in March 2015 I got notice that I was being evicted from my home of five years in Newtown. The eviction was so the owner could renovate the place and put it back on the market at higher rent, letting them raise the rent quicker than they could with a continuous lease. 

I tried for months to find a new place, having severe panic attacks, and PTSD flashbacks, breaking down near daily in crying fits. Eventually the day came that I had to move out, and I moved my stuff in with my auntie in desperation. It seemed okay for a week or so, but then she invited over one of my childhood abusers without giving me notice, trapping me in a confrontation, and I realised it wasn't a safe place to stay, so for the next few months, I couch surfed. Couch surfing was the most stable I'd felt in years, with the support of friends, but it didn't last, eventually good will dried up.

In desperation again, I moved in to the first place that accepted me, a tiny sharehouse too small for my stuff, too expensive for my pension, and, they didn't tell me, but it was infested with thousands of european cockroaches, swarms the size i've never seen before or since, something which would only get worse as summer came. I'd already lost a lot of weight through the homelessness, and now, financially stressed and without a safe clean place to prepare food, i kept loosing weight. after a couple weeks, I was back to couch surfing. A few more months, and a lot of my stuff abandoned because of roach infestation - they moved in to the cooling holes on electronics, cut holes in to packaging of food. stressed and hopeless, I became really badly suicidal, and one day, I tried to check myself in to RPA psych unit. They didn't accept me, saying they had no free beds, and sent me home. I tried to kill myself that night. I failed, obviously, but.. it was during this time of hopelessness, that a friend moved out of newtown, and a room became free in one of those mythical old newtown sharehouses, where the rent is okay, and the owners seem less evil than most. I moved in there a few months in to 2016, ending the year long insecure housing / homelessness.

Then my pension was reviewed by centrelink because of the liberal's budget measure, which took like six months to clear up, which was a cruel and mismanaged process from the start. two years on i'm starting to feel secure enough to nest and get comfy. I'm terrified of another eviction but i don't know what i can do to say safe. I nearly died last time. I don't want to be homeless again. I can't handle this. I'd run away to some other country if I could, but i know pretty much none of them would give me a pension, and I can't work, so i feel trapped, here on the edge of survival