Leave A Difficult Living Arrangement - Get On With My Life

Suh dudes?

I'm in a living arrangement that is negatively impacting my mental health. It is important that I leave. I have been reached out to by a friend to stay for a little while to help me get back on my feet. But in order to do that, I need to cross a few Ts and dot a few Is. This post provides additional context. It is long, but for those who care, it is here. Suffice to say, I'm in more debt than I've ever been in my life, and I'm trying to keep things wound together as the ship braves the storm. I have a particularly combative crew member that isn't making it easier.

I want to preface this by saying that I thank each and every person who has donated as much as a dollar, left a nice comment, approached me at an event and said hi, or lurked in stream to have something to fall asleep to. Everyone who has supported my career, in any way, is deeply appreciated.

For those who don't know me. My name is Gwen. I go by G's Gaming Experience on YouTube. I've covered Rainbow Six Siege as a content creator for several years. I also write scripts and provide voiceovers at Couch Co-Op, a side project and collaborative work with a strategist who I met through working at Disrupt Gaming before it was acquired by Astralis.

YouTube has ups and downs. It feels like being a professional gambler but when it's working it's working. When it's not, it's crushing. But right now, it's crushing for reasons not necessarily related to the job itself.

Over the course of the past 9 months, I've been walloped. Due to storm clouds rising that made me feel uncomfortable to live in the state of Texas, I had to pack my things and go. I had healthy and very much needed financial assistance from my mother, but I also leaned too much on credit. Living in DC, I could not do YouTube full time. The space was too small and it was not accommodating of production work. Can't win 'em all. That's what my degree was for, Communication & New Media, BS, Shepherd University.

As it turns out the "BS" meant something else. The degree ended up feeling quite useless.

I did what I could with occasional contracts, but keeping it set up with my mics, desktop PC, and general workspace was not feasible in that apartment. Realizing that my options were limited, I was content to roll with the punches and walk away from YouTube for a good long while. I had my PC set up in a friend's home for a while, and got out a couple of videos just to keep the channel on life support. When I moved back home near DC, as I stated earlier, looking for a job in the private sector turned out to be considerably difficult. I felt a calling to civic service, and felt now was the time more than ever, to reinvent myself. I shopped around for a job in the federal government. A few months later, that too, ended up being a disastrous endeavor.

Without much recourse, I continued looking around for entry level jobs just to keep my finances stable. Only to realize how awful the job market was. Rejection after rejection, from places I never suspected to be rejected by. To top it off, we had to move again, out of DC and a bit further South. So I continued shopping for jobs with my degree. I had interviews, and once again, rejections. More and more, the degree felt useless. The backup plan, turned out not to be a backup plan at all. As it became clear over the course of months and months, that this was a difficult situation, my mother turned increasingly hostile. And the support turned into anger and bargaining chips. I would not ask for things, receive them, then have those things I didn't ask for used as leverage to explain how much money she had spent on me and how much I needed to get my ish together.

To make matters worse, the environment in which a home we had purchased as a backup plan and investment years ago was in a red state that I also did not feel comfortable living in. For good reason, considering their house state legislature has played around with ideas that put the trans community in an awkward position. Whatever. I'm not gonna cry over spilled red states.

This is where the toxicity comes into play. There were red flags at the jump. Red flags I didn't expect, pertaining to my transition. But this post isn't about that. The purpose of bringing it up is to help clarify many people saw this coming, even if I didn't. My presence frustrated her retirement plans to Florida, to which she brought up constantly. Not like I can do anything about the political situation regarding trans people in Florida. During those conversations I felt no sympathy. It was as if I was being blamed directly. A pang in the chest would come up sometimes. I look back on that and realize exactly what that feeling was. A sense of emotional betrayal and disregard for the fact that I couldn't do anything about the combative situation in Florida, or South Carolina, or God knows any red state right now, for trans people. But Florida especially.

I was trying to figure out what to do with my IRS debt, trying to find a new job, debating whether I quit YouTube altogether, on and on, while trying to deal with a very toxic, oftentimes unhelpful and counter productive attitude, with my mother.

At various points, my mother has been the brief subject of commentary on Twitter. This is usually in the form of a "Just got kicked out of my house" tweet that ends up getting deleted a couple hours later. Initially, I was afraid to go public with more details, for fear of the "honor" in privacy or whatever. I'm past that now after the treatment I have received every single day with no ability to advocate for myself or find common ground. And after explaining the situation in detail with examples to friends, eventually, I started to realize 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, and 10 close friends. All agreed that it was really bad. So I'll try to contextualize that with some important "crashout" points at which I tried to remedy the situation and failed.

The first time I was kicked out of the living arrangement was in the Fall of 2024. After a fight, I was told to "get the fuck out," so I did. I packed my things in various boxes and crates, which was relatively easy since I didn't have much. I threw those things in the trunk of my car, called a friend and told him I was taking him up on the offer of that couch. He had offered it previously because this relationship with my mother, and its toxicity, has been a subject of conversation just about since I moved back to DC. I hit the road and was ready to get underway, when my mother called me. She insisted that I not leave. It took considerable internal deliberation to not hang up and keep driving, but I thought of what my father would have wanted me to do and I turned around, hoping we'd finally have hit a Rubicon at which we could talk seriously and sincerely with one another. That moment never came.

We went on a Thanksgiving trip and had fights for no discernibly good reason. At a family dinner, we shared drinks at an outside table by the beach -- laughing, and sharing stories loudly. I did as well. But at one point, despite my volume matching everybody around us and the social expectations of being in an outside seating arrangement, she said "shhh," audibly enough for a friend of mine sitting across from me to notice it. The eyes of my friend and I locked for a moment and I couldn't shake that confused feeling that seemed to cross her face. I whispered to my mother discretely enough to not do that. I felt I was in my rights to. Later, my new friend remarked that getting "shushed" in the company of grown adults for my noise levels when I wasn't any louder than anybody else there seemed incredibly bizarre and controlling. That was when I started to realize something was wrong.

Now, I was able to pay for my own gas to drive my car out here. Despite my unemployment, I had done some things here and there to keep the ship from completely sinking. I asked for a little bit of help with a mortgage payment for a rental property we co-owned, a mortgage payment I had covered without help aside from one mortgage payment she liked to bring up in arguments (I handled if not all, then a statistically overwhelming bulk of the closing costs, at least $10,000) until just now. A house that I had paid the taxes on for two years as well. Again, I asked for help from my co-owner, once. She flamed out and stormed out of the vacation property after angrily agreeing to do so. I figured that she was in a bad mood and didn't want to speak with me that day. So I explored the area on my own and linked up with some family friends. Later, she remarked, exasperated, that I had "run" from her and left her all by herself to explore the isle. I told her I wasn't trying to be rude or dismissive, I just genuinely felt that she was in a bad mood and wanted distance because the last conversation we had ended so badly. We got into another fight the next day, and feeling at my wit's end, I took a moment to breathe in my room. Then I came back to tell her what the past few months had been like. I told her I felt like I was constantly walking on eggshells. I didn't know how to approach positions of critique or disagreement with her without making her upset.

I said I felt like talking to a time bomb, that at any moment a remark made that implied she could improve something in some way about how we approached each other, it caused a considerable degree of stress. Naively, I thought that by explaining the things I do wrong, and things I could do to fix my approach to the situation, that would invite her to consider the same. She stared at the wall in silence, giving me the silent treatment and unable to say anything. Then, she spoke.

She started scolding me, raising her voice, a stern, angry expression written across her brow. But it wasn't an expression of bewilderment or injustice, it was anger at defiance. It was anger with something that needed to know their place. It was a look of scorn. I pleaded with her to calm down and stop escalating the situation. But instead I got a litany of shouting over how ungrateful I was of her money, or having a roof over my head etc etc. And that she was within her rights to navigate the social dynamic we had in whatever way she wanted. I finally got exasperated enough to say that I would like to record the conversation so that I could have something to reference in case I lost memory of the specifics of how intense the situation had become. "Fuck you," my mother said.

I went back down to my car to vent to some friends, explained everything that had happened. And they agreed that I needed to consider leaving as soon as possible. But I couldn't. I had no money. I had no agency. I talked through some conversational strategies. I decided to tough it out just a bit longer.

The fights continued, but boiled over after we moved further South. When hanging a picture, my mother shouted at me for no particularly good reason at all, unhappy with how I was doing it. She tried to yank the picture from my hands. It was a painting I had done at Shepherd. An original work of my own. That struck a chord. I responded strongly demanding to know why she was talking to me like a 12 year old. Rather than try to talk through the difficulties of our inability to have conversations, we briefly remarked on how it was difficult to live with each other, to a point at which I did not raise my voice, shout, or adopt a hostile tone. Then, she told me "get the fuck out of here."

Here we go again. I went to my room and started packing my things. During this, my mother followed me into my room to denounce me for how "ungrateful" I was of her generosity. How I disrespected her. How I didn't do this. Didn't do that. I remarked, calmly, that the dynamic, with red flags and examples that I will not reveal publicly for the sake of our privacy, had been explained to a wide range of people in my life who had all, without hesitation, concluded were crossed lines, and that I did not have to put up with it if I did not want to. I was within my rights to advocate for myself and leave if I had the ability to. She scolded me for talking to my friends about the living dynamic. Said I was "such a little pussy, that you go talking to your little buddies about what we discuss in private." I want to clarify that this reaction was not in response to something that I said to match her hostility. Throughout the course of the past minute or two, I had talked in a low, quiet, dispassionate tone of voice, a technique I have adopted to avoid giving her any ammunition whatsoever to use against me in an argument. I was packing my things, relatively ready to leave, and then I tried, for one last time, to have a candid conversation about our living together and how counseling was probably very important for either of us to do. She did not reciprocate the idea of going to counseling. After bluntly asking if I was kicked out or not, she waved her hand and I went back to my room pissed off, confused, and unsure of what to do next.

So I kicked it into high gear on YouTube. I applied to IKEA, Costco, Wegman's, a bar, a home remodeling company, a car dealership. Nothing. My mother and I shot around the idea of me going back to school. I knew that if I went to trade school and studied something like air conditioning, I was going to lose my mind. I would be so bored that I would flunk out and then we'd be in another crisis. I talked with a close friend of mine from college, from my Greek life friend group, who is every bit of a brother to me that I never had. He told me there is absolutely no reason to not try and find something to be passionate about. There is always room to find a passion in something even if it's not the first thing you wanted to do. If you want to go to trade school, it damn well needs to be something you are passionate about, for the reasons I stated earlier. Just deciding to try the trades at all is a step a lot of people don't take.

I wanted to work on cars.

My mother agreed with that plan, until one day, she didn't.

She went on a trip with an old college friend of hers. Feeling helpless and frustrated with my situation, I called telling her I didn't know if I could work full time 10 hours a week at a Jiffy Lube and go to tech school at the same time. She remarked not to worry about it and I can always just quit if I need to when school starts up. That gave me a great deal of relief and made me feel like she was in my corner for the first time. Then her friend told her a story about their cousin who went to automotive tech school for a year and quit.

When she came back she spent several days trying to talk me out of the plan without saying it outright. She said talk to a counselor. I hadn't talked to a career counselor yet, but I had talked to my therapist, who told me that what I planned seemed like a good idea. She made me sit down and list the options I really wanted, the options I could put up with, and the options I'd hate but do purely for money and nothing else. Auto tech was still at the top of my list and I was really passionate about the idea. She continued to remark that she was scared it wasn't for me. That I had never worked in a garage. That garage guys could be mean. She said working in a garage was "dehumanizing." I told her working in a data center was dehumanizing in a way as well, stuck in a row of computer towers and no sunlight. She claimed I had a natural affinity for computers so why not keep working on them. "I'm not saying to abandon the auto thing." She was, because the result of what she was asking me to do had that.

The crux of it then boiled down to YouTube. She insisted, finally, outloud. That I would have to walk away from YouTube for good to do this. That I needed to "suck it up" and realize that life isn't about being happy. I finally got so fed up with the line of conversation that I explicitly pointed what she was saying was not true. I was not above working a crappy job to make ends meet. I was not a stupid artist who insisted the world needed to accommodate their art and let them read and draw and keep a roof over their head. I was a hard worker who busted my ass to get to where I am who didn't have a sports car, but I had made a modest income over the course of many years. I had to walk away from it due to an extenuating circumstance that forced me to leave Texas. She insisted that I hadn't recognized reality. She gave me the "pick yourself up by your bootstraps" kind of speech. She said IT work would be good for me, and I remarked that my Greek life brother D, was working $20 an hour right now because the market had gotten completely blown up on the East Coast by the shakeup at the federal government - despite 10 years of proven experience. She said that's how life goes.

I left the dinner table and on the way back to my room she said "go bitch and cry to [namedrop,] [namedrop,] or [namedrop] about how mean your mommy is." This wasn't the first time she had condescendingly invoked the phrase "mommy," to make me feel weak and incapable of doing anything for myself.

I realized what it was all about right now. My mom wasn't interested in helping me. She was interested in helping me to the point that it was convenient to her. She remarked the tools to get into auto tech were expensive, despite the fact that I wasn't anywhere close to needing to pay for those out of pocket yet and that we had spent money on this new living arrangement superfluously anyway, throwing money at appliances and furniture we didn't need. Moving guys would remark on the stuff we were moving out to end up replacing with "what's wrong with it?" Nothing.

Another Greek life brother, T, remarked on it soberly. And said it felt more like I was being treated like an investment. I most certainly feel that way by now. I felt like a stock that needed to go up and if it didn't go up at the rate she wants, she was ready to sell.

The truth is, I'm perfectly content taking up the offer of my friend I mentioned previously. I see absolutely nothing wrong with working at a surfboard shop by day, making a banger YouTube video by night. Because that's more or less what I did in college. I juggled college, my Greek life org, YouTube, and more, and still pulled it off. I've done it before and I can do it again.

I have absolutely no reason to throw away this asset both emotional and material in investment in the trash. So I'm not going to.

The donation money here has no specific places. Most of it would go to debt. Some of it would be moving expenses. But all of it would go into various things to help me get back on my feet and get on with my life. I don't think I will ever be able to get on with my life until I leave this living arrangement. Because this living arrangement has become a part of the problem, not a part of the solution.

I was afraid to talk about all of this publicly for a long time. I thought I was the asshole for a long time. When I finally had enough and talked to people close to me about it, conscientious and scared that I was really just hiding my own insecurities and masking the "real" story. I was assured. I have done everything I can to make this work, and several lines have been crossed that anybody would have walked away for.

So I am.

I have no timeframe at the moment. I will soon. But I appreciate every one of you.

Thank you all for reading this the whole way through. I'll see you in the next video.

Deuces.