It’s Wednesday, so the story continues.
Picking up from last week –
(This is sort of starting a new storyline. The health stuff is over. This is more about the effect it had on the rest of my life.)
My lease was coming to an end in the summer. I decided not to renew it or sign up for more classes in the fall.
I’d been offered a job working for America’s Got Talent which would go through part of the fall. I was tired of being “the heart girl” at school, and wanted to escape for a bit.
I didn’t have as much money as I used to (though I’m not sure how that helps the case to move, when really that probably should’ve helped the case to stay put and try to climb out of the hole… Either way, the reasons for the lack of money were two fold.
1) In 2009, before I’d gotten sick, I worked a ton of jobs. Many were low paying, but when you work a lot of low paying jobs, you end up having money. All of that income disappeared as I had to let go of job after job after job in the hospital. So, I’d been using credit cards way more often than before, and had built up a nice bit of debt on them during the many, many months without any income.
2) I now had medical bills as well. Granted, insurance covered by far the majority of them. (And thank goodness. My understanding is that close to half a million dollars has been sunk into my body. (Wow.))
So, I took the job went to Cali. At the time, I had the intention of going back to school. (I didn’t.)
I only subleased in California. I wasn’t ready to commit to being there for anything longer than the show.
I lived in some crazy places. I lived in what may or may not have been a drug dealer’s apartment (pretty sure it was). I didn’t ask any questions, and I got out of there after the month for which I’d paid.
I lived in a place (warning if you don’t want to hear about bugs) infested, and I mean infested with cockroaches. (Shivers thinking about it.) I sprayed roach spray one night to try to get the ones I’d seen. When I woke up, there were rows of dead cockroaches sprawled out in the spray’s path… I was out of there in three days.
I ended up living in the living room of someone’s apartment. Once AGT was over, I started gearing up to go to school in the spring. (That had been my plan all along. I’d taken online classes during the fall so as to not lose my full-time student status.)
However, I couldn’t find the money to go. I know this sounds very childish (of course, I was still kind of a child then), but my parents were the ones who worried about school money, and they said it just wasn’t there.
I wasn’t offered any money after filling out my FAFSA. Even if you’re living in California, working, and paying for your own stuff; the government considers you a dependent if you’re under 24.
Oh well, I’m not gonna hate on the government for that. They do so much great stuff for us, I can let that slide.
So, however my parents had figured out how to procure money in other semesters, it wasn’t working out this time.
As far as I was concerned, if they said I couldn’t get the money to go, then I couldn’t get the money to go.
I believe there’s always some kind of way, somehow, to make things happen if you really want them. Maybe that’s true. Maybe that’s a foolish belief. But the truth is, I didn’t know how much I really wanted school, anyway.
I’d never been that keen on going to college. I wanted to try working. Once it became easy not to go back, I just didn’t go back.
(Granted, at the time, I was a little thrown thinking I was going to return to the safe confines of college – just to be thrust into the “real world,” basically without a safety net. But I figured, “This is my life now. I gotta just make it work.”)
I stayed in California for the rest of the month. I did a day on Skating with the Stars. (I even drove (a huge vehicle!) all day… and everybody lived!)
Now, as you know, I’m not a huge fan of Los Angeles…
This is where we’ll pick up next time.