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Thanks for being a place for me to talk because I don't feel like I can talk to any of my NT friends without creating new activities in what has become my own personal agility course. I am struggling with depression, it's only situational. I don't want to kill myself I just want to skip this chapter in my life. I am currently living in a seemingly nice early 1900's house that should be condemned (falling backwards off the foundation, sinkhole from old plumbing cross the street, rotting hardwood flooring, termites, add ons slowly breaking off from the house, squirrel infestation, mold, failing light fixtures, and clearly not up to code or maintained. Our landlord is also 81 (despite looking and acting like he's 70) and shouldn't be operating a massive list of properties and businesses (let alone mostly by himself). My heart goes out to him but he wont let us put our name on the utility bills (which for some reason are in his sickly wife's name despite this never being their former home). So instead of paying our bills when they are due, we have to wait for this man to give us the bills (he isn't organized enough to find them in a timely manner) and we get hit with 5 months worth of utility bills or more notably the giant water bill (which includes water runoff from his other commercial business).

He also hires sketchy people (probably because he's only willing to pay whatever the minimum wage was in 99') to "fix" said issues with the house. Understandably we try to make do with the issues (because at this point the house should have been bulldozed 6 years ago) or fix little things ourselves because we don't want 4 strangers on our property essentially worsening the damage and making us feel unsafe. Our lease is some kind of month to month year lease (which is maddening to me because my mother was a damn good property manager) that has expired and my partner (the master tenant) cannot pin this f er down so that we can sign a new lease. My partner has also purchased me a small dog (that my counsellor pitched to him). I have the paperwork to legally have my well mannered dog but we aren't willing to communicate to the landlord that we have her until we have a new lease just to avoid any bias.

So you might be asking WHY ON EARTH DO YOU CHOOSE TO LIVE HERE?? Well, we live in portland Oregon where the rents are rapidly becoming as high as LA (apartments here are 1,100 a month for 300-500 sq ft). We've managed to make the house look and feel like its not falling apart and like we aren't in imminent danger(but we are). My partner and I have also made the decision to pursue SSDI for me and so I've been out of work and he (as a children's music teacher) has been under employed (its summer) because he gave his side job boss too much wiggle room (he put in his two week notice and ended up staying for 4 weeks because she failed to hire another person, which would have been irrelevant to me if I were in his place). We have roommates that make our rent cheap when it's cheap to rent to begin with (our rent for our room in the 3bdrm house is collectively $540 or 270$ each). We've also made safe guards because of how difficult our landlord makes things (calculated and merged the average utility costs with rent for the other tenants/friends we live with). As soon as I am able to take and prove my case in court (I have a disability attorney, doctors, and 2 psychologists) he and I are going to bust out of this town as if it were pompeii (most likely living on the outskirting towns so he can still commute to work) and live a normal life again.

Just typing this story makes me picture myself as this fat, living off the government, lazy, worthless sack of s**t when in actuality that's just a caricature of disability that I fight almost everyday. I'm a painter, self taught interior designer, dog person in my mid 20's living with a wonderful hard working partner (although a bit disorganized himself) who is accomplishing both his dreams of lucratively working with children and music. I want to use my money to get us a safer living situation, a car, and hopefully invest into some trade school classes or go to a community college so that I can make a living doing upholstery, making furniture or at least something because I cant do a lot of this low skill work that relies so heavily on all of my impairments. My dad is willingly paying my rent right now because he wants me to get disability instead of another job where I'll deal with blunt ableism and essentially get fired some more for terrible attendance because of my meltdowns and panic attacks. My counsellor also has my back and I have a pdf of my case study from a prior counsellor and tomorrow I'm going to get on medication that might f*** my s**t up because I'm so sensitive to medication (Zoloft gave me 15 day long periods and made me feel uncomfortably "up" there).

TLDR;
living in a death trap of a house, trying to get SSDI and I'm going to deal with all of it until I can get help living as well as anybody without learning disabilities, generalized anxiety, depression, and asd.

That's a real bitch---charging you for the water runoff!

And the fact that you live in an unsafe house. I feel for you.

Sounds like your landlord is a stubborn old fart. Those sorts of people tend to be destructive to many things and people.

I'm sure you will find people here who can relate to your situation.

Good luck with all that! Sounds like you have a good plan for getting out of that situation, but how frustrating to be stuck with it for now. My brother and sis-in-law recently had to vacate their rented house due to termite damage (she fell through the floor but was okay)... Stay safe and I hope things get better for you in the upcoming months!