After the Fact

After everything had hit me like a 3-ton truck, I began to feel better.  Call it life, call it time, but it truly does heal.  After that first day, and the second, and the third, I realized that I was still me, and that I had the support of all my friends and family.  My friends especially were incredibly supportive, some offered me alternative ways of having fun on the cheap, some showed their support by telling me their own stories of debt and being broke and one in particular even rallied behind me to support me with food for a month!  I realized that I was not alone with this monster. That I wasn't going to live in a shadow forever.  I realized I could still laugh, I could still have fun, I could still live and I still had my friends.  

I was more annoyed by the fact that three years would seem like FOREVER!!!  Each day goes by so quickly, and yet somehow 1,068 of them seems endless!  How will I ever be able to reach my goals when they are so far away!?  But each morning that went by I realized that I could get creative with my means of saving money.  (and by saving money, I mean not spending money.)

I began taking my meals to work.  Breakfast and lunch.  I knew I couldn't afford to spend even $1 on food so I started taking my lunch to work like I used to do in grade school.  At first I found it hard to break the habit.  Used to buying a coffee every morning, purchasing a bowl of fruit or eggs and bacon at breakfast and again at lunch spending money on a sandwich is convenient and easy.  But after my first day of successfully avoiding the cafeteria I began to see how habits end up costing way more than you'd think and that I was on the right track to breaking some of those bad habits I used to have.

The thing with habits is that you don't always realize how they affect you.  There are always excuses.  50 cents won't matter.  A dollar won't make a difference.  Two dollars?  What's that in the long run?  What we forget is that habits are formed over time, and so is debt.  And debt, I am realizing now, is a habit.  I am habitually in debt.  Those pennies do add up.  That change in the bottom of your car is real; it's money, and most of us treat it like garbage.  With that mentality towards money, it's no wonder so many of us are in debt. 


I've come to realize that money is like shit.  You have a lot, or you have a little, but everyone's got some.  Even me.  Even now.  It's not a lot, but it'll do.