Survivor Literacy

Hello my loves,
You might notice it’s a bit quiet in here. It’s ok, and I promise I’ll come back bigger, badder and better than ever.

I’m a person of many visions, and diverse knowledges. I love detecting patterns and making connections. Sometimes making these connections is awesome. Other times it makes me feel like quite the outsider.

The chaos of so many connections that I carried alone finally became too big. After a lifetime of repeating cycles of abuse, 2 social science degrees, 3 pregnancies, 9 years of college, multiple restraining orders, and more evictions than I care to count, I not only hit autistic burnout, but with no resources I also went homeless with my two teenagers in 2014.

Every single day since that day has been a struggle to get back to myself. I became a different person than the survivor who had endured my mom, my exes and a broken and discriminatory system. I became an animal in survivor mode. I perceived the world in terms of level of threat posed. I saw the underbelly of America, where capitalism chews up disposable bastards like me, all for the cost of someone else’s Mercedes.

I’ve made decisions that I’m adamantly ethically opposed to. I’ve faced situations which left no space for ethics or authenticity, only survival.

After all of the years I spent learning how to love myself, I lost my self-love and self-respect one compromised decision at a time. I was the hypocrite that I’d promised myself I’d never become. I knew I wasn’t capable of staying there, but autistic burnout, graduate burnout, homelessness, and survival mode are not something you can just make better my turning a new leaf.

It’s maintaining faith when you’re filled with hopelessness. It’s holding on to your authenticity when it’s the only comfort you have in the world. It’s choosing love when it doesn’t choose you back. It’s making impossible choices that are absolutely necessary, and that everyone will punish you for.

It’s knowing that a tiny moment of true human understanding can save a life. It’s believing that even at our worst, even when we have absolutely nothing else, we have this tremendous power to make someone feel loved, or seen, or valued, or even just a little less alone.

It’s wanting that so badly, and somehow losing your patience with the cashier, because you have absolutely nothing left, and knowing that in every single interaction you either have to mask (which feels like a complete erasure of yourself when you are disposable), or defend how different you are from everyone else.

It’s scraping change for the bus ride to take your dvd player to the pawn shop, and hoping they take it, so you can afford the bus ride home. By dvd player, I mean absolutely everything you’ve ever looked forward to, while you convince your kids it’s going to be ok.

It’s begging churches for help, so you can get housing, just to lose it again in a few months even though you were trying your hardest every day.

It’s nonstop problem solving of the same problems on repeat that refuse to stay solved.

It’s barely finding housing in the nick of time. It’s never finding an ethical job. It’s getting fired for ridiculous reasons, and starting from scratch.

It’s dishwashing, and canvassing, and housekeeping, and shredding a body that is always in pain.

It’s aging with Ehlers Danlos Syndrome, having no idea what Ehlers Danlos Syndrome is but knowing that your body doesn’t work anything like other bodies, to the point you truly question your reality. It’s having joints that fail on me, and are constantly cracking. It’s lots of bruising, and an incredibly pain threshold. It’s being dysautonomic, and incapable of warming up, and having to pee constantly. It’s losing control of your limbs and digits intermittently. Its having a variety of sensations that you should not be having. It’s having your joints dislocate while you sleep or sit too long, while working full-time for crap wages. It’s not being able to eat what anybody else eats.

It’s having a country that thinks we all just deserve to die, so big pharma, insurance, and a whole lot of bureaucracy and politics go into actively prevent us from being seen, diagnosed, or cared for.

It’s having to figure all of that out, when out of spoons, extremely low on resources, and with an absolutely broken spirit.

I’m coming out of it finally. I was lost for a really long time. This blog began as my realization that I was going to lose myself entirely if I didn’t fight like hell to get through this.

This began as a space to process my journey figuring out what was going on in my body, and sharing my story so zebras might be more visible, and so someone out there feeling the same things might have a resource, or at least feel less alone.

It has turned into so much more because absolutely everything is connected. You can’t talk about homelessness without discussing health. You can understand health without understanding trauma. You can’t understand trauma without understanding conformity.

There is no one topic.

I can’t talk about my experiences without discussing social theory. So, I’m just going to write it all.

My life story-

My quest to receive care-

The sidequests along the way-

The dynamics that power the cycle-

Absolutely nothing is off limits.

There are no taboos here, only understanding.

So, please don’t go anywhere. I’m reformatting, organizing, and tidying up a bit, because I want this page to feel like home. I can finally see through the haze of the chaos, and it’s time to transform.

Thank you for coming with me. Thank you for hanging around. While I’m getting it all together, and preparing for the relaunch, it’s a great time to invite others along for the ride. Chat me up to your friends. Tell them how handsome and charming I am, and how I tell the best jokes, and stories, and how you’d love to discuss these gems with them. Invite your family along. It’s fine if they’re dysfunctional. Nobody around here will even notice.

I’m going to take about a week, and then we’ll start over in a way that makes a little more sense.

Thanks for being here. I love you all dearly.
-Protyus