Living life with Bankruptcy

For those of you that don’t know my story I’ll go over it again in short hand. I was born and then shoved back in, denied oxygen to my brain, destroyed brain cells and was given a life sentence of less than. My mother suffered the pain of the shove back, lost her uterus, blamed me and it went down h ill from there. I left home at 16and created a good life for myself, no one to beat me, sell me, abandon me, and punish me for something I had no control over.

Now I’m 56 and in the middle of a bankruptcy and it feels like I’m in the middle of hell. I was laid off my job in 2009. The loss was sad, I worked with a good group of people and that ended. I wasn’t concerned about finding a new position. It is said you will know your future by remembering your past. My past indicated that I would get a position soon; I was more than just wrong. I spent my first year unemployed searching diligently for a position. I was granted a lot of interviews only to find when I got there that look on their faces: old, fat, only speaks English……reject. It took me due to my slow brain function a long time to figure it out; I wasn’t going to find work with my GED. People with AA, and BA’s had my traditional positions, and were very unhappy about it, but it was a job for them and I’ve been left behind once again.

Well my past from when I was 0-16 caught up with me, I was reliving my youth as an out-cast reminded daily how useless I was, only this time there was no sex involved, people simply letting me know how useless I am in today’s new world. I broke mentally, physically, and emotionally. I take pills to stop me from following people around that currently hold positions that I am qualified for to run them down. That’s a bit of an exaggeration, but I was looking through the obituary’s to see if someone had a job I was qualified for.

While all this was going on we used our emergency credit cards to supplement our income, I was still thinking I might get land a position; I was so stupid or should I say naïve. Well the credit card companies got wind of our financial down fall and began lowering our credit limit, which in turn damned our credit; even though at this time we were paying on time. When we learned this we had to make some decisions, what was important to us? We decided it was the house; we did not want to lose the house. We weren’t behind on payments nor were we late, but I could see that was coming at the rate we were going. So we stopped paying on the credit cards, and kept up with all the basic living bills including housing. I continued to look for employment; I was awarded SSI disability, and went directly to the Department of Rehabilitation in wide eyed hope of getting a position through them.

What I got was a angry, put upon counselor that was more than dissatisfied with her position. She expressed her wrath equally among the clients. She did not help me, she made getting a position through them almost impossible, she demanded I seek mental help, and then she would do her job. I have no insurance and as I was calling the list of places she wanted me to go the first question they asked was ….”do you have insurance?” I said no and was turned away just that fast. I got mad and decided I’d had enough of this woman and requested a new counselor; while I was doing this she found a new position and assigned me to a new counselor; that I still haven’t heard from and it’s been about 7 months.

We ended up filing bankruptcy, our greatest fear was that some creditor was going to garnish my husband’s wages and poof out in the street we would be. I found an attorney through the Better Business Breuer (BBB) another mistake. The man is lazy, I like how his mind works, but his work ethic is what I have issues with. I wanted to do a chapter 13, that’s more work for him because our income is so low. He would need to file the chapter 13 and then file a chapter 7 if our income could not support the chapter 13. It would be to our benefit to file the chapter 13 and if our income would not support it we could ride ourselves of the second and keep our home. This man wouldn’t even try. In the months while he was stalling our filing (that we paid for in full), I was working on getting a loan modification on our Second and the 1st.

So far I have a modification for the second that will last until 2022. I’m still working on the 1st. We should have gone to court on October 13, 2011 however this lazy man got an extension and put off the date until November 10, 2011. Sounds like no big deal, right? Guess again what happened is someone called our basic living companies, like the electric company, gas, phone, etc and told them we filed against them. We had no idea that we had done such a thing. If we are trying to keep the house why would we want to live here without utilities? We have been paying them every month faithfully but that doesn’t matter. The electric company closed our account opened a new one and is now charging us $400.00 in deposits. I’ve written to my attorney regarding this and asked him to fix this; it was never our intention to file against the utilities, the man called the electric company and told them we filed against them and now we are going to file against the new account as well. When the electric company called to tell me this my jaw dropped. The informed me that they will be closing the new account, open another account and add a higher deposit; some attorney hug???

It feels like the whole world has gone stupid. If we are paying our daily living expenses then how on earth can one act on a tip that a bankruptcy has been filed and then go after these human being with all the force that the 1%’ers have. The stress of all this has been relentless. When I called PSE to find out where my bill was I was informed that my husband called them and told them of the bankruptcy, I checked with him and he said no, he called them and was given another story, I called them back and was given my favorite story that they were surfing the net and came across our bankruptcy, then came the story that “someone” from the court called with regards to the bankruptcy. For the past two years this is how our life has gone, all the phone calls from the collectors, they even called my friends; then the lazy lawyer with all of his time-outs, and now the utilities taking their bite. I’m glad I have the drugs, I think without them I’d have put a gun in my mouth and been done with it.

If you lose your position and need to file bankruptcy to keep your head above water, don’t think for one minute that it’s not only going to be distasteful, embarrassing, demoralizing, painful, and go on forever your friend will abandon you; it’s fear that what you have may be catching. I’m beginning to wonder if they’re not right; do I have a disease that there is no cure for?