Just turned 28 and life still hasn't settled the f*** down since everything went to hell about 5 years ago. My parents go through a nasty seperation. My father begins drinking, my mother leaves her daughter, and two younger sons to live with an old high school sweetheart. I suffer with suicidal depression and sky rocketing OCD. My fiance and I move into that house to save money for a house and so that I can console my father and take care of my brothers. They weren't babies, but they never learned to grow up, never learned to live without my mother. Then I graduate from undergrad (barley), with a degree in art…no opportunites. I'm enemplyed and stuck in that basement where my fiance and I had taken residence and slept through most of the days. If I wasn't sleeping I was cleaning. If I wasn't cleaning, I was looking up recipies (I didn't know how to cook), so that I could feed my family. If I wasn't in that basement waiting for my fiance to come home I was at the supermarket, with maybe $20 to my name. I began cutting and pulling out my hair. It was indeed…the worst year of my life and honestly- I don't know HOW I survived. I thought about suicide everyday. At night I would go into the garage and sob into my lap. I had been trying to keep the severity of my suffering a secret to Eric, my fiance. Our relationship was suffering, my ROCD was at it's worst and he grew tired of dealing with it along with my depression. He was depressed himself….so I cried alone. I cried and cried until it felt like I had cried out all the water in my body. I sobbed in the frigid cold garage and hoped for one of those Fairy Godmothers to just appear as they did in all of my favorite stories. But they never did. I'm not sure if I was Jessica then. I feel like I don't remember who that was, who I had to become-a pleasant girl after 5 when Eric came home from work, and a sobbing, broke, mess starting at 6 am when he left for work. I lost my mother…only for a while until her romance ended and she came back to that house…that house that we had all suffered in.

Then Eric and I found a house of our own….it will be great. It wasn't great. It was expensive and Eric hated his job, So he quit, and then got another. He hated that one too, so he quit that one. Then he found a wonderful job teaching at Quinnipiac University…they had a massive layout of over 20 faculty members. However, during this time of Eric's career ventures…I began to grow. I created a new portfolio over the course of 3 years. I got a shady internship with a con artist who scammed me into doing free work for her…but I did learn a lot about teaching and marketing. Then I began teaching at the college level…that was the first time I felt a spark of self worth. I began exhibiting some of my work in group shows, I even got in the paper. I won a front cover feature of some not so popular art magazine along with an interview, my idol artist acknowledged me to her followers and I in turn recieved a few hundered thanks to her….I began to come alive. I was breathing again. Eric on the other hand, was not so alive. He found some other temp jobs at various design studios.His depression grew and grew and I began noticing something unnatural in his behavior. Irrational ideas and plans to do crazy irrisponsible things, rapid talking, rambling for hours, pacing, then another day it was as though he was a zombie-empty, detached, angry, irratable, and broken. I urged him to get help.

Now, 2015…we're getting married in 2 months, I'm pursuing my MFA so I can be elegible for a professorship (slim chance),along with building my own brand as an artistand Eric's current job has shut down their dept-he will be unemployed again in a month. I have no car. We live in the middle of nowhere so nothing is exactly walking distance. I'm lucky to have a full semester of teaching this fall, but adjuncting alone won't pay for a high mortgage. My dog is breaking down and costing us hefty vet bills, I know I'll be grieving him soon. Eric is more lost than he's ever been and the job he may take cannot support these high living expenses in this house. His idea of solving this problem is to move back into that house. My parent's house. The house where each day was a living hell, where both my seperated parents live, where both my brothers live, where all those horrible memories reside. I can't do it. I can't do it and my question is…when the hell are things going to finally just WORK OUT? Yes some good things have come through during these 5 or 6 years of hell….but not enough. I feel like we're cursed. I'm 28 and I'm still waiting