2026 has been an INTERESTING year so far. I’ve made a few small, general updates about my situation elsewhere, but I wanted to finally get back to using my blog, so I thought this would be a good opportunity to go into more detail about what’s been going on.
2020
Way back in 2020, there was this thing called “The Novel Coronavirus”, aka Covid-19. I was starting my third year at my first full-time animation job. In March, we switched to work-from-home, and I stopped going outside altogether. Part of it was me being a big lazy fatso homebody, but I also was incredibly worried about getting sick. There was so much talk about how many people were dying. I had distanced myself from my family back in Mississippi at that point, but suddenly they were trying to contact me. I ended up getting an email from a doctor saying that my grandmother had gotten covid and was dying. I was too ashamed to reach out by that point. But even ignoring the massive death count, there was also so much information coming out about long covid, and how even if you got a relatively minor case, this could lead to all sorts of awful health problems like early onset dementia.
So I never went outside. Garbage piled up in my apartment. I wasn’t getting any exercise whatsoever, and so I started getting fatigued more and more easily, to the point where even walking down two flights of stairs to check the mail felt daunting, so I stopped checking the mail. I was ashamed of the way I was living, and I didn’t want anyone to know. Everyone else continued to live relatively normal lives, but somehow I was devolving. I constantly made up excuses. If someone wanted to send me mail, I told them that mail in our building got stolen a lot. Which was technically true, but I would have said it even if it weren’t. Sometimes friends would mention that they were going to be in the bay area and that we should try to hang out. I would find excuses. I was completely isolated and never saw another human face in person for years, save for one brief journey outside that I’ll get to in a bit.
2021
In March 2021 I was laid off. Netflix hadn’t picked up the show I had been helping develop and our little studio had to trim the fat. I was the least talented person on payroll, so I should have seen it coming. But instead it was the emotional equivalent of getting t-boned. I did a lot of crying for a while, mourning the loss of what felt like the only good thing in my life. So much of my self-worth was tied up in being someone lucky enough to have their dream job.
This lead to my depression getting worse, and my physical health was still declining.
My old driver’s license expired mid-2021. I knew I would need a valid ID if I ever hoped to get another full-time job. Despite being terrified of getting sick and being so insanely out of shape, I felt I had no choice. I cut up an old t-shirt to make a face mask and headed out to catch a bus to the DMV. Every step outside felt like I was wading through mud. I felt like my breathing could be heard for miles. When I finally got to the DMV, I had to beg someone to let me skip the line outside so I could sit down. I wasn’t strong enough to stand for even a few minutes.
The photo on my ID is still painful for me to look at. I look awful, even by DMV standards. It was all I could do to stand long enough for the photo, and having to lower my mask in this building full of people only made me more stressed.
But it was finally over and I could return to the comfort of my home. I had to make my savings last as long as possible, so I knew I should take the bus back home, but even the small amount of additional walking to get to the bus stop, to transfer to another bus, to walk from the last bus to my building felt like an impossible task. So I took out my tablet, got on the DMV’s wifi, and used Skype to call a cab (This was during a years-long stretch where I did not own a phone, which feels like a whole other thing to explain).
I got into the cab. It was the same guy that occasionally took me to or from the studio when I was in the mood to get somewhere faster than usual. I didn’t have any cash, so I asked him to stop by an ATM so I could withdraw a 20 to pay him. He did. The ATM refused to give me any money. That worried me, but I went back to the cab and asked him to take me to a store that I knew offered cash back with debit/credit transactions. But when I tried to buy something, my card was declined. And I couldn’t call my bank because I didn’t have a phone or a wifi connection to use Skype. Meanwhile the meter was still ticking up. I started panicking. I didn’t want to make this guy mad. I didn’t want to get in trouble. I went back to the cab and explained my situation. I asked him if I could pay him back later, that I had to sort out the issue with my card, but that I would need to use a cab again in a few days, so I could pay him double then. He said I had always been a good customer and that he was fine with it as long as I promised to call him for a cab in a few days.
I never called. I don’t even remember what I had planned to use that other cab ride for, but I never took it. I was in such awful shape and so stressed out, I had to rest twice just walking up the two flights of stairs to my apartment’s floor that day. I got back into my apartment and I never wanted to go outside again. And I didn’t.
I scrambled to find any animation work I could. I got a little freelance here and there, mostly from Mike at LowBrow, who has always been very good to me and helped me out with jobs when he could. I also got to be story editor for a project at a French animation studio called Superprod, who knew of my work because they animated our preschool show Go Go Cory Carson. But besides those tiny highlights, I mostly had nothing to do for a year as my meager savings ticked down to nothing and my mental and physical health kept getting worse. I couldn’t understand why I was having so much trouble. I had gotten my foot in the door of the animation industry. Wasn’t it supposed to be smooth sailing now?
2022
Quite literally at the last possible moment, when my savings were almost entirely gone, I got a life-saving email from Carl Greenblatt. He has been a fan of my comics from the very early days when I called them “SHITFEST” on Tumblr. We kept in touch over the years, and he had some great news. Warner Bros had greenlit another order of Jellystone episodes. He asked me if I wanted to storyboard on the show. Didn’t even ask for a board test. I agreed, feeling like things were finally going to turn around.
I’m starting to realize February has somehow become an important month in my life. My first day at my first full-time animation job started in February 2018. I also got the news about being laid off from that same job in February 2021. And now my first union job was starting in February 2022. And it was even better than I could have expected. I was getting paid union storyboard artist wages, but for the first three months I was part of the writer’s room. Every day or two, I would log onto Teams and shoot the shit with funny guys who all had made some of my favorite cartoons from my childhood. Spongebob, Billy & Mandy, Chowder, Superjail. And I was just part of the gang.
But I still was dealing with everything else. Vaccines had begun to roll out. I wanted to get one, and went as far as scheduling an appointment online. But I couldn’t make myself go out. I kept thinking about how much of an ordeal the DMV trip had been. And I had only gotten weaker, more worried, more depressed. I thought about how I would have to take a bus full of coughing sneezing people, expelling germs. What if I got infected with covid on my way to get a covid vaccine? I knew that didn’t really make any sense, but I couldn’t get it out of my head. So I never went.
My garbage pile had gotten BIG, and I had to angle my camera in weird ways during writers room meetings to keep people from being able to see it. I kept thinking that I should be using all this union job money to pay someone to come clean out my apartment since I wasn’t able to do it myself. But having anyone, even a stranger who was used to seeing dirty apartments, see MY dirty apartment and learn how awful a life I lived was too embarrassing. Plus I was hesitant to spend ANY money that wasn’t on things I needed, like food. Not sure why I thought having a clean and livable apartment wasn’t needed. But I guess after barely avoiding becoming 100% broke, I was feeling a little hesitant to spend money that I might need for rent and groceries later. So I told myself that as soon as I got my next big job after this, and was CERTAIN I had the extra money to spend, I would pay to get my life sorted out finally.
My time on Jellystone ended in February 2023, and that next big job never came.
2023
This was the year things really took a turn for the worse. My garbage problem had gotten to the point where I had trouble even getting to my desk. My health had gotten so poor that I would piss in bottles just to save myself the effort of getting up from my bed, and would only get up when I needed to empty them, I needed to shit, or I needed food.
My anxiety had gone through the roof. At some point in 2022, my apartment building had been sold to a new owner, who hired a company called Lapham to manage it. Where we used to get email notifications of anything going on in the building, now we only got papers taped to our doors. And since I never went out, I never saw these papers until I got a grocery delivery and the Instacart guy took a pic of the bags left at my door. I had developed a habit of, before allowing myself to see the delivery pic, saying “no paper, no paper, no paper, no paper, no paper, no paper, no paper” exactly seven times (the lucky number).
I would also say something like “able to reach” seven times because sometimes they would leave the bags a few feet away, which was an issue for me. I dreaded having to leave my apartment for even a few steps. I ended up buying one of those extendable painter’s poles, hoping that if the groceries were too far away to grab by hand, I could stick the end of the pole through the bag handles and drag them closer. Incredible forearm workout, if you’re going for the Popeye look.
The reason the papers on the door stressed me out so much was because we started having yearly apartment inspections. I realize we should have ALWAYS been having apartment inspections, legally speaking, but for whatever reason my building never had them before the new owners. Anytime I saw a piece of paper on my door, I KNEW this would finally be the time that I was going to be kicked out, become homeless, and die in a gutter somewhere. But usually it was a false alarm. Notices for temporary water shut-offs in the building, etc.
When it was time for the first inspection, I was an absolute mess. But since it was still “during the pandemic” (it’s still going on now, but I digress), I got lucky. All I had to do was test my smoke detector and my carbon monoxide detector while the inspector listened on the other side of the door. MASSIVE relief.
But things continued to get worse for me.
Around June of 2023, I pulled a back muscle while slowly ambling my way to and from the bathroom. I had pulled back muscles a few times in the past, but this one really put me out. I was in too much pain to do anything more strenuous than lay in bed, so I stayed on my little floor mattress for two or three weeks, without ever getting up. The piss bottles multiplied. I was using gallon water jugs and milk jugs. I started shitting into walmart bags, tying them up as best I could, and just tossing them into the bathroom from where I lay.
When my back felt better, I tried to get up. I could no longer stand.
I freaked out. I never thought this was something that could just HAPPEN without some sort of major spinal injury or something. But I felt I had no choice. I just adapt and live with it. I couldn’t go to a DOCTOR. Doctors cost MONEY and I needed that money to help me survive until my next job. I had already been living life on the floor for a few weeks, so it wasn’t hard to just keep doing that. I could deal with this later, after I had some steady income again.
Bill Reiss, a great big sweety who worked on Jellystone with me (and who also worked on some of the greatest Spongebob episodes ever, and made that Mickey Mouse cartoon that “whahapen” meme came from), said that he’d be happy to work with me if the show he was developing for Sony got picked up. This was my light at the end of the tunnel all year. He had already been developing it for years at that point, so it seemed like it was close to being greenlit, and this kept my hopes afloat.
In October or so, I got news from Bill that Sony canned the whole thing. Which astonished me, because it was based on a massive animated IP they owned and it seemed like an easy win. Later on I saw ads for that same show, but with no involvement from Bill. Apparently they just gave it to someone else.
I now had no prospects, and I started to panic. I had a good amount of savings, but what if it ran out before something else came along?
2024
I signed up for unemployment. You’re probably wondering why I didn’t do this in 2023, or why I also didn’t do it for the year I was unemployed in 2021. I had it in my head that the big pile of unemployment money they stored in Fort Knox or wherever was finite, and that if I took some of that money, it meant someone ELSE who was worse off than me wouldn’t be able to get any money. I know that logic sounds insane, but consider: I spent years alone in an apartment surrounded by garbage and shitting in plastic bags.
Scary paper time came around again, and this time they were not willing to just stand outside the door. They needed to come inside and do a proper inspection. I was propped up beside the door, crying and panicking. I told the inspector I couldn’t let him in. He kept trying to reassure me that it would only take a second, and that he was wearing a mask, etc. Doing what he could to comfort the crazy person on the other side of the door. But eventually he just came out and said that the apartment needed to be inspected, by law, and if I refused to let him in, he would leave, but that someone would have to come back some other time. I told him that was fine. I refused to let him in. He left. Nobody said anything about it for the rest of the year.
Since I no longer could walk, I no longer used the refrigerator or any kitchen appliances. Even if I COULD walk, there was plenty of trash to block my way. So I started exclusively ordering groceries that didn’t require any cooking and could at the very least last a few days without being refrigerated. Lots of sandwiches. Vegetable sandwiches were a big go-to for a while because meat was EXPENSIVE, but if I put onion, tomato, lettuce, mustard and mayo together on a sandwich, it was enough to trick my brain into thinking I was eating something more substantial. I just had to make sure to eat all the veggie groceries fast enough that they didn’t go bad. And surprisingly mayonnaise is perfectly fine even after two weeks.
I always got groceries on fridays, because the one treat I allowed myself every week was pizza. Originally I had allowed myself to get 7-Eleven pizza, because it was the cheapest hot pizza I could find. But at some point I developed gallstones (again, did not consider going to a doctor), and so eating a delicious hot pizza started to result in me waking up in the middle of the night with incredible pain that lasted for hours, usually combined with nausea and vomiting (into more walmart bags).
Through experimentation, I learned that eating a frozen pizza didn’t affect my gallstones for some reason. Thus, ordering groceries on fridays. I would get my delivery around noon-ish, and included with all my normal groceries would be a thin crust tombstone or a totinos. Thin crust pizza was the only kind where the crust was already cooked, so I wasn’t eating raw dough. The pizza would thaw out over the next few hours, and by dinner time, I basically had a meal-sized lunchable pizza. Not the most ideal way to eat pizza, but it was miles better than what I ate during the week.
The garbage continued to expand and fill more of the apartment. It was to the point where I didn’t even have the room to lay down straight. I’m like 6’6”-ish. My feet and ankles have always hung over the edge of every bed I’ve slept in. But now garbage was piling up at the foot of my mattress and at the head too. The pile even covered maybe half of the entire mattress, making the full-size slightly less than a twin, but there was still just enough space for me to lay there with my legs criss-cross apple sauce style.
What I learned after months of never straightening my legs is that apparently your tendons can contract. I could no longer straighten my legs beyond about a 90-degree angle. Again, never considered going to a doctor for any reason. My savings were dwindling and I didn’t want to go into debt from hospital bills. I just needed to make my money last until I could get another nice full-time job, and then I could fix everything all on my own. EASY.
Along with the garbage, the bags of shit and bottles of piss also piled up. I was good about keeping the bags separate from everything else. They had their own designated space, the spot where I chucked them in the bathroom. The bottles were way out of hand though. I really had nowhere to keep all these things. I just started throwing and shoving them wherever I could. I also learned that some of the containers I was using were not meant to withstand the power of fermenting urine. Apparently ammonia and whatever other gas builds up in there, and some containers just pop. Not only did it smell, but apparently smoke detectors are also set off by ammonia, and so on top of everything else that constantly had me stressing out and panicking, my smoke detector would just randomly go off. I wasn’t able to stand to reach the little button. Lucky for me I bought that painter’s pole. But it really sucked to get woken up at 3am because of a piercing beeping going on. And of course, in my mind, all this noise was going to attract attention and someone was going to find out my awful secret. Then I’d be homeless and dead in no time.
I tried getting baking soda and clay cat litter to help absorb the smell and hopefully whatever chemicals in the air were causing the alarm to go off. I think it helped somewhat, but not fully. I was so on edge that when the beeps started happening, I started grabbing fistfulls of cat litter and just tossing it in the air, I guess thinking maybe that would somehow help, but mostly I think I was just stressed out of my mind.
Eventually I got some duct tape and was able to use the painter’s pole to stick the tape onto the little detector vents, stopping it from detecting anything. Very safe and smart, I am aware.
2024 was also when I also increased my job hunting efforts by tenfold now that I knew I didn’t have a sure thing job waiting for me. I applied to any and all storyboarding jobs or writing jobs I could find. I signed up for so many different job search sites. I started using LINKEDIN. It was rough. I never heard back from any job I applied for.
I started applying for non-animation jobs as well. There wasn’t much I was capable of doing while being unable to walk or leave my apartment. Before I started getting work in animation in 2016, I had gotten 5 or 6 years of experience in customer service calls. First for DirecTV’s tech support, then for AARP. These jobs were so mentally and emotionally taxing that I kind of just default quit the AARP job by being so depressed and anxious that I couldn’t leave bed for days. But I figured it was my best bet at getting work, so I started applying for any remote customer service job I saw. I also never heard back from any of THESE jobs.
That’s actually not 100% true. I had widened my search to apply for any remote phone related job. One company that called me back was a sales job. I was THRILLED to finally have a job lead, even if I knew I was terrible at sales from my past customer service experience. As long as they offered a steady paycheck, I was willing to do a mediocre job. It turned out they did NOT offer a steady paycheck. You were only paid commission, so it was entirely possible to work your ass off for 40 hours a week and come home with Zero Dollars. I turned it down.
Another company reached out for a job interview. They wanted to do it over Microsoft Teams, which was a little odd, but fine. I had used Teams while on Jellystone. Professionals use Teams all the time. But then they didn’t want to do a video interview, or even a call over Teams. They wanted to use chat. I agreed anyway. I’m much less awkward when I have time to type out my thoughts rather than talk. But when the interview started, it felt off. The interviewer replied in very unnatural-feeling messages, and it always seemed to take a while for them to reply. They seemed to misunderstand or sometimes fully ignore what I was saying. I tried googling the company name and it turned out they were in AI. I was pretty sure these people were taking advantage of a lot of desperate people seeking work and using their job interviews to train an AI chat bot. So again, no job.
That’s not to say I didn’t get ANY work. Just that I didn’t see any results from all the effort I put into filling out application after application, writing custom cover letters to kiss the ass of every company dangling a carrot in front of me. I still got occasional jobs from Mike at LowBrow. And a new studio in the Czech Republic hired me to write the pilot episode for their preschool show pitch. I also was very lucky to have Vera Drew (director of The People’s Joker) reach out to ask if I’d want to storyboard some sections of a horror comedy she was writing. She didn’t have much money to offer, sadly, because times are hard for ANYONE trying to have a creative career these days. But she offered what she could and promised more work down the road if she could get funding. She rules.
Around the time Vera got in touch with me was ALSO about when my savings officially ran out. When Thanksgiving came around, I made a big post on all my social media accounts saying I just needed money to cover two months of rent/bills/groceries, and would be grateful for any help. I figured if I could make it through the holiday months, surely SOMETHING would turn around. I felt awful having to do this, but luckily a lot of people (mainly my wonderful, incredible friends) came through and I reached my donation goal in no time.
2025
I finished my work for Vera in January, and the rest of 2025 was a dry spell. I got one other job from Mike at LowBrow, storyboarding something for the Cleveland Browns, but other than that, I had ZERO work all year. This was my year of begging.
Every month or two I would once again be out of money. Sometimes I would let rent get a month behind since I knew that nothing would happen until I got TWO months behind. It went like this all year:
- run out of money
- become filled with fear and shame
- make posts begging for money to live
- eventually raise enough money
- feel relief for a week or two before the anxiety of dwindling money sets in again
- goto 1
Many mornings began with me being upset that I was awake. I wanted to go to sleep and never wake up. Unconsciousness was the only time I didn’t worry. Well. Stress dreams happened pretty regularly.
Inspection time came again, and I again had days and days of panicking. During these and similar periods, I would regularly get so stressed that my body would fully shut down and I’d find myself waking up from an unexpected nap. When I was awake, I wasn’t able to focus on anything at all, so I frequently would find something I could turn on and watch for hours. Going through the trouble of moving my arms to click on other videos or type was too much for me to handle. I needed to lay perfectly still for as long as possible and only focus on youtube videos or british panel shows.
Inspection day came, a knock on the door happened, and then I again started crying and begging and pleading for him to not try to open my apartment door. And again the guy left.
Around June or July of 2025, the power cord for my tablet computer shorted out. This was my main source of entertainment, the only way I was able to draw and do work, my main means of staying in touch with the outside world. I got it in 2018, so by this point the battery would only keep a charge for 30 minutes maybe. It was also the only way I was able to keep my phone charged (I had to get a phone when I was hired for Jellystone), because all reachable power outlets were hidden behind piles and piles of trash. So I panicked. I mentioned how stressed out I was about it to my discord group, and luckily my buddy Andrew offered to buy me a new power cord. This was as close as I ever got to telling anyone about my situation. I explained to him in as vague of terms as possible why I couldn’t charge my phone in wall outlets, why I desperately needed my computer to work, and so on. Every little detail I mentioned made me terrified that I would be judged. There are so many shows about hoarders and other people with problems where it’s entirely about the spectacle, like a freak show. Look how this person lives. How gross. There was some famous streamer I don’t know anything about besides people constantly bringing up how nasty his house is, and I knew I had a much worse living situation than that guy. But, of course, Andrew was very kind and never said anything about what little I told him.
The power cord would arrive in a couple of days, but my phone was already nearly dead. I wasn’t sure how I could exist alone in this tiny cramped space without anything else to keep my mind occupied. I cracked my door open just enough to peek and staked out the hallway. My apartment was right next to the back door of the third floor, so there wasn’t much traffic. Time passed. A guy walked by and I flagged him down. His name was Nick. I talked to him through the door. I explained that I was disabled and was in a weird situation. I asked him if he would charge my phone for me, and he agreed. It ended up taking hours for it to fully charge, but thankfully it worked out.
This was also around the same time that I got my first 3 day notice. But it’s hardly worth mentioning, because I ended up getting them several more times, and it just lead to more panicking and begging for donations online.
I started reconnecting with my mom in the latter half of the year. She sometimes would email me or find some other way of contacting me, and I usually ignored those messages, mostly out of guilt and fear. I loved her, but things were complicated. I started responding, slowly. I never let her know about my situation. But she kept hinting that she would love for me to come home and live with her. And at this point I really really wanted to. I would have LOVED to not have all of this worry hanging over my head every second of every day. But my insane logic was that I couldn’t move out of there until I got a job and cleaned up the apartment back to like new and got my legs fixed and and and and and and and
The garbage problem had gotten to the point where I was now sleeping on the floor. The mattress had been consumed by The Pile. Not only that, but every morning I would wake up with garbage covering me like an extra duvet. I would have to methodically place, shove, throw it all in places where I thought it would no longer avalanche down onto me, but eventually ancient bits of trash would end up covering me again, and I’d have to do it all over again. Usually this happened 2 or 3 times a day.
There was now a gnat problem. I didn’t know what to do to fix it besides putting up fly ribbons wherever I could reach in my closet-sized living area. I also bought some cans of Raid. You’re not supposed to use it indoors, it’s bad to breathe it in. But I didn’t want the building to have a gnat problem and have them trace it back to me. Homelessness. Death.
There were also spiderwebs all over the apartment, so I hoped maybe those guys would help kill the gnats. There were other bugs too that I would occasionally feel crawling on me. Not sure what kinds.
I started getting rashes and sores on my back and sides. I wasn’t sure if they were bed sores or if it was something to do with the mold I noticed growing on the floor. Or it could have something to do with the fact that I hadn’t had a bath since 2023. I would also get irritated skin from remnants of cat litter that were still all over the floor from a year ago. But whatever was causing it, they made it even more difficult to be comfortable. Adding to my discomfort was occasionally having small bits of plastic trash or broken glass or whatever else from The Pile poking at me, causing little cuts here and there.
2026
Now we’re almost up to date. Not much happened in January besides yet another 3 day notice.
February was the beginning of the end. On Groundhog’s Day, I got a knock. If there’s one thing that could send my anxiety higher than seeing paper taped to my door, it was a knock. I never had any reason to hear a knock. I didn’t have visitors. There had been a few times where the knock was a false alarm. A maintenance worker coming to the wrong door. Someone asking for a petition to be signed. One time a man working for the Nielsen ratings people left flowers in front of my door and told me I could get a Nielsen box. I really wanted to because it would have been at least a TINY bit of income, but it required having a device plugged into an outlet, and of course there was no way for me to reach any electrical outlet. I turned him down. The flowers became a snack for The Pile.
But even THINKING about a knock on the door was enough to raise my heartrate. I actually tested this a few times. I was like a dog, and a knock on the door was like fireworks or a vacuum cleaner.
This knock was THE knock. It was someone from Lapham hand-delivering a notice to me.
The note explained that there had been complaints in the building of gnats and of a strong odor, and that they needed someone to come in and check my apartment. It also mentioned that my apartment had not been marked as inspected for the past few years, and that they would need to have someone inspect it for that reason as well. This all was mandatory. I had no way of getting out of it. I had received a death sentence.
I didn’t know what to do. I ordered some cleaning supplies, a new shirt & new shorts (the ones I had on had basically fallen apart from wearing them for god knows how long), and some cleaning wipes to try to make myself as ungross as possible. I don’t know what I expected this would do. They would open the door, see a giant pile of garbage, mold and bugs, but there would be a tidy little 5’x4’ area and me wearing clean clothes laying in the floor with fucked up legs. Surely this hypothetical man would give a little wink and a big OK sign and be on his way.
I made sure to message my mom to tell her happy birthday on February 6th. I suddenly knew why some people got their affairs in order in the days leading up to swallowing a bottle of pills.
The day finally came. February 9th, 2026. I couldn’t sleep at all the night before. When it was close to time, I cracked open my door and looked out into the hallway.
I heard some voices from down the hall.
As they got closer, I heard “OH GOD… Is that smell HIM???” This was when they were maybe 20 feet away. I had no idea my apartment smelled at all. This was devastating. Not only being misgendered (I’m nonbinary, btw. Hi.), but also being made aware that I smelled so awful that it made people gag from a bus-length away.
These two guys got closer and I resigned myself to my fate. I opened the door as wide as I could. Not that wide. The livable area of my apartment had gotten so small that there was no room for me to open the door more than maybe a foot or so. But it was wide enough for them to see inside, and the person who had commented on my immense stench, a guy in his mid-to-late 20’s, went “No way… OH NO WAAAYYYY…”
It’s really something to realize in real time that you’re going to be a story someone tells their friends and family for possibly years. I’m not sure what emotion comes after “devastated,” but I guess I was at least a few notches past that by this point.
They asked me to open the door all the way so they could come inside, but I had to explain that there was literally no room for me to do that. So they left. Then the building inspector came, and he also asked to come inside. I opened the door as best I could and again explained there was no room. He stuck his phone in through the door opening and took a picture. Then he left, too.
I didn’t know what to expect after all this, but I knew it was probably bad. All those thoughts of homelessness and death came flooding back, more powerful than ever. I messaged Andrew because he was the person closest to knowing my situation, and also was physically closest to my location. I lived in the bay area, and he was in LA. I explained that I had just gotten an apartment inspection and that I was PRETTY SURE they were going to evict me. I asked if it would be possible for me to stay with him and his wife Lizzi for a little while until I could figure out how to fly home to live with my mom in Mississippi. He asked about how soon did I think they would evict me, and I said I had no idea. They usually give a three day notice, so maybe three days?
I didn’t know what to do with myself. I had been stress watching season after season of the show QI, so I put on another episode and tried to distract myself from the horrors engulfing me.
Another knock. Anxiety anxiety anxiety. It was the fire department.
They told me they needed me to leave the apartment, that it wasn’t safe for me. My brain felt like it had just gotten dropped into a dunk tank. I know I tried to reason with them or talk to them in some way, but I can’t remember exactly what I said. I just remember them saying that I didn’t have a choice, I needed to come out, it was for my own safety. I was breathing heavily. Nothing felt real. A man squeezed his way through the door opening and removed the ancient hinges on my apartment door. The door came away and someone put their hands in my armpits and dragged me out into the hallway. There were maybe 6 or 7 men there. I don’t know if they were all firemen, or if some of them were EMT’s or what. But I can never forget the rapid fire misgendering coming from all sides all at once as they all discussed me amongst themselves. He. He. He. Him. He. Him. Him.
I felt entirely separated from my body. I was looking at everything through my eyes, but at the same time I was looking down at everything happening like a security camera feed.
They asked me if I could stand so I could get onto the gurney. I tried to explain that I couldn’t, but I probably was babbling nonsense in actuality. I demonstrated that I couldn’t stand, but I could at least get up on my knees. I wobbled around and held onto my apartment doorframe for stability. Someone left to go bring up the gurney. But something as simple as just standing on my knees and leaning against a doorframe was still too much for me to handle for longer than a minute or two. The panic and the trauma probably didn’t help.
I laid back onto the hallway carpet to rest. Eventually someone came back with the special gurney seat. They put a bunch of straps around my legs, waist and groin then five of the men grabbed onto the straps to lift me up into the gurney. I rolled away. The security camera became a drone that followed me down the stairs.
NEXT TIME: The ambulance, the emergency room, and the looney bin.