There's a Light at the End of the Tunnel. But How Long Exactly is the Tunnel?
An attempt to stay stable in unstable times.
California has had a wonderful, wet, and dark winter. After living in Los Angeles on and off for almost seventeen years, I have come to cherish the rain. There have been so many disappointing winters where where we had little to no rain. Where the leaves on all the trees remained a dull, pale brown, coated in dust and pollution. Where ninety degree days, hot sun beating on my neck, gave me the feeling that we were living in an apocalyptic global warming future reality. Because it’s so rare, there is nothing more romantic than a rainy LA winter.
But even I got sick of the rain this winter. I got tired of the fact that I have no idea where my umbrella is (do I even have one?). I got tired of mud and dirt getting all over Satie every time I took her out for a walk. I got tired of the darkness, just one more thing to be depressed about. I loved the darkness and rain until about the third week of our last megastorm, then I got sick of it.
I haven’t been to Londo Lodge, my Yosemite cabin, since as ski trip I took there with my family and Joey in January. It feels weird that the last time I was there Joey and I were essentially a couple and now he won’t talk to me. We were together every day. We slept with each other every night, Satie nestled between us sideways. And while I always knew we weren’t really a match, there was love there. There was care there. And it feels weird that I haven’t been to my cabin in so long that the last time I was there the structure of my daily romantic life was completely different.
Londo Lodge has been buried in snow since January, when the first of these storms began. The front door is still buried. I wanted to go up and check on it, but my schedule has not permitted that just yet - every time I have time to go up, another storm comes along threatening to close the roads and shut off the power. So it’s been sitting there, wedged between large formations of snow, now ice, waiting for spring to come and set it free.
In January, everything seemed like it was going fine. No work was coming in, but that’s normal for this time of year. Plus, I had a lot of money coming to me so I figured I’d be fine for the next few months while I waited for things to pick up. Unfortunately I found out in February that there had been a massive disparity between my bookkeeping and that of my management. Without getting too far into the weeds, basically my manager oversees my payments. So at any given time I have a ton of invoices out for various content I’ve produced as well as for hosting work I do from time to time. I keep a spreadsheet of all the contracted payments I’m owed, but I have a hard time getting my team to actually use it, so sometimes I have no idea whether certain invoices have been paid or not.
Unfortunately, a lot of invoices got deposited without my knowledge and therefore were not future income I could rely on. I’m looking into getting a bookkeeper to prevent this type of thing this year but thus far I haven’t really had an issue like this. I obviously have to know how much money I have coming in so I can make decisions based on that. And this situation isn’t really anyone’s fault except literally everyone involved, including me.
Another unfortunate circumstance: I decided to start renovating the Londo Lodge kitchen in January, which I thought I had the money to do at the time. I found a very competent and inexpensive contractor and he demo’d out the old kitchen. He even found a taker for my old cabinets, which he removed still assembled and carted away. So my kitchen is now just an open room, waiting to be turned back into the kitchen of my dreams. The appliances, tile, sinks, and hardware have been sitting in the garage for over a year. I have been waiting to do this since before I bought the house.
When the rain finally stopped at LA turned back into the sunny place we always expect it to be, I was at first relieved. It’s always nice to get a change of pace when it comes to the weather, to the light. But the long winter had completely altered my sense of what time of the year it was. It was still mid-winter as far as I was concerned. It had just stopped raining and Londo Lodge was still under five feet of snow.
The other day, some reporter on NPR said something about it being spring and the second I heard that my heart stopped.
FUCK. What am I going to do about my kitchen?
I’ve been broke, like REALLY broke since early February. Literally the only money coming in is a few straggling payments from brands (from early December, they love taking their time to pay) and from the kind people who have subscribed to this newsletter (THANK YOU!). So rather than spring bringing joy, it’s brought me an overwhelming sense of dread. I cannot keep living like this. How can I get out of this financial hole?
I bought Londo Lodge with the idea that if I did not like living there full time (I didn’t) I would rent it on Airbnb. Unfortunately the process of getting the cabin permitted with the county took sixteen months and over fifteen thousand dollars. You have to get a permit to rent in my county or they will shut down your rental. And by the time I got my permit, it was this past December.
December is a dead time for rentals in my town because Yosemite’s visitation dips much lower than its summer highs. So you can’t really charge what you can charge in the summer. Added to that, the expense of hosting explodes. Propane is expensive, snow removal is expensive, the property manager has to spend a lot more time and money getting people in and all that comes out of my pocket. So I did do a few rentals in December and January but it ended up being way too much work for very little profit. Which is one reason I decided to just bite the bullet and start my kitchen.
Because my contractor was good and inexpensive, I decided to have him start so he could squeeze me in between jobs. He began by removing the old kitchen and had begun installing the new windows and doors before the first major storm came and made the cabin inaccessible. He hasn’t been back since and since January he’s been ghosting me (not uncommon for contractors so I’m actually not that worried).
Part of my plan for Londo Lodge and how I would afford it was always to rent it out. It’s in an area that has been predominantly vacation homes/rentals for decades, long before Airbnb even existed. Vacation rentals get a bad wrap and I can see why - places like LA don’t have enough affordable housing. But the town I live in was built as a vacation community and there aren’t really “industries” there, aside from a few hotels that provide housing. Salaries have not risen in tandem with the prices of homes, especially in California, so I think more and more people my age are doing this kind of thing. We don’t want to die penniless and for many of us this is the only way we can see to get our hands on an asset that will (hopefully) appreciate over time like past generations did. Long story short, I couldn’t afford to buy a house in LA and I’ve always wanted a house so I decided to buy it as an income property to share with my family, again connecting us to an area we lived for thirty years.
But the permit prices took about a year longer (and about $12K more) than I expected. And on top of that I have agreements with multiple appliance/materials sponsors that add up to well over a hundred thousand dollars so I have had a good deal of pressure to get the kitchen done ASAP, before the things I’m promoting are no longer being made (keep in mind, some of these things have been in my garage since 2020). So I’m definitely feeling a tremendous amount of guilt and anxiety that the kitchen project has taken so long to get started.
I want to do a good job, I want to make the sponsors happy, I want to produce photos and video that inspire people. And I really want to get the weight of Londo Lodge’s various expenses lessened by income from renting it out. I want people who visit Yosemite to have a nice place to stay that doesn’t have bears carved from tree trunks in it (sorry if you have one of those).
The last three years (ugh, I hate that it’s been three whole fucking years of this shit) have been an exercise in resilience. It’s not like I’ve written this down or anything, but I’d guess that in the past 36 months, I’ve spent about six feeling okay financially. The rest of the time has been pretty awful. Drinking because it’s the only way I can calm down awful. Gaining fifty pounds awful. Cell phone getting cut off because I couldn’t pay the bill awful.
Kelly and I were texting about how the light in LA can be really oppressive when you’re depressed. Like when you’re not happy the sunny sky feels blaring and flat. The whole atmosphere feels like a Bret Easton Ellis novel, glaringly pop and bright while being distinctively cynical and hopeless.
Last Thursday I had one of those very Bret Easton Ellis mornings. I woke up later than normal, around 7:30 and it was already sunny and warm. I made my coffee and checked my email and something stuck out at me. It was an email from my psychiatrist (I have to check in with a psychiatrist every two months to maintain my prescription for ADHD medication). Apparently I had an appointment at 8:30 AM I hadn’t written down and they were writing to tell me my insurance had lapsed so I’d need to pay cash for today’s appointment.
I immediately went on the Blue Cross website to pay my bill. It was on autopay but I’d gotten a new debit card and forgotten to update the number on my Blue Cross account (in my defense the old number was still working on Amazon and elsewhere so I thought it was still active, sometimes they give you a grace period after sending you replacement cards for this reason). So I paid the past due amount and had my appointment.
During the appointment, the doctor brought up my anxiety issues, which have been a backburner issue to my ADHD for a while now. I’ve avoided being medicated for anxiety because, quite frankly, I don’t really want to be on a million medications. I waited a VERY long time, thirty seven years to be exact, to be open to going on Adderall (and I still hope to wean myself off it once things stabilize). So the idea of being on not one but two mental health meds makes me feel like I’m just medicating my problems away rather than tackle them head on. No judgement to anyone taking multiple meds, I’d just rather not be on a bunch of medications for the rest of my life.
It came up in conversation that almost all of my anxiety these days is coming from financial terror. So it almost made me laugh at the end of the conversation when the doctor reminded me that I needed to pay $300 for today’s appointment and took my credit card number for that purpose, despite the fact that I told him I was going to call Blue Shield directly after the call to reinstate my insurance (while I’d paid my bill online, the site directed me to call to have my insurance reinstated which I didn’t have time to do before my appointment because I’d only found out about the appointment at 8 AM).
When I called Blue Shield, I found out I had more to pay before I could get my insurance back, totally almost $1000. So with my $300 appointment and my $1000 Blue Cross bill, I ended up paying $1300 for a doctor’s appointment, which left me with less than $900 in my bank account (sorry this is starting to feel like an SAT question LOL). I’d planned to drive up to my family in Sonoma County for Easter, but spending $200 on gas with so little in my account felt like a stupid thing to do with so little in my account.
I was devastated by this. It was sad to not be able to see my family because I feel like I miss so many family things - they all live within 20-30 minutes of each other up there and I’m about a 7-8 hours drive away (I have to drive now because of Satie). I have just had so many moments like this in my life. Just reminders that I’m not where I want to be. Reminders of what I’m striving for - security.
When I was twenty-nine, I sliced my hand open washing a Marta water glass from CB2. It needed stitches, but I couldn’t go to the doctor because I had no insurance. So my architect boyfriend glued it back together. “How am I twenty seven and I can’t take care of my body, I can't go to a doctor?”
When I was thirty, I was so overwhelmed with financial anxiety that I got shingles. Again, I could not go to the doctor so I laid in my bed for days with searing pain on the side of my face and down the back of my neck.
I write about these things because they are important to me and my story, but I also write about them because I feel like they’re indicative of my generation. Millennials were raised by one of the most affluent generations in history and we’ve had a tough time figuring out how to get our footing through a Great Recessions and a Pandemic. This is my story, but it’s also the story of a large portion of my generation.
When people look at me, they often see my privilege. The online presence I’ve built, the book I wrote, the TV shows and other hosting work I’ve done. What they don’t see is what these opportunities cost me physically and mentally. You don’t see a lot of single people doing what I do because it’s actually nearly impossible to do without financial and logistical help from a partner.
My life has been a wonderful undulation of highs and lows. And I’ve tried to be as good a sport about it as possible - you don’t necessarily control the opportunities thrown your way so if you choose a potentially tumultuous career path, you have to be ready to take the bad with the good.
Upon finding out I couldn’t go to Easter, all I could do was lay down. My body just felt heavy, my limbs immovable. I laid on the sofa in my little Spanish bungalow, garish Bret Easton Ellis sun streaming through the windows, feeling gratitude that I had created such a nice place to live while also giving in to utter exhaustion.
I’m exhausted because for three years my wheels have been spinning. I’ve bene pivoting over and over trying to figure out how to make things work. And to my credit I’ve made it all work somehow, just barely. I’m still alive and I still own a house. But that doesn’t mean that the constant pressure to innovate ways to garner income doesn’t get exhausting. Spinning your wheels is exhausting. I’m an exceptionally resourceful and inventive person, that is a gift I am thankful for. But invention, reinvention, and reinvention of reinvention gets tiring and that day on my sofa I just needed to stop spinning for a minute.
Right now, I’m in a situation that feels pretty impossible. My stress is financial and I know the only way to get past it is to seek financial security. And finishing my kitchen and getting the expense of my cabin off my hands is a big part of seeking financial security.
Lest you think I’m just taking this all laying down, here are the proactive steps I’ve taken towards controlling my income so that I am no longer reliant on brand partnerships, which have proven in the last few years to not be a very stable source of income because of how volatile the economy (and thus marketing budgets) is:
I’ve started this Substack, which is growing over time and once established can hopefully provide 50% or more of my monthly income needs.
I have a few trips planned with Trova Trip, a company that allows influencers to travel and get paid for it.
I’m planning a series of income-producing retreat workshops at Londo Lodge.
I’m getting my house ready to rent out to Yosemite visitors.
I’ve revised my interior design billing processes to ensure I am being paid adequately for my time, billing more frequently/regularly than I used to. I am working with a pilot client on this and will expand to more if the profit matches the amount of work I put in (which it never has in the past).
These are some of the blessings of the past few years, being forced to think of ways to diversify my income. And I think that will serve me going forward, even if the process of finding these income streams is exhausting.
In addition to all of the above, I’ve also greatly altered my plan for the kitchen. Originally, this was going to be the first “legit” (ie non-DIY) renovation in the house. But after the past few months I realized I can’t afford custom cabinetry, which comprised the bulk of my remaining costs (I’ve gotten bids between $50,000 and $175,000). I have come up with a DIY plan to combine Home Depot and Ikea cabinets to imitate the layout I’d wanted for the kitchen originally and the plan is now to go up and do a lot of the work myself with help from family and friends. Here’s hoping it doesn’t look terrible!
I am aware I am in a low moment of my life. And I’ve been in this position many times before. You don’t get to where I am without taking risks, and they don’t always work out. But my goal this time, while I am in this valley, is to figure out how to use this experience to help me reach one of my New Year’s Resolutions: to be more resilient. I see this moment in my life as growing pains, basically the emotional and logistical costs of getting into home ownership for someone who didn’t have help from family or a partner to buy my house. No one told me it would be easy and I didn’t expect it to be, but I’m ready for things to stabilize a bit.
I’m an idealist, which sometimes means I can’t handle situations that aren’t perfect. The two things that go first when I am overwhelmed are my physical and mental health. I get depressed and down on myself. I gain weight and have skin breakouts. And the last few years have been mostly that. Mostly averse effects from being upset about my situation.
I want this time to be different, I think in part because I am forty. Being this age, you kind of look around and assess your life. And for me, I’ve been mostly feeling like I didn’t like most of it so far. And that sucks. So now my mind is concentrated on changing patterns. I’ve worked way too hard to hate my life this much. How can I alter my mindset so I can appreciate my life more. I don’t want to be an ungrateful, bitter person so how do I take this valley and make it a growth experience?
The pattern of my life has always been that something shitty happens, then something amazing happens, then something shitty, and so on. But I always come out better than before, regardless of how low the low was. I know I’m in the shitty part and I want to figure out how to enjoy being in here, because honestly more of life is the working-towards-something part than the finally-getting-payoff part. I want to enjoy the in-between because I want to enjoy my life.
I’m kind of swinging back and forth between seeking positivity and letting myself have natural responses to stressful conundrums. So you understand the type of decisions I’ve been making, here are a few:
A brand has contracted to pay you $30,000 to shoot a space with their furnishings. This is for a few different shoots and you are on the last one. You have $6,100 in your bank account and the materials you’ll need to prep the shoot are $5500. You won’t get paid until your last social media post goes live, which can be up to five months after you’ve submitted the images for approval. And brands can take up to twelve months to pay you. Do you:
A. Spend the money and shoot the space as quickly as possible knowing that it could be a year before you get money (so the sooner you’re done, the better)?
B. Hold off on spending any money until you get paid for a few other things, knowing that the longer you take to turn in your content the longer the brand can Net90 you into oblivion?
You need to renovate your now-empty kitchen to be able to rent out your house on Airbnb to help alleviate your financial anxiety, which over the past few years has obliterated your sanity and left your body for the worse. You have a $5000 paycheck coming. Do you:
A. Spend $4000 of that money to renovate the kitchen, not knowing where more money is coming?
B. Hold off on spending any money on renovation, thus ruining any possibility that you will be able to rent your house out for the summer, thus kicking the can down the road and ensuring your financial anxiety will last even longer?
These are the kind of decisions I’ve been having to make and while I get that I’m lucky to even own a home, I also just genuinely don’t know what the right thing to do is.
On Friday, after I spent all day on the sofa the day before, I got up and went to the bathroom to check out a bald spot on the back of my head. It had appeared a few weeks before and I was pretty convinced it was just an accident from shaving the back of my neck (which I don’t remember doing but have done in the past so it’s not out of the realm of possibility). When I’d shared a story about it on Instagram, a lot of people thought it might be stress-induced alopecia. It was on the very back of my head and is shaped like a quarter so it didn’t look like male pattern baldness. It just looked like a chunk of my hair was missing.
When I looked in the mirror on Friday I noticed that not only had the hair NOT grown back in the spot where it was missing, there was another dime-sized chunk missing on the other side of my head, still not close to an area typical of hair loss in men. Luckily, the overwhelming depression of the day before had passed.
There is no reward for being miserable.
There is no reward for being hard on yourself.
There is no reward for hating your life.
I’m going to the doctor today to see if she can help me figure out what is going on with these bald spots. But in my gut I feel like it’s something stress related. And I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t worried about how much the copay and potential medications I might get are going to cost me, if they’re going to wipe out my bank account and make it impossible to travel to Londo Lodge tomorrow to check on what exactly is going on up there that’s causing the electricity usage to be higher while I’m away thank it is while I’m there.
One of the downsides of being someone who has shared his life for more than ten years with thousands of strangers is that I am so used to anticipating peoples’ nitpicky opinions about me and my life that I often see the outside perspective of how any experience I have will be perceived before I see my own version of it. It has been a blessing to have people read my words, to have people see me. But it’s come at a cost. The cost is that I don’t really get to have a shitty experience without viewing it through the lens of my greatest detractors. I can’t be sad about anything without hearing someone tell me I’m being entitled. I can’t be angry about anything without hearing someone tell me I’m spoiled. People see the opportunities I’ve had and they resent them. They see everything I’ve been able to do without seeing what it cost. Without seeing all the things I wasn’t able to do, opportunities I wanted that didn’t pan out. Like most people, for every “win” I have a dozen “losses.” But people only see the wins.
So here I am. I’m in a situation that feels impossible. I have to get my kitchen done before summer or I will continue to suffer, despite my attempts to be more resilient, to roll with the punches.
I thought a long time before deciding to write this post. Kelly encouraged me to do so because writing about challenges helps other people going through similar challenges. But the seeing-myself-from-the-outside-first part of me thought it sounded like complaining. I don’t want to be seen as someone who complains all the time (except as a joke because I think that’s funny). But it’s all that’s on my mind and sometimes writing things out helps me process them and figure out ways to progress forward.
A wonderful woman who follows me on Instagram offered me free virtual nutrition and workout planning help. And I took her up on it because I want to try and use this low moment as a way to show myself I can experience hardship without falling apart and letting my mind and body go. I’ve been doing her program for a week and have been having some decent progress. If I can get through this valley with my health intact I will be so proud of myself. A downside to being as overly sensitive as I am is that I let everything affect me. So I’m trying my best not to let this bout of financial anxiety affect me.
When I made the decision to rent my LA Bungalow, I did so with the best information I had at the time. I had booked a lot of work, it seemed like the pandemic was ending, then Delta came. That is was it is. If I’d known the next two years were going to be the same roller coaster as early covid, I probably would have made a different decision. I can’t regret the decision because I made it with the best information I had at the time. Now all I can do is try to solutionize my way out of it. The biggest piece of the solution has always been renting out Londo Lodge to get myself out of what is basically a double mortgage situation. Renting my house out has been the light at the end of the tunnel for almost two years now.
At this point, I can see that light. Like I can see that I am close to crossing the finish line. I just need to finish that damn kitchen! But I actually don’t know how that is going to happen. I don’t know where that money is going to come from. And rather than pretend I have all the solutions, I’m just living in that uncertainty trying to accept it for what it is. Uncertain just like that last three years.
This is the downside of working freelance. The price you pay for being able to control your own work and life is this. It’s uncertainty. Yesterday I was talking to my sister and she asked me if I had thought of getting a 9-5 job. Of course I had. When you spins your wheels for three years straight, you think of everything. I think ultimately that might be a kneee jerk reaction that in the long run would leave me less successful, but nothing is off the table at this point. I’m open to solutions.
I can see a light at the end of the tunnel. I’m just not entirely sure how I’m going to make it through. I have confidence that I will make it, I just don’t know how I will do that. It’s an odd place to live but I’m trying my best to be at peace with it.
What would you do in my situation?
Ok, hear me out. This may be a bit out of the box but, what the hell...
You have so many readers and followers who have GENUINE AFFECTION for you, because of your talent, of course, but also because of your honesty and willingness to be real and vulnerable. I'm sure lots of them read this post and wished they could help! I think you should start a kitchen renovation Kickstarter!
I'm willing to bet you could at least raise the funds for the cabinets, if not more. You could host a one time event, (after ironing out any security concerns), at the house for those who contributed, or maybe offer a small, one-time discount to participants who want to rent the space, (10% off? One free night when you book a week?). I think EH had a similar type of event for her blog readers at her mountain house.
We all feel like we are part of your life already, (and Satie's!) watching every little improvement you make and learning from you. Why not give your followers the chance to participate?
Oh, Orlando. You are speaking the language of so many of us in this moment, and I'm so grateful for your candor and vulnerability. If there is an enduring truth about the impacts of the pandemic, I believe it's made us lonelier, more isolated, and more uncertain about how our lives intersect with others around us. Your voice today has made me feel less alone.
I've realized over and over again in recent weeks just how universally traumatic the pandemic was, and how little we've been able to do to address that trauma. Those of us in marginalized communities in the US are also watching our rights be stripped away, our loved ones be legislated out of public life, our children threatened (note that in this context, "marginalized" basically means "everyone who is not a wealthy cisgender heterosexual White Christian Republican man"). All of us are bearing witness to the increasingly dangerous and chaotic impacts of climate change all around us, reaching our lives and homes. All of us are making decisions on a wing and a prayer, based on a future that has never felt more unknowable, more uncertain. It has been SO HARD. And somehow we're being convinced that the struggles we're having now are divorced from the last three years, and that we are failing if we are not rising and grinding or killing it or whatever. It's bullshit. We all need to go easier on ourselves, and embrace the reality that we are all healing while continuing to struggle through such profound instability.
And within that nearly unbearable context, you have been so, so brave. You have consistently made choices that were about your own joy, immediate or future. You have put the needs of others ahead of your own. You have done right by your family, by your perfect dog, by yourself (even when it doesn't feel like it). You have gone through the hard fucking work of living, every day, and you continue to strive to make the world a more beautiful place for the people around you, not just yourself. You've pivoted, you've learned from your mistakes, you've grown and changed and endured. That's all worth celebrating, no matter what.
And now you're finding your way through the darkness, with continued optimism for the light to come. Which is amazing.
I have so much faith in your ability to make the choices that will serve you best. I have no particular advice to offer, mostly because I think your decisions will have to be determined by your own personal tolerance levels for risk, insecurity, uncertainty, and so forth. But I do really trust you to do what is best for you. AND I know, confidently, that the light is just around the corner for you. You have a very large group of digital friends cheering you on.