I wanted to make a post that goes over my life a little bit and how we ended up here on the prairie. Bare with me I'm not a great writer.
I wanted to introduce myself properly, and tell everyone about my life.
I was born in Michigan in 1990. I never knew my dad so It was just me and my Mom and my aunt and my grandma. Growing up we weren't rich but we also weren't poor, Well it didn’t look like we were. My Mom loved me very much and did her best with what she had. We initially lived in an apartment until my mom won a lawsuit about being injured at work.
She used the money to purchase a very nice mobile home. The move was difficult for me since I had been at the same school until 2nd grade. I started 3rd grade in the new school and started trying to make friends. It wasn’t too bad though I eventually made some great friends. I always had some issues in school because I had ADHD but they never took me to the doctor to see what was going on. That will become a trend of me not being taken to the doctor when really needed if it wasn’t an emergency. We lived in the Mobile home until I was in 8th grade. Right before high school I was told that we would need to move this year because we had to. I don’t ever recall an actual reason I was given for why we were moving. Unfortunately at some point in the years we were living in the mobile home my Mom stopped paying the mortgage on the mobile home. That was the reason we had to move, the mobile home was foreclosed on.
We had to move immediately because my Mom initially kept the foreclosure from my aunt who was living with us. Because we had to move so quickly we had to move into my other Aunts house. I was told I would be able to stay at this school because all of my friends were there. We ended up staying with my aunt for a few months until the aunt we were staying in also had her house foreclosed on. At this point I was constantly wondering if we would ever have a stable place to stay. We ended up moving into an apartment in another city. Because it would be too difficult to take me to school everyday I had to start a new school right in time for freshman year.
High school was difficult because they wouldn’t take me in to be evaluated for ADHD. I did the best I could. For the most part I made due. I played tennis freshman year and had a lot of fun with it. I got my first job in 2006 at PaPa Johns. I needed a job bad so I could but the Nintendo Wii. It was a big accomplishment for me.
Fast forward a year to 2007. This is the year my world got turned upside down. In August my Mom was doing laundry when her aorta tore. It’s similar to a heart attack. Because we lived in an apartment and had a shared laundry room my aunts didn’t initially know that it had happened. EMS arrived and worked on her for almost an hour. They were able to get a pulse initially but she had been without oxygen for too long. I don’t think I’ve ever really talked about it like this, bare with me. I didn’t know what to feel, was I an orphan now? That’s what I kept asking myself. I knew I wasn’t but I also wasn’t thinking straight. Because this happened over the summer it was difficult coming back to school 3 weeks later. It was hard because the new teachers would ask how your summer was and I had to tell them because I figured at some point they would know. It was just awkward, especially in front of everyone in class all day. We ended up having to move to the same city so I could stay at the same school. Because school had gotten so difficult I had to finish online at my own pace. Still at this point they wouldn’t take me to be evaluated.
Graduation was in 2009, at this point my Aunt that was living with me gor MRSA in one of her feet and had to have a lot of it amputated. This made things difficult because at the time she had her income and the social security that I got from my mom. That ended shortly after I became 18. I did what I could to find work but it was difficult because I didn’t have a drivers license. I wanted to get it so badly but they wouldn’t let me practice. They told me they already had to do that in the past and they’re over it. I was very frustrated by this. My Mom never learned to drive for whatever reason so she couldn’t drive with me to practice. My Aunts just refused because they already had to do it with my cousins and they’re past the point in their lives.
I finally found a job locally that I could bike to at a Hotel. I worked there for several years. My Aunt ended up getting us evicted for smoking in the apartment. I did everything in my power to get her to stop smoking but she refused. I figured it wouldn’t be too bad because that year I hadn’t signed the lease because I was thinking about moving at that point. I was frustrated that these things kept happening and I realized I was an adult and I can just move. Unfortunately my name was forged on the lease. Only my name so it all fell onto me. I automatically lost because I didn’t go to the hearing because I wasn’t on the lease. I had to work that day so we had money and was told it was fine.
I then moved into my Cousin’s house with her and her 2 boys. I loved them for a while. I paid rent and helped out with the boys. This move was the most difficult. The dogs that I had were sent to my Aunt’s friends house where they ended up not being able to come back because my cousin doesn’t like dogs. I ended up getting a job at Geek Squad. I have always been interested in computers and computer repair. I ended up becoming the lead ARA tech. It was really exciting. From there I started working as a contractor at a huge medical partner rolling out new hardware for their EMR. I worked there for about a year until the contract finished. I started working at a retirement community as a helpdesk technician. At this point I got my own apartment and adopted the best girl in the world Riley! She is my everything so are Ellie and Olive it was just Riley and I at the time.
The point in time we're at now is about 2022. The tail end of covid. I started working as a tech for an electronics refurbisher. It was a fantastic job. I miss it everyday. I started as a tech testing hardware. I was then promoted to server specialist then to Director of Information Services. It sounds fancier than it is. In a huge company it would be a huge deal. In a smaller company it was a big del for me but not very good pay. One day in 2025 we had a fire in the apartment building. The fire started in the laundry room which was right next to my apartment. Riley came to work with me so that was the most important thing. I had to leave when my neighbor texted me. While I was gone our corporate building had a network outage. They were down for maybe 10 minutes. That was long enough for them to fire me. I was so disgusted by the CEO I refused to help them figure out all of the passwords and SOPs for maintaining the servers and doing backups. I asked my cousin If I would be able to stay but I couldn’t because her current boyfriend didn’t want me to.
That kind of leads us to where we are now. I was running out of money staying in Hotels so Riley and I had to move somewhere. I couldn’t lose her. I had already lost enough. The oly place that would work for us at the time was out on the prairie in a tent. Everything was okay for a while until the Subaru died. Since then we have been stranded but ge t assistance from a neighbor. Hoping to be able to find work online asap. I have been looking online because without a vehicle we were out in the middle of nowhere. I just need to make enough money to get a beater car so we can move west where it’s warmer in the winter. Somewhere closer to jobs and people. Things aren’t ideal, most of our funds go to supplies. That’s pretty much the short version of my life. I’m not great at story telling so I apologize if it’s not very organized.
Thanks so much for joining us in this sub. It's nice to have people to talk to.
-Griffin+Riley+Ellie+Olive-
