Prepping gets Personal

I've been depressed and unmotivated lately.  It has caused me to examine my lifestyle and motivations again, and to do some tweaking.  Things that work for me, that add something to our quality of life, or at least don't take much away from it, made the cut.  Some things that I was doing purely out of guilt or fear, or based on someone else's priorities, were set aside for now.  Life is too short to live by someone else's priorities.  Am I the only one who does that?  I tend to get on a certain intellectual and lifestyle track that I find appealing, read a certain type of blogs telling me how to live, and proceed to shove my square life into that round hole.  For the past couple of years, it's been the homesteading/DIY/prepper/declinist/peak oil community.

But my situation is unique, as is everyone else's.  I've been mostly trying to adapt to a future of food and energy shortages, climate change, economic collapse, and other universal, generic, and somewhat abstract concerns, the kind that are commonly discussed in the "blogosphere".  I've largely ignored the factors that are most likely to affect me and my family in the short to medium term, and the things that give us the most bang for our buck. 


For example, getting my husband's green card this year is a more important investment for us than, say, solar panels or a wood cook stove.  After that is done (because I can't move before it's done), deciding whether or not to move to Mexico by myself with my son should be my highest priority.  My inertia in regard to that decision has been bothering me for a long time, and I need to give it more attention.  While I don't make decisions based on pros-and-cons lists, I think they can help to organize my thoughts.  So I made some lists: pros of staying here, pros of moving to Mexico, concerns about staying here, and concerns about moving to Mexico. 

I found that the things on my list "concerns: moving to Mexico" were things I've already given a lot of thought to, like: being alone, far from family and friends; separating my son from his father; having to start from zero in finding a place to live; homeschooling without access to good libraries; depending on my husband to send money; and having to transport or replace all our stuff.  But the things on the "concerns: staying here" list are things I have been reluctant to think about, such as how we're going to get by on one income when my unemployment runs out; what we're going to do if the car dies before we can afford to replace it; my son not having kids his age to play with here; the probability of eventually needing medical care and not being able to afford it; and the possibility of losing the house we live in and becoming homeless (for example, if something happened to my mother, who owns it).  The list of pros for staying here is quite small so far - the principal one being that our homestead is fairly well established.  The list of pros for moving to Mexico include the fact that it is a more resilient society and much better adapted to living in poverty; a more pleasant climate (I despise our humid summers); being able to escape from my unhappy marriage; and my husband being free to take a traveling job (installing roofing, with some relatives) where he would require neither a car nor a home.  

Making decisions based on incomplete information and educated guesses about the future is hard.  It sure would be nice if there was someone writing a blog about my specific concerns, whose advice would be really helpful.  Of course, I'm on my own on this one.