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
