Re: family/future. Need advice

Ok so, here is your plan:

When you turn 18, you can apply for SSI.  This will take anywhere from 1 to 6 months, and will give you around $700 a month.  The complicating factor is that if your family is as bad as they seem to be, they might try to get you declared incompetent and assign themselves as your legal guardian.  That's an unlikely worst case, but at least be aware that it's a card that could be played.  But they almost certainly can't play it successfully if you fight it, because there's plenty of precedent of capable blind people, you sound like you have at least passing grades in school, and you can almost certainly find a lawyer pro bono.  "I graduated school early" is a winning card in a fight like that.

Second is moving out.  You're going to either need a roommate or affordable housing.  Affordable housing is yet another thing you apply for, and depends highly on the state you live in.  It'll take however long it takes.  So if your goal is to get out as fast as possible, find a roommate.  Unfortunately for everyone, $700 isn't really enough to get an apartment and have enough left over for groceries unless you're somewhere super rural, or willing to go somewhere super rural.

You can survive indefinitely off canned soup, rice, and potatoes, and you can easily get the former two from Amazon.  You might also want to add some junk food in there, because it tends to be very cheap.  One of your best and also worst options at the same time, if you can arrange for it, is to be near a Mcdonalds.  It's horribly unhealthy, but you can eat at Mcdonalds for $3 per meal, which gives you something you could do as a cheap luxury a couple times a week or, if you don't mind being hungry and a bit malnourished, a way to eat for around $120 a month on one meal a day.  It's also worth noting that spices and seasonings are very cheap, stay good basically indefinitely, and you only have to buy new ones every few months if that.

If you have a roommate, the eating situation is much better because you can split the cost of groceries and you're also splitting the cost of rent, which would likely give you $300 to $400 per month instead of maybe $100, which is enough to even allow for a little luxury.

Furniture is going to be one of your bigger obstacles, but air mattresses can last a few months and are like $50 to $100.  You can get cheap things from somewhere like Ikea, and even cheaper used things from Craigslist or something like that.  Things like wrestling mats are also good to some extent.

Obviously the above sucks, so you're going to want money as soon as possible.  To handle management first, basic money management is you figure out all your expenses, write them down, sum them, and see if it's less than your money per month.  You really want some headroom, but on SSI that's just not realistic,so money_per_month < ssi is all you're going to get.

Next, you need to try to get rid of the SSI penalty for working, basically they say if you make $1 we take $1 from your benefits.  it's stupid, but there's something you can do, I forget what it's called, maybe a plan for self-sufficiency?  It's not something I know much about. I believe there are also exceptions for education things like scholarships.

As for actually getting money, you have 2 good options, 1 not so good option that may nevertheless work, and 1 long-term play.

Your first good option is to get scholarships for college, if you can.  This is a function of your grades, etc etc etc, but being blind can help you because there are usually scholarships for disabled people.  Apply to as many as you can, and if you can get enough you may be in a position to go live in a college dorm for your college degree off the scholarship money, which solves a lot of problems for a few years.  I can't advise you on what degree to get other than to say that CS is good if you can manage the math/science portions and have the talent for programming; that's a good, mostly accessible job that will let you make more than everyone you know out the other side.

Second, you can get a remote job.  Accessibility tester can pay well, if you can get it, but is few and far between.  If you can find an accessible transcription platform that may also be an option.  Unfortunately your options are limited because you're blind, and I can't offer more specific advice--my first job was programming, I skipped through the rest.

Your third and bad option is gofundme.  If you don't mind selling out, you can play up the blindness, tell a compelling story, and get a bit of money coming in that way via all the sighted people who feel bad about it.  Yes, this is kind of meh, but as with a lot of what I'm describing this all boils down to what prices you're willing to pay.

Your long-term play is to get in touch with whatever your state's vocational rehab is called.  Every state has one to my knowledge.  They can do a few things for you, notably help pay for college, and work toward getting you into the Randolph Sheppard implementation in your state, which is basically "here's a little restaurant and everything you need to run it, have fun".  I say this is a long term play because the college help won't be enough without scholarships unless you're in one of the states with a  really good VR program, and Randolph Sheppard takes upwards of a year to get into (but once you're in you're in).

Notably, this is structured around you not being able to use anything but a microwave and not being able to leave your house alone.  That's fine, but you'll want to fix it.  To do so, NFB is a good place to ask advice from.  They're kind of meh if you're young and will likely rub you the wrong way, but they are very big on blind independence.  You'll also want to look into lighthouse for the blind, if one is near you, and the VR program will also have resources and the ability to help fund it, even if they're one of the really shitty ones.

Now, a lot of this is easier with a sighted friend, but let's say you don't have one.  Your back up options there are these.  First is Aira/Be My Eyes, both of which currently have a free offering (for Aira it's 5 minutes a day, for Be My Eyes I believe it's all volunteers).  Aira also has a lot of sponsored free options around things like "we're free if it's for work".  Second is personals.  Craigslist and Reddit both come to mind for that.  You will find that there are helpful people out there and "I'm blind, I know I can be independent, but my family wants to arrange my marriage" is the perfect sort of thing to trigger the U.S.'s sort of anti-otherness-ness I guess we can call it, and you may be able to find someone willing to help for free, if I had to put my money on it someone older and retired who's bored.

I wish I could say i'm speaking from experience, but from experience here basically means that I got lucky and got to dodge a lot of this when I decided to move to Seattle.  But this was my plan.  It's maybe not the only plan, and a *lot* of it comes down to whether you're willing to pay the price, because if it sounds miserable, it totally is.  But I was willing to pay this sort of price if necessary, because gay in Florida with a not very understanding family wasn't a healthy place for me to be.  So, well, up to you whether it's actually that bad or if it's the pandemic talking, but there you go, a plausible way to achieve "I live somewhere else".

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