The bird is the word

My current focus is paying off medical debt/rebuilding credit tanked when I spent every cent and bit of credit I had dealing with my jaw surgery and being unhoused for several years. I still have, well, no teeth, lmao, which is something I'd really like to fix because optimally I've still got a good chance at another forty years left in me and I would like to not spend all that time with ill-fitting dentures. I've never been able to not be aware of the taste of any of the different denture gums/sealants I've tried and its not super fun walking around tasting a constant awareness of that time you were gay-bashed and it blew up your life and led to longterm health complications fifteen years later that blew up your life a second time, even more thoroughly loooool. Why do I add lol there? Its not funny. Whimsy I guess. Idk I dont really get me.

POINT IS. Even if I eventually secure some better dental insurance down the road, there's no way I'm affording teeth implants without decent credit cards or loans in the future. And since jaw bone deteriorates when a tooth is absent and I have quite literally no teeth, the years since my jaw surgery mean I need mega bone grafts in my jaw before I can even think about implants, and the longer it takes to get there, the worse (and more expensive, and thus more unlikely to actually happen) it becomes.

So, as anyone who's lived below the poverty line knows, the only way to make goals like that happen is to prioritize them with every paycheck. So things like food, medication, etc, all come AFTER putting money towards "the big things," with whatever's left over. Which leaves basically zero buffer for anything else, especially the unexpected. I haven't bought a new item of clothing in over four years, etc. A few days ago we wasted a whole day just trying to find an extra freelance job online so we could get five bucks for a box of band-aids. Stuff like that.

Which is to say, five bucks here and there from people who enjoy my content when I actually AM around and would like me to be more often is hugely appreciated and makes a BIG difference, because it helps with all that "extra." For example, even just an extra $40 in a month can keep us fed for a week without having to dip into a paycheck and take money away from The Big Goals. $30 is enough to pay for my most important medication for the month. It takes me two train transfers and a bus to get to work and then the same back, but public transpo caps daily fares at $5.25, so even just an extra $21 takes care of getting me to and from work for a whole week.

A single $3 ko-fi or $5 donation might not sound like a lot to most ppl but for us it adds up quickly and just a handful of those can mean the difference between getting to apply a whole paycheck to where we NEED it to go vs it quickly getting whittled down to nothing and we end up right where we started.....or usually worse off, bc those unexpected expenses like boxes of band-aids or some Advil or little things like that add up quick too and we often start off the next month knowing we have to devote a whole paycheck to everything we couldn't get last month and we're a week in before we're even back at zero and able to start putting money back towards the Big Goals.

So if you ever see this post and think eh, what difference could $2 or $3 bucks make, please just know its VERY appreciated and makes a very big difference indeed. Sometimes an extra $3 means being able to spend a whole day off work ACTUALLY off of work instead of spending ten hours hustling to try and find and secure an extra freelance gig when literally the only thing we needed that day was an extra $3 for a box of pasta and some sauce.