Well you know how it is, I guess
Rough few months. Posting on my alt account for reasons I guess haha. Hard to rationalize what these past few months have looked like.
I’m 22 and I think I’m cooked. This one might be a doozie lol. About a year ago I turned 21, and one of my buddies came over to celebrate. He brought with him a certain white powder, and you know… he had decent intentions. I mean it wasn’t like he was trying to ruin my life or anything like that. Just wanted to have a fun night and move on after that. Which is understandable. I couldn’t move on though.
My addiction to that stuff brought me to places my sober mind would never take me. Pretty much right into the gutter. At the time I was in the process of moving into a new apartment. New beginnings I figured you know? I had money, I had stable work, I had a home, I was never hungry, I had good roommates. All things that looking back on, I think I might have REALLY taken for granted. They say your 20s are for making mistakes but this one is gonna take a really long time to recover from.
My new roommate and I were hooked… bender after bender. At the end of every week we’d get off work and instantly hit up the plug. Tons and tons of cocaine moving through our apartment at all times. People we had never met in and out of our house, 8 ball after 8 ball. One time I took a week off work and spent the entire week on a bender, didn’t eat once. Barely had any water. Think I was running on pure will to live at that point.
It’s hard to rationalize why we did it, but we had started to run incredibly low on funds, well with our addiction and all. Both of us were too broke to afford rent. So we started pulling out loans… payday loans.. lots of them. Too many of them. Every cash advance app, all the schemes. All the while our addiction plagued us. Eventually you get to a point where you literally cannot pull more fake money out of the air. It happened.
9 months of constant benders later, and the two of us were getting evicted. Luckily at that time we had both been on a mission to curb the problem and it had decreased substantially. But in a way, that kind of gave us more time to wallow in self pity and misery over the situation we had to marinate in. Never thought I’d be homeless at 22, but here we are.
It’s been 3 months now since we got evicted, which means I’m 3 months clean. 3 months clean, but $30,000 in debt, and homeless. The only thing I’ve managed to keep, is my stable job. And my will to live I guess. The indomitable human spirit eh guys? Haha. I’ve been in and out of a motel 6 for a couple months now, some weeks too poor to afford nights so I’ll spend 2 or 3 in my car.
Speaking of my car, my tire shit the bed about a month and a half ago, I haven’t been able to afford a new one because I’m perpetually somewhere between -$500 and $0 in my bank account. Between the motel and the loan payments, I don’t even get close to enough to get a new tire. I’ve been riding on a spare for a month and a half, knowing it’s gonna pop at any second, leaving me stranded in butt-fuck nowhere.
I figure the average person at work or on the street can see the desperation in my eyes. Just your regular 22 year old homeless bum who’s running out of options. Every door slams right in my face. College is out of the question now. It’s hard to even imagine a time where I had hope of a bright future anymore. And it’s all my fault. That’s the worst part. I used to have some degree of confidence that I would make good decisions, and that I could live a happy, healthy life. Now I don’t even have health insurance.
Struggling to eat, go days without food sometimes. Which I suppose isn’t necessarily irregular for me considering my whole, “coke era”, as I like to call it. It’s quite tough to see a way out of this. Truly. Feels like I’m never making any progress anymore. I’ve enrolled in debt relief programs, but I never have enough to actually pay them what they’re asking with all my other bills going on. The only thing that could possibly save me is a debt consolidation loan, which companies won’t even try to offer me. I’ve considered bankruptcy but I’d lose the only things that define me as a person anymore, and that’s kind of a terrifying thing. All the shit from my childhood, all the precious keepsakes from back when my mother was alive. I don’t know. I have nobody to talk to anymore. The whole “coke era” really did quite the number on my friendships and social life.
I want so much more out of my life, and I don’t want to live every day wondering what could have been. The potential I had. I keep trying to find ways to get out of this. I spend most days researching ways, and looking into potential opportunities, but there’s nothing there. Not anymore. My credit has dropped from 760 to 520. Creditors breathing down my neck. My life’s in shambles.
Sometimes I think about how my problems are so small in the grand scheme of things, but problems are all I have anymore. Makes them seem like the Burj Khalifa is ramming my ass full of bullshit at a constant rate. Basically I just mean that they seem really big. Insurmountable. I wish I could just escape. I wish this was all a dream I could wake up from. I wish I could start over. I wish I could change things. I wish I wish I wish I wish blah blah blah. I’m done now.
Have a good day folks. 👍