Isis E. Prosser

waiting on news that could either be really good or super, super bad. like, the kind of bad where i don't know how my mom and i will move forward. i'm terrified.

I am not looking for advice. I do not like putting this up top but I have been going through every channel available to me where I live. I assure you that everything even a little bit associated with social assistance programs is something I have already explored.

Yesterday I found out that I am no longer receiving disability payments. As in immediately. As in I do not get paid at the start of next month.

Apparently they've been sending me money for the past 28 months in fucking error. You know, a little error of $1300 for 28 months. They accidentally sent me over $36,000 over the course of nearly 2.5 years for 28 months, went "whoopsie doodle!" and sent me a letter saying "yeah okay, so we're gonna stop doing that." This has left me in a lurch that I don't think should be fucking legal, but after doing what due diligence I can in a ruined emotional state, it turns out it is.

Worse yet, they want that $36,400 back.

Right now I have about $95 in the bank. My rent is $725 a month. My electricity is $75 a month. My heating bill is $40 a month. My internet is $85 a month. I don't even know what my food budget is per month because my answer is basically always "the rest I guess" because everything else goes either to that or whatever incidental costs come up. I am expected to pay the government $36,400.

What I've done so far is the equivalent of putting a bandaid on a bisected body. I've cancelled things like my select few patreon pledges, things like xbox live, whatever I can that I can actually do, but that's going to save me maybe $40 a month when I am in desperate need of $1000 just to make ends meet. I hate asking for money and I hate how often I have, but now I'm in the most desperate situation I've been in since I had to move between provinces in the first place.

I'm so excited to finally share the coming soon page + trailer for a game that I've been doing illustration and art direction for, Clever Girls! If you're curious, the very talented team and I would love for you to add it to your Steam wishlist to follow its progress! (:

hello ??????? this is the kind of game i have been wanting all my life holy shit thank you. immediately bookmarked so i can follow along!

hard not to notice how much more frequently im seeing posts from ppl needing money to make rent. doesn’t bode well!! please donate if you can, subscribe to patreons, help keep each other safe

i’m mostly pointing this out bc i feel like it’s really easy to get fatigued seeing lots of posts like that, and possibly, even if you’re sympathetic! to start resenting them. but from personal experience every time someone asks for money is usually extremely hard and painful and only something most ppl do when they’re really desperate, and the less you have, the more often you have to ask bc you’ve already cut your expenses down as much as is possible (at least i have)

evictions are one of many ways society's immune system attempts to neutralize and digest people from marginalized backgrounds. it's tiring, but those of us in a position to help should do so. we've gotta help each other, nobody else is going to.

On the subject of evictions in particular: Speaking from experience, mine and that of people close to me... Keeping people in housing is absolutely critical in our society, even more than a lot of things. If you can throw a few bucks and help someone make rent one month, that's something they can come back from. If you end up losing your housing and are couch surfing or outside... recovering from that can be a goddamn miracle.

as someone who has been homeless in the past, it absolutely permanently changed me (in a deeply negative sense) and the only reason why, nearly 15 years later, that i'm not still homeless was with the help of several friends. it's unfortunate that these days i'm no longer in contact with most of them. many times we stopped being friends out of some interpersonal conflict partly born from how that event broke me, but more are now dead. (albeit not from the process of helping me) i've never even been evicted and it was still essentially like attempting to climb out of a 10 meter tall pit while you're slowly bleeding out, where all of the walls are completely smooth and slick with oil and your own blood, and then at the top of the pit there's some razor-wire as a final fuck you.

it cannot be overstated how it completely changes how you look at life and money. how it breaks you. how your psyche suffers a violent fiery death and how it is born anew, replete with a million more hangups and an almost fundamental inability to thrive, the only thing that remains is simple survival.

if you can help it, treat my experience as a monument to that which must never be repeated. i wish i could thank those that helped lift me out of that pit that i no longer can give thanks to. a while back, i tried messaging one that i fell out with long ago. i never got a response back from them, but i hope they read the message thanking them. i can only hope that my message didn't fill them with a sense of revulsion.