On Financial Insecurity

Yesterday wasn't a good day. It was very far from a good day, I was in the midst of something of a continuous anxiety attack that had started the night before. I ended up writing this post on Bluesky shortly before passing out asleep for the rest of the day:

So what's going on? Well, that's a lot to unpack. According to my therapists (both my previous and current one), I show signs of PTSD in a number of areas, one of which is financially oriented. To understand this, I need to take you back about ten years, to when I'd just moved to Berlin, I'd been at a tech job for a year, done fantastic work, saved them tens of thousands of euros a month, and made it possible for them to launch their service. But during that time, I'd also faced a 2-3 month depressive episode due to a housing insecurity issue, my landlord had moved back into our WG, and simply put he did not understand a young queer trans woman and that undercurrent of a lack of safety at home triggered a depressive episode. I ended up being pushed out of my job at that company (but they kept the misogynist they hired to push me out on staff for 5+ years, even though I'd raised that he was problematic when he first started).

Anyway, after that job collapsed in the middle of 2016, I started looking for a new job, and kept finding closed doors. I picked up some freelance work, where the client stiffed me on the bill (but did offer me a healthy salad because he felt bad about it when we prepared to take legal action).

At the start of 2017, I picked up a contract position with a startup, but was subsequently given a mythical man month task: basically rewriting their entire application from scratch, without flow charts or design references, because they'd managed to screw up state management that bad. The hourly rate for this contract was €50, which in 2017 was both pretty decent for the company. They insisted I change my visa and join them full time, a month later they fired me. Why? Because according to them I "wasn't writing code fast enough", when I asked if anyone else on the team could write the code faster, I was met with a "no".

That broke me. I still remember breaking down in tears walking through the entrance hallway of the building their office was in. That night I penned an article that gained me some infamy: Tech, This Is Good Bye.

Tech, This is Good Bye.

If you’d asked me a week ago, I would not have told you that this is an article I was expecting to write. Unfortunately, today the company…

That was the start to the hardest year of my life. I still have no idea how I made it through that year. I simply don't know. People in the local community did rally around me and help by donating groceries or giving me money. Half way through the year I was assaulted in a homophobic attack, which Berlin Police failed to prosecute, which caused me to have to abandon a work contract because I couldn't physically leave the house without having an anxiety attack. I was very close to being unable to pay my rent on several occasions, which would have left me homeless.

Some how I made it through 2017, and at the end of it, someone reached out with an unusual work offer: they'd pay me whatever they thought I was worth in order to advise them and help them launch their company & hire their team. Turned out, they really valued my work, which helped me re-enter the tech industry in 2018.

However, 2017 left its scars in me deep. I'd unknowingly developed some sort of PTSD that year related to money and financial insecurity. I write this now in 2026, and those scars are still as deep and strong as ever.

I currently have enough money to pay myself for January, €3000 to cover my expenses: housing, food, recurring bills, health insurance. The basic necessities.

That's been the way things are for several years now, after I supported myself on my own savings in 2023 to contribute to building the open social web. At the end of 2023, I had another depressive episode because I was struggling to get enough support for my work, and a contract I'd been trying to secure was taking much longer to materialise than I'd expected. Things looked bleak and I basically collapsed into a depressive blackhole for a month, and it was only when I asked a friend of a friend for help that I started to get back on track (she was a dominant type and had absolutely no problem bossing me around for a bit to get me back on track, and later became my girlfriend for two years).

Things in 2024 were okay, as that contract had finally come through and there was plenty of work, but I was also battling a heart condition which required my heart being medical restarted in the emergency room and then subsequent heart surgery a few weeks later.

In 2025, my contract concluded, and I was working on an NLNet grant I'd secured, but it was constantly not enough money coming in. I was regularly in the red each month, and balancing freelance work and grant work was difficult to say the least. It was basically a year of continuous financial insecurity.

Now today, I'm back there in that place in 2017, unsure of how I'm going to pay my rent next month. I haven't been able to take a break or really buy anything nice for myself for several years. I am quite literally burnt out, but I keep on going.

Some how I survive, but what I'd really like for 2026 is to thrive. I want to do the good work I'm doing and get compensated for it. I can't keep working for free. It just doesn't make ends meet.

The best way to support me and the work I do across both the Atmosphere and Fediverse is to hire me, I promise you'll find me a valuable asset to your team. I know open social protocols inside out, I know OAuth like the back of my hand, and I know how to build and when to ask "should I really be building this?"

The second best way to support my work is to donate €5 or €10 each month, which adds up and gives me the ability to do all the freely available work that I do.

Support Emelia Smith (@thisismissem)

Fund her work on the open social web, improving trust & safety, and making contributions to various other open-source projects

If none of those are an option, boosting this post to your followers is always greatly appreciated:

I can't quite explain to you the absolute chaos financial insecurity causes me, where my sleep cycle becomes completely out of sync and erratic, nor the headaches and mental distress that it triggers. It feels like brain fog meets exhaustion meets continuous fight or flight, and it sucks. It means I can't do the work I want to do, I can't build the open social web and push things forwards. Every interaction is strained and tainted by that financial stress. I feel like I'm right back in 2017, struggling to exist in the world.

I don't want to just barely survive, I want to thrive and fulfil my full potential, and do fantastic things. Help me achieve that.