Is it just a dream...?

• 2009: $650 for a two bedroom apartment. Cool, cool.
• 2010: $800 for a three bedroom apartment. Chill, that’s fine.
• 2015: $900 for a one bedroom apartment. Uh, ouch, but...
• 2016: $1200 rent raise of that one-bedroom apartment what the WHAT? Fuck that shit, I'm out
• 2016: $1300 for a two bedroom apartment, ugh
• 2017: Fuck that shit, I'm out, part 2: cheap shitty condo edition to at least have some control over my rate increases, except, HAHAHA HOAs suck, too.

I spend so much of my free time now looking at gorgeous single residence houses that are 2000+ sq ft for like $150k in other cities and just being pissed off that I'm still here. I'm so angry that I feel so much more financially stressed out, trapped, and helpless at age 33 than I did at age 23. And it’s not like I’m bad with money. At 23, I was fresh out of college and into my first full-time job, and I was still paying all my bills on time, paying off extra on my student loans every month because I budgeted carefully, and starting to travel abroad once every year or every other year. I’m good at taking care of my finances.

But despite doing everything right, life did not get better. It got worse and worse, because I had the piss poor luck of growing up in a city being hit by a mass wave of yuppie transplants that led to abrupt urban growth in a city that was not ready for it and did not have the infrastructure in place to handle it.

If it weren't for my parents being elderly, I'd be desperately trying to move out of Portland completely and go somewhere less crowded, less noisy, less angry, less expensive, and less... everything... than fucking Portland has become. I hate it here. I hate being here. Everything is expensive. Eating is expensive. Housing is expensive. Grocery shopping is expensive. Going anywhere and doing anything is expensive. Traffic is becoming nuts. The louder the liberals get, the more the far-right conservatives also come crawling out of the woodworks everywhere to screech in the streets, and everyone is just so angry.

(Abandon any notion that Portland is a progressive haven. It’s not. It’s a blue city that leads to a blue state, yes, but one that has still historically, and is still currently, full of frustrated reds bent on defending their territory. Most of Oregon is red, and you’re going to find a lot of that in Portland, too.)

I've lost most of my reasons for ever loving Portland in the first place, and I grew up here, before all prices of everything cranked up and led to mass gentrification in a short span of time such that wages couldn’t keep up with the cost of living.

I'm so tired and depressed and worried and anxious all the goddamn time. I sleep too much or not at all. I can't feel engaged in anything I do anymore. I thought I was just normally depressed, but I just went away to a quiet little town for a week, and had almost no depression there, until I started talking about the conditions in Portland and barely held myself back from a panic attack. The crowding and expense and stress of Portland is eating away at my last nerve.

And I’m so lonely, too. My best friend is off with her boyfriend and sister and sister in law, my roommate works basically the opposite schedule as me, the friends I saw most moved to Washington, and I basically don’t see other friends anymore unless I happen to have a D&D game scheduled. Even when I repeatedly say I miss you, I'd love to see you more, and they agree, nothing happens from there. Everyone is too busy with their own partners and other friends while I just go to work, go to school, and hope for morsels of attention.

And I hate the dating culture here. If I see the phrase “ethical non-monogamy” ONE MORE GODDAMN TIME ON DATING SITES WHERE I’VE EXPLICITLY CLICKED THE THINGIE THAT I’M NOT POLY, I’M GOING TO INJECT A FUCKING VIRUS INTO THEIR STUPID ALGORITHM.

(I’m kidding. I do not have the level of computer programming required to create a virus.)

Literally all I want out of life is a stable partner, a stable house, my dumb cat, and my sassy lizard. I hate how unattainable this is as long as I stay in fucking Portland. But as long as my parents are alive, I’m stuck here, because they’re old and barely speak English and need me to go help them with housework or translating mail or fixing their computer fucking constantly, so I can’t even move, and I feel like I’m ruining my life the longer I stay here.