Migration Time, Yet Again

Neurodivergent Survival In A Suboptimal Global Capitalist Social Ecology

The old, long-defunct Santa Fe Railway station near my home in Pratt, Kansas.

It’s now all but certain. Next year, I will probably be moving back to Ellensburg, Washington, from Pratt, Kansas, where I have lived for nearly five years. I placed my name on the waitlist for Section 8 housing subsidies in Ellensburg, and the last time I checked my status, it looks like I will be offered a voucher next year. This will allow me to secure rental housing in Ellensburg after selling my current home in Kansas.

As I get ready to move across the country, I can only hope this will be the last time I have to make such a big move and that I can finally settle in Ellensburg, or at least near the Central Washington area.

I mentioned this dilemma in a previous post called “Onerous Transitions.” However, back then, I wasn’t entirely sure whether relocating was necessary or where I should move.

I’ve decided, for various reasons related to my writing, mental and physical health needs, and personal safety as a disabled person living in the US under the Trump administration, that I would be better off in a blue state. While I personally think the US Democratic Party is very out of touch, they’re not nearly as dangerous as MAGA Republicans. Moreover, a few blue-state governors, including Washington’s current governor, Rob Ferguson, have been pushing back against the Trump administration in their efforts to unleash the military on US citizens. With Trump in office for the next three years, I want to be closer to the Canadian border in case the situation under his administration worsens enough that I need to apply for refugee status in Canada.

I now have everything prepared and planned so that once housing becomes available for me in Ellensburg, I can simply load most of my belongings into a moving pod, ship it to Ellensburg, and book a one-way flight back to Washington. This way, everything should go smoothly with minimal disruption to my writing routine. I’ve heard that long-term logistical planning is a noted strength of dyspraxics.

While I’m not stressing about the move itself, I have mixed feelings about having to do this yet again, especially since I hoped my current location would be where I could finally settle and spend the rest of my days. While I had long sought permanence and stability in my life, my current location no longer suits my needs in light of recent life changes, along with some of the practical realities of my disability.

A Lefty On The American Plains: Why Kansas?

For some background, I left Washington state around mid-2021 after receiving a large cash inheritance, following my mom’s passing nearly a year earlier, which was about a year after my dad died. My dad passed away in mid-2019, and my mom died in mid-2020. I managed both parents’ estates because I lived in Washington at the time, while my sister lived in Portland, Oregon, and still resides there.

After receiving my half of the inheritance in early 2021, I was determined to buy my own home. I had long wanted the personal space, independence, and privacy that come with owning a detached house. For nearly a decade before that, due to capitalism’s commodification of housing and threadbare income support for disabled individuals, I struggled to find housing that met those needs.

When I was found eligible for both SSI and SSDI because of my neurodivergences and psychosocial impairments in the early 2010s, I rented rooms in Tacoma and Olympia, Washington, for about a year before finally getting approved for subsidized housing through the Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Section 8 program. Once approved for Section 8, I was able to rent a one-bedroom apartment in Ellensburg, Washington, in a complex subsidized for elderly and disabled tenants. Having my own apartment was definitely an upgrade from renting a room in a house with several other housemates. However, the poor construction of the building meant I could still hear neighbors talking on the phone and smell cigarette smoke from outside seeping into my unit. These were more than mere discomforts; they were painfully tangible reminders that, as a disabled person under capitalism, I am not considered worthy of something as basic as my own space, where I have complete control over my living environment.

As a tenant, whether in a single room or an apartment, living in such close quarters with others was always very distressing. I rarely stayed at my place during the day, usually just sleeping and showering there. After showering and eating my breakfast in the morning, I’d pack my gym clothes, books, laptop, writing utensils, and enough non-perishable food to last the day, all in either a 40L backpack or my bike bags, and then disappear for most of the day. I’d spend days at a local university library, reading and writing, before hitting the gym, just before returning home around 6 or 7 in the evening. This was how I managed to stay mentally afloat.

Therefore, as a renter, I still felt like a nomad or a drifter, despite having what technically qualifies as a legal permanent residence. This was not how I preferred to live. You can’t truly build a life when your daily routines revolve around avoiding the insults and indignities of the marginal living space the system affords to you. I longed for the stability, predictability, and familiarity of having my own place where I could settle down and establish roots indefinitely.

By the time I received my inheritance, I had been exploring all options for buying a home within my budget for a long time. Years earlier, I qualified for the SSA DAC benefits program¹, which gave me a slightly higher benefit than just receiving SS/DI alone. The combination of a large cash lump sum and my increased monthly benefit finally made me ready to buy my own home, just not in Washington state or anywhere in the western US. By then, the pandemic housing boom had driven home prices across much of the country up to a point where I could no longer comfortably afford the monthly mortgage payments based solely on my SSDI benefits.

I needed to buy a home outright with my cash inheritance, and the closest state to Washington where that was possible was Kansas. This was also where my dad’s family originally came from, and although I no longer had relatives there, I was somewhat familiar with it from visiting as a teenager in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Soon, I found a home in the town of Pratt, situated somewhere between central and western Kansas. I purchased the home sight unseen with no mortgage and moved there in June 2021, still having enough money left to furnish the house.

Pratt is roughly the same size as Ellensburg, Washington — that is, a little over 7 square miles — but probably has a much smaller population and thus fewer amenities and resources. However, it has all the essentials—grocery and hardware stores, hospitals, a bank, and a post office—within easy walking or biking distance from my home. Since I can’t drive, I find it beneficial to live in areas where key amenities are close together.

The low population density in Pratt usually means less traffic, except during the morning and evening rush hours and around 3 pm, when all the children get out of school. As a vulnerable road user, I avoid those times when I need to leave my home. Aggressive and reckless driving have now grown commonplace across the country, even in small towns like Pratt, Kansas.

After living in Pratt, Kansas, for nearly five years, I now have no choice but to leave behind the life I tried to build here and move back to Ellensburg, Washington. Now that I’m serious about my writing, homeownership has become a burden I no longer need. My slower work pace, caused by my dyspraxia, means I am operating under a much tighter time constraint. Therefore, I cannot balance writing, my health routine, and the responsibilities of maintaining a home.

Granted, my home is relatively small — only about 750 sq. ft. — and I always thought this size should be manageable if I established a regular writing routine again. However, that hasn’t proven to be the case. It now makes more sense to sell my home, move back into a subsidized rental, and use some of the sale proceeds to invest in my writing, such as editing costs and promotional services.

Furthermore, the underdeveloped infrastructure in my town results in numerous inefficiencies and inconveniences in daily life. These issues have become especially burdensome given my increased time pressures.

We don’t even have curbside recycling where I live. I must haul all my household recyclables to the local recycling center, either in my bicycle trailer or a hand-pulled wagon. Sometimes, my tap water turns a rusty red color, usually after a fire hydrant in my neighborhood has been used or a recent repair to the mainline, and I have to use my wagon or bike trailer to go to the store and buy bottled distilled water until I can flush out my system and get clear water again.

Plus, there isn’t a bicycle repair shop in my town. Without the time pressure from my writing, doing my own bike repairs and upgrades isn’t a big deal. But now that my life has gotten busier, I need to live somewhere with a decent bike shop that has an on-site mechanic so I can offload repairs and upgrades.

Also, as I mentioned in my last post on this topic, there is no decent, fully accessible gym in my current location, and working out either at home or outdoors is proving very ineffective over the long run. Basically, none of the exercise options currently available to me really burns many calories, nor do they seem to actually boost my metabolism. All year, until recently, my morning weigh-ins have averaged about 3-4 pounds heavier than I’d like. Therefore, I have had to switch to a calorie-restricted, low-carb diet, which recently helped me bring my average weight to the 159-161 lb range, where I prefer to stay. However, such restrictive dieting is never sustainable in the long term. Plus, I’m doing more running than I should, given that I likely have a second inguinal hernia forming on the left side of my lower abdomen. Last year, I had to undergo surgery for a right inguinal hernia. The one on my left side isn’t quite surgical yet, but my doctor wants to monitor it closely. She seemed unsure about me doing fitness runs again, but without a suitable gym, I don’t know what else to do. I have an indoor fanbike, which is excellent for overall aerobic and VO2 max training, but right now, running remains my best option for both weight-bearing activity and deeper lower-body muscular engagement, which actually helps boost metabolism. What I really need is access to a good, fully accessible gym, which would eliminate the need for me to add running to my routine. However, I won’t have that until I can leave my current situation.

Since Ellensburg, Washington, has a larger population than Pratt, Kansas, and the general public everywhere is becoming increasingly insufferable to be around, I will likely adopt a more nocturnal schedule to avoid the idiots. At least Ellensburg offers more resources, such as more extensive municipal lighting, 24/7 gyms, grocery delivery services, and stores open late, which will allow me to live more or less nocturnally and thus avoid most people. This should help me escape much of the noise, over-stimulation, aggravation, and even the dangerous driving habits of our increasingly dumbed-down and degenerated society. Trust me, I’m not the dour misanthrope that I probably sound like here.

Is It Too Much To Ask?

Many neurodivergent individuals seem to have community and environmental needs that most people could never imagine. Much of my adult life has been a constant struggle to find a safe, comfortable living environment that matches my natural functioning and specific needs related to my neurodivergence. I even have C-PTSD from nearly being run over many times as a vulnerable road user. This especially keeps me on high alert and makes me feel like I need to leave whenever an environment starts to feel even slightly threatening. All I want is to feel safe and at peace for once. But in the noise and chaos that define late-stage capitalism, maybe that’s just too much to ask.

I envision neurodivergent public infrastructure that shares many of the same features as more sustainable and livable cities. These would include:

• Expand the supply of publicly owned social housing, like in Vienna, Austria, where such housing is owned by the city as a public good, without the stigma of subsidized housing for the poor common in many other countries, such as the USA. Tenants in these developments, on average, pay only a fraction of what they might in comparable European and other cities. Rents stay stable, and people from all backgrounds live there, enjoying privacy, housing stability, and building wealth without the burdens of homeownership. This would be an ideal housing solution for a neurodivergent creative

• Stricter regulations on motor vehicle noise, emissions, and steep, unwavering fines for violations.

• Banning certain classes of privately-owned motor vehicles, such as SUVs and “muscle cars.”

• Make most urban core areas “car-free zones”, excepting only certain classes of authorized vehicles such as emergency and delivery vehicles.

• Stringent and careful screening of prospective drivers before issuing a driver’s license is essential. For example, I believe that individuals should be required to be tested and found free of any Cluster B personality disorders to qualify for a license.

• Extensive networks of physically protected and segregated bicycle lanes and trails with impermiable barriers, left turn lanes, and their own appropriately-timed signal systems tuned to the pace of human-powered transportation. In the Netherlands, for example, there are even vast “bicycle highways” that connect to neighboring Germany and Belgium.

• Noise-reducing urban planning, like what exists in many Finnish cities. For example, Helsinki uses porous asphalt for roads, which reduces noise and improves drainage. Sound-absorbing facades for buildings, as well as natural sound barriers such as parks, forests, and waterways, further insulate neighborhoods from noise. I’ve never been to Helsinki, but I have been to Pori, Finland, which also had many of these noise-reducing features, and it was one of the few larger urban locales where I didn’t feel totally agitated and overstimulated.

Transportation, housing, and urban soundscapes relating to ecological and human health, wellness, and economic concerns are all areas I want to explore and write about further. For example, I often imagine public works projects where 3D printing is used in developing low-cost social housing that includes small, sturdy, detached, low-maintenance, single-family homes for better privacy, with features like secure, weatherproof bike storage capable of holding adaptive cycling gear, such as recumbent bikes and trikes.

If any of what I wrote about in this piece resonates with anyone, please drop a comment in the comments section. Those always make for interesting and engaging conversations. Thank you for reading!

Below is a link to my Book, Disrupted Pathways: A Dyspraxic Odyssey. It is my self-published memoir about coming of age as a late-diagnosed and previously misdiagnosed dyspraxic person. Here is the link below:

https://books2read.com/u/4NEyLY

1. Disabled Adult Child (DAC) benefits are administered by the Social Security Administration, and eligibility is contingent on proving that one has been continuously disabled since before age 22, is unmarried, and has minimal or no Social Security coverage based on their own record. Thus, DAC benefit payout amounts are based on the insured parent’s earnings record and are usually a lot higher than any benefits the person might be eligible based on his/her own earnings record.