A Life Out of Alignment

For pretty much all my life, but especially the past 4 years, I’ve been living a life that doesn’t feel like mine. One that keeps me confined, overstimulated, disconnected. A life that doctors would label “mental illness”, but I don’t see it that way. What I experience is a deep, painful misalignment with the way modern society works. I believe many of us feel this, especially those who are sensitive, neurodivergent, justice-driven, and wired for something deeper. I write this for them, too.

My name is Nat, and I live with my partner Mart and our little dog Fannar. We’re quiet people. Nature people. People with a big heart for animals, for honesty, for freedom, for the wild outdoors. We’ve always lived outside of the box, often quite literally; at one point we even had our own old campervan to escape city life from time to time. But our life changed dramatically in 2020 when the government took away our home on wheels, along with the independence and peace it gave us.

Since then, we’ve been stuck living in my old childhood room and even the paved backyard of my mother’s house where we lived in a small tent. Trauma prevented us from entering my childhood bedroom for one and a half years: we lost someone very dear to us.
There’s no kitchen. We sleep, eat, and live on the same bed. We fetch water when my mother is away, to avoid bumping into her. We cook on a desk with a cooker in a hot room. Our window is always open to be as close to the outdoors as possible and to feel less confined, so we hear everything: the neighbors, the cars, the dogs barking. The smell of detergent and smoke creeps in. And for two years and eight months, I barely went outside during the day. I walked my dog at night, under cover of darkness, because I couldn’t handle the noise and overstimulation of the world outside. And our old car didn’t have MOT yet back then, so we couldn’t drive to a more quiet place.
That’s how intense this misalignment can get.

But the truth is, it didn’t have to get this far. Long before the housing crisis exploded, there were options. We could have found something manageable, somewhere quieter. But for six years, my mother (out of fear of being left alone) manipulated me into believing I couldn’t leave. She kept me emotionally stuck, and in doing so, she delayed Mart moving in. By the time he did, in early 2018, he had already lost his home due to the cost of traveling back and forth. We’ve been playing catch-up ever since, especially since our income was even lower back then.

This is what survival mode looks like.

And yet, we’ve kept dreaming. We dream of a life where we can breathe again, where we can live gently, grow our own food, rise early, hike a lot. A simple life in nature, in harmony with the seasons. A life where we can move freely, sleep deeply, and finally be creative again.


We’re not asking for luxury, just the chance to live in alignment with who we are. We don’t want a big house, a mortgage, or a modern lifestyle. We’re happy with very little. We’re vegans since long before it was trendy. We’ve never flown. We wear clothes until they wear out, eat fruit by the kilo, and live minimally by default; not for show, but because it makes sense. For us, for the animals, for the earth.

What we need now is support. Just enough to get us out of survival mode and back into life. We have a very small but steady income and qualify for housing benefits. We can pay monthly rent up to 900 euros. The problem isn’t our ability to sustain a home: it’s the lack of options that aren’t in overstimulating, urban, unsafe areas. Our struggle is finding a place that isn’t toxic for our mental and physical health. Social housing often puts us in the very environments that make us sick. We’ve been bullied in the past just for being different. For being quiet. For doing things differently. For not fitting the mold.

We know what we need to thrive. And we finally have a chance to get there. But we need help.

If you believe in slow, intentional living… If you believe nature heals… If you know what it feels like to be out of step with the world… please consider supporting us. Whether through a donation, sharing our story, offering a small house nearby nature or simply cheering us on: you make a difference.

Thank you for reading. Thank you for seeing us.

With love,
Nat