Survival Mode

I’m getting anxious again.

We have a week and a half before we’re supposed to be out of this house, Will’s been too sick to pack stuff and we have NO money for a place to live—we may have enough to rent a storage shed and a moving truck, but that’s about it. Not only that, our car registration and insurance are due, as is my RN license renewal (and yes, I plan to renew one more time “just in case”). I will also need meds during the course of the month. Six hundred and sixty-eight dollars don’t go very far…..and in this situation, nowhere near far enough.

I don’t know what else to do. We’ve applied for food stamps and I’m working on the forms for Medicaid, but we can’t get cash assistance because we don’t have dependent children. We still need to apply for housing assistance, which will take a while, and we also have yet to go to our church and see if they can help us out. How humiliating is all of that? And how do you let everybody know where you’re going to be when you don’t even know?

The timing couldn’t possibly be worse (as if there’s a good time for any of this). Winter is coming quickly, and so are the holidays, although I’ve had to give up on the notion of Christmas entirely and put it out of my mind. That’s the least of our problems, anyway; what we need now is a bunch of strong bodies to help us box up and move our stuff, and a place to put it…..not to mention a place to put ourselves.

This is how people give up a normal life and move into survival mode. I don’t know how we’re going to get out of this except the hard way. I never believed things would come down to the wire like this…..we’re supposed to look at a room in someone’s house on Thursday, but if we can’t scrape together the money to rent it, it’s a useless exercise. Family members keep telling us they won’t let us live on the street, but there’s no room at the inn.

So, I’m freaking out a little. And yes, the occasional ‘sui’ thought comes down the pike, but those are banished FAST and with little difficulty, as I’m very well-medicated and I have much better control of my thought processes than I did prior to going inpatient. Besides, thoughts are not actions, and I don’t have to follow through with them. I didn’t always know that.

But it doesn’t prevent me from being scared. I think back to how this year began, with boundless optimism and high anticipation…..and then came all of this crap. I’d never have believed it could be possible to fall this far, this fast if I weren’t living every excruciating moment of it. But now I know that catastrophic losses do happen, and life will never be the same even if we manage to rebound from this and have a life again, as diminished as it may be.

If you’re a praying person, please send up a few petitions for us; if not, positive energies and good thoughts will do. We need all the help we can get.