so I could keep an eye on them. It would have been ideal. I'd be in proximity to take care of them but I'd still have my own living space (occupying quarters with them is unpleasant for reasons I don't want to get into).

My mother decided that it would be a good idea to move back to NY which has affordable healthcare and aid programs for people like my sister and BIL. We always wanted to move back to NY anyway. However, JD had just inherited a house. She couldn't immediately pick up and go with us. Both houses went on the market around the same time- my mother's sold in a few months and in that span of time, JD hadn't even gotten so much as a nibble. I wanted to stay with JD but there were some issues, most notably that my mother needed help moving. Moreover, all the money from the sale of my condo went into the new house on the understanding that I would have a place to stay until I could get back on my feet. JD and I talked it over and determined that we would do the long-distance thing until she could sell her house.

So I moved to NY and JD stayed in FL. It was only temporary. All we had to do was wait for her house to sell and we'd have plenty of money to buy a decent place together in NY. The intention was to find a location within easy reach of my mother so I could help her with my sister, BIL, and the baby but I'd have my own place and I could finally live together with my partner like quasi-normal adult human beings. Dare to dream.

If you've been paying attention to this point, you probably noticed the trend and have guessed that there's a "but then" coming and boy was there ever. JD's health took a sudden, drastic turn for the worse. Her insurance was around 700$/mo and her deductible was enough to buy a decent used car with so she had to cancel it. Only by the grace of a charity clinic could she get any care at all but they had no idea what they were doing.

The Florida doctors kept telling her "it's just female problems" and sending her home with pain meds. It should be noted at this juncture that JD has a 100% cancer rate in two whole generations of her family and the third generation is catching up. She also has pernicious iron deficient anemia, lupus, WPWS, POTS, and a list of other issues longer than she is tall. But they kept telling her it was just "female problems."

No one was showing any real interest in her house even as she lowered the price. 115K. 110K. 105K. 100K. Nothing. Her health got so bad that she finally caved in and started looking at these "we buy unsellable house" type buyers. 70K. That was the only offer she got in the two years we were apart- a little more than half the house's estimated value. But it was better than nothing. She needed to get out before Florida bankrupted and killed her. Tens of thousands in medical debt were piling up as the doctors kept telling her "feeeeeeeeeemale problems." We decided waiting for the full cost of her house wasn't worth her life and so she sold it for 70K.

If you've been paying attention, you should definitely have noticed the trend and you're sure there's a "but then" coming and this one is a real doozy. Apparently, there was a 40K lien on the house that JD was never informed of. She called the man up, apprised him of our situation, and begged him to drop it. He laughed in her face, called her a bitch, and hung up then out of pure spite, tried hitting her with penalties and fines since the lien had gone unpaid for almost a decade. According to this man's own lawyers, he is a multimillionaire (they also said he was a horrible POS but they were not at all willing to work with us because he paid them 2M a year EACH). I'm not sure whether the number I heard was eighty-million or eighteen-million but either way, he could have easily shrugged off 40K and he pointedly did not. There was no fighting it. The house could not be sold without satisfying the lien.

When all was said and done, after closing and moving costs, my partner had a little over 30K in hand. This completely destroyed all our plans and sent both of us into a blind panic trying to figure out what to do. No one would rent to her because she has six cats. Yes, I know she could have rehomed them but that would have destroyed her, especially after having just lost her two dogs back to back.

In the end, she had little choice but to buy a shitty, falling apart trailer with barely enough room for her and her cats, let alone me and my cat. Keep in mind, our plans fell apart literally in the span of however long it took her lawyer to inform her of the lien. Deals had already been made, hands shook, and everything was in motion so decisions after that point were made in a hasty panic.

At least we would be together again… sort of. She settled about twenty minutes away from me and could only come to visit on days when she wasn't horribly exhausted by the one shitty, low-paying employer that would have her. She worked a lot of Uber in her off-hours which eventually destroyed her car so I had to lend her mine (she no longer Ubers because it's just not worth it). Disability kept turning her down which ended up being comically arbitrary (more on that later). Nevertheless, we were determined to try again. I began saving up with the intention of getting a bigger place for the both of us.

If you've been paying attention, you'll notice the trend has kind of a rhythm and it's about time for another "but then." This one goes by the name of Covid. Manifold and multitudinous are the ways in which this disease fucked our lives (took me out of commission for about a month and I haven't been right since) but my partner got the worst of it. Her health was in freefall. I don't want to get into specifics she might not appreciate me sharing but it was really bad. I mean literally, no joke, not exaggerating, "how THE FUCK are you even alive right now" levels of badness. Her hemoglobin was chronically in the near-fatal range and resisted all treatment for reasons it took NY doctors approximately two days to figure out. (FL doctors couldn't figure it out in all of two years.) It was determined that she needed a radical hysterectomy.

Naturally, covid came along and befucked that right the hell up. She was told that her surgery was an "elective procedure" and elective procedures were on hold due to the virus which was starting to ramp up at that point. So they pushed her surgery back into April. Then they pushed it back again. And again and again. And again until almost a year later. Her hemoglobin was so low (4.2) that they had to spend a whole day transfusing her before the surgery which finally took place on January 8th of this year.

Remember those "feeeeemale problems" I mentioned previously? Turns out that was about 41lbs of fibroids and endometrial stromal sarcoma which set up its own vascular system and was constantly exacerbating her pernicious anemia which had been resisting treatment for years because the sarcoma would basically just eat any transfusions and spit them right back out again.

But wait, there's more! A short time later, after a two-week recovery period, she passed out at work with a fever nearing 104. There had been symptoms leading up to this but she was afraid to take more time off from work. Turns out she had a softball-sized abscess at the site of the incision. A CT scan was ordered to determine how best to proceed.

If you've been paying attention and you have an IQ higher than the average rutabaga, you're now very well aware of the trend and you should be 100% sure there's a "but then" around the corner and in this case, the "but then" was the aforementioned CT scan which happened to incidentally pick up a few blurry bright spots in the lower lobe of her left lung.

Stage-4 metastatic lung cancer that migrated from the endometrial stromal sarcoma.

And not even a full week later, doctors found cancerous nodules in my mother's lung.

Yeah….

So here's the bottom line:

I can't keep coasting on commissions. I just cannot work fast enough or command prices high enough to keep this shitshowship afloat that way. Both JD and my mother have countdown clocks over their heads. When my mother dies, I will be responsible for two intellectually disabled adults and their child, who, by all accounts, is a normal, sweet, healthy little girl in every regard (some-fucking-how, magically, I guess). I could just walk away but I don't want to. No one else has stepped up to take care of them and I hate to think about what will happen to that child without me or my mother around.

I have three more commissions in my queue and after that, they will be closed indefinitely so I can focus on my Patreon. (More on that soon.) To be clear, I will still be putting out personal art. It may just be more sporadic until such a time as I ever find stability in my life.