Help Me Rebuild My Life After Career-ending Abuse

Kofi - https://ko-fi.com/handsomehugs

Cash$app - $AngVon

Venmo - @AngVondra

Hey, everyone. Before I get into the why of what’s going on, the short version is: I’m being eaten alive by a lot of debt, and I need help getting it down.

- I have nearly maxed out my credit cards; Almost $8k on one, and $2k on another

- I owe someone $6k who footed the money to pay the down payments and help me get the place I currently live in

- I have a $4.8k collections bill for a spine surgery that insurance didn’t want to cover in full (hoping to try to make this one go away because fuck our health care system)

- Along with needing to cover my monthly expenses that includes a $2k monthly rent bill (hoping to get a roommate) along with phone bill, car insurance, food, and necessities to keep me alive.

I need approximately $25k of money in order to clear these overwhelming financial issues and have a starting point to regain safety and stability.

I assume most people reading this are familiar with the situation, and if they are not, I apologize but it is way too much to get into but I have others who are acutely aware of it and can verify my situation.

I’ve purposely been vague and inconsistent about my story and what I’ve been up to these last months in order to protect myself; This has led to harassment as well, because of the entitlement to details of my personal life.

Hopefully now with KF gone, it’ll at least be a little safer for me to talk about what is going on because slander and lies won’t all be accumulated together in one place to be woven into my story for anyone to find. If KF was still up keeping tabs on me, I would not have felt safe to do this otherwise.

My life has gone in a majorly different direction than what I planned, due to the accumulation of events with having my career, real life friendships and stability directly sabotaged by stalkers/abusers online; This is after I was already down from trying to pull myself back from severe illness that left me bedridden for months and housebound for a few years.

My mother is mentally unwell and in jail due to being homeless and my grandparents are elderly and have no space for me and are dealing with their own issues (my grandmother has been having health issues, including long covid and skin cancer). I have no real family or home to go back to and be a safety net for me, and I barely had one to begin with. I had let the KFers and abusers online believe I had been living at home with my family because I didn’t want to get targeted and hurt again, it felt easier that way and to avoid harassment.

Within the last year alone, I have moved five different times around the entire country (not counting all the additional traveling between this time) as I’ve desperately tried to find a way to stabilize myself.

It wasn’t safe to live in California anymore after what had happened to me, knowing my real life relationships with people would be dictated by online drama anyone could stir up then pin on me and knowing the animation industry is tight knit enough that information circulates quickly; I couldn’t afford living in LA anymore either without a career in my trained skillset as an artist.

I had to abandon my childhood dream to work in the animation industry and give up everything as most of my friends in animation turned their backs on me and enabled my harassment or looked the other way, save for only a few. And while in hindsight it seems the animation industry is in a turbulent place, my situation was extremely traumatic and I was cut off from any job opportunities, connections, friendships or support I needed to stay afloat while I was already in a vulnerable place as a disabled queer person, especially during the pandemic.

The lack of stability in one location long enough to establish myself, along with getting surgery last March has left me unable to get a foothold anywhere long enough to get a job, build up a savings, or to work on commissions and get through my backlog.

Every time I tried to get settled, I was swept off again elsewhere due to circumstances beyond my control. I am in contact with those who have commissioned me, however, despite sincerely appreciating the support I've been getting, the neverending next round of bills and expenses have been overwhelming, which has been a big contributor to why I haven’t been able to take on more commissions. I’ve been unable to catch up on my backlog because I have to keep focusing on needing to scrounge up money for the next situation. (I tried living in cheaper areas but not having access to needed health care, jobs, etc. limits where I can live).

Because of all the moving, I’ve also ended up in continuous gaps without my medication which had declined my functioning (like right now, I am without one of the meds I need to literally be able to walk or be upright for periods of time, but hopefully getting that within the next few days). I had to also abandon a ton of furniture, thousands of dollars worth of belongings (I had been under the impression I was going to make my home in LA longterm when I made these investments) to be able to move because it was too expensive to bring larger items. This is along with the cost of moving my remaining belongings so often when it’s expensive to move even once. I’ve had to also grit my teeth and take heavy, heavy losses in terms of what I own and what it costs.

Aside from having to move my remaining belongings all over the place, which was expensive and complicated, even with having to cut so many losses, the strain it has put on my already disabled body to have to carry boxes of books and belongings from location to location, up and down stairs, pack and unpack multiple times, etc. has left me sicker. After moving several times, when I finally thought I had found a stable situation and settled in, there was a leak, and toxic mold appeared, and my roommate, our downstairs neighbor, and myself became horribly ill from it and I had to move again just as I got settled.

The effects of the black mold on me were by far the most severe, I started having severe body-wide inflammation, unbearable pain, and cognitive decline including hallucinations, which led to me having to evacuate immediately without being able to take my belongings for the time being. This also required me to drop $1k out of pocket on treatments to get myself functional again after the mold exposure, $360 on a hotel for a few days, and I was homeless for another month.

I was fortunate to have a temporary housing situation quickly resolved due to friends who extended a hand towards me, so thankfully I wasn’t on the streets, but it was still difficult. I had to dedicate the entire last month to apartment hunting, and after I signed a lease to a place, my roommate and I had to part ways due to a difference of needs, so now I have to pay rent on a year lease way above my budget until I can find a new roommate. Along with this, finding a new roommate who isn’t someone I know beforehand is going to be difficult due to my trauma of letting people around me with everything that has happened and fear of my online identity and callouts being discovered. I am so fearful to let another person live with me that it’s paralyzed me from taking on a roommate quickly.

As mentioned, I had a major surgery this year on top of all of this back in March, and have no access to therapy anymore as I cannot afford it, so have had to go through all of this with only my own intuition and resilience and online support.

I have no established primary care doctor at this time. My main doctor, who has helped me significantly with my health, is about to leave their position to go train new practitioners for conditions like mine at the end of this month (which is great for them, especially because we need more doctors trained in chronic illness).

As a result, they will no longer be seeing patients, and it leaves me shit out of luck because finding doctors who are experienced in my conditions is a fucking nightmare: waitlists can be insanely long for good doctors or they aren’t taking new patients, costs are high because insurance won’t cover a lot of these treatments, and I’m worried about falling into the hands of medical abuse again and being denied necessary help, especially with no “better” insurance (that I had temporarily during my time working in the animation industry) to get those treatments or money to get those off label medications which literally saved my life. If my access to my current medication falls through, it’s essentially game over for me to have any quality of life, and these expenses will have to be footed out of pocket.

I am trying to dig myself out of this hole but it feels like things like my debt is growing faster than I can get a handle on it.

Even if I can’t get all these costs covered and paid off this way, even just getting it down to a manageable level would help a ton and I will be able to move forward with my life.

My biggest fear with my credit cards all being almost maxed out is if I end up in an emergency situation, I won’t have any way to create a buffer to deal with it financially. Right now my interest on my cards is so high I can’t even begin to pay anything down, only try to manage the interest fees. At this point, I’ve been in nonstop, dire emergency situations so I can’t trust things will be safe any time soon so seeing my credit cards almost tapped out is also anxiety inducing.

Right now I can’t even afford furniture for my current residence so it will remain empty, sans for my bed and desk indefinitely. I’m trapped in fight or flight mode to survive, crumbling my health and making it difficult for me.

I have had to use all my wits and cards to survive the last year or so. I haven’t talked about it much for safety with the eyes that were on me who wanted nothing more than to hurt me, and even now I’m trying to be careful with what I say, but this is what is going on.

Of course, it didn’t get this bad overnight. This has been building for the last 8 months, the harassment itself went on for years, and I have been reluctant to try to say anything for my safety due to stalkers who were looking to hurt me. I was fearful of what may happen to me if they knew where I was and how vulnerable I have been.

It’s a lot and it’s overwhelming. I need help and so I once again have to swallow my pride and put myself in a vulnerable position to plead for help where people have the ability to keep beating me down. This is hard for me to do.

I absolutely hate being vulnerable online and truthful with what people have dealt towards me and the damage harassment online has caused my life offline.

This last year has been absolutely difficult and I’ve never had a break in my life with situations like this happening one after another and piling onto me.

I want to believe that my struggles are finally nearing a close. I believe I’ve finally found a place to plant myself and begin to build stability, somewhere where I can be emotionally and physically content. I don’t have anywhere to call home right now, I haven’t in a long time, and I want to hope that where I am now can become that place. All I want is somewhere safe to live and a shred of consistency and being able to live without being scared of what will befall me next.

So, the good news is that I see a way out of this darkness but I need one final push (assuming I’m not thrown another curveball, god, please no more) and I don’t think I can do it alone. I’m going to try to take out housing loans to keep where I am while I try to figure out work and get caught up on comms, etc. but that takes time to get established and it’ll do nothing to lessen the burden of my debts, only add to it.

Even getting $300-$400 on commissions and art with the amount of time it takes me to do these art pieces (several days) while spending most of my day trying to sort through my situation does not cover my full monthly expenses let alone even touch all the debt I'm in. On top of this, now that the animation industry isn’t a career option anymore, I have to scramble to learn an entirely new skillset while under all of this stress so I can support myself, which is going to be an intense, time-consuming process on its own.

If I can build some stability, get my debts down and have some money to cover my current monthly expenses, then I can catch up on commissions, I can get a job (to the best of my abilities with my disability) and be able to fully pay off my current bills and start reestablishing getting access to professional help for my mental and physical health. I feel guilty to ask for help online again because I’ve never had to do this so much until my career was sabotaged; But with non-stop online stalking and harassment, it made me more and more vulnerable to one bad situation after another to keep piling on which is why it got this bad. I was never given a break to rebuild a safety net.

I’m trying to get to a place where I can support myself and so no longer need to reach out online for help. I’ve been extremely lucky to have so many wonderful people I've met online who have extended their hands out to me and helped me get through this last year, I don’t know where I'd be without them.

People who have offered me somewhere to stay, fed me, and sent me money, thank you. Thank you so much. I know I am lucky because without other people's kindness, I would not have made it as far as I have.

I do not take it for granted, so I feel awful to have to ask for more help again. I hope one day I can be in a stable situation so I can pay it forward and return the help to others. I hope I can have the stability soon to focus on my personal projects, share them with you all, and do amazing things. I have many goals and am working on getting into a new career. I am taking steps to get out of this, but I need a little more help.

I want to hope this is the last time I’ll have to ask for help like this, I know we’re all struggling because it’s just so expensive to exist and the economy today is a dumpster fire, but if you are in a situation to spare anything without it causing you too much trouble, I am incredibly grateful.

Thank you. Thank you so much.