Hi, I'm Keaghan, aka as Cassette or maps. I'm an out-of-work educator, social worker, & disabled trans woman in San Francisco—and I'm about to lose the q*eer-centric household I've lived in for almost 8 years. I desperately need help staying afloat while I get my home ready for new roommates.

Here's what's happening.

My roommate of seven years–also q*eer–moves out May 24th. The rent on our unit is about $5,600 & I'm on the hook for all of it on the lease. I need to fill three rooms, fast.

Right now, common spaces in my house are... buried. I inherited a genetic predisposition towards a light form of hoarding–nothing gross or filthy or dangerous, anything like that. Just a massive pileup of stuff that has to be sorted, organized, & cleared before anyone can actually live in those spaces.

What follows might be a bit a long read, but I want to truly explain why I'm in this situation, how deeply I love this location, & what living here means to me. I appreciate the time you take to read it.

"Why don't you just clean up?"

Well, here's the part that makes this way harder than just "buckling down for a weekend" or "sucking it up." I have fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, & multiple forms of chronic pain. I used to be able-bodied, even relatively fit until a series of injuries & traumas from my early to late twenties compounded into the multiple diagnoses I have now. One day in my early twenties, not long after my father suddenly out of the blue, I woke up screaming in pain. From that day I've existed with a constant baseline of pain that never relents, no matter how much physical therapy or medication I throw at it.

In my later twenties, after the sort of fall that leads to paralysis or broken spines, my baseline pain deepened, & suddenly I found myself increasingly exhausted by exertion & activity that was trivial when I was able bodied. My lifelong struggle with insomnia from childhood worsened & started including severe restless leg syndrome & paresthesia (whole-body nerve pain); to this day I have stretches where I am extremely exhausted & trying desperately to sleep but even with medication can't for sometimes days at end. Any time I have a "good period" I have to rest & recoup afterwards, sometimes for days, or I can trigger symptom flare-ups that can last for weeks.

All of this say: at all times, I am both exhausted & in constant pain. Some days just getting out of bed to feed myself & my dog & do basic self-hygiene is all I'm capable of. Clearing rooms by hand is way beyond what my body can do alone, so I'm calling in everyone I love to help. People are showing up. But it's slow—everyone has jobs and lives and packed schedules, & the timing could not be worse given how many of my close local friends are academics or otherwise in school.

Every weekend we get a few more bags out, a little more floor visible, & then my body just stops and we have to quit for the day.

I'm doing the work. I just need enough runway to finish it.

Why this is more than just a house to me

I moved to the Bay Area from New Zealand when I was a kid–I'm 2-3 years shy of living here for 30 years now. San Francisco is the city I've loved my whole life. I've also watched it get gutted by technocapital—watched the people who actually know this city, who grew up in it, get priced out by people who can afford the rent but don't really know the place.

Last I checked, 71% of unhoused people in SF were housed here before they lost their housing. They didn't come from somewhere else. They got pushed out of their own city.

I've lived in the Lower Haight since summer 2019—almost eight years in the neighborhood I used to wander & worship as a kid, falling in love with it before I ever lived here. My roommate & I have made this house a home for q*eer people the entire time we've been here. We fly a Palestinian flag & a trans flag off the front of the building, right on the Wiggle–one of the busiest pedestrian streets in the city.

I have worked tirelessly for almost a decade to make this spot my home. It means the world to me.

I built custom shelving throughout the house. I converted the backyard & front yard from dead dirt into a garden that, when I can keep up with it, grows enough food that I leave produce and plant cuttings in boxes on the corner for whoever needs them. I've built a small community of neighbors & traded the worms from my backyard compost pile for plants for the front garden, helped corral & walk my elderly neighbor's escaped dog from the park across the street from my house to the other end of the neighborhood. The local businesses I support(ed) regularly when I wasn't completely broken not only know me & my pooch by name, they've even come to my physical defense when I was subjected to a hate crime by a visiting bigot.

I have poured everything I have into this place. Losing it wouldn't just be a housing crisis. It would break something I don't know how to fix—and I can fix almost anything.

On Loving San Francisco

From the minute I could afford to live in SF, I started organizing to help keep other people housed. I joined DSA, worked with the Homelessness Working Group, & was an early member of Red Star Caucus before it went national. I canvassed for Our City Our Home & collected hundreds of signatures, & later did the same as we got on the ballot as Yes on Prop C—taxing billionaires to fund homelessness services. I canvassed hard—including volunteering for a 4:30am to 9pm shift on Election Day—for Dean Preston, who did more for housing justice than any supervisor in this city's history. I did homelessness street outreach & worked San Francisco's most utilized needle exchange program through the Homeless Youth Alliance during the peak of the 2020 lockdowns as an essential worker.

I'm looking for work in the same field right now. Believe me, I have been looking & interviewing. But I'm a trans woman, and since coming out, getting hired in the field I used to walk into with no problem has been nearly impossible. I have not been able to find anything short of low-paying gig work since 2023. And it's only gotten worse since. I love what I do & am a hard worker with immense passion for my field. I would love to be working right now but even with my stellar work record I have been unable to land jobs I once would have readily been hired for, and every month my employment gap grows, exacerbating the problem.

What I do

I've worked with youth since I was eight years old, assisting my late mother who specialized in working with neurodivergent children. I got my first job at 15 & a half, and at 18, began working professionally in childcare. I've never looked back, & over the years have pivoted from focusing not only on neurodivergent & q*eer children, but towards SF's most underserved populations: runaways, homeless kids, transitional-aged youth. I've done street outreach and crisis counseling at the Homeless Youth Alliance, run STEAM & outdoor LARPing camps at Camp Galileo and Trackers Earth respectively, founded the afterschool program at Brightworks, and worked as a humanistic behavior interventionist with severely neurodivergent kids.

I also serve as volunteer CTO for a prison reform nonprofit where I'm building a system to give incarcerated people access to legal resources and support.

I also build things—tarot, I Ching, & astrology readings, handmade jewelry, software development, & other things I've taught myself to make. I sell what I can through cassette.help (while also offering an extremely robust set of daily augury readings, free of charge) & my Ko-fi (nosleepcassette). Every day, for free, I provide a single card pull, a three-card spread, and an I Ching throw that ties it all together.

I also mess around with software development as a hobby & as a reflection of my personal ethos towards existing in the digital world—my github is github.com/nosleepcassette.

What I'm trying to raise

Rent & Utilities. That's it. Every dollar goes to rent or bills—maybe dog food for the coming months if I can spare it. Keeping me & my lovely aging dog from becoming homeless long enough for me to find steady work is the entirety of the goal here.

The full unit is $5,600. A full month of runway would be the dream, but I'm realistic—I don't expect to raise that. My share of the rent is roughly $1,200, and that's what I'm really trying to cover. Just enough to buy time while I get rooms filled.

Best case: I find long-term roommates who want to live in a home q*eer on the Wiggle.

Realistic case: I find short-term subletters fast enough to stave off eviction while I keep chipping away at the house.

I've applying for General Assistance. I've called 211. I've scheduled dates in the coming weeks for collective "help maps keep her home" cleaning parties for the coming weeks.

I'm doing the work with my own hands and the hands of everyone who's showing up for me. I'm not asking anyone to carry this. I'm asking for the time to carry it myself.

Anything helps. Truly, anything. $10 means I can at the very least keep my dog fed for a week or two at a time.

If you can't give, please share.

Thanks for reading. I can't tell you how much I appreciate it. It truly means the world to me.