Escape to Liberty

This is my first post on this blog.

This is kind of cool to have a blog again. I have never used a site like this before, but it looks very easy to use. I like that. I used to use Open Diary, where you had a list of entries with titles, and clicked on them to read them; I liked the organized layout of having a table of contents. That site crashed, and I went to another, private diary site with the same layout. I still have it, but rarely write in it anymore.

I decided to try this kind, with the posts all one after another. It might work better for quicker, shorter posts, or for posting whatever's on my mind without having to think about it too much.

One of my favorite blogs on the Internet, that of Susan Senator, is on Blogger, therefore I decided to try it.

So, I just moved to a new and very strange town in the middle of nowhere upstate New York, which I had to do for health reasons. So most of this will probably be about my journey as I try to figure out how to make a new life here and try to figure out how to converse with the natives. :)

I am 24 years old, and from Maine originally. I have lived in Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Montana all in the last year or two in my quest to find a safe place to live. I have something called multiple chemical sensitivity (go to http://www.libertyschoolmold.com/ for more information), and I react to almost every chemical known to man, and anything fragranced, including new paint, new carpet, most old carpet, perfumes, air fresheners, floor finishes, pesticides, so on and so forth.

So, for two years, I tried to find a place to live. For two years, I couldn't even walk into an apartment - any apartment - without having a severe chemical reaction. In seconds.
I did manage to live in a few apartments for durations of a few days to two months, but they all left me far sicker than I was before them, and are unfortunate memories and mistakes in my mind.

After two years or so of searching and going back and forth between unworkable situations at my parents', I recieved an email from someone on an MCS (multiple chemical sensitivity) email list. She was commenting on something I had posted not related to housing. She linked to her website.

That website, which I linked above, single handedly changed my life.

Not because I didn't know what MCS was; unfortunately, I know all too well. But because it was the single best website I have ever seen on the web about MCS, and it blew me away, how well it was organized, the quality of the writing, the user friendliness of it. I had never seen a website that explained what MCS was half so well.

If her website hadn't been so amazing, I probably wouldn't have bothered to email her back. I get a lot of emails every day, and sometimes conversations fizzle out pretty quickly without something to instigate them. If I hadn't emailed her back after the first email, though, I wouldn't be living where I am today, and I am thankful for that.

So, I emailed her back and told her how much I loved her website. And we started a conversation. And in the midst of that conversation, she mentioned her husband had just built an three unit apartment building for people with MCS. For the past two years I had been open to moving anywhere that seemed feasible, anywhere in the country or even continent (I briefly considered a few Canadian options) except for the South (sorry, Southerners, but you got a bit too much of that hot weather), so I was immediately interested. I was in Montana with my mom at the time, but had just made plane tickets to go back to my dad's in Maine, to a situation that would have been extremely difficult and most likely intolerable for all of us, because it was my only option.

When she told me it was in upstate New York, that was all I needed to know. I asked her, "How soon can I move?" No, actually, I asked her a bunch of questions and discussed it with her and my family for about a month before deciding to make the plunge and move. It was walking distance from shops, and they agreed to help me in some areas that I needed help with; that was all I needed.

I flew into Albany, New York, from Montana, on November 1, 2008.

I had never been to upstate New York or really any of New York before; NYC a couple times as a kid but that hardly counts. But I was ready for a change and willing to take the chance.

So, after two years of searching, and a dozen or so moves in that time, I have finally arrived, in a small town called Liberty. Liberty: a name that stands for freedom, hope, peace. A name that suggests liberty - liberty to do as you wish; liberty to be who you are; liberty from persecution of any kind, especially that of harmful chemicals.

Liberty may not be all I am looking for in a town (or very far from it), but I have accomplished the impossible: I found an apartment I can tolerate living in, built specifically for people who have multiple chemical sensitivity. In two years of looking, I never thought that would be possible. So every time I get depressed over what I don't have, and what the town doesn't have, I need to just remind myself of that: at least I have a place to live. A place to live that doesn't make me sick. That trumps all.

So, welcome to the start of my new life, one that will hopefully last longer than two weeks, or two months, this time.