This year has been…really, really hard

Hi friends,

I'm a 36-year-old professional woman with a post-masters education, a great job, and a ton of student loan debt. I was raised by a single-parent and had to use loans to fund my future and pursue my goals. I'm employed full-time and recently had to take on additional part-time jobs to earn extra cash in order to keep up. The last year of my life has been, to say the least, challenging. As referenced in the title of this post, a family member was murdered during a robbery. I had my identity stolen. Twice. My mother - the once strong single-mother who managed it all - is now completely wheelchair bound and almost unable to speak. She has a progressive motor neuron disease. My car was totaled. My (almost) new car. Totaled. My (almost) perfect credit is ruined. Everything that I've worked so hard to establish is slowly coming undone and I can do nothing to stop it without losing everything in the process (my home). I've already lost my life savings and am losing more. I am a real person with a real crisis. I can't ask you to ignore the reality that people use crowdfunding for the wrong reasons. I can only ask you to consider the possibility that I am not one of those people. Please help. I vow to pay it forward.