Annissa Fernandez

Annissa Fernandez discusses the struggles of escaping an abusive relationship and how her and her child have adapted to their new life in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“I feel like this was the worst time to make any kind of life changing decision.”
— Annissa Fernandez

Annotations

1. Domestic Violence - The Power and Control Wheel, also known as the Duluth Model (because of its genesis in Duluth, MN), is most likely the method that Annissa's therapist used to help guide her towards identifying an abusive situation. The wheel model assumes he/him pronouns for the abuser and she/her pronouns for the survivor, in an effort to call out the inherent disparities of power within societal structures. Still, they emphasize that domestic abuse can happen to people of any gender or sexuality.
2. Domestic Violence, Pandemic - If survivors are quarantined with their abuser, the control methods shift towards their new insulated setting. According to psychiatrist Judith Lewis Herman, new scenarios allow for perpetrators of domestic abuse to “reinvent” the ways in which they seek control over their victims. Amanda Taub investigates interpersonal stories of real women who are constantly surveyed by partners or family members. Taub recounts one victim’s pandemic circumstances, stating that, “He insists on total surveillance at all times.If she tries to lock herself in a room, he kicks the door until she opens it.” Lockdown gifts this new found promise of total control.
3. EISS Resources - Early Intervention Support Services, shortened to EISS, is an outpatient program that provides immediate intervention for adults facing serious emotional or psychiatric distress. These programs are an alternative to hospital admission or emergency room admission. Depending on the county, the level of help you need, and other factors, the program can be as short as 30 days or as expansive as 6 weeks, as Annissa mentions. Several EISS programs throughout New Jersey are making telehealth adjustments as needed due to COVID-19.
4. Play Therapy - Play Therapy is a more recently acknowledged method of therapy for children typically ages 3-12. Play Therapy uses the act of play as a method to walk through and understand the child’s conflicts and circumstances. According to mental health professionals, play functions as the child’s language, and the toys are their words. Play Therapy is still performed over Zoom, but the transition from in-person play to virtual can be jarring for patients who formerly had in-office sessions. However, according to Play Therapist Jennifer Taylor, "play therapy at home comes with a sort of 'home field advantage' for kids. When they’re at home, kids might be more likely to express themselves openly, without taking time to ‘warm up.’” Each child being considered for this type of therapy can have different reactions based on circumstances like housing and stability. In Annissa's child’s case, the combination of being houseless, experiencing the transition from in-person to virtual, and the general behavioral shifts from escaping a violent home, contributed to her response. Virtual Play Therapy should be considered on an individual basis.
5. Food Insecurity There is a bidirectional relationship between food insecurity and housing precariousness, and this relationship ultimately affects one’s overall health. Those experiencing food insecurity often have a chronic level of stress when they are not sure where their next meal will come from. This chronic stress can have a flurry of socio-economic and personal consequences and can result in feelings of isolation, depression, anger, and frustration. Lacking agency over one’s access to food is often one of the top stressors of housing precariousness.
6. Parenting During Crisis - Parenting during a crisis is a process that every parent must navigate in order for both them and their child to feel stable. USA Today categorizes the different types of stress that a child might go through as either tolerable stress or toxic stress. Tolerable stress is defined by stress which is manageable because of the presence of a supportive parent figure.Toxic stress is defined by situations that children endure without the assistance of a supportive parent figure. Annissa does exactly what professionals recommend to do while parenting during crisis: introduce something unique into your routine. Annissa introduces hand written cards and notes to establish something positive that her child can look forward to every day in an effort to create a tangible support system.
7. Support System - A social network can be vital for a person experiencing housing precariousness: that support system can be the difference between having a shelter or not. People with a limited network tend to fall harder into precariousness due to the lack of help from a social network. The lack of a network can directly impact one's mental health, stress level, and coping abilities.

TRANSCRIPT

Interview conducted by Emma Young

Highland Park, New Jersey

July 17, 2020

Transcription by Rutgers Oral History Archive

Annotations by Mikayla Luchun

0:00

Testing, testing, and we appear to be recording and so we will leave you.  

Thank you.

And by all means, take your mask off now.  [laughter]

Got it, thank you.

Thank you.

Bye, bye.  

Bye.

Bye.  Okay, hello.

Hi, how are you?

Good.  How are you?

Good.

So, we’re recording August 17, 2020 at the Reformed Church of Highland Park in Highland Park, New Jersey. So, we should get some baseline data down first.  This is something they want us to input right at the beginning of the interview, before we transcribe everything.

Okay.

So, your name, actual of course, but your name.

Annissa Fernandez.

Okay. Your age, or your age range, that’s totally fine too.

Twenty-six.  

Yes. And, if you’re comfortable with sharing it, your sex or the gender you identify with?

Female.  

Then, also, if you are comfortable sharing race or ethnicity?

Just Caucasian.  

Place of birth if you’re comfortable providing that.

Brooklyn, New York.

I’m sorry, what?

Brooklyn, New York.  

Last place of residence before relocation?

I was in South Amboy, New Jersey.

South Amboy, New Jersey?

Yes.

Okay, thank you. And your interaction with RCHP-AHC. What service did they provide for you?  

They helped me find a rental property.  

Okay, thank you. That’s all the super boring questions out of the way.  [laughter]  So, I suppose a really broad way of asking would be saying, how did you get here?  What circumstances brought you to RCHP-AHC or the Shelter Project, sorry?

Back in February, I was leaving my home due to domestic abuse and I was put in a domestic violence shelter for a couple of months prior to the COVID.  Then, once the COVID epidemic kind of sprung out, I was very limited to even leave the shelter and find housing.  So, come about April and May they were starting to tell me that I was starting to overstay my welcome and that my time limit there was very limited now. Even though, due to the COVID, I wasn’t able to find housing. So, when I reached back out to the church they had actually had an apartment that was available for me and I was able to move in kind of I don’t want to say before getting thrown out of the shelter because they actually did place me in a motel temporarily in between going from the shelter to the new apartment, but it was really life saving because it made the time in the motel a lot more limited.  

So, when you were still at the shelter, they were enacting some sort of quarantining when the pandemic happened?

Back in March, they had said that we were all in like a sit and stay and that we wouldn’t be able to leave the premises or we would get kicked out of the program which made a lot of things difficult like even grocery shopping. It made it difficult to be able to adhere to a custody agreement I had made with my daughter’s father and she was with me at the time, so she herself wasn’t even able to leave the premises from basically March to May when we went to the motel room.  

So, when they sent you to the motel was there still that sort of overseeing that they were having at the shelter or was it just sort of leaving you there?

It was just leaving me there.  

Okay.  

So, I was free to make any trips if I wanted to. 

Okay. When you were nearly kicked out of the domestic abuse shelter, did they give you any resources other than the motel room permit?

No.  

Okay.  How did you find out about RCHP-AHC, the service, or the church?  

I was going to a therapy program, like the EISS. I can’t remember what it was called but it was like a six-week program and my therapist at that time had mentioned a PATH program and she had put me in touch with a PATH worker who works here.  

[Annotation 3]

[Editor’s note: Projects for Assistance in Transition from Homelessness (PATH) is a federal grant program under the Center for Mental Health Services. PATH provides services for those who are experiencing or at risk of becoming homeless. A key component of this program is to provide mental health services for those experiencing homelessness.]

Okay, so you didn’t have any experience with them beforehand, before asking them for help?

No.

Okay. You said you were in therapy, did your housing insecurity affect your ability to get help like that?  

What do you mean? When, in the shelter?

Yes, when you were in the shelter.

Well, we sort of been doing a lot of sessions through Zoom meetings and stuff. So, the shelter in place didn’t really affect that too much.

Okay. So then, what would say your relationship is with housing stability? Was it after this sort of recent event or has it been a longer relationship with houselessness?

Just after this event.

7:00

Okay. How has the pandemic affected your friends, family, community, et cetera?

Well, I know with my mother– she’s in Staten Island and she was actually getting ready to move from her apartment to a new home and, because of the pandemic, she’s unable to move any kind of furniture because she can’t get any renting trucks and plus she also has a low immune system. So, she’s kind of quarantining herself and she’s a little nervous to leave the home. 

Has that affected your relationship?  The fact that she’s in Staten Island during this and you’re here.

A little bit. It makes it a little harder to really get that kind of support that I need but–

Yes.

But in a way, I think the biggest thing that impacts the relationship with me and her right now, is the fact that she has her own struggles to go through with the COVID and she has her own worries with her own apartment, so she wasn’t really able to be there for me, emotionally and mentally, when I was going through my struggles because she had her own to kind of worry about.  

In regards to your relationship with your family, you have a daughter, yes?

Yes. 

How is this experience having to live in a domestic abuse shelter while also having COVID compounded on it?  How has that affected you being a mother to your daughter and your daughter being a child?  Sorry, that’s a really broad question.

No, that’s okay. It was really challenging because being in the shelter in itself was a whole new experience. There was a lot of other kids there who didn’t always act the most appropriate. So trying to stay firm in what I expect of her was already a challenge and then a little more than a month in, to our stay at the shelter, we were in the lockdown. So it kind of became more amplified of her being exposed to these other children—in picking up these habits from them—and her kind of trying to test the boundaries and see how far she could go with not having to listen to things that we would typically expect.  

I don’t know the age of your daughter. You don’t have to tell me any of that but I am curious also, if in this shelter, if they provided any sort of daycare system?  If they provide any kind of educational system when lockdown happened?

No, they did provide us with a resource. It was a therapeutic. It was called Perform Care. But once the COVID happened the therapist was no longer able to actually come and meet us at the shelter. So, we had to do her therapy sessions through Zoom meetings which was completely uninteresting to her. It was a lot of play, what’s it called, play therapy.  So once it went video it was a whole different experience for her. She was literally getting frustrated with the therapist, and saying, “I just don’t want to talk to you,” because she just wasn’t in the same frame of mind. She was just sitting, staring at a computer and she had to really focus on what she was talking about and it was just uninteresting to her. There was nothing to distract her anymore.

[Editor’s Note: Perform Care NJ focuses on aiding youth with emotional and behavioral needs by personalizing a therapeutic plan for the individual, based on their unique needs. It's a publicly funded service for youth with disabilities, substance use challenges, behavioral problems, and children subject to houselessness or violence.]

Yes, I’d imagine it was just staring at a screen for a child.  It’s not a person, the same way it is for others.

Yes, it wasn’t very interactive like it used to be.

I’m sorry, what?

It wasn’t very interactive like it used to be. Like when she used to come to the shelter and meet with us, she would bring toys for her to play with them. A lot of times I would just see my daughter playing with the toy and just blurting everything out that she felt and was going through but when there were no toys in front of her, she was just closed book.  

[Annotation 4]

11:43

You brought up, which I thought was very interesting, that idea of interaction, it’s not the same during lockdown, during quarantine.  Have you felt that sort of difference in interaction yourself during lockdown, during those months from the domestic shelter?

Yes, I myself had therapy over the Zoom meetings too and that was quite honestly, it became frustrating for me too, especially my daughter being with me twenty-four seven, I felt very restricted on what I was able to talk about. It wasn’t that same comforting feeling of, now I’m in the office, my daughter’s not here and here’s my time to just kind of express what I need to express. So, it was definitely very restricting and I even noticed, in my daughter’s aspect, she had started doing her school work at home through the computer and the iPad and that was a completely different experience for her too. Some of the games she took to and actually enjoyed and she would do more work than she needed to that day but other things, they just couldn’t grab her attention on it which was a big difference to her because she really excels academically. So it wasn’t that she didn’t understand the work or it was too complicated for her, she just genuinely was bored with it.  It was frustrating for both her and I because I needed her to do it so she would pass for the day but she just– she would just kind of stomp her feet and be like, “I just don’t want to.”  

My nephew was stir crazy at home.

Yes, there was other things she wanted to do.

So, when you were feeling that sort of like, you described it as frustrating.  It was not the same.  Did you ever find some sort of outlet, if this therapy wasn’t the same for you?  Do you have any sort of creative outlets?  

I do a lot of writing and drawing. So a lot of the times, especially after my daughter would fall asleep, that’s kind of how I would try and kind of, I guess, collect myself. Sometimes I even– after I would finish writing how I was feeling throughout that week, that’s kind of what I would focus on during my therapy sessions. Sometimes I would actually hold up the book to the screen and let my therapist read it so I didn’t have to worry about my daughter hearing me reading it off. But other than that, it was really hard and challenging because I was focusing on everything. At the same time, I was focused on trying to find an apartment. I was focused on trying to make sure my parenting was still in effect or trying to focus on her school work, and then my therapy and all the things I needed to do with the workers at the shelter. We were also required to do daily chores, so then I also had to focus on my chores and it felt very overwhelming.  

15:12

You mentioned also, they didn’t let you leave to even do something like grocery shopping. 

Yes.

So, what about basic things like getting food and feeding your child and things like that?

They continued to provide food but the thing is, it’s a communal living situation there. So, food goes very quick and a lot of the time, before the lockdown, what I would do is I would buy food and I would actually leave it in my car that way I didn’t have to share it with the rest of the house. So the, we weren’t even able to kind of– I would have to keep the car a couple blocks away and I wasn’t even able to get to my car to get any of my food.  So, we kind of just for a while relied on the shelter’s food from the food pantry and stuff. In the last month that we were there, they kind of started drawing back a little bit of the restrictions and they lets us go a certain amount of feet away but we have a severe protocol when we came back. We had to wipe down all the groceries, take a shower and then immediately wash our clothes.  

[Annotation 5]

Wow, shower, yes, that is a lot.

Yes, especially when you have kids. I know my friend who was staying there too, she had five kids and you cannot leave your kids unattended there. You have to always bring them with you. You can’t leave them in a different room without you. They have to be with you at all times. So, when she would go grocery shopping, I remember seeing her come and they would wipe everything down and they would literally, since there were five kids plus her, they would wait in line to take a shower and it was– I’m sure really frustrating.  

Looks like a conveyor system. Yes, that also strikes me that’s a lot of children constantly with their parents in a building and a room.

Yes.

It also makes me think, you were saying you have a creative outlet.  Is there anything that you have your daughter do to release any kind of tension she might be feeling or anything?

I try but she is a completely different person from me. So she’s not always interested in writing and drawing. Usually, from what I’ve noticed, my daughter likes to distract herself with the iPad and that’s something I’ve always really struggled with especially when she gets upset, that’s kind of what she does. She kind of blocks out her feelings and she’ll have to go watch videos or she plays games which sometimes I prefer the games because I can kind of monitor what kind of games she has. So, I think at least ninety percent of her games are all educational. So, I don’t know if exactly– if she finds comfort in doing things like that. Because I know she’s that kind of kid. She actually really likes math. So sometimes for her just playing around with numbers and math is very– it helps her stay preoccupied but I’m still trying to find out what kind of outlet works out for her.  

I mean, I’m sure creativity is, like, all kinds of things.

Yes.

What’s to say that’s not creative to do math in your free time?  [laughter]  Sorry, I’m just going through.  We went through sort of out of order, so I’m just trying to pick out where to start again.

That’s okay, I’m sorry.

19:30

No, it’s totally fine. This is very fluid, I like it, very conversational.  So, this is a church.  So, you contacted a church for this service.  Is there any sort of faith-based or religion that you ascribe to that made you feel more comfortable at a church or were they just a service that you could use?

Not really. I actually wasn’t aware that it wasn’t going to be a church. I was just told it was just something called a PATH program. I had linked up with one of the workers. His name was Jason and we were talking for a couple of weeks and then I also was speaking to someone named Jim who is the one who helped me get the apartment. So, I was kind of. I don’t know. I mean, I kind of felt comfortability in just who they were but other than that I liked the fact that it ended up being a church. It seems like they have their own little community here. It’s very welcoming.  

[Editor’s note: RCHP Affordable Housing Corporation is a service that runs affordable housing for low-income residents across central New Jersey. They renovate properties for low-income families to move into their new home. They have three programs running currently, Accompany Now!, Still Waters, and Interfaith-RISE.]

So, have you been interacting with the religious community of the church?  Or, is it just the community that’s servicing?

I want to say not exactly. I haven’t interacted with any of the religious events that they’ve had yet. I’m not even sure. I tried to find out what they’re doing especially since COVID, I know it’s very limited. But I just kind of interact with the staff here. They have some programs where they helped me get stuff from my home. So, I’ve been working with some of the workers doing that and also now I’m starting to kind of volunteer to kind of help when I don’t have my daughter to pass the time and also just to kind of give back and say thank you for the help that they’ve given me.

That’s great.  So, just if you’re comfortable clarifying, do you have any religious orientation?  No.  

Not really.  

Okay.

I grew up Catholic but we kind of– I remember we stopped going to church when I was a preteen, so, I mean, I still have, like, a lot of those values in me, but I’m just kind of, I don’t know, I just kind of stay single.  [laughter]  

Okay.  Did being houseless ever affect your creativity like your ability to write or draw, or anything like that?

A little bit. It was definitely kind of like a hopeless feeling at first, especially because leaving my house due to domestic abuse, I literally just left with the clothes on my back. So for a while it was just mentally challenging to kind of accept the fact that this is where I was and that I was leaving everything behind. I kept, I guess, focusing too much on wanting what I left behind in regards to even things like my clothes. I had cats that I had to leave behind. So, it was just mentally overwhelming, trying to put myself in the present moment. So, for a long time, I kind of just brushed off my creativity, I guess in a way to wallow in the sadness that I was going through. Honestly, what kind of brought it back was at first my daughter was the one cheering me up and then for the first couple weeks she was actually really happy about everything. She was kind of like doing a lot of, like, kind of like, dances and she was thanking everyone, saying, “Thank you for helping my mommy, and keeping my daddy away from her.”  Then, I don’t really know what happened. This was prior to the COVID but something just kind of sunk in with her and got her upset. So every night I would kind of draw her little notes or cards that way, when she woke up, she had something special to see before going to school and stuff, and that’s kind of, like, what got me back into that creativity, making her special little cards and pictures.

[Annotation 6]

24:48

That’s very sweet. That’s really sweet.  So then, I’m sorry, that’s just really cute.  [laughter]  So, then, wow, we just sped through a lot of these just from you sharing so well. Okay, so would you say that being houseless has sort of, like, over encompassed everything in your life?  Like, it has put everything else on the back burner in a way?  

Currently, yes.

How, I’ll let you go.

It was, I guess, it was a very overwhelming feeling. I guess because there was a lot required of me to also not be homeless. I guess I kind of went to the logical side of my brain and I just kept trying to focus on doing work and figuring out how to get out of this situation.  To put a lot of things– I would typically do a lot of self-care on hold. I put a lot of my emotions on hold. Yes, it was definitely a struggle.  

You said you were focused on working and not being houseless. What work were you originally doing or trying to do and did that change during COVID when the pandemic happened? 

Well, prior to leaving I was a stay at home mom. So before I had left my home in February I was searching for a job. I didn’t exactly land one for very long before going to the shelter. So once I got to the shelter I kind of just told the employer that I was no longer able to work there because the distance was too long. So I was basically– I was told from the workers at the shelter to apply for public assistance where I was put on something called TANF, Temporary Rental Assistance.  So, the kind of work that I had to do was just looking for apartments within that budget that they had given me. I had a lot of meetings, especially before the COVID, it was just running around, going to different offices, talking to different people. Saying my story over and over and over again and them just telling me what my next appointment was, and during the COVID it just became phone calls instead of running around all the time. It just became non-stop phone calls, non-stop Google searches for apartments and stuff and quite honestly it was a lot more frustrating, at that time, because again, my daughter was with me twenty-four seven and I was trying to juggle that kind of work that I had to do and her school work, and making sure that she was focused on that and also just making sure that she was behaving and not doing what she shouldn’t be doing with the other kids and it was exhausting.

[Editor’s Note: Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) is a fixed federal grant of close to 16.5 billion distributed to states annually. Though Annissa found her housing through TANF, it’s typically associated with cash welfare. But TANF can be split according to statewide needs, and often states are given broad discretion on how to distribute their grant. States like New Jersey must divide a good sum of their grant towards rental assistance programs, as many other states do. Typically, TANF helps renters not get evicted, but in the midst of COVID-19, their attention was split between making sure current tenants were surviving, and finding housing for people in need of shelter. Also refer to the Chart Book for TANF from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.]

Yes. You mentioned making sure she was getting her school work done. The change to online learning, did that– how much work did you have to put in for her to be able to do online learning?

I mean, honestly, there probably wasn’t much that I needed to do but my daughter is the kind of person where, if you just put something in front of her and expect her to do it, even if she knows how to, she’s just not going to be enthusiastic to do it, so she really wanted me to do be there and watch her and encourage her.  So, it was kind of hard. I would try to sneak off and do some work on my laptop and then she’d look at me and be like, “You’re helping me.”  She wasn’t happy with me multitasking. So, it was just a lot of trying to give her my attention because she knew what to do. I mean, she didn’t usually have any struggle with understanding the work that needed to be done. She just wanted somebody to cheer her on and give her, her enthusiasm she needed. 

So, online learning, or at least individual learning, it didn’t really fit her learning style?

Yes, it wasn’t as interactive as she wanted it to be, which is honestly– I thought it was going to be great, because, like I said, she loves her iPad and she loves her videos and her games and that’s all it was. It was a bunch of videos and games but she just didn’t want to do it on her own. She wanted to have that attention from me and I mean, quite honestly, the schoolwork would take about two to three hours and then, since everything was strictly online, I had some other things I wanted to implement for her. Like I still wanted her to practice on her writing. I wanted to make sure she was able to go outside and get some fresh air and also have her breakfast, lunch, and dinner and it really became a struggle to do both. I remember one week, I kind of neglected all of my responsibilities, especially because being, like a prior– I was a stay at home mom, I felt really guilty not being able to give her that attention that she wanted and needed. So, I would kind of neglect my responsibilities for the day and then as soon as she would go to sleep, I would get on the laptop and start trying to make up for all that lost time and it was exhausting because I was pushing myself till like two or three o’clock in the morning, writing all these phone numbers to write down, so that way, when I had a chance, I could call them and I didn’t have to do as much work throughout the day while she wanted me and it was– it was hard.  It was a lot of trial and error and I honestly, I don’t think we ever got a specific plan that worked for us.  Like every week was just different.

32:16

Yes, that does sound really exhausting a lot, just constantly. So, during those times when you were being there so much for your daughter and also looking out for the wellbeing of both of you– you already told me about your mother and how she lives too far away to be a very good support system, but did you have a support system nearby where you were? Or friends, or anybody, or people in the shelter with you?

Unfortunately, no. When I was still living in my old home, I didn’t really get the opportunity to make any friends being in that relationship.  So really the only support system I had was my therapist. In time, during the stay, I had made a few friends, but it wasn’t as helpful because I always felt guilty when they would ask me, “So, how are you feeling?  What’s going on?” I didn’t want to say anything because I knew that they had their own struggles that they were going through and I also sometimes, after hearing what some of the other people went through, I kind of felt like, well mine may not be as severe, so I’m just going to keep it to myself. So, I found people to kind of, I guess, socialize with and keep me company and support me in certain ways, but it wasn’t exactly what I needed. I didn’t get the support and the encouragement I needed from them.  

[Annotation 7]

So, could you expand on that feeling of guilt and how that prevented you from maybe reaching out to people?

Well, the guilt feeling is something I still struggle with because I know– When I first left my home in February, even now, like I still kind of struggle to grasp that I was actually a victim of domestic violence that what I was going through actually was domestic abuse and there is the– I don’t know how to explain it but it was kind of, I guess almost like– for some reason, it’s just hard for me to believe. So, I guess because I didn’t necessarily feel like my situation was that picture of domestic abuse that I have in my head, um, it kind of kept me from opening up and reaching out. I don’t know.

35:52

That’s okay, thank you. So, how and what helped you get to that point where you were able to recognize, like, yes that is a valid point of domestic abuse?

I kind of had my therapist from Rutgers embedded in my head. There was just a few experiences I had, especially with that particular therapist, where I– when I would share my story, they would kind of look at me and they’d be like, “Are you serious? Like, how do you not still believe this is domestic abuse?” I remember I had a session with my therapist and she had given me– it was like a diagram. It was, like, this little wheel and it said the circle of domestic abuse and she was like, “Read all the patterns and tell me which ones apply to your relationship?”  It was literally all but one that applied to my relationship.  So, it was kind of– it was moments like that that gave me the eye opener of, you know, that you don’t need to actually get beaten senseless every day for it to be considered domestic abuse. But I don’t know, I still even to this day, like, I teeter with the feeling of, is it, isn’t it. I don’t know. It’s very hard to grasp.  

[Annotation 1]

Yes, is this the therapist you went to Rutgers, is she with one your still with now or you changed it, right?  Yes.

No. Prior to all this happening, I had started therapy in October 2019 and then once I was in the shelter they had put me with the program with the EISS.  It was like a six-week program. There was a crisis therapy. So I think that ended like early April and then once that ended, I still continue with my therapist prior to all this happening.  

38:30

What would you like people who hear your story to know about people who are in your situation and how COVID has affected them?

I mean, I feel like this was the worst time to make any kind of life changing decision. It was a really hard circumstances because, in itself, you know, having to leave my home due to domestic abuse was hard and emotional. I mean, there was a lot I was expected to do and it seems like COVID kind of put it on a severe halt, um, you know, because I even notice with the other people that were staying in the shelter too, they were really having a hard time trying to find any kind of place. We all just kept being told, “Due to COVID, we’re not accepting any new tenants right now.” Or, in regards to the PATH program, there were a lot of people who were supposed to be leaving their home which would open the vacancies for us to move in, but because of the COVID, people are not allowed to be evicted right now. So– it was very hard to kind of feel hopeful, but I am glad I did stay hopeful and I’m very fortunate that there actually was still help that was available. There was just a lot of waiting and staying positive.  

[Annotation 2]

Thank you.

Absolutely.  

I feel like that’s a good place to end it. There are one or two questions that are sort of dangling at the end but it all fit super well.  

Yes.

I suppose, if you feel like, during this time, if you have a relationship to current events. How connected do you feel to current events like protests or just political things even?  Is that even on your radar?

Unfortunately, right now, I think for me, I’m so overwhelmed with everything that I’m still currently kind of going through. It’s hard for me to focus on anything but what’s very close to home. But, yes, it’s not that I don’t support any of the movements that are going on, it’s just hard for me to focus on everything that is going on around me. Like even with the news and keeping up with what’s going on with COVID, to me– that’s– it’s almost like if I open up my attention to that, I feel like I’m taking away from the other things that I need to focus on because, even though I’m out of my situation now, I mean, there’s still a lot of legal things that I’m facing. Unfortunately, my daughter is very emotionally torn right now. She’s going back and forth to visits. It’s almost like my plate is too full to focus on anything else.  

Yes, of course, yes. I think that’s it. I think that was great, thank you.

Absolutely, thank you for your time.

Oh no, it was great, thanks, I enjoyed it, speaking with you.

Thank you.  

I don’t know if one of us is supposed to stop the recording?

Yes, they told me to hit this button.