When Plan B becomes Plan A

Reconstructing a Life; Update on My Move

Reconstructing a Life in Which I Might Live; Mixed Media Collage on Canvas by Crystal Marie

Before diving into today’s post, I want to take a moment to welcome all the new subscribers. Many of you found your way here through my Fibre Arts Take Two Friday Feature Artist interview, for which I am honored and grateful.

I share my life on this blog as an artist, a writer, and a human from an authentic and vulnerable perspective. You may find my life to be a complete enigma to your own, but there are underlying themes that many relate to, regardless of the difference in our circumstances.

For a little background info on the content of today’s post: I am in the midst of a restructuring year in an attempt to create a life for which I don’t need to escape in order to avoid burnout, a topic I first wrote about in October of last year.

You can read about why I chose the word Restructure as my 2024 word of the year in this post.

Read this post for more details on the why behind the word. To be honest, I needed to reread this one myself. Also this one, which elaborates a bit more on the necessity of moving from the home I’ve lived in for the past five years.

Today’s entry is a post-move update. Read on to find out where I am, a bit more on how I got here, and where I might be going.

With gratitude,
Crystal Marie

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I started writing this post before the move, but couldn’t manage to finish it with all that I had on my plate to do. Moving is an all consuming endeavor. Moving, when half the home is also a working studio, even more so. Moving when there is no new home to move it all to? Emotionally, physically, cognitively, one of the most exhausting and difficult things I’ve ever had to do.

So there you have it, the TL:DR spoiler—I’ve implemented plan B. Which I only intended to be a tension relieving joke during my search for a new place:

I searched the city, searched the suburbs, considered locations farther away, only to find that rental rates have gone up across the board. I found apartments I thought I could make work only to have them rent before I could submit an application. I scheduled appointments only to be ghosted by the leasing agent, or have the place snatched up before my appointment.

When I finally connected with an agent, I learned that the vast majority of places were being rented site unseen or awarded to tenants with the ability to put upwards of 6 months rent down to secure it. And true to my own experience, those places that weren’t renting as fast had clear issues that made them unhealthy options. In all of my years as a renter, I have never encountered this kind of competition in the market.

For the longest time I’ve looked at this move as a personal failure. My inability to keep up with the increases in my rent each year, along with the rising costs of other essentials we humans rely on; food, gas, healthcare and the meds my body needs to survive, being somehow my fault, rather than the reality of the times we live in. The inability to find a place to move to only compounded that feeling. Blaming myself, rather than the collapse of the housing market.

The decisions I’ve made about this move have come with no small amount of shame and grieving. I had an entire post planned to write about how the culture uses shame to pathologize individuals who cannot manage their own needs, even when said needs are brought on by no fault of their own, through circumstances outside of their control.

We celebrate rugged individualism in our society. It is the American way to work hard and to earn our own way. We like a good hero story, with a conclusion that proves that all we really need to do is to pull ourselves up by the bootstraps and put in the work in order to succeed. But that is not the reality for the majority. And it isn’t the reality for me.

Pushing past my own personal limitations of chronic health and disability, working 10-12 hours a day, never taking a full day off, canceling plans with friends and family more often than not, that has been my life. The workload I’ve had to put in to pull in enough income to cover my own needs has been nearly untenable. I only say “nearly” because somehow I managed to get through the end of my lease.

By the time I’d scraped that last months rent together, there was absolutely no doubt left in my mind that staying another year wasn’t an option. And yet I still felt it as a moral failure of my own until it hit me—the system is broken, not me.

The system is broken, yet also it is working exactly as it was designed to be. There is much to be said on this topic, but I’ll save it for another day. Today I am simply acknowledging it out loud, so to speak.

So where am I now?

All of my things are in storage, at least all that fit in the four U-boxes I rented from U-haul. I’ve got a few boxes of artwork sitting in a friends studio and a few more, along with my winter clothes, sitting in my daughters garage. I gave away what I couldn’t keep, filled the dumpster several times over while packing. I stuffed my car to the very last inch and set out for a summer residency in Kansas City, a generous offering at an artist friend’s home and studio.

This month will be a busy one with previous obligations; I’ve got several courses to edit, an upcoming live online workshop to teach, another that I’m contracted to film, and a second live online workshop in the works to schedule.

I’ll continue my search for a place of my own as best as I can from this distance, but in the interim I’ve chosen to embrace my circumstances (waves of terror and grapling to find acceptance notwithstanding).

I’ve got a new body of work in the making based on a poem I shared on my membership blog called Ithaka (read it at this link), which I will be writing about in an upcoming post. And I’ll be reopening the shop with offerings of local found treasures and artwork from the Ithaka series soon.

If necessary, I do have a second location lined up for October and possibly September, which I hope to utilize as a writing residency.

And from there? Stay tuned for updates as they come.

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