Calm Spot

I’m broke. That is the fastest way to explain my situation. I could regale you with the long, sordid details of my very typical story, but what it boils down to is, I’m broke and in debt. I realize that this is a depressing fact for a lot of people in the United States, and that in the grand scheme of monetary wealth I’m way better off than the vast majority of the world population. But those truths don’t really get me around the fact that lately, I’ve been asking myself the same question over and over – what do you do when you find yourself poor?

For me anyway, the short term answer was to ignore it. It was a lot easier to not think about it than to try and figure out how to rectify my past mistakes. What can I say, it wasn’t smart, I knew it, but I did it anyway. I’m a procrastinator by nature. The unfortunate part though, is that I’m also a worrier. Eventually even I couldn’t ignore the phone calls or the fact that my mail was filled with unpleasantness. (And yes I tried letting it pile up and ignoring it – that is when the phone calls start.)

There is a lot of emotional baggage that goes along with the realization that you’ve made a mess of your life and basically put a roadblock to your future that is going to take years to climb over. And there are a lot of hard realities about being broke in a society that makes being poor awkward and socially isolating, but there are some key lessons (yes, lessons – I know, I know, cliché) that I have managed to garner out of this experience.

The big one, the one that starts the ball rolling to all the others, is responsibility. I never – or at least not for more than a few self-pity filled minutes – thought that my situation was somebody else’s fault. I know why I’m broke. I made really bad decisions for a long time, and even when I started making better ones, it was too late. I chose and I reaped the ‘rewards’. This basic concept of cause and effect seems to be eroding quickly and quietly in our society. There seems to be a lot of finger pointing these days and a lot of instantaneous gratifying going on. I am just as guilty as anyone else, but the thing is, late at night when I’m alone, I know that the only person truly responsible for my life is me.

This leads me to the next big lesson - the really hard one for a procrastinator like me - Action. Once you start accepting your own role in where you are, you are left with the only sure way of getting out. You are going to have to do something. I had to hit some walls and bounce off a few rock bottoms, but I’m finally beginning to learn that if I don’t do something then things are going to remain the same and since that is totally unacceptable to me my only path forward is to do something.

I’ve still got a constant stress level that is sky high, my heart beat skips when the phone rings, my mail is still scary to even look at, and I’m far, far away from any semblance of financial control. I often look in longing at the lottery Powerball billboards around town and daydream about the possibilities, but for some reason, just acknowledging that it is my fault and that I do have the ability to fix it, makes me feel better. Even though fixing it is going to be way harder than buying a lottery ticket.