I swear I'm not drunk or high or crazy. Just let me talk this out a bit.
I feel like I have this huge, monstrous Feeling inside of me that wants to come OUT somehow, and because it's so huge, so overwhelming, I don't even know where to start. ARGH. This is hard for me to deal with, because I'm a writer, a poet--this is supposed to be what I'm GOOD at, but it's so damned hard to try and put this into words. I'm freewriting now, stalling, trying to think of a way. It'll come if I keep turning it around in my hands here, looking at every angle, searching for the tiny speck of light that MUST be there somewhere to help clue me in on where the opening is.
There it is.
I have never been taught how to handle money wisely. My family has been dirt fucking poor for as far back as I can personally remember. There was some distant peripheral ancestor who was a gazillionaire in Montana, but in true Heinze family fashion he lost it all before he died. Fucking figures. Thanks loads, great-great-uncle Fred. Really appreciate that.
I read this thread (
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=389&topic_id=2770992&mesg_id=2770992 ) on GD and it has me emotionally shaken up to the marrow of my poverty-ridden bones. You know, it's really true; the vast majority of poor people have no clue, not a single notion, of how to wisely handle what little money they have. I won't go so far as to say that we don't need handouts, because the truth is that many of us DO...sometimes the generosity of friends, strangers, or a combination of the two is what keeps the electricity on and the fridge from being empty, ya know?
But what we really, really, REALLY need are financial planners. People who are Good with money, willing to donate some of their time to people like my family. I'd like to say that I'm different, that I'm "better" because I'm more intelligent, more informed, I have access to the wealth of information on the internet, but it's all so overwhelming that I don't know where to start. I close the door on it and pretend it isn't there, because I don't know how to deal with it.
Poor people are incredibly good at rationalizing things. For example--ThinkBlue1966 and I recently got our student aid checks, and the Very First thing we did was to pay our rent ahead until the end of May. Good, solid, intelligent thing to do. Then we blew $100 on dinner at a restaurant. Definitely NOT an intelligent thing to do. But it's so damned easy to rationalize it. With us it was, "We have been surviving on macaroni and cheese, fatty cheap hamburger meat and instant mashed potatoes for almost a YEAR. We haven't "eaten out" since last Spring, unless you count a couple of dollar-menu cheeseburgers at Mickey D's. We have suffered. Let's not suffer tonight. Let's celebrate the fact that for the first time in a year, we are not about to be evicted/lose our power/lose our heat/watch our kid cry because we don't have something he really wants to eat."
And when you combine a whole year's worth of emotional hell, of selling treasured possessions for food money, of accepting handouts from friends and crying over it later because we're both relieved and ashamed, of food bank fruit cocktail being a relatively HEALTHY item on our menu, of two atheists considering going to church because that church was kind enough to supply us with a holiday food basket so we didn't go without a Thanksgiving dinner, of lying to friends and family in order to keep them from knowing just how horrible and hurtful every minute was, of being TERRIFIED of failing a class in college because an "F" could mean the loss of the financial aid we need so desperately, of little to no sleep, of getting angry out of shame and guilt when the kidlet sulks over not having any fresh apples or bananas in the house...
When you add all of that up, it's so easy to rationalize it. But it was a stupid thing to do. We should have put that money up, saved it for a time when we'll need it a hell of a lot more than we needed to eat at Chili's. I feel the most horrible kind of guilt. I get Food Stamps, and yet I ate steak at Chili's once this year. I wasted that money, and other money too--I bought an iPod for my son and I to share, because we literally couldn't buy him *anything* for Christmas and he desperately wanted one. (His Christmas gifts came from a compassionate and amazing person that will likely never understand just how frantically grateful I was at the time) We replaced our DVD player because Brendan got some DVD's from a friend at Christmas and he desperately wanted to watch them. I bought a laptop computer because I have arthritis in my finger joints, and typing is less painful than writing with a pencil at school.
None of those things were "necessities". Well, maybe the laptop was--maybe. This desktop computer is about dead, so we'd have needed another computer no matter what--I just chose to get a $999 laptop from Best Buy because it killed two birds with one stone--no writing for me, and a replacement computer when this one dies.
The point is that...hell, I don't even know. We ate a $100 dinner (the three of us and a friend), and we bought a new DVD player, and the iPod was definitely not a necessity.
I know this probably sounds insane, but after reading some of the negative responses over there, I find myself absolutely wracked with guilt. I shouldn't have made those decisions. I was feeling sorry for myself, trying to assuage emotional wounds by "treating" myself and my family a little, and it was just fucking stupid.
I don't even know why I'm writing this, other than the fact that maybe the guilt and pain and hopelessness and humiliation inside are just too huge to hold on to without having it tear me apart. If we're financially hurting six months down the road, I don't know if I'll be able to live with myself. I will look back at that dinner and fucking HATE myself, and blame myself, and I'm actually sobbing on the keyboard right now. I can't decide if I'm actually brave enough to push "Post message", because I'm so afraid that everyone here will think I'm some emotionally-damaged mental case, or worse--that I truly am a total fuckup who deserves every painful thing that happens to me.
It's just so hard, so hard, every day. I'm getting through college. I'm going to get a terrific job and make other peoples' lives better, and if I could have ONE wish right at this moment, I wouldn't wish to be wealthy. I would wish to be middle-class secure enough to not feel exactly how I feel right now. I don't want to sob hysterically with regret over taking my partner and our child to eat at Chili's. I don't want to ever feel like
this again.
I'm so sorry for using the Lounge as a confessional. It's just that, I don't really have anyone else outside of my family who could ever understand, and I know that a lot of you
do. I don't make friends easily, because the VAST majority of the people I'm around every day at school are young people who don't have the life experience to comprehend any of this, and there's a Wall between their middle-class normalcy and the kind of life that I have.