Thank you for visiting my blog.
This blog is a work-in-progress "table of contents," with links to all of the threads I have written on Twitter, from when I started using the social media platform, in October of 2012, through November of 2021.
Every once in a while, I like to do a "thoughts" post, talking about my life experiences over the time frame for the threads I've recently posted links to. For this post, the time frame is basically September through November of 2021.
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I started this blog a few years back, after I'd been on Twitter for a few years already. My plan had been to get the links to the few hundred Twitter threads I'd already written into a blog, and then update my blog with the new Twitter thread links as I wrote each Twitter thread.
This plan never really panned out, and I would spend a little time each year adding a few more Twitter thread links to this blog, but never focusing myself on getting the work completed.
This all changed in 2020 and 2021, when, due to COVID, I was spending a lot more time in my house. I had time to focus on getting the blog up-to-date with my Twitter threads. But by that time, I had written about 1,000 threads. It was a lot of hard work getting myself to the point where I was finally up-to-date. But in May of 2021, I'd succeeded.
I kept the blog up-to-date through September of 2021, when, as I describe below, my life kind of fell apart.
Now (January of 2023), I am working on to getting back up-to-date again.
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2021 was a pretty bad year for me, as I think some of my threads show.
Since 2016, I'd been a consultant, mostly helped people I'd worked with in the past, on sales-related projects for startup or turnaround companies. In 2019 I started work on a consultancy project which lasted me all the way through the pandemic.
Due to a number of factors I've already discussed in older posts like this, as well as Twitter threads, in March of 2021, I had the rug swept out from under me, and I lost my consultancy position.
Due to COVID policy, 2021 was one of the few times consultants could actually receive unemployment pay. But after I lost my job and I applied for unemployment, I learned that someone had committed unemployment fraud in my name. I spent months trying to get the fraud off my record. But my profile stayed frozen.
I tried to get other consultant gigs. Eventually I got three gigs. But only one of them paid. The other two were basically bogus. One was a real project, but not in my area of specialty. And, even though I did the work, I never got paid for it. The other wasn't even a real project, but the attempt by two people to do some weird tactics to get them out of some deep trouble they had already fallen into.
The real gig was only part time, and it ended at the end of August, 2021.
I knew, as you'll see from the post I did in this blog on September 1, 2021, that I was in trouble. I was pretty sure I was going to end up homeless.
In September, I asked my landlords if they would cooperate with me on another COVID-relief program that was going on for people who were renting their houses. The program would only work if they cooperated on it. But my landlords, who were generally nice people, declined to cooperate. This may possibly be because of the way they were renting out the house to me.
Being on the COVID renter relief program would have helped me out of my situation pretty easily -- I would have gotten monthly pay that would have tided me through while I was looking for more work. But it didn't happen.
But because this didn't happen, I also had to give my landlords my 30-day notice. I had run out of money. I wouldn't be able to pay rent in October. I was given until October 6th to move out.
Also in early September of 2021, I finally got tired of doing consultant work. From 2016 through 2021, my life had been a real roller coaster of great times and terrible times. 2021 was one of the worst financial times of my life. I was through with it. So I decided to start looking for a full-time, permanent job.
I did a lot of work putting my resume out to people. Surprisingly, I got a lot of really good responses. By the end of September, I was doing a ton of interviews and second interviews.
I could see pretty easily by the end of September that I was going to have a job soon. All I needed in the meantime was a place where I could stay that would let me wait to pay until I started getting my paychecks from my new job.
The only people I knew in the small mountain town I lived in were from the local Democratic Party. I'd done a lot of work with them over 2021. So I asked around, to see if they would be able to find a place for me to stay.
Ultimately, this didn't work out -- though on two occasions, it looked like it would. But both of these experiences ended up being pretty terrible.
With one person, I met him at a local pizza joint and had a conversation with him. He basically told me I probably wasn't going to ever get a good job again, and why didn't I just go work for his friend at a car wash all the way down in Denver (about 50 miles from where I was living at the time)? I told him I couldn't do that. He told me, if that was the case, he couldn't let me stay at his place.
With another person, I met her at her house. We hit it off really well. And I thought I was a lock for being able to stay with her. But then, one or two nights before I was supposed to move into her place, she called me up, ranting and raving about the fact that I didn't show up for some children's birthday party she'd invited me to (???!!!), and which I'd already told her I couldn't attend. She told me she'd rethought things, and I was no longer welcome to stay at her place.
By this time it was the beginning of October. I had only two or three days left to find a place.
One of my friends from the Dems set me up to talk with another person. But when I went to look at the place the person was offering -- it was completely hideous. It was a trailer in the middle of the woods. The trailer had no electricity. It had doors and windows, but just barely. It had no heat. The roof was filled with holes. And it was clear that animals had come into the place and gotten on the mattress, which was water-stained anyway.
There was no way I could have stayed in that place. I wouldn't have survived.
Even though my friends on the Dems couldn't find me a place to stay, they did pool together to give me $200. But that wasn't even close to enough for me to pay my rent.
So by this point, it was October 6th -- the day I was scheduled to move out of my place.
I had already been moving stuff out of my house and into storage (which was what most of the $200 from my friends on the Dems went to). So I didn't have a ton to move.
My landlords actually didn't make me move out until October 7th. So on this day I took one last load of things down to my storage. Then I got in my car and drove west, not really sure what I was going to do.
I should mention that by this time, I had gotten past the second interview stage for three different companies. It seemed pretty certain that I would get a job offer from at least two of those companies. I was so close to getting a job. But it just didn't happen quickly enough.
Honestly -- if I'd started applying earlier for a permanent job, I'd have been fine. But I was so stuck on continuing as a consultant. My own bullheadedness really hurt me.
So on October 7th, I'd driven west, thinking I might drive out to a city like Las Vegas, try to find some sort of homeless shelter or something, and then, from the homeless shelter, do the rest of the work I'd needed to do in order to secure one of the jobs I was interviewing for.
But as I did the calculations, I realized that I didn't have enough money to get myself very far at all. I had maybe enough money for one more tank of gas. Then I would have no more money.
At this point I called my mom. She lives out in Western Colorado. And I asked if I could live with her for a little while.
I have to say -- there were a lot of reasons I saw living with my mom as a last resort. None of those reasons had to do with my mom.
My mom has three adopted daughters and a four-room house. In October of 2021, my brother was already living with my mom. So five people were in the house. With me, it would have been six people. So conditions would be really cramped. I didn't want to put everybody -- especially my little sisters -- through that.
The other thing was that I hadn't had a very good relationship with my brother for a few years by that point. He'd been back living with my mom for a few months. And I felt like, if my brother and I were together for too long, it might not lead to a very good situation.
But I didn't have a choice by this point. And my mom was ecstatic to have me stay with her. So on October 7, 2021, I moved in.
As I predicted, I started receiving offer letters from jobs only a couple days afterwards. When all was said and done, I got four different job offers. I took the best offer, and I started work for that company on November 2nd.
Additionally, once I got my job offers, I started working for the Walmart in my mom's home town.
I've discussed this in the past. But some people asked me while I was going through all my trouble in 2021, Well, why don't you just go work at a grocery store or restaurant or something, especially as they were boosting up their hourly pay a lot -- most of the time to at least $15 per hour? But I know that if I had done that, I would never have been able to get a business-world job again. I would have been blocked out -- especially because I'm Hispanic.
But once I had my business job secured, I started working at Walmart right away, so I could get some money, start paying off my bills, and start contributing to household expenses at my mom's place. It wasn't that I didn't want to work. It was that I wanted to make sure I had a job for my skill set secured before I worked anywhere else.
So for the second half of October, I was working at Walmart. Then, through all of November and December of 2021, I was working at my new job, 40 hours a week, plus at Walmart, something like 24 hours per week. I was working seven days a week. And, in fact, I ended up, between my day job and Walmart, working seven days a week through the end of January of 2022. After that, I worked six days a week between the two jobs, until I finally left Walmart at the end of June of 2022.
I ended up staying at my mom's house until April of 2022, when I was finally able to get back into a place of my own. So I'm a man in his forties who lived with his mom for six months. I'm extremely grateful to my mom -- for basically having saved my life. But I also feel ashamed, to be honest, about having gotten my life to the point where I needed so much help.
Not long after I arrived at my mom's house, my brother left. Only a week or so after that, one of my nephews came to live with us. There were a lot of family issues that were involved with my brother leaving. And my nephew coming to take his place added a lot of family issues, which eventually, I feel, became focused on me.
September and October of 2021 were some of the hardest months of my life. But I do feel like I had people around me who were trying their best, according to their comfort level, to help me. And I just also feel eternally thankful to my mom for the way she helped me.
This story continues, of course. And I'd like to share it all right away. But I think I'll wait until I've posted the links from the next few months before I go into more detail.
Thank you for reading.
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