Human, not a Slave
I woke up this morning.
Not just from a night of rest, which was great, but from years of self-destruction.
I woke up, realized what I have been doing for the past three years, and felt a wave of calm come over me.
There is still work to be done, and it may take just as many years to fully move on, but I have a bit of a path forward.
I know what I am going to stop doing. I know why I am stopping. I know how I am going to do things differently.
All of this, for the past 14,019 days of my life, comes down to money.
Money has been a topic of conversation and on my mind for what feels like my entire existence.
People who don’t have it want it; people who do have it stress about it.
There must be an in-between somewhere.
And I think that is what I realized.
I think I found the in-between.
The in-between of the haves and the have-nots.
The tricky part in all of this is that one must go through it to know it. Plenty of people can preach and teach something that they have no real-world experience with. A true teacher is someone who is on the other side of where their students are.
And I have gone through it. And am currently in the midst of it.
I have never had any good teachers when it came to money.
“Don’t go into debt!” they would say. “It is slavery!” they would say.
And they were and are correct. But then, these same people would also say, and did say:
“Except for education and a house, those are okay.”
“Oh, you need a car? I can loan you that money.”
So if those are okay, then why are these other things not okay? And so I went into the other things, into credit card debt, and now find myself in way over my head. Way over. Drowning. Bleeding out. Enter your analogy here.
Debt is debt. Plain and simple.
Some of us have more control than others.
Others of us (“addicts”) just need an excuse to jump.
For me, that was the end of my marriage. The end of my marriage was the reason to jump.
“Fuck it.” That’s what I said.
Everything everyone has told me has turned to shit: college, marriage, home “ownership,” family.
And so, “fuck it.”
And these people, these influencers in my life, weren’t just random people. They were people I trusted. They were people I had very close relationships with. They were people who were in my life face to face, in my ear, in my brain, for decades.
“Ashes in my mouth.”
But the only person to blame is myself. I signed the papers. I agreed to things and accepted the terms. And that is on me.
It is also on me to not see the hypocrisy. Or maybe I did, I noticed the red flags but ignored my gut.
I let my trust in others outweigh my gut-level survival instinct.
And maybe I’m also just dumber than everyone else.
Who knows. Who cares.
Reality is reality.
Back in 2007, the year of our wedding, my wife and I started a blog called Where You Are Now. It was a personal finance blog written by two 21-year-old kids who didn’t know a thing about anything.
But we didn’t have any debt either. Well, I did have that car payment to the person who loaned me the money, but otherwise, we were “debt free.”
And I think the blog, writing it, immersing ourselves in it, was a way to keep that in front of us. Keep the mindset constant.
But, life happens. People change.
Mistakes are made. Risks are taken.
We are human.
Grace is required. Forgiveness.
Forgiveness to those that led us astray. Forgiveness to ourselves. Grace for ourselves.
A good perspective is also healthy.
Money is just that, money. It is not the air that we need to breathe to live. Despite its mostly digital existence these days, money is a very tangible thing.
And tangible things can be dealt with.
A bridge can be made and then destroyed. A mountain can be blown up.
The air, though, the air cannot be managed. Air is not a tangible thing. Thankfully. If it was, we would all most surely have eliminated ourselves from existence a long time ago. We humans are terrible at being responsible.
Money is tangible. The lack of money also is.
And so it can be handled, managed, learned, dealt with, and controlled (as long as we can control ourselves).
All of this comes through experiencing failure. It comes through recognizing where we are at now and moving forward.
The past is not something we can change, but the future is something we can influence.
Actions have consequences, but they can also have rewards. We just need to make the right decisions.
And that is what I’m going to begin doing from this day forward.
My goal is to live to 100 years old. And so, for the next 22,505 days, I will make the best decisions I can when it comes to how I handle the money I am entrusted with.
No more slavery for me.
~ Aaron
Sunday, July 28, 2024
Harrisburg, Pennsylvania