mom
I guess you have your internet now??
Jessica Amber Murray
no, i'm at the tim horton's across from the uhaul. i need to do some research on fridges.
mom
Oh yes...Won't disability help you with that? They used to anyways.
That and dryers, washers and stoves if one needed them.
Jessica Amber Murray
no. well, i'll ask after. i doubt it.
there's
a washer/dryer. it's sort of weird. the dryer is free, but the washer
is $4. which would be alright, if it wasn't so small. i'll probably use a
laundromat. there's a stove i can move in. it's old, but i only use it
to fry eggs and make spaghetti. worst case, i'll just get one of those
portable elements. probably more useful to me in the long run (i could
use it for camping or whatever if/when i move). likewise, i'm thinking
i'll probably get a mini-fridge, if they're cheaper. i don't need a big
or fancy fridge. when i had a big fridge before, it was mostly empty
most of the time..
Monday, August 12, 2013
Re: things that are missing
From: "Jessica Murray" <dfhldgdhdlhfdla@gmail.com>
To: stepmother’s email address
i'm sorry to drag this on. you can be assured i wish to move on.
i'm just confused about a few things. i can understand why my sister would have taken the mandolin and the 12-string, as well as a number of other things. i'll have to deal with that bilaterally. i don't understand why she would take my blanket or my tax returns or some of the other things and really don't think that she did. i don't see why you would take them, either, though. i don't consider these things stolen and am not making accusations regarding them.
i'd just like to try and understand better what may have happened to them. are you absolutely certain you looked everywhere in the house? could there have been some things stored away in an out of the way place, like behind a staircase or under a sink? i know there was some water damage in the shed on lexington. i spent a while sorting through cds. were there boxes that were thrown in the garbage as a result of that damage? is it possible that there were items forgotten at lexington? i know that you reboxed a few things. were items thrown in the garbage as a result of that reboxing process? some of the things i'm looking for (like a handful of old beaten up shirts i had hanging on my wall for many years) could have easily been mistaken for garbage.
there was not much there in the way of monetary value, but there were personal possessions that were of great value to me and i'd appreciate any help you could provide me in at least understanding where they went, if they are indeed lost forever.
j
To: stepmother’s email address
i'm sorry to drag this on. you can be assured i wish to move on.
i'm just confused about a few things. i can understand why my sister would have taken the mandolin and the 12-string, as well as a number of other things. i'll have to deal with that bilaterally. i don't understand why she would take my blanket or my tax returns or some of the other things and really don't think that she did. i don't see why you would take them, either, though. i don't consider these things stolen and am not making accusations regarding them.
i'd just like to try and understand better what may have happened to them. are you absolutely certain you looked everywhere in the house? could there have been some things stored away in an out of the way place, like behind a staircase or under a sink? i know there was some water damage in the shed on lexington. i spent a while sorting through cds. were there boxes that were thrown in the garbage as a result of that damage? is it possible that there were items forgotten at lexington? i know that you reboxed a few things. were items thrown in the garbage as a result of that reboxing process? some of the things i'm looking for (like a handful of old beaten up shirts i had hanging on my wall for many years) could have easily been mistaken for garbage.
there was not much there in the way of monetary value, but there were personal possessions that were of great value to me and i'd appreciate any help you could provide me in at least understanding where they went, if they are indeed lost forever.
j
documents to print
From: Jessica Murray
To: wpl850@gmail.com
hi.
both files should open with word.
j
1) Answering the question of why I.doc
He claims that I suffer from weak symptoms of depression and that this is part of the reason that I’ve been unable to work. I cannot deny that the symptoms associated with the diagnosed ‘dysthymia’ seem applicable, but if they’re applicable now then they’ve been applicable continually since early childhood and they didn’t prevent me from working in the past. I do not honestly believe that I am too depressed to function in the workforce on a general basis, but I will concede that my general personality is not ideal for a job in the service industry, which is about the only industry that I am now and likely ever will be qualified to work in. So, there is a roundabout relevancy to the observation. Insofar as this is my personality, and the issue is perhaps wholly described in these terms, this is not a resolvable issue without some form of drug use or psycho-therapy. Is it worth the state’s time and energy to put a hopelessly apathetic personality type through therapy so that it can flip burgers for minimum wage? Excuse me for being jaded by the prospect.
I hope you’ll excuse my biases in favour of empiricism over deductive reasoning, but perhaps the better argument in favour of my inability to work is the fact that I’ve been so unsuccessful in the work force over the last several years. My last period of ‘gainful employment’ ended in mid-2008 due to a layoff. I was then fired twice in 2008, both times due to chronic tardiness that was brought on by symptoms that seem consistent with the diagnosis of dysthymia, before heading back to school to study computer science, partially as a result of being unable to find steady employment. I felt targeted by my professors over the next few years due to the fact that I rarely attended classes. I rarely attended classes due to issues of social anxiety; while I’ve never needed to sit in class to keep up and my grades have always been above the curve, most professors were not sensitive to this at all and, in staggering displays of counter-productive ignorance, decided to pick me out and make an example of me. This led to two predictable outcomes. First, I was forced to stand up for myself and challenge several professors through administrative means. I won every fight. Second, I was then even less likely to attend classes due to the increased social anxieties of being singled out by professors and peers. As an aside, I think that there should be mandatory training for professors about the issue of social anxiety and why it prevents some students from attending class or working in groups. Certainly, making an example of students for ‘truancy’ under ignorant assumptions should be viewed not just as unacceptable and unprofessional but as criminal harassment. Over time, I became paranoid and suspicious of all professors and teaching assistants under the empirical deduction that they seemed to be purposefully singling me out, which made me even more anxious, even more upset and excessively confrontational. I eventually forced myself out of the program a credit short of graduation; I do not feel that I can complete the program with an objective evaluation at this particular institution. My GPA in the program is above 10 out of 12, which is an A.
Accepting that it was best to cut my losses and start fresh, it was in the fall of 2010 that I forced myself out of the program in order to raise the income necessary to undergo gender transition. I’ve been unable to find any significant employment since then. The few jobs that I’ve been able to find have been either part time or commission-based, and I’ve been fired from all of them, except one - a part-time job at a company that was short-staffed and in the process of bankruptcy. When the company eventually failed, I lost employment.
How many interviews have I been to over the last year and a half? I’ve been to several hundred of them, and in every industry imaginable. I’ve been to dozens and dozens of fast food interviews, including at several of the same restaurants multiple times, and simply cannot get anybody in the industry to hire me. Dysthymia may be to blame, as may be transphobia. To be blunt, I think the culprit is more likely to be a combination of ageism and reverse-classism. With no recent service industry experience, an advanced education and being above the age of 30, this is simply not an option that is open to me. Unfortunately, it’s also the only option that I have without going to school again. If I am accepted into disability, I may indeed enroll in correspondent classes at the other local university with the hopes of putting myself in a better long term self-employment situation.
I was first diagnosed with gender dysphoria more than ten years ago. I’ve always felt as though I am female, but was taught (primarily by my mother) to suppress those feelings as abnormal and wrong. My mother, overall, has had a haunting effect on my life. She suffers from paranoia, schizophrenia and drug and alcohol abuse; she was extremely emotionally negligent and abusive towards me for most of my young childhood, which has left me deeply codependent and very strongly attracted to exploitative and abusive relationships. A few months into transition, I fell into one of these deeply abusive relationships with a young girl that convinced me to stop hormone therapy. We went our ways several years later; I have arguably yet to recover from the emotional damage she caused me, but going back into transition is a positive step forward in the proper direction of the recovery of my ego and self-confidence.
As I’ve been unable to find employment for the last year and a half, I’ve had to rely on the help of family members. My father is wealthy, but I am not welcome in his home due to issues of transphobia. He helped me for a little while and then cut me off in a sink or swim scenario. I ended up getting evicted from my apartment, losing most of my belongings and moving into the spare room in my elderly grandmother’s apartment, which is where I am currently. My grandmother is a compassionate woman but she lives on a fixed income and cannot afford to take care of me indefinitely. I need to find an alternate solution.
Welfare has not been a valid solution. The maximum monthly amount is not sufficient for any individual to exist upon; as I am currently not paying rent, it’s been cut down to $200/month, which I find to be remarkable. My medication is almost $200/month! The idea of me raising enough money to move away from my grandmother through welfare is laughable. I cannot find employment. I cannot function socially. I cannot stay here forever. Without some kind of significant state intervention, my future, then, appears to be either in homelessness or prostitution or both.
I went to the doctor to try and understand what the causes of the problems I’ve been experiencing are and don’t feel I’ve walked away with a deeper insight than I had before. Depression that is so weak that it cannot even be called depression? That seems so trivial, and so unworthy of aid. However, when the diagnosis is put in the context of what I’ve experienced over the last several years, perhaps a larger pattern emerges. Perhaps my social and contentedness problems are at the root of my inability to find employment and, if that is truly the case, then perhaps, and despite years of denial, I do qualify for disability.
Hopefully, this will be the short term solution that allows me to rebuild my life in the face of an adversity that is larger than I am able to conquer through sheer willpower and hard work. I feel I’ve run out of other options and am asking you for aid out of desperation.
Jessica
2) odsp essay.rtf.
To: wpl850@gmail.com
hi.
both files should open with word.
j
1) Answering the question of why I.doc
How I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb
Answering the question of why I’ve been unable to work over the last few years, and why I feel that this will likely continue for several more, is not something I can do with ease. In truth, this is what I sought out a psychiatric opinion about. I did not come to the process of evaluation with an understanding of the problem but with a desire to better understand it and I do not honestly feel as though my brief encounter with this psychiatrist has left me with a significantly better understanding of the core issues.
He claims that I suffer from weak symptoms of depression and that this is part of the reason that I’ve been unable to work. I cannot deny that the symptoms associated with the diagnosed ‘dysthymia’ seem applicable, but if they’re applicable now then they’ve been applicable continually since early childhood and they didn’t prevent me from working in the past. I do not honestly believe that I am too depressed to function in the workforce on a general basis, but I will concede that my general personality is not ideal for a job in the service industry, which is about the only industry that I am now and likely ever will be qualified to work in. So, there is a roundabout relevancy to the observation. Insofar as this is my personality, and the issue is perhaps wholly described in these terms, this is not a resolvable issue without some form of drug use or psycho-therapy. Is it worth the state’s time and energy to put a hopelessly apathetic personality type through therapy so that it can flip burgers for minimum wage? Excuse me for being jaded by the prospect.
I hope you’ll excuse my biases in favour of empiricism over deductive reasoning, but perhaps the better argument in favour of my inability to work is the fact that I’ve been so unsuccessful in the work force over the last several years. My last period of ‘gainful employment’ ended in mid-2008 due to a layoff. I was then fired twice in 2008, both times due to chronic tardiness that was brought on by symptoms that seem consistent with the diagnosis of dysthymia, before heading back to school to study computer science, partially as a result of being unable to find steady employment. I felt targeted by my professors over the next few years due to the fact that I rarely attended classes. I rarely attended classes due to issues of social anxiety; while I’ve never needed to sit in class to keep up and my grades have always been above the curve, most professors were not sensitive to this at all and, in staggering displays of counter-productive ignorance, decided to pick me out and make an example of me. This led to two predictable outcomes. First, I was forced to stand up for myself and challenge several professors through administrative means. I won every fight. Second, I was then even less likely to attend classes due to the increased social anxieties of being singled out by professors and peers. As an aside, I think that there should be mandatory training for professors about the issue of social anxiety and why it prevents some students from attending class or working in groups. Certainly, making an example of students for ‘truancy’ under ignorant assumptions should be viewed not just as unacceptable and unprofessional but as criminal harassment. Over time, I became paranoid and suspicious of all professors and teaching assistants under the empirical deduction that they seemed to be purposefully singling me out, which made me even more anxious, even more upset and excessively confrontational. I eventually forced myself out of the program a credit short of graduation; I do not feel that I can complete the program with an objective evaluation at this particular institution. My GPA in the program is above 10 out of 12, which is an A.
Accepting that it was best to cut my losses and start fresh, it was in the fall of 2010 that I forced myself out of the program in order to raise the income necessary to undergo gender transition. I’ve been unable to find any significant employment since then. The few jobs that I’ve been able to find have been either part time or commission-based, and I’ve been fired from all of them, except one - a part-time job at a company that was short-staffed and in the process of bankruptcy. When the company eventually failed, I lost employment.
How many interviews have I been to over the last year and a half? I’ve been to several hundred of them, and in every industry imaginable. I’ve been to dozens and dozens of fast food interviews, including at several of the same restaurants multiple times, and simply cannot get anybody in the industry to hire me. Dysthymia may be to blame, as may be transphobia. To be blunt, I think the culprit is more likely to be a combination of ageism and reverse-classism. With no recent service industry experience, an advanced education and being above the age of 30, this is simply not an option that is open to me. Unfortunately, it’s also the only option that I have without going to school again. If I am accepted into disability, I may indeed enroll in correspondent classes at the other local university with the hopes of putting myself in a better long term self-employment situation.
I was first diagnosed with gender dysphoria more than ten years ago. I’ve always felt as though I am female, but was taught (primarily by my mother) to suppress those feelings as abnormal and wrong. My mother, overall, has had a haunting effect on my life. She suffers from paranoia, schizophrenia and drug and alcohol abuse; she was extremely emotionally negligent and abusive towards me for most of my young childhood, which has left me deeply codependent and very strongly attracted to exploitative and abusive relationships. A few months into transition, I fell into one of these deeply abusive relationships with a young girl that convinced me to stop hormone therapy. We went our ways several years later; I have arguably yet to recover from the emotional damage she caused me, but going back into transition is a positive step forward in the proper direction of the recovery of my ego and self-confidence.
As I’ve been unable to find employment for the last year and a half, I’ve had to rely on the help of family members. My father is wealthy, but I am not welcome in his home due to issues of transphobia. He helped me for a little while and then cut me off in a sink or swim scenario. I ended up getting evicted from my apartment, losing most of my belongings and moving into the spare room in my elderly grandmother’s apartment, which is where I am currently. My grandmother is a compassionate woman but she lives on a fixed income and cannot afford to take care of me indefinitely. I need to find an alternate solution.
Welfare has not been a valid solution. The maximum monthly amount is not sufficient for any individual to exist upon; as I am currently not paying rent, it’s been cut down to $200/month, which I find to be remarkable. My medication is almost $200/month! The idea of me raising enough money to move away from my grandmother through welfare is laughable. I cannot find employment. I cannot function socially. I cannot stay here forever. Without some kind of significant state intervention, my future, then, appears to be either in homelessness or prostitution or both.
I went to the doctor to try and understand what the causes of the problems I’ve been experiencing are and don’t feel I’ve walked away with a deeper insight than I had before. Depression that is so weak that it cannot even be called depression? That seems so trivial, and so unworthy of aid. However, when the diagnosis is put in the context of what I’ve experienced over the last several years, perhaps a larger pattern emerges. Perhaps my social and contentedness problems are at the root of my inability to find employment and, if that is truly the case, then perhaps, and despite years of denial, I do qualify for disability.
Hopefully, this will be the short term solution that allows me to rebuild my life in the face of an adversity that is larger than I am able to conquer through sheer willpower and hard work. I feel I’ve run out of other options and am asking you for aid out of desperation.
Jessica
2) odsp essay.rtf.
Re: can you please check the storage for boxes
From: Jessica Murray <death.to.koalas@gmail.com>
To: grandmother’s email address
i really wish i had paid better attention. i was in such a haze that week...
i believe you when you say you can't find anything else. i sort of specifically remember taking a few things down off the wall at the last minute, though. i sort of fear a box may have been taken from beside your car. those pictures would have been destroyed if they were left out there, anyways.
i have a list of about 100 things that have disappeared. everything from a mandolin to a blender; weird things, like half of the keys from my synthesizer, inexplicable things like my blanket. it seems like she just went through and helped herself to whatever she wanted.
i'm doing well, besides that.
To: grandmother’s email address
i really wish i had paid better attention. i was in such a haze that week...
i believe you when you say you can't find anything else. i sort of specifically remember taking a few things down off the wall at the last minute, though. i sort of fear a box may have been taken from beside your car. those pictures would have been destroyed if they were left out there, anyways.
i have a list of about 100 things that have disappeared. everything from a mandolin to a blender; weird things, like half of the keys from my synthesizer, inexplicable things like my blanket. it seems like she just went through and helped herself to whatever she wanted.
i'm doing well, besides that.
odsp essay
Hello.
I apologize for the late response, but I had a very difficult several weeks and needed some time to reflect before attempting to engage with anybody in any kind of official capacity. My relationship with my father was slightly strained over the last few years of his life, but it remains a loss that I am likely to feel deeply for many years to come.
I understand that I need to explain my decision to move to Windsor, and will gladly do so. I may even go so far as to suggest to your office that it is a process you should actively involve yourselves with on a regular basis, as the process would have been less erratic had I had a little bit of help with it. I also feel that many people that live on ODSP in Ottawa could have their quality of life profoundly increased by relocating somewhere where the cost of living is dramatically lower. Within that sentence lies the core of my reason to relocate, but it is void of any kind of context. My diagnosis is PTSD, but I feel my condition is more in the schizo-affective spectrum (and merely driven by stress), so to get a proper grasp of the situation requires creating the context through narrative. I'm willing to acknowledge at this point that I ended up signing a lease in Windsor as a function of a stress-driven episode or breakdown; while I hope it is by more than pure coincidence, I do also feel very strongly that it was a positive decision that will help me accomplish the goals that I have.
The first thing that needs to be understood would be the rather hopeless conditions I was living in. I stayed in my grandmother's spare room (in a two bedroom apartment) from approximately November, 2011 until July, 2013. She allowed me to stay there because I had nowhere else to go, and it was a safe and stable place for me, but she was openly hostile about the fact that she did not want me there and threatened to throw me out on multiple occasions. By this July passed, I had already missed several deadlines related to me leaving and was expecting to be forcefully ejected around September if I was unable to find anywhere else to go. However, I also knew that I would be unable to find anywhere else to go, so I was more or less just waiting out the time and planning for whatever drastic actions that the inevitable would force into being. In my case, that meant drinking a lot of alcohol with a close friend of mine and ranting out various depression-fueled ballads.
It would be an error to accuse me of a lack of effort. I state this in defense, and indignantly, as it should go without saying that failure does not imply a deficit of labour as much as it implies a deficit of ability; when we fail, we generally don't do so because we didn't try hard enough, we do so because our strongest efforts were not good enough. To create a market society that necessarily produces losers and then blame the losers is an incoherent position, logically; it is the system that produces losers, who are victims, and the system that must change to get people out of that situation. Should I or anybody else claw their way out, it would merely relegate another to the position. There's no net gain by focusing on the individual, merely a continuation of the harmful mindset that has precluded the problem of splitting society into winners and losers.
That being said, it seemed as though I found something in June, but the price seemed too good to be true and the conditions on the lease demonstrated as much. I applied for several places throughout June and July but was systemically rejected from all of them. While I was never able to get a response back on what the precise issues may have been, I can take a few guesses - my credit is very bad, there are societal stigmas against people that are unable to work due to disabilities (and many people that question if this is actually really true), I am openly transgendered and I have a deeper concept of classical Greek (albeit not much) than I do of business-normality. Business-minded people tend to interpret me as childish; while the feeling is mutual, artists don't tend to be property agents so there wasn't much chance of me finding somebody I could see eye-to-eye with. The reality is that finding an apartment in Ottawa is something I would not have been able to do without some help from a body of some sort, such as subsidized housing.
This is a good place to bring up the cost of housing in Ottawa, which is beyond what an ODSP living expenses allotment can be reasonably considered to allow for. You don't have to take my word for this. There was a white paper issued some time last year (Brighter Prospects: Transforming Social Assistance in Ontario. Frances Lankin and Munir A. Sheikh) with a *key recommendation* to calculate living expenses through a market-dependent formula on a city-by-city basis to compensate for the differences in rent prices across the province. In a city such as Sudbury, $479/month may come close to providing for shelter. In Ottawa, it is difficult to find a room for $479/month; bachelors usually run over $700 and one bedrooms run close to $900, generally not including utilities. The white paper suggested increasing living expenses in Ottawa to account for this higher market cost while keeping amounts in Sudbury steady (or perhaps even decreasing the shelter amount). I am not surprised that the government has completely ignored this recommendation in favour of hiding a push for workfare behind a phony attack on ableism. However, the white paper demonstrates that this is a problem that exists, that the government is failing to react to it (or even acknowledge it) and that finding a solution is imperative. As the government will not act to increase the living expenses allowance, I feel anything that I might do to compensate should be commended and possibly studied as a model of action. Certainly, *somebody* has to do something about this.
The places I applied for in Ottawa were at 80-90% of my monthly check and would have made living day-to-day extremely difficult. They were the cheapest places I could find that I could have actually lived in. I would have likely been unable to afford proper nourishment for myself, clothes, entertainment, or much of anything else besides the cost of rent and food. While I can survive for very long periods on spaghetti and books, that's not much of any kind of existence. I often found myself asking the following question: if they wish to kill the weak, why not just go ahead and do so? Why bother letting us live if the result is a sort of torturous boredom? Did I want to bother with that kind of existence? I was seriously contemplating suicide.
There are various solutions that could be proposed. One is to find a rooming house, but this wouldn't be possible for me. The reason I'm on disability is that I can't function socially. Putting me into a rooming house is going to exacerbate the problem and throw me into a series of episodic fits. In order to maintain sound mental health, I need to spend a large amount of time (probably close to 90% of it) completely alone - not with an animal, not with a partner, nobody at all except me. So, this is an option that is out of the question. A second would be to get a job, but I'm facing two barriers in relation to this. The first barrier is that I've found finding employment to be very difficult (discrimination due to gender expression, artist/business incompatibility and other more traditional reasons such as a lack of any kind of non-academic experience relative to my age) and the second is again that I'm on disability due to an inability to function socially and could not work *enough* hours to compensate, anyways. A third option was to wait for the condo boom to lead to a crash in the price of rent, but that could take up to ten years and I had to find an answer as soon as possible.
So, there didn't really seem to be a solution, and often the only thing that made sense was to get drunk and drown away the hopelessness....
....until a friend of mine completely accidentally provided me with a solution I hadn't really contemplated: she suggested I move out of Ottawa with her. At first, I wrote the idea off entirely as something I couldn't afford to organize. However, the more I looked into it, the more I realized how beneficial it would be to me if I could find a way to get it done.
She picked Windsor as a destination, and I ended up here before her, but that didn't automatically place me here. The entire area of southern Ontario has rent at half the price of Ottawa. Even Toronto has areas of low rent housing...
What I began to see as I was studying the rental markets of cities in Ontario is that it isn't Windsor that is exceedingly cheap (although it is one of the cheapest places), but Ottawa that is outrageously expensive. Worse, from my perspective, is that Ottawa simply doesn't have a low rent market. Rent is mildly cheaper in Vanier, but pretty much consistent across town. I can only guess at reasons for this. It is possible to find a one-bedroom apartment in the less safe areas of Toronto for under $479/month; why isn't that true in Ottawa? Is it because there aren't unsafe areas in Ottawa? Is it because there is a chronic shortage of subsidized housing in Ottawa and this artificially inflates the cost of rent? Whatever the reason, I need to be clear about the precise nature of this subtle point. It may be true that Toronto is more expensive than Ottawa *on average* once you've worked in all of the ridiculously expensive suites on Yonge Street that there is not really a parallel to in Ottawa, either. However, if you're on ODSP or welfare or even working minimum wage, your options for cheap rent in Toronto are considerably better; from the perspective of looking at the market from the bottom up, Ottawa is incomparably more expensive than Toronto. It is the most expensive place to live in Ontario, whereas Windsor is one of the cheapest.
Coming to this realization was actually very important, as it made me realize that the situation was not hopeless after all - I just happened to be stuck in the most expensive city in the province, by whatever unfortunate twist of randomness. So long as I could find a way out of Ottawa, things might be OK after all.
It was decided, then, that we'd go down to Windsor to observe the situation. She had friends we could stay with. No decisions about Windsor were made at that point; I thought it would be a good idea to take a strong survey of the entire area southeast and southwest of Toronto before any serious decisions were made and decided to do that by hitchhiking. Things worked out a little differently...
Before I left, I wanted to spend some time with my father who was at the end stages of terminal brain cancer. After three unsuccessful attempts at surgery, he stopped taking his chemotherapy drugs at the beginning of July. This was a conscious end-of-life decision; the third surgery left him with some brain damage, and a fourth surgery would have almost certainly left him severely brain damaged if it didn't kill him outright. While my stepmother assured me that he'd be alive when I got back, I didn't know how long I'd be gone and didn't want to miss the opportunity to have a real and serious goodbye. The night before I left, we had a very emotional phone call that I felt was a permanent goodbye (he was losing control of his face muscles and therefore his ability to talk), and it triggered me into a state of passive mania for the next week or so that subsequent events only exacerbated. I was getting updates about the situation every few days as I was traveling. As it is, my father died on Sunday, July 28th while I was sleeping in a Tim Horton's in Windsor; I signed a lease on Monday, July 29th to move in for August 1st without any ability to finance, with the sole aim of getting home in time for the funeral. The reality is that I was in a haze the whole time I was gone, was not behaving particularly rationally and barely remember large portions of the week at all. For somebody with stress-related issues, that's a whole lot of stress to try and deal with without reacting in a less than ideal manner.
I did, however, get a place in Windsor; and I did make it home for the funeral. I may have wanted, ideally, to spend a little more time shopping in the area by hitching rides from town to town, but my willingness to do that was itself perhaps symptomatic of the mania I was feeling all week (was I avoiding the pain of facing up to my father's death by escaping town?) and in the end the place I got is something I couldn't afford to have rented in Ottawa. Everything else aside, I feel this is a smart decision that will help me live more comfortably on a very small income.
I was able to finance first and last ($1300) by taking a loan from my stepmother, and I borrowed roughly that from my biological mother's friend (who was gracious enough to drive) to rent a U-haul for 800 miles and pay for gas. If there are any kinds of programs (such as the discretionary moving allowance, or first/last rent helper startups) that are available to help me pay some of this back, it would help me make this fresh start truly fresh. It's going to take a long time to pay back $2500.
To answer the question as to why I would move to Windsor, briefly: I simply could not afford to live independently in Ottawa.
I have attached the essay I initially sent to ODSP a little over a year ago, where I explain the reasons I applied for ODSP and what I hoped to get from it. I do feel as though this move is a major step in getting me along in the process. To update the situation, I spent the 2012-2013 school year studying Law at Carleton University (and completed a minor in the subject). I feel this helped me work through some personal issues, but do not think I am well suited for a career in this field.
I am not sure what kind of employment opportunities exist in Windsor, but I am not convinced it particularly matters because I am not confident about my abilities to convince an employer to hire me in the first place. The reality is this: If I am unable to compete with teenagers for service jobs in Ottawa, moving to Windsor is not going to increase my chances, but is not going to significantly harm them either. I am unlikely to find a job either way. I am more likely to secure employment through luck or systemic aid than I am through competition on the open job market. I don’t need more schooling – I have far too much schooling – I need some kind of targeted job training and I need some experience doing something useful (32 years old and with no experience doing anything except reading books is a significant employment hurdle). About the best thing (and the most realistic thing) I can say is that my luck may be better here in Windsor than it was in Ottawa. However, I’m not holding my breath. I’ll just have to see what happens.
Jessica
I apologize for the late response, but I had a very difficult several weeks and needed some time to reflect before attempting to engage with anybody in any kind of official capacity. My relationship with my father was slightly strained over the last few years of his life, but it remains a loss that I am likely to feel deeply for many years to come.
I understand that I need to explain my decision to move to Windsor, and will gladly do so. I may even go so far as to suggest to your office that it is a process you should actively involve yourselves with on a regular basis, as the process would have been less erratic had I had a little bit of help with it. I also feel that many people that live on ODSP in Ottawa could have their quality of life profoundly increased by relocating somewhere where the cost of living is dramatically lower. Within that sentence lies the core of my reason to relocate, but it is void of any kind of context. My diagnosis is PTSD, but I feel my condition is more in the schizo-affective spectrum (and merely driven by stress), so to get a proper grasp of the situation requires creating the context through narrative. I'm willing to acknowledge at this point that I ended up signing a lease in Windsor as a function of a stress-driven episode or breakdown; while I hope it is by more than pure coincidence, I do also feel very strongly that it was a positive decision that will help me accomplish the goals that I have.
The first thing that needs to be understood would be the rather hopeless conditions I was living in. I stayed in my grandmother's spare room (in a two bedroom apartment) from approximately November, 2011 until July, 2013. She allowed me to stay there because I had nowhere else to go, and it was a safe and stable place for me, but she was openly hostile about the fact that she did not want me there and threatened to throw me out on multiple occasions. By this July passed, I had already missed several deadlines related to me leaving and was expecting to be forcefully ejected around September if I was unable to find anywhere else to go. However, I also knew that I would be unable to find anywhere else to go, so I was more or less just waiting out the time and planning for whatever drastic actions that the inevitable would force into being. In my case, that meant drinking a lot of alcohol with a close friend of mine and ranting out various depression-fueled ballads.
It would be an error to accuse me of a lack of effort. I state this in defense, and indignantly, as it should go without saying that failure does not imply a deficit of labour as much as it implies a deficit of ability; when we fail, we generally don't do so because we didn't try hard enough, we do so because our strongest efforts were not good enough. To create a market society that necessarily produces losers and then blame the losers is an incoherent position, logically; it is the system that produces losers, who are victims, and the system that must change to get people out of that situation. Should I or anybody else claw their way out, it would merely relegate another to the position. There's no net gain by focusing on the individual, merely a continuation of the harmful mindset that has precluded the problem of splitting society into winners and losers.
That being said, it seemed as though I found something in June, but the price seemed too good to be true and the conditions on the lease demonstrated as much. I applied for several places throughout June and July but was systemically rejected from all of them. While I was never able to get a response back on what the precise issues may have been, I can take a few guesses - my credit is very bad, there are societal stigmas against people that are unable to work due to disabilities (and many people that question if this is actually really true), I am openly transgendered and I have a deeper concept of classical Greek (albeit not much) than I do of business-normality. Business-minded people tend to interpret me as childish; while the feeling is mutual, artists don't tend to be property agents so there wasn't much chance of me finding somebody I could see eye-to-eye with. The reality is that finding an apartment in Ottawa is something I would not have been able to do without some help from a body of some sort, such as subsidized housing.
This is a good place to bring up the cost of housing in Ottawa, which is beyond what an ODSP living expenses allotment can be reasonably considered to allow for. You don't have to take my word for this. There was a white paper issued some time last year (Brighter Prospects: Transforming Social Assistance in Ontario. Frances Lankin and Munir A. Sheikh) with a *key recommendation* to calculate living expenses through a market-dependent formula on a city-by-city basis to compensate for the differences in rent prices across the province. In a city such as Sudbury, $479/month may come close to providing for shelter. In Ottawa, it is difficult to find a room for $479/month; bachelors usually run over $700 and one bedrooms run close to $900, generally not including utilities. The white paper suggested increasing living expenses in Ottawa to account for this higher market cost while keeping amounts in Sudbury steady (or perhaps even decreasing the shelter amount). I am not surprised that the government has completely ignored this recommendation in favour of hiding a push for workfare behind a phony attack on ableism. However, the white paper demonstrates that this is a problem that exists, that the government is failing to react to it (or even acknowledge it) and that finding a solution is imperative. As the government will not act to increase the living expenses allowance, I feel anything that I might do to compensate should be commended and possibly studied as a model of action. Certainly, *somebody* has to do something about this.
The places I applied for in Ottawa were at 80-90% of my monthly check and would have made living day-to-day extremely difficult. They were the cheapest places I could find that I could have actually lived in. I would have likely been unable to afford proper nourishment for myself, clothes, entertainment, or much of anything else besides the cost of rent and food. While I can survive for very long periods on spaghetti and books, that's not much of any kind of existence. I often found myself asking the following question: if they wish to kill the weak, why not just go ahead and do so? Why bother letting us live if the result is a sort of torturous boredom? Did I want to bother with that kind of existence? I was seriously contemplating suicide.
There are various solutions that could be proposed. One is to find a rooming house, but this wouldn't be possible for me. The reason I'm on disability is that I can't function socially. Putting me into a rooming house is going to exacerbate the problem and throw me into a series of episodic fits. In order to maintain sound mental health, I need to spend a large amount of time (probably close to 90% of it) completely alone - not with an animal, not with a partner, nobody at all except me. So, this is an option that is out of the question. A second would be to get a job, but I'm facing two barriers in relation to this. The first barrier is that I've found finding employment to be very difficult (discrimination due to gender expression, artist/business incompatibility and other more traditional reasons such as a lack of any kind of non-academic experience relative to my age) and the second is again that I'm on disability due to an inability to function socially and could not work *enough* hours to compensate, anyways. A third option was to wait for the condo boom to lead to a crash in the price of rent, but that could take up to ten years and I had to find an answer as soon as possible.
So, there didn't really seem to be a solution, and often the only thing that made sense was to get drunk and drown away the hopelessness....
....until a friend of mine completely accidentally provided me with a solution I hadn't really contemplated: she suggested I move out of Ottawa with her. At first, I wrote the idea off entirely as something I couldn't afford to organize. However, the more I looked into it, the more I realized how beneficial it would be to me if I could find a way to get it done.
She picked Windsor as a destination, and I ended up here before her, but that didn't automatically place me here. The entire area of southern Ontario has rent at half the price of Ottawa. Even Toronto has areas of low rent housing...
What I began to see as I was studying the rental markets of cities in Ontario is that it isn't Windsor that is exceedingly cheap (although it is one of the cheapest places), but Ottawa that is outrageously expensive. Worse, from my perspective, is that Ottawa simply doesn't have a low rent market. Rent is mildly cheaper in Vanier, but pretty much consistent across town. I can only guess at reasons for this. It is possible to find a one-bedroom apartment in the less safe areas of Toronto for under $479/month; why isn't that true in Ottawa? Is it because there aren't unsafe areas in Ottawa? Is it because there is a chronic shortage of subsidized housing in Ottawa and this artificially inflates the cost of rent? Whatever the reason, I need to be clear about the precise nature of this subtle point. It may be true that Toronto is more expensive than Ottawa *on average* once you've worked in all of the ridiculously expensive suites on Yonge Street that there is not really a parallel to in Ottawa, either. However, if you're on ODSP or welfare or even working minimum wage, your options for cheap rent in Toronto are considerably better; from the perspective of looking at the market from the bottom up, Ottawa is incomparably more expensive than Toronto. It is the most expensive place to live in Ontario, whereas Windsor is one of the cheapest.
Coming to this realization was actually very important, as it made me realize that the situation was not hopeless after all - I just happened to be stuck in the most expensive city in the province, by whatever unfortunate twist of randomness. So long as I could find a way out of Ottawa, things might be OK after all.
It was decided, then, that we'd go down to Windsor to observe the situation. She had friends we could stay with. No decisions about Windsor were made at that point; I thought it would be a good idea to take a strong survey of the entire area southeast and southwest of Toronto before any serious decisions were made and decided to do that by hitchhiking. Things worked out a little differently...
Before I left, I wanted to spend some time with my father who was at the end stages of terminal brain cancer. After three unsuccessful attempts at surgery, he stopped taking his chemotherapy drugs at the beginning of July. This was a conscious end-of-life decision; the third surgery left him with some brain damage, and a fourth surgery would have almost certainly left him severely brain damaged if it didn't kill him outright. While my stepmother assured me that he'd be alive when I got back, I didn't know how long I'd be gone and didn't want to miss the opportunity to have a real and serious goodbye. The night before I left, we had a very emotional phone call that I felt was a permanent goodbye (he was losing control of his face muscles and therefore his ability to talk), and it triggered me into a state of passive mania for the next week or so that subsequent events only exacerbated. I was getting updates about the situation every few days as I was traveling. As it is, my father died on Sunday, July 28th while I was sleeping in a Tim Horton's in Windsor; I signed a lease on Monday, July 29th to move in for August 1st without any ability to finance, with the sole aim of getting home in time for the funeral. The reality is that I was in a haze the whole time I was gone, was not behaving particularly rationally and barely remember large portions of the week at all. For somebody with stress-related issues, that's a whole lot of stress to try and deal with without reacting in a less than ideal manner.
I did, however, get a place in Windsor; and I did make it home for the funeral. I may have wanted, ideally, to spend a little more time shopping in the area by hitching rides from town to town, but my willingness to do that was itself perhaps symptomatic of the mania I was feeling all week (was I avoiding the pain of facing up to my father's death by escaping town?) and in the end the place I got is something I couldn't afford to have rented in Ottawa. Everything else aside, I feel this is a smart decision that will help me live more comfortably on a very small income.
I was able to finance first and last ($1300) by taking a loan from my stepmother, and I borrowed roughly that from my biological mother's friend (who was gracious enough to drive) to rent a U-haul for 800 miles and pay for gas. If there are any kinds of programs (such as the discretionary moving allowance, or first/last rent helper startups) that are available to help me pay some of this back, it would help me make this fresh start truly fresh. It's going to take a long time to pay back $2500.
To answer the question as to why I would move to Windsor, briefly: I simply could not afford to live independently in Ottawa.
I have attached the essay I initially sent to ODSP a little over a year ago, where I explain the reasons I applied for ODSP and what I hoped to get from it. I do feel as though this move is a major step in getting me along in the process. To update the situation, I spent the 2012-2013 school year studying Law at Carleton University (and completed a minor in the subject). I feel this helped me work through some personal issues, but do not think I am well suited for a career in this field.
I am not sure what kind of employment opportunities exist in Windsor, but I am not convinced it particularly matters because I am not confident about my abilities to convince an employer to hire me in the first place. The reality is this: If I am unable to compete with teenagers for service jobs in Ottawa, moving to Windsor is not going to increase my chances, but is not going to significantly harm them either. I am unlikely to find a job either way. I am more likely to secure employment through luck or systemic aid than I am through competition on the open job market. I don’t need more schooling – I have far too much schooling – I need some kind of targeted job training and I need some experience doing something useful (32 years old and with no experience doing anything except reading books is a significant employment hurdle). About the best thing (and the most realistic thing) I can say is that my luck may be better here in Windsor than it was in Ottawa. However, I’m not holding my breath. I’ll just have to see what happens.
Jessica
ugh. i'm ready to pay $100/month just to turn off the fucking radio. honestly.
this pop-techno craze is horrific. never before has there been a more simplistic, watered down, completely fucking boring style of music. worse, it's hopelessly generic. you can't even tell when the songs switch. it's impossible. they're all identical. relief seems to come in the form of sappy new country that was likely written with the intent of ending up in a hallmark commercial. ugh.
i like a very wide variety of music, both very mainstream and not so much, and from just about every time period. i admit i've never liked the radio much, but it's never been so *irritating* that i've sat there sincerely wishing they'd just turn it off altogether...
this pop-techno craze is horrific. never before has there been a more simplistic, watered down, completely fucking boring style of music. worse, it's hopelessly generic. you can't even tell when the songs switch. it's impossible. they're all identical. relief seems to come in the form of sappy new country that was likely written with the intent of ending up in a hallmark commercial. ugh.
i like a very wide variety of music, both very mainstream and not so much, and from just about every time period. i admit i've never liked the radio much, but it's never been so *irritating* that i've sat there sincerely wishing they'd just turn it off altogether...
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