I'm gonna start this with a backstory that covers where Zack and I are at in life right now because knowing that is the necessary context for a LOT of those questions. Zack and I started dating in September of 2020, Back then I knew I was gay but didn't know what autism was for the most part. I had a diagnosis on record at the time for Aspergers but freaked out when I was told that and blocked the memory for a while. Back then I was bouncing between houses 'cause my mom's house was very unlivable, and my dad's house wasn't a permanent solution. I was staying over at my mom's for that holiday season 'cause she asked me to watch the house while she cared for her great aunt in hospice. For reference, my mom is very Christian, the kind that constantly talked shit about "sinners" like gay people. She also was living in a mouse, flea, fly, roach, and maggot-infested house. That house also didn't have working AC, when too many things were plugged in it blew the breakers to the house. It had tons of holes and was just generally disgusting because my mom would let her dogs shit all in the house, the guy she was dating also did jack shit to clean. I could clean a lot of it, but would FREQUENTLY get sick because I shared my sleeping space with dog shit and mice. Living with my mom wasn't working out, so I asked to move in with Zack who my mom didn't know about at the time. Zack's mom agreed so long as we both worked towards saving money and paying back my credit debt I was acrewing because, at the time, I was making good money from streaming and could justify building credit through utilizing a big credit limit. I ended up moving into her place with a 750 credit score and $4000 owed on 1 card. Living with her was all right, but I noticed very early on Zack's mom was ludicrously manipulative. She practically controlled everyone in that house, from not allowing anyone but her to do laundry so she could hold it over people's heads, to making everyone wash their recycling, to guilt-tripping about not eating her expired food, to making everyone in the house end most conversations with 'momma knows', to controlling everyone's finances, to holding onto the bulk of zack and I'm weed and giving it out at a steady pace, etc. Zack would at times get into just the dumbest arguments with her and would end them after getting yelled at by thinking "I'm wrong, she's right", and she was wrong MOST of the time. Fights between him and her started to increase more when I told him "Stop thinking you're wrong, you're not, she's being unreasonable/insane". The thing that sent her over the edge with me back then was me utilizing my good credit to finance 2 monitors and a new phone for Zack. Zack's phone was broken at the time and I was using 60hz to stream CH. 2 240hz monitors and an iPhone 12x for $1200 that if paid back in a year had no interest sounded like a GREAT deal to me, Zack's mom reacted to that like I killed an animal of hers or something. screaming shit at us like "How dare you waste money while I'm letting you live here because you said you were gonna try to save money?" to which my response was "At the rate I'm making money, I'll be able to pay this back easily." She then spends the next 3 months seemingly trying her hardest to stop me from being able to stream properly. She'd drag me to a water park across the state weekly, each time that happened we stayed at an Airbnb that I couldn't stream at. The times I'd be home, it would be a constant interruption. either with mall trips, random chores, arguments between her and Zack, or her and Zack's dad, or her and Zack's sisters. I steadily bled viewers until I wasn't making enough money to keep up with my credit payments anymore and our bad spending habits at the time. The tension then became about our bad spending habits and "Zack not helping enough". Now don't get me wrong, we were young, had no real-world experience at the time, and were spending like idiots because up until conversations like that, my stream supported those bad habits fine enough. I tried to get the point across that her constantly not letting me work is why my debt was getting bigger at the time and she wouldn't hear it. Even though I moved in with $4000 in credit debt and added $1200 to that with a big purchase, after living there for 7 months my total debt was sitting at like $6000-$6500, so it was just on the edge of being scary. I started up a substation because due to that debt going up, Zack's mom had started to dehumanize the both of us and I was scared she might kick us out. One day, she did, A fight broke out between her and Zack, and she and Zack's dad immediately kicked us out. Their wording was that I was the only person kicked out, but my mom's house was not an option to return to without putting my health at risk, and my dad's house wasn't available to live in, so instead of me being made homeless alone, zack went with me. I'm so thankful for that, but that immediately doomed the both of us because of Zack's mom's iron grip on his entire family. We were both outcasts and shit-talked to everyone to the point where no one would help us. This was the summer of 2021, so the pandemic was at its peak, it was around when the housing and apartment market was starting to crash again, and neither of us had any real-life experience. Being made immediately homeless with no prep time or budget in mind pretty much destroyed my credit. We were hopping from weekly stay hotel to weekly stay hotel because Zack was having trouble finding work at the specific locations we were at and we'd just go to a new spot in Houston to see if it had better opportunities. We tried reaching out to blackmagicbannette, at the time a friend of ours, to see if he'd wanna move out of his parent's place in Tennessee and get an apartment with us in Texas. He stays with us for 3 weeks and doesn't contribute to the weekly stay hotel costs, ends up being in the background of the megalodon FC, and a week later after a job he thought he was gonna get fell through, left us both in a panic on a random morning and just drove back to Tennessee. At that point, my credit wasn't able to support us and I had just about ground as many bounties as I could, so our only option was an old offer we originally rejected because it was in a different city. That's when we moved over to Austin and stayed a little over a month at Zack's childhood friend Jake's apartment. (This is where I teach find the unnerved chart of Expurgation for reference.) When we make it to Austin, it takes a bit of time to hear back from a job, but after a couple of weeks an oculus tech support job gets back to Zack and with his income plus my streams at the time, we were EASILY able to cover the kinda expensive Austin rent. After that whole debacle, when we finally got on our feet, Zack was working and we had an apartment, I finally was able to start learning good spending habits. The more I learned about how I lived, the more the autism diagnosis I had became unignorable. I learned a LOT during this time. We quit ordering doordash but realized both of our safe foods were fast food, so cutting that completely out of our diet wasn't a good plan. We slowed down MASSIVELY on weed around here as well, going from spending around $800 a month on weed to $400, still too much but progress was being made on both of us slowing down & finding more cost-effective options. We learned good shopping strategies and began to meal prep. We were paying back my credit and stuff was going well despite having a credit score of 400 and $15000 in credit debt. Zack let the stress of his job get to him after a while and made a pretty poor decision by quitting his job at Oculus Support before having another one lined up, conveniently right as I was taking a break from streaming because of stress myself. I think this was the last time I can point back to us making a genuinely bad decision that impacted our finances in a big way.1 It took 2 months for us to find another job for him, and at that point we both needed one to afford everything. That's when we started working @ HEB and did the overnight shift. (This was a few months after The PCPlayerSH Quiz FC.) 3 months into us both working at HEB overnight, Zack's dad calls Zack in the middle of a shift (at 2 a.m.) in a very emotional state. He said he was getting a divorce, and that Zack's mom was genuinely being a horrible evil person to him and by proxy his daughters who still were forced to live back "home". He apologized profusely for ever kicking us out, both to Zack and me. He expressed that he wanted to help us out and that he'd let us come home and live with him in Zack's childhood home rent-free for a while to try to make up for the shithole he and his at the time wife's actions put us in. So, we decided to listen to him, both of us quit our jobs at HEB, we told the apartment people we weren't going to renew our lease, and we moved home... Zack's mom hears about this, reopens a CPS case against Zack's dad, and threatens to have us get drug tested every day while living there because she somehow concluded that both ME and WEED ruined her marriage. We immediately realize that this was yet again her overstepping and controlling our lives which she has no right to, but she has her PARENTS LITERALLY BUT THE ENTIRE HOUSE FROM ZACK'S DAD AND HAS HIM SETTLE OUT OF COURT SO SHE CAN TAKE $1200 MONTHLY FROM HIM FOR ALIMONY, AND $600 PER KID, ALL THE WHILE SHE ONLY HAS TO PAY $500 RENT FOR AN ENTIRE 4 BEDROOM HOUSE. (AND NOW SHE ISN'T EVEN PAYING THAT, SHE'S BUSY, IN HER WORDS WHICH SHE PROUDLY SAID IN EARSHOT OF ZACK'S 13-YEAR-OLD SISTER, "DATING 8 GUYS, ONLY FUCKING 1") We asked around to see if any of our friends had openings in their house, and Zack's childhood friend Jonah's band was having turmoil 'cause one of the members put 19 holes in the wall at the house they were staying in. We offered to take the room he leaves when they kick him out so we do that. As soon as we both moved in there, we both took up contract work at a furniture moving company called "LoveBirds". Zack's dad realizes how fucked we got because he asked us to quit our jobs and move, so he pays for our first 3 months' rent at this place, which I still heavily appreciate. Outside of the 1 guy out of the picture that was wall punching, that was a fucking frat house. They were each fresh out of high school being supported by the band leader's dad whose approach to life was to be born into wealth and treat every bad thing that ever happens as a hypothetical that other people have to solve, not him. None of them did chores, none of them bought groceries, and only one of them would help with shit if we asked them. They would purposefully lock us out of the house for "shits and giggles" and were starting to bully Zack before I had to put my foot down. The guy in charge of the house bills forgot to pay them until utilities got turned off 3 times. The guy who was our co-worker at the furniture place flaked more times than not. All the effort I was having to put into picking up other people's slack and just surviving was taking time away from my stream and I was back to not being able to support even myself due to how poorly that got to performing. We were told by that group of people that when the lease of that house expired in June, they'd find a house that'd fit us. 3 months into living there, the lead guy tells us WHILE DRUNK that everyone but Zack and I would be moving into his dad's old house and it wasn't up for discussion. During the latter half of my stay, Gonzo started helping with stream commentary 'cause he found it fun, but after I left that house I haven't talked to him much :/ I then heard that GDQ accepted me again for SGDQ 2023 and I raised money to afford to pay back the remainder of my current PayPal loan so I could take out another and afford to take us both to Minnesota for that. At the time we had a trailer lined up that the boss lady of our job offered to rent to us, all the way until she ghosted us a week before leaving for GDQ. While at GDQ we realized we were homeless again, but we didn't do anything about it besides look for work when we got back, which was most of what we did on the way home. When we got back, Zack's dad offered to let us stay for a month 'cause any longer and Zack's mom would make shit worse for him and his sisters. I immediately started trying to go hard on streaming and 2 days later, I got an ear infection. It lasts a week, I can't work the entire time, Zack's dad gets restless that I'm not making money and jobs aren't replying to Zack. He then told me I couldn't stream there on weekdays from 8 am to 5 pm and any day past 11 pm because the guitar hero noise annoyed him too much, so while I lived there capitalizing on that GDQ popularity was quite literally impossible. My dad then let us move there for a while until the landlord told us to leave which took a month. This is finally when my stream started turning around, Jobs still wasn't replying or were auto-denying Zack but I was finally starting to make alright money again for myself with the H-ell grind and such. After time ran out at my dad's, we moved into my buddy Gage's place for a bit, he's letting us stay until the 31st of this month and this city has already had a decent few jobs in the reply to Zack and he's got interviews and stuff lined up now, which is great! Chapter 2: The last few days 3 days ago, Zack got a text that our cat that his dad was watching over was missing. this hits both of us like a truck because we both realize the only reason we're struggling right now is because Zack's mom is a ridiculous bitch. She still hasn't spoken to me since she blamed her failing marriage on me. If she never kicked us out we'd be well off right now. If she just let us live with his dad, we wouldn't have had to deal with the fucked up twats in north Houston. We would've been living with Dexter if she wasn't a fucking cunt, and the possibility of losing him because of Zack's dad's lack of care was the final straw for us both. We decided to drop the subathon I just started to go look for the cat and set the family on fire. We started driving down to Houston from San Antonio with the belongings we brought to Gage's cause if our cat was gone, we weren't coming back. Our tire explodes on the way there, and a stranger helps us put our spare so we make it home, as we're replacing the tire already halfway there his dad calls us and says they found dexter. Good, he's safe. We still were fed up with having never talked to Zack's mom about things and wanted to get confirmation she had no intentions of making things better, so we shouldn't hold back from telling the people she's lying to about those lies (which is what happened), or she'd apologize to me and him and make things better (which she is seemingly incapable of.) Zack went and had a one-on-one conversation with her while I stayed at his dad's place. She still hates my guts, every reason she listed is anti-autism. She claims I'm abusive and always get what I want because she heard me tell Zack "Well that's 5 minutes I'm never getting back", at an arcade, as a joke, because Zack accidentally chose Cliffs of Dover on Medium and GH arcade has no stop or restart. She claims I'm a liar because she spoke to my mom in person for 5 minutes before she even KNEW I was in a gay relationship and got the vibe that my mom wasn't homophobic and her house was perfectly livable. She claims Zack is equally at fault for ruining her marriage and that I got us both addicted to weed, this coming from the lady with 3 empty liquor bottles on her NIGHTSTAND. Just a week before that convo she had her 15-year-old daughter drive her home from a bar the second time she had ever been behind a wheel. Zack asked if she ever planned to talk to me, and she said she never wanted to see me again. He asked what if we got married, and after a frustrated initial response she said "I don't know". He tells her if she doesn't repair her relationship with me, he doesn't want one with her. She doesn't seem to care. She keeps trying to say I'm a horrible person who abuses him and he eventually snaps back with "He has made me feel more loved than you or Dad ever did" She kicked him out at that point, hysterically crying "If that piece of shit makes you feel more loved than when I took you to kidney surgery at 1 year old, and baseball practice when you were 4, then get the fuck out." so he left, and plans on staying no contact with her unless she starts treating me like a human being. We decided that Zack's dad's uncaring nature towards dexter getting out of the house was too dangerous for him, so we brought him with us up back to Gage's place, and now... things are very uncertain (and my last 144hz monitor broke on the way back >:(. Zack has job interviews but we're currently BROKE 'cause I haven't been able to work as much as I want to and the job that Zack was able to get was a pyramid scheme marketing thing that didn't even pay him. We need to get out of Gage's hair within the next couple of days, but can't currently afford the weekly stay we'd have to smuggle dexter into, or the higher cost one that's pet friendly. That's my goal over the next few days of the frifathon, to keep us floating at weekly stays until a full-time position gets back to Zack and we can take advantage of the cheaper living in San Antonio vs. Austin & Houston. His pay alone would cover our rent and I'm confident that with my stream going how it is, I can cover the rest of our expenses, we just have to GET there. Even with all I've been through, it's now that I'm most stressed because I know there's no time to be stressed. we both are stuck in this shit together until SOMETHING gives. We've lost so much and been through so much because we were naive enough to be burnt twice. We've learned so much but it feels like it always results in us ending up right back here. I'm trying my best to stay focused and push through 'cause there's no other option. I'm just praying for a break.