Got another notice from the city housing authority yesterday, stating that I was approved for yet another waiting list on yet another apartment complex. Been burned too many times to get excited about it. I filled out the online application. Yet I expect nothing to come of it. I’ve just settled in for the long haul. It’s very possible a wheelchair accessible low-income place ever comes open before I die. I’ve come to accept that things rarely work out like they’re supposed to.
As much as I would love to have my own place again, I have made my peace with the idea that I very well may have to live with my family for the rest of my life. My parents are elderly and in declining health. I may have to go live with my brother. I don’t know how that would go as my brother and I didn’t have much of a relationship as children and we don’t have much in common as 40 something adults. It’s a huge blow to my pride that I may never be on my own again. But at least I am still alive and fighting. Some days I don’t know what keeps me going other than old fashioned survival instinct.
I’ve only recently realized just how powerful the survival instinct in a person is. I’m beginning to understand how people can eat out of garbage cans, or even each other if things got bad enough. When I saw the movie ‘Alive’ as a teenager back in the 1990s, I was squeamish about the survivors of the plane crash in the Andes mountains eating their own dead in order to stay alive. But, until I saw that movie, I didn’t realize that Catholics (whom most of the survivors of that crash were) considered eating human flesh extremely evil. But many of them did survive long enough that some of the healthiest survivors were able to hike out of the mountains and get help. They survived for I’m guessing over 4 months in the Andes Mountains until they were rescued. And this was based on a true story about a soccer team (I think) back in the 1970s. I imagine some of them are still alive today in 2023.
Things have been really challenging ever since my old friend Pastor Verne died in 2014. In the next ten months, I lost two more close friends and my last grandparent. In October 2015, I was in a car wreck that did over 5000 dollars worth of damage to my car. Since I was not at fault, the other driver’s insurance covered my car repairs and medical treatment. I messed my back up pretty bad and had to have three months of chiropractic therapy. Even after the therapy was over, I was still anxious about driving. I gradually drove less and less. In 2017, I started buying everything online and having it delivered to my apartment. I guess it was a good trial run before the pandemic hit in 2020. In 2019 I sold my car and started having severe knee pains all day, every day. The knees hurt so bad that I become homebound. I complained about the pains to my doctor in December 2019, but nothing was done. I was scheduled to have a follow up appointment six months after. In March 2020, the covid pandemic came to America. And everything changed after that.
Since the hospitals and clinics were overwhelmed with covid patients, I decided to shelter in place. I have preexisting conditions, like schizophrenia and sleep apnea, that probably would have made covid worse. Much to the irritation of most of my family and former friends (I have lost close to 75 percent of my previous friend base due to contentious politics and culture war garbage and no longer feel safe going to family functions), I treated covid like I had gotten drafted to go to war. I sheltered in place until I got my first vaccine in May 2021. Between March 2020 and May 2021, I never left my apartment without a facemask or hand sanitizer. Most of my family and neighbors were upset I did this, but I didn’t ask for anyone else to do the same not even once. Sure it was lonely spending day after day alone. But I read alot, lifted arm weights almost daily, got serious about watching my diet, gave up sugar and most carbs. Between March 2020 and February 2023 (when I left Nebraska for Oklahoma) I lost over 170 pounds.
In September 2021, I was diagnosed with congestive heart failure. Once that got stabilized, I went back to my apartment in Kearney. For the first three months I had a home health nurse come check in on me once a week. This was going great until it was suddenly discontinued after only three months. When I applied to get back in the program, I was denied and told it was only temporary for everyone. My doctor refused to renew my scripts through telemedicine (even though my psych doctor did so with psych medications all through the pandemic). Since I had no car anymore, and public transit in my previous hometown was essentially non existent, I could no longer make it to my appointments. My family was 500 miles away at the time. In May 2022, I started having heart failure issues again.
This time I decided I wasn’t going to repeat the past mistakes. I requested going to assisted living in a place where, not only could I get my heart problems stabilized, but I could also get physical therapy too. I found a place in a real small town a 2 hour drive away from my hometown. My initial plan was to stay there for a couple years, rehab my heart, get my meds straightened out, and then relocate to Oklahoma City where the rest of my family now was. My parents moved here to Oklahoma City in 2018 to be closer to their grandchildren. I would have moved down here sooner, except the pandemic and heart failure made me take a several year detour. In 2018, I wasn’t ready to abandon Nebraska just yet. After spending the pandemic alone and almost dying of heart failure on two separate occasions, I realized that I had no future in Nebraska.
My move to the long term facility was a life saver and a life changer. I made lots of friends there, mostly with the staff members. Most of the staff were in their 20s and 30s. They were optimistic go getters, really encouraging, and really cool people. Turns out my recovery went faster than I expected. My minimum two years there turned out to be only eight months. I moved out for good on February 6, 2023. Ironically, February 6 was the exact same date I moved out of my childhood farm village for Kearney. Kearney was a college town of 35,000 residents. I lived there from 2005 to 2022. I loved it there, at least until the chronic physical health problems started. I was pretty much a shut in from 2019 to 2022, granted most of this time was during the pandemic. My mom lost one of her best friends to covid. The lady who sold some land to our family when we still owned some land in rural Nebraska also died from covid. One of my best friends worked for an internet provider in a major urban center. He was classified as an essential worker, caught covid three times, and he and much of his department were still laid off when the pandemic started to lift in 2022. Most of the nurses and doctors I made friends within long term care caught covid multiple times. None of them ever went into detail, much like veterans don’t talk about their experiences in war much I imagine. One doctor said she saw “many” people die from covid. That’s all she would say about it. Angers me that many people in my country still don’t take it serious. It’s like they don’t care that millions of people died from the pandemic, including one million in our own country. Attitudes like that are sick and soulless.
Been in Oklahoma since February 2023. Got my new doctors lined up. Met a couple of my case workers. Met some of my neighbors. Made some really great friends within the last few months. Reestablished a couple friendships that had fallen apart during the contentious politics of the last eight years or so. I’m still afraid of going to family functions. Probably always will be. I do great in one-on-one situations. But I do terrible in group settings. Always have. Even as a teenager, I despised group assignments in school. The only partner I ever had in any group assignment that put in the same effort I did was my best friend. She still is my best friend even in our 40s. I just don’t trust anyone to put in the same effort I do in anything I’m involved in. Probably never will.
There’s lots I love about living in an urban area. I love the diversity in cultures, diversity in small businesses and restaurants, and I love living in a place that people actually want to move to. First time in my 43 years of living I lived somewhere that wasn’t slowly dying. First time in my entire life that I’ve lived in place that is overall optimistic and hopeful about the future. It’s so far better than anywhere I have ever lived, at least for me. Sure I will miss the cold winters and the cool evenings in summer, but I am starting to adapt to the new surroundings. It’s the diversity in cultures, people, and thought that I love so much about being in an urban center. I’m starting to feel like I finally found my own personal tribe. First time in my entire life (other than my years in college) where I feel like I’m not a complete outcast for loving nerdy things like history, philosophy, economics, and science fiction. After 43 years of painful searching, I may have finally found my people and permanent home.
A Life Of Mental Illness 