2023

I'm going to summarise 2023 before I forget everything because it's been a roller coaster year and I want to remind myself later of what I survived.

JANUARY

The start of the year held a forboding almost immediately when my partner tested positive for COVID on New Years Day. Fortunately he'd felt sick enough before the test to call off going to a New Years Party, and I was away housesitting so I stayed in with the pets I was looking after instead of going there to meet him as planned. My housesitting clients got rained out during their holiday because of a bad storm in the North Island, so they decided to come home a week early. Since my partner was isolating and I couldn't go straight home, I ended up staying at a friend's house for the week instead. It was very hard not to be there with him for Christmas and New Year because of all the house sitting work. Over Christmas I had a chemical pregnancy miscarriage, the first I was aware of, and it was already an emotional time.

FEBRUARY

I was supposed to get re-tested for Coeliac Disease so I started eating gluten again, but then didn't ever get my tests. I'm still eating gluten and doing fine so I guess it's kind of irrelevant now? I get the sense I'd be better off without the gluten but right now we need the convenience and it saves on food costs. We were also rushing to get paperwork to the immigration lawyers on time so we could extend my partner's Work Visa while waiting for an answer on his Resident Visa application.

MARCH

The first anniversary of my dad's death. He was supposed to turn 80 a week before and he'd been looking forward to it. He wanted a big party with all his friends and relatives who could make it. I wish I'd been more of an organised and altogether with-it person who could've organised a memorial party, but instead the date went by without much fanfare.

APRIL

My partner was beginning to really struggle at work. Long Covid was kicking his ass. We spent an entire morning and a couple hundred dollars just to be told by a doctor that he needed rest and maybe vitamins would help.

MAY and JUNE

By this point I was very much avoiding the narcissist next door, my so-called mother who I like to refer to as N for capital narcissist. I was struggling to keep up with the garden. My own health was up and down. I signed up for an art class for mental health and I was successfully starting to grow my pet care business, trying to increase the cat feeds and dog walking while reducing the house sitting. I very much wanted to have a Christmas and New Year at home with my partner for a change. I was also already getting excited for a couple of upcoming events: my 40th birthday in September, and Wolfenoot in November, which we usually celebrate as a combined Thanksgiving/Christmas/New Year since I'm often away housesitting for those months.

JULY

This is where it started to really get surreal. The Long Covid wasn't going away. Yet another doctor prescribed my partner two months off work and gave him antidepressants. So, he gave notice of his resignation to the job that he'd worked really hard to get and was otherwise enjoying. Two days after handing in his resignation, we got 90 days notice from our landlord that we had to move out so he could sell the flat my family had been renting for 22 years. I basically had grown up there. It was the place I considered 'going home' to even more than the family home, and there were a lot of memories of my dad still there. I was quite devastated. We began the process of looking for a new home.

AUGUST

Time was marching on. My partner had worked his notice period and was now unemployed. Unfortunately we still hadn't heard back about his Residency application and that meant that he wasn't eligible for any government assistance or benefits. We were living on only the tiny amount of self-employed work I could find each week plus my half of a disability benefit because they calculated my entitlement as one half of a couple. Yep, he was able to negatively affect my benefit even though he wasn't eligible for anything himself. Anyway, what it meant was that we had no way to prove we could afford rent anywhere and with also having pets and the competition being high for every rental we could afford, we weren't having any luck. It didn't matter we still had a few thousand dollars saved from my inheritence which would've kept us afloat for a while. Landlords wanted guaranteed rent.

This is where the bubble of surrealness got even bigger. My best friend said we could move in with her to a house share situation. We'd be able to keep our pets, the landlord was a great guy, etc etc. The catch? They lived in another city and it was going to take all we had to make the move. It was going to be a huge plunge, but in the end, having very few options, we decided to accept.

Important to note, for my own record, that we didn't have NO option. The owners of our favourite restaurant had just built their house and were going to be moving into it. They offered to put in a good word to their landlord where they had been renting a self-contained part of a house in the hills to let us be the next tenants. We almost said yes, but being closer to my best friend had a strong appeal.

SEPTEMBER

My birthday month, and some good news for a change. My partner got his Residency approved! We had a big party for my birthday and to celebrate his Resident status, and also to say goodbye to all our friends who were all amazing and so many of them gave us much-needed support and generous funds we ended up badly needing. Before the month was over, we got a moving truck to take most of our things, and we organised transport for our five ducks. The cat would come with us in the car with the last of the stuff we could fit into it. We hired a skip and broke ourselves trying to clear the flat in time and didn't manage it. I spent most of the car ride to the new city organising for friends to help the landlord clean up our mess, and it really wasn't a small mess. Exhausted, devastated, and broken, we arrived at what we thought would be our new home.

OCTOBER

I applied for jobs immediately, and within four weeks I got one that was absolutely perfect for me! I joined an all-female barbershop-style acapella choir. We applied for, and received, benefit for my partner now that he was a New Zealand Resident. Things were looking up, especially financially and socially! I was finally becoming the person I was always meant to be: social, happy, friendly, capable,  communicative, assertive, and resilient. I was getting along with my friend. Things seemed very good - at first.

Over time it became very clear that my friend was not as 'chill' living with others as she claimed she was. Every single day, every single conversation, was a chance for her to add another preference to a growing list. I wrote them all down in the end and it took up about 3 pages. We did our best to work around her and not bother her, but she actually made it impossible. No matter what we did, no matter how quiet we tried to be or how much we tried to stay out of the way and do everything just as she wanted, we annoyed her somehow. I sent her a message on Discord saying we'd really like to have a flat meeting to discuss ground rules, and she messaged back saying there was really nothing to discuss and that we just needed to be considerate. It's implied that she only meant considerate of herself, since she wasn't going to consider us.

This is where things got even more surreal. I finally cracked in the kitchen one day. Just every time she showed up it was with some kind of criticism and disregard for my personal space, and then she also made a verbal judgment on the way out about what I was cooking. It was too much after being told that the day before, when we knew she was napping and tried to be quiet, we'd been too noisy cooking at 4pm on a Sunday afternoon and she wanted to yell at us because she had a migraine. (By the way, she said all of this not as a constructive criticism, but as proof that she was a chill, mature person who could choose not to yell at people when she wanted to. But oh, she wanted to, and she made sure we knew it!) I told my partner I needed to leave the situation, left the cooking to him, and went to our room to cry. Well, my partner wasn't sure why I didn't just apologise and talk to her directly to smooth things over so he decided he'd venture out to do that on my behalf.

He got lambasted! He actually told her after she was done that he was planning on encouraging me to speak to her myself but if she was going to talk that way to us then he was going to tell me not to bother instead. She called us immature, she called us children, she told him we were damaging her mental health and she'd had to increase her medications... No actual feedback on what we'd done wrong, just criticism. I mean, what had we done? We'd tried to do everything her way and stay out of her way. Apparently that was wrong?

NOVEMBER

After that we realised she wasn't actually going to listen to anything we said anyway, so we avoided her hardcore after that. Other than getting to work and going to choir practise, I minimised being outside of our room, and my partner did any cooking for us which eventually devolved into us buying takeaways almost every day just to have a reason to leave the house as well. My partner ended up also having to do all the duck feeding and medicating because I'd have to walk past her to get to the back yard, and I didn't want to even step into the kitchen anymore where the cat food was.

Finally, my friend (though we were barely friends already by this point) texted my partner - not me, her  supposed best friend, but my partner whom she had called a child in the previous blow-out - to say she wanted to talk to him (again - not me). I said to him, maybe she was ready to actually compromise? But probably it was just going to be another talking to. What actually ended up happening was she gave us three weeks to move out. The final day we could stay was 10 days before Christmas. WTF!

DECEMBER

First, some good news. Both my partner and I went to my work Christmas party together and had an amazing time, and I also later went to the Christmas party for my choir which one of the residents hosted at her place. I normally dislike Christmas a lot by association, but all of these were positive and I felt very social and part of the community. I managed to make friends enough with one of the people in the choir that I discovered she has a farm. I asked if she might have room to look after ducks while we were house hunting and she said yes! So our ducks, at least, had a safe home for Christmas and New Year lined up.

We applied for every rental we could afford that would consider pets. We got so many rejections it was painful. Three weeks to move out in a city we were still very new to, without our support network around us to help, was totally unrealistic. I DID manage to  After two weeks of viewing houses, applying, and getting rejected, we finally went to the government agency to ask for help with emergency housing. It turns out we don't qualify because of our pets, and they'd only pay for a shoebox room, shared bunking situations, or a camping ground unit. None of that would fit us, or they won't allow pets, or they simply weren't available this time of year. We're not the only people struggling with housing by far. They won't even give us anything to help with food because we saved for first rent and bond for a rental within our budget, and we're expected to use those savings first and then beg them for a loan for bond and rent later. Their advice to my partner over the phone while we were asking for assistance was, "we know pets are like family but maybe you need to make housing your priority and consider letting go of the cat." Wow.

Now I'd recently also connected with an old friend I only found out lived here around when we were moving to the city, and she originally said that our cat and the two of us could pile into her 1-bedroom flat if the alternative was the street, but as the date drew nearer she started to get nervous about her offer because she worried her own three cats would be too nervous with another cat plus strangers in the house and might run away. We understood, and tried to find out if we could get our cat into a cattery instead, but with it being Christmas time everywhere was full.

So in the end, we bit the bullet and found a pet-friendly motal that would accept us having the cat in the room with us. He has a dog crate he can go into when we're both away, and it holds his food and litterbox off the carpet. The only rule is no pets on the furniture due to the fur being so hard to get out so we have had to cover the bed and couch with sheets, no problem at all. The units are private and larger so we can keep some of our stuff with us, and they have everything we need in the unit to properly cook. We will have to switch units during our stay because of availability, but the motel owner moved some bookings around as he could to minimise disruption. The down side is that it's well over our budget and every week we stay here will eat into our savings considerably.

Plus, a lot of our furniture and things are still trapped in the garage at the old place. The actual landlord said we could keep our things there, but the ex-best friend still insisted we return our keys, so we have no way to get to our things without asking for access. It's kind of shit.

And that's it. The really bizarre year that's been 2023 in summary and with a lot of missing detail. It turns out I get to spend Christmas with my partner just like I'd hoped, but definitely not as planned. We  certainly didn't foresee ourselves living out of a motel with our cat in a strange city for the last weeks of the year but hey, at least we're not totally vagrant. We've booked here until 29th December and then we'll see where we can go from there.