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morethanreputation: morethanreputation: morethanreputation: morethanreputation: morethanreputation: I don’t know how to word this. Two years ago, my family spent six months homeless. We searched for ages trying to find someplace to rent to us, but because we are low income and need to rent with housing assistance (through a government program called Section 8) we had a very hard time finding anyone willing to take a chance on us. We finally got a home in January 2017, and have spent the past two years trying to build a life here. It’s in this house that I was finally stable enough to afford to buy tickets to see Taylor Swift perform for the first time, after being a fan for a decade. It was in this house where I finally signed with a literary agent after years of practice and hard work to build my talent as a writer. On Saturday, my family was informed that our landlord’s company is selling all their Section 8 houses because they can’t afford to keep up with the requirements anymore. He’s offered to help us buy our home so we aren’t displaced again, but unless I can improve my credit (by paying off the credit card debt I have from expenses from the last time we were homeless) and we can improve our income, I’m not sure if it’ll happen. I’ve gone into further detail about what led to this point and what can be done at my gofundme page: https://www.gofundme.com/help-lily-avoid-homelessness-again I’m making this post specifically on my swiftie tumblr because the friends I’ve made here and the group chat that resulted from that has been an invaluable source of emotional support and friendship for me. I’ve been homeless twice before and had to move several times throughout my childhood, so I don’t really have very many local friends. Taylor’s music has always been a huge source of comfort and power for me, pulling me through my repeated trials of poverty, bullying, friendship loss, rejection, and deep seated fear that I’ll never be successful. My favorite song of hers is Sweeter Than Fiction because it ties into my deep passion for storytelling and my aching ambition to make something of myself and provide myself and my family solid ground and a chance at a real future. I keep listening to it and start crying at this verse: What a sight, what a sight when the light came on
Proved me right, proved me right when you proved them wrong
And in this perfect weather
It’s like we don’t remember
The rain we thought would last forever and ever Because I remember the look on my mother’s face when we moved in and closed ourselves inside the home she’d wanted for us for so long and how I waited until last week to finally put up real bookshelves instead of piles spilling from boxes, because that always felt like too permanent a move. I just want to feel at home finally and I don’t know if I will get to have that physically, but emotionally I have the permanent friendship of the friends brought to me by our shared passion for Taylor and it means a lot to me that they will follow me even if I can’t stay here. I was supposed to meet one of them (@messthatuwanted, love you Brit!) in two weeks when I drove to Cali for a book festival, but I’ve cancelled that road trip in light of this new crisis. I can’t justify the expense. I feel guilty and heartbroken asking for anything, but if you can’t contribute to my gofundme (please do not feel in anyway obligated to!), a simple reblog or retweet of my post on twitter would mean the world to me. Thank you for making this such a positive place for me. Love,
Lily Meade My friends asked me to update here too, so I just wanted to say that I made a potentially final update on the GoFundMe. It’s really long, so I don’t wanna to copy/paste it here, but the general summary is my mom’s income and credit are not enough to get approved for a loan on her own (even though we could afford to keep up with a mortgage if we were approved) and I haven’t sold a book yet so I have no steady income to better our family’s financial prospects. So basically, unless we can come up with at least 230k in the next 45 days to buy it outright we have to prepare to move. Even though the renting market is unexistent in my area nowadays and even though we’ll have nowhere to go. It’s basically over. I am feeling really empty and exhausted and I’m afraid to even listen to Taylor to try and cheer myself up because I don’t want my brain to subconsciously associate her music with how absolutely horrific and awful I feel right now. I wanted to thank everyone for their help and support, especially my friends in the Black Swiftie Group Chat. It’s really meant a lot to me to have the friendship and distraction of waiting for Lover to keep my mind occupied this summer, but I thought you should know the final score. I’m sorry I can’t report happier news. My mom and some friends asked me to update the GoFundMe to the amount we’d need to buy the house upright, so I did do that today (along with a note clarifying the time limit/urgency). Thank you for all the kind words and support. ♥️ For today’s action I needed to focus on something positive, so I wrote a Love® letter to @taylorswift thanking her for Lover and my Swiftie friends. They’ve been really supportive during this and I’m really grateful for that. I filmed a video on what’s been going on and thought I’d share it here to keep you updated. ♥️ @taylorswift -- source link
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