Selfish post
I know it's been, heck, years, since I posted here, but I'm having a low-grade freak-out and need to vent.
My landlord told me, late Sunday night, that he won't be renewing my lease on July 1st so that he can move his daughter into my apartment. In the building I've lived in for ten years. I have to move out of my home. Not just an apartment, but the place I love. I know all the streets, all the faces, all the foibles and sounds of the neighborhood around me like someone who grew up by the sea knows the sounds of the tides. So many momentous things have happened to me here. I've been happy here (not at the moment especially but that's for failed-romance reasons.)
I can't make a big stink and fight him, because if I ever want to get a new place I'll need his recommendation, since he's my only previous landlord since the first Bush administration. But I don't have money for a deposit, or the first months rent most buildings require. I don't have a credit rating, not because I have debt, but because I've never bought anything I can't afford. I'll need to hire a mover because I live on the third floor and have 30 boxes of books and a frigging printing press on my coffee table, and I don't have a license or any friends to help me. I need someplace on the north side so I can get to work, but the only places I can find in my price range are garden studios with shared kitchens in Edgewater or the far west side, where I wouldn't have room for anything.
I'm panicking. I vacillate between a sickly forced excitement for a "new chapter" in my life and an overwhelming despair. At the moment the most likely scenario is that I'll spend every last cent moving my life into a storage unit, and buy a bus ticket to a friend's place in an unpleasant town in rural North Carolina, or, worse, my dad's place in Minnesota. I would celebrate my 38th birthday sleeping on my parent's couch.
I feel like a failure as an adult. I've build nothing of note out of my life. I have no resources, no accomplishments, no career. I just received a reply from a service to place writing with agents and editors; I can't even pay to get my work published. They told me my novels are "inaccessible" and "not commercially viable". (Just to add a little more rejection into my day.) Friends have told me maybe it's good for me to move home and plot my next move, but I don't really want anything other than a home in a place that I love, the space and time to write my inaccessible novels, and some peace. Which is apparently an unreasonable and immature way to live. I am teetering on the precipice and I don't see any footholds or dangling vines, just a great dark pit.
Thanks, LJ friends. I needed to write that. Hopefully it will help me think clearly about what to do next.
My landlord told me, late Sunday night, that he won't be renewing my lease on July 1st so that he can move his daughter into my apartment. In the building I've lived in for ten years. I have to move out of my home. Not just an apartment, but the place I love. I know all the streets, all the faces, all the foibles and sounds of the neighborhood around me like someone who grew up by the sea knows the sounds of the tides. So many momentous things have happened to me here. I've been happy here (not at the moment especially but that's for failed-romance reasons.)
I can't make a big stink and fight him, because if I ever want to get a new place I'll need his recommendation, since he's my only previous landlord since the first Bush administration. But I don't have money for a deposit, or the first months rent most buildings require. I don't have a credit rating, not because I have debt, but because I've never bought anything I can't afford. I'll need to hire a mover because I live on the third floor and have 30 boxes of books and a frigging printing press on my coffee table, and I don't have a license or any friends to help me. I need someplace on the north side so I can get to work, but the only places I can find in my price range are garden studios with shared kitchens in Edgewater or the far west side, where I wouldn't have room for anything.
I'm panicking. I vacillate between a sickly forced excitement for a "new chapter" in my life and an overwhelming despair. At the moment the most likely scenario is that I'll spend every last cent moving my life into a storage unit, and buy a bus ticket to a friend's place in an unpleasant town in rural North Carolina, or, worse, my dad's place in Minnesota. I would celebrate my 38th birthday sleeping on my parent's couch.
I feel like a failure as an adult. I've build nothing of note out of my life. I have no resources, no accomplishments, no career. I just received a reply from a service to place writing with agents and editors; I can't even pay to get my work published. They told me my novels are "inaccessible" and "not commercially viable". (Just to add a little more rejection into my day.) Friends have told me maybe it's good for me to move home and plot my next move, but I don't really want anything other than a home in a place that I love, the space and time to write my inaccessible novels, and some peace. Which is apparently an unreasonable and immature way to live. I am teetering on the precipice and I don't see any footholds or dangling vines, just a great dark pit.
Thanks, LJ friends. I needed to write that. Hopefully it will help me think clearly about what to do next.