Logistics

I need to find a place to stay for a 90-day separation. I want to spend it in recovery work, in healing from wounds and griefs I will not describe here, and in giving time and space to the gift I have always put last: writing. Physical problems (short of disability) caused me to leave my job recently, and would narrow the choice of jobs I can take, and in this economy, it would be hard to get a job even if that were my focus. I am not eligible for unemployment or disability benefits.

I have a gift from a friend and a tenuous promise from my spouse, and the two together might get me through, if I am very careful and nothing goes wrong and the rent is low enough in a reasonably safe place. Spouse has the job where the house is, and needs the car because there is no bus here. That gives me the interesting opportunity to try out a sort of urban Walden experience: the simplest possible life in a society that values affluence and views poverty as shameful and healing time as selfish. (Of course, Thoreau never mentioned that he spent a lot of time at home or having dinner with the Emersons. He didn't say much about starting a forest fire by accident, either. There is a certain amount of fiction to his account, and I, who am going to be living the facts, am not reassured by his omissions and elisions.)

I'd be eligible for inpatient treatment for a couple of conditions, were it not that my insurance policy is elegantly written to exclude them. If I had $35,000 at hand, I could pay for the treatment myself, but instead, I'm trying to cobble together an equivalent on my own for less than 10 percent of that. If I make it, you bet I'll write the book.

The bittersweet irony is that the depression, anxiety, and OCD that have blocked my path for decades are now enough under control that I'm not eligible for treatment or disability for them--and if I tried, I'd have to give up the things that have worked over the last couple of years and go back to the things that didn't work, which cost far more and leave me hamstrung by side effects.

I wish there were still beguinages. They were a great institution: women living in community with some rules but with temporary vows rather than permanent ones. They'd be a great place for women coming out of painful relationships and learning to live on their own, for those trying to change habits and learn new life skills. We have nothing available anymore for women who are not eligible for welfare, but not financially independent, and who are not in immediate physical danger but who are ill with stress or hurt in body and soul to an extent that makes it difficult or impossible to work for awhile. YWCAs took some of that role for awhile, but few have lodging anymore.