I am losing my home in four days (May 3rd)

May 4th Update: Saved.  Closing this fundraiser now, with overwhelming and undying gratitude.

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I am deeply ashamed and afraid of having to do this, but I have no choice.

 

My sister and I are about to lose our house. It's being foreclosed next Tuesday (may 3rd)... unless we can pay $35,000 before then. (We could pay $23k and get to keep the house for now, but will be left to pay off the rest over an unknown amount of time. That would leave us scarcely less desperate, but at least buy us SOME time.)

If you'd like to know a bit more about who I am, you can check out my dormant digital home at manmadeghost dot com.  Among other things, I was a longtime photographer & artist, and in 2000 I wrote Greymatter, "the original, primordial, blogging platform. Blogs look like they do ... because Noah Grey did it first." (Wil Wheaton, Still Just A Geek).  It directly inspired WordPress, which currently powers over 40% of the entire internet thingamajig you're using right now.  ...for whatever it's all worth — literally.  I had been taking the past year to recharge & renew my creativity, and want to continue, as I always have done, in spite of — and really, as therapy for — a lifetime of trauma and grief, disability and mental illness (about which much more below).

As for our immediate financial crisis: Long story short, my dad was toxic & abusive to my family, & when my mom finally divorced him about 20 years ago she had to take out a mortgage on our house to help keep us going. She kept an income from being a military wife, but that ended when she died two years ago (on May 3rd... yes, we're about to lose our home on the same fucking day she died). Since then our sole income has been my SSDI (social security disability), which is supposed to be the minimum for one disabled person to live on, but my sister/caretaker (the only person I have left here, not even any local friends) has desperately tried to stretch it to keep the lights on and food on the table. She couldn't keep up the mortgage/property tax, and now here we are.

 

I am physically disabled with autism and severe mental illness, exacerbated by multiple life traumas including childhood rape, the murder of my oldest sister, and the brutal death of my husband.  I sustained brain damage from surviving an attempt to hang myself eight years ago (which got me thrown into a hellhole of a mental ward, and I would sooner beg for death than ever go back there), and (again, long story short) complications from my illnesses brought me as far to the brink of death as you can go.  I have doctors and a therapist through Medicaid, but Medicaid only does so much; I have two operations I've been in need of for years now.  I have to take strong medication every day to be functional, and to avoid stress at all costs (which... <waving hands around frantically>... yeah)

 

I'm telling you all this because my home is where (my entire medical circle agrees) I'm safest and with the best chance to keep recuperating. I've been a shut-in most of my adult life (since covid started, I haven't left the house for anything other than medical reasons), and home is where i manage living with my disabilities every day, slowly managing and healing with the help of my doctors and above all my sister's tremendous care. This house is adapted to my needs, physically and mentally, as much as it can be.... and I cannot leave it. (Never mind that we'd have literally nowhere to go —and we're both too frail for any moving process to take us a year or so at best. Once our house is foreclosed and bought, we would be evicted in *three days*.)

 

I am begging. I'm pleading. I *can't* endure this. I can't. I would not be here to write this without my home and without my sister.

 

I don't know who among the few friends I have that will read this can contribute anything at all, and heaven knows I understand.  (I don't even know how many of my friends are left to see this, because the universe had to give me such a *wonderful* time to come back to twitter.)  The money will go to my sister's bank account.  We need the $23k/$35k by Monday, May 2nd, or else; we've exhausted (or would not have time for) EVERY possible option in the past few days since this was sprung on us with no warning, and having the money ready to go is our only salvation.  For her sake, and for my own survival, I beg and plead for any scrap, though I know all this is an impossibly desperate hope.

 

Thank you.