Ok so this situation has gotten me to come back from a rather lovely period of touching grass. I fully intend to go back to touching grass after this, but, well, I think I have a unique and perhaps useful perspective on all of this, so I’m sharing it here.
So. You received a large donation. What some are calling a life-changing amount of money. And yeah, that kind of money certainly has the potential to be life-changing. One person said it’s not possible for a lump sum like that to help someone escape homelessness, and I have to disagree; I myself helped someone on this very website escape homelessness with a relatively similar amount of money. But, it wasn’t life-changing for you. Some people are offended by this. Some people are sympathetic. But none of that changes the reality that what you needed was, it seems, more than just that lump sum.
But I hope that you can at least take some useful lessons from this experience. I hope you’ve learned how quickly a pile of money can vanish into the wind. I have no doubt that’s a tough pill to swallow, and I’m sure it’s hard to see that as any kind of silver lining. But take it from someone who has had a very similar experience, on a somewhat grander scale: those lessons do have value.
You see, I wasn’t into meth, so I can’t say I get what you’re dealing with there. But I was into weed (still am, truth be told, so your experience will likely have to differ, in that I don’t think you can escape where you are without ditching your drug-of-choice). I was very into weed. I don’t think dab rigs existed back then, but I went as hard on weed and its various concentrates (kief, bubble hash, hash oil) as it was possible to go: hot-knives, then fancy glass hot-knives, then an expensive glass gravity bong–which I eventually semi-destroyed while in the throes of a bad mushroom trip–and a fancy custom-made bubbler that had my name written on it, in glass (I still have that one, a relic of my incredibly foolish youth; I haven’t used it in at least a decade now).
Because yes, I too received a large pile of money. Only mine was an order of magnitude larger than yours, and I was quite young. I put 40% of the money into a sensible investment–a real estate venture. In the mid-2000s. And I squandered the entire rest of it. I had more than ten times as much money as you did, but it only lasted about four times as long.
My point in telling this story is to make it clear that you can come back from this. And when you do, you will hopefully recognize the importance of stewarding your hard-won gains more carefully than you did in recent weeks.
But! You need a plan. You need to figure out how to leverage any and all resources you have to make a change. I won’t pretend that’s easy, and honestly my path was much easier than yours will be (I moved back home, got a temp job for a while, slowly got back into school, and eventually graduated with a degree that I could use to pay off the massive debt I had by then accrued; not an option available to most people, I’m afraid.) But the reason I was able to do that, where I had failed utterly at doing so before, was because I took stock of what had happened, my experiences trying desperately to find jobs after my money ran out, and assessed what I needed to do to ensure that I would never find myself in such a situation again, and then once I had chosen a direction, I pushed forward on it until I had gotten where I needed to be.
Your road will be hard, yes, harder than mine, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. I think it starts with finding the will within yourself to get off the hard drugs. They’re not doing you any favors; rather, they’re an anchor dragging you down. From there, I think finding a steady job is your best bet, and perhaps a halfway house might provide you someplace to sleep at night while you look. And perhaps from there, if you aren’t satisfied with the jobs available to you, to pursuing an education. (One word of advice, if you want to make that leap to education: get an education that will get you a job. It’s not worth it if you don’t have job prospects waiting at the other end, especially if you have to borrow to do it.)
I hope this comment is helpful to you in some way, and that your situation gets better in time.
I have (or had) a friend who used to be in my sorta position, and then they got the COVID unemployment shit—idk exactly how much but it was five figures—and it changed their life. When I was out shopping and whatnot I’d say to myself Heh, I’m just like them now.
Ok so this situation has gotten me to come back from a rather lovely period of touching grass. I fully intend to go back to touching grass after this, but, well, I think I have a unique and perhaps useful perspective on all of this, so I’m sharing it here.
So. You received a large donation. What some are calling a life-changing amount of money. And yeah, that kind of money certainly has the potential to be life-changing. One person said it’s not possible for a lump sum like that to help someone escape homelessness, and I have to disagree; I myself helped someone on this very website escape homelessness with a relatively similar amount of money. But, it wasn’t life-changing for you. Some people are offended by this. Some people are sympathetic. But none of that changes the reality that what you needed was, it seems, more than just that lump sum.
But I hope that you can at least take some useful lessons from this experience. I hope you’ve learned how quickly a pile of money can vanish into the wind. I have no doubt that’s a tough pill to swallow, and I’m sure it’s hard to see that as any kind of silver lining. But take it from someone who has had a very similar experience, on a somewhat grander scale: those lessons do have value.
You see, I wasn’t into meth, so I can’t say I get what you’re dealing with there. But I was into weed (still am, truth be told, so your experience will likely have to differ, in that I don’t think you can escape where you are without ditching your drug-of-choice). I was very into weed. I don’t think dab rigs existed back then, but I went as hard on weed and its various concentrates (kief, bubble hash, hash oil) as it was possible to go: hot-knives, then fancy glass hot-knives, then an expensive glass gravity bong–which I eventually semi-destroyed while in the throes of a bad mushroom trip–and a fancy custom-made bubbler that had my name written on it, in glass (I still have that one, a relic of my incredibly foolish youth; I haven’t used it in at least a decade now).
Because yes, I too received a large pile of money. Only mine was an order of magnitude larger than yours, and I was quite young. I put 40% of the money into a sensible investment–a real estate venture. In the mid-2000s. And I squandered the entire rest of it. I had more than ten times as much money as you did, but it only lasted about four times as long.
My point in telling this story is to make it clear that you can come back from this. And when you do, you will hopefully recognize the importance of stewarding your hard-won gains more carefully than you did in recent weeks.
But! You need a plan. You need to figure out how to leverage any and all resources you have to make a change. I won’t pretend that’s easy, and honestly my path was much easier than yours will be (I moved back home, got a temp job for a while, slowly got back into school, and eventually graduated with a degree that I could use to pay off the massive debt I had by then accrued; not an option available to most people, I’m afraid.) But the reason I was able to do that, where I had failed utterly at doing so before, was because I took stock of what had happened, my experiences trying desperately to find jobs after my money ran out, and assessed what I needed to do to ensure that I would never find myself in such a situation again, and then once I had chosen a direction, I pushed forward on it until I had gotten where I needed to be.
Your road will be hard, yes, harder than mine, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. I think it starts with finding the will within yourself to get off the hard drugs. They’re not doing you any favors; rather, they’re an anchor dragging you down. From there, I think finding a steady job is your best bet, and perhaps a halfway house might provide you someplace to sleep at night while you look. And perhaps from there, if you aren’t satisfied with the jobs available to you, to pursuing an education. (One word of advice, if you want to make that leap to education: get an education that will get you a job. It’s not worth it if you don’t have job prospects waiting at the other end, especially if you have to borrow to do it.)
I hope this comment is helpful to you in some way, and that your situation gets better in time.
I have (or had) a friend who used to be in my sorta position, and then they got the COVID unemployment shit—idk exactly how much but it was five figures—and it changed their life. When I was out shopping and whatnot I’d say to myself Heh, I’m just like them now.