Stressed

Lately I find myself going in so many directions that I feel like I'm hardly doing any of it well. School has been a trial, as usual. Throw moving into the middle of the work/school conglomeration (not to mention NaNoWriMo), and all of a sudden my life is a big quivering pile of demands, obligations and overly critical thoughts. I don't know how I do it all. I don't know why I do it all. It's like at some point I decided that the only way for my life to have value is if I crammed as much experience into it as possible. Also, if I can continue to distract myself by being super-busy, I won't notice that I'm really kind of running in place. When do I stop powering through something because I believe the long-awaited end result will make me happier? When does the plain ol' enjoyment of life happen?

I don't know the answers to these questions. Hopefully someday I will.

I made a food blog!

Yep, giant nerd here. But also yay!

http://cookingwithglee.blogspot.com/

So this is how personal debt happens

It's been about a year and eight months since my bankruptcy was discharged. As you can imagine, following that frustrating and humiliating process I swore to myself that I would never get in that deep again. For a long time I refused to even have a credit card at all. I felt like they were pretty much evil and I didn't need one since I use my debit card for everything. But then the credit card industry reeled me in under the pretense of "rebuilding my credit" and I got a card with a small ($500) limit. I vowed to only use it for groceries or other things I already had money for. I thought I was playing the game, see. I thought I was being "responsible". Then one week I overextended myself and I needed to use the card to buy groceries that I didn't have money for. So I started carrying a balance. At that point, my relationship with my card underwent a subtle shift. All of a sudden I started seeing my available credit as extra money I could spend. After I made a payment I would think about what I would use the available credit for. I wasn't struggling financially at this point at all...I had enough cash in my bank account to take care of my needs without using the card. In most cases I was using the card for retail therapy, buying stuff to make myself feel better.

Believe it or not, all of this was happening without my even registering it. Here's what happened next: I had some extra money left over from my tuition reimbursement and I planned to spend it on fancy things for my new apartment. Initially I was going to buy a big TV and a sofa so I could watch football games and movies and invite people over to do the same, but one day I was looking at my credit card bill and I realized I was over my $750 limit (they raised it a few months in to reward my good spending) so I decided to use the extra cash to pay my card off and then use that available credit to buy stuff. It wasn't until I was standing in the shower last night, thinking about what I wanted to buy, that it occurred to me that that credit wasn't money to spend...I had, in fact, already spent it and was now simply paying it back. It seems like such a simple thing to realize, but it really did take me that long.

That credit card thing is a slippery slope. I'm just glad it finally occurred to me what I was doing before I got myself right back on the path to drowning in personal debt. The sad thing is that now I can't buy my big tv for another few months. I know, poor me. Being an adult is hard.

xo,
C