Photo by Blake Cheek on Unsplash

I am in a massive amount of credit card debt. And no, I’m not going to tell you the number. I can barely utter it aloud to myself without spiraling. I say mean things to myself every time I think about it.

But perhaps worse — or maybe it’s a blessing — it makes me wonder if I even know who I am, because I obviously shouldn’t be in this situation. I have a good job and no kids; I’m supposed to be the rich one in this simulation. And because it shouldn’t be like this, I spend a lot of time thinking about how I got here, sifting through the wreckage of credit card statements like an archeological dig.

This is an improvement, because there were years when I just ignored the looming financial tsunami, engaging in some sort of magical thinking that it would somehow all work out. Perhaps a wad of cash would land on my windshield while I was stopped at a red light? During those years I had a recurring dream that I was on beach with a huge wave that was about to crash, wiping away me and everyone else on the sand. I tried to warn the other beachgoers, but no one believed me that the wave was coming. By the end, terrified, I would try to scramble to high and dry land before being submerged in water.

I have this dream less often now that I’ve finally decided to face what I’ve done to create this financial tsunami, and my credit card bills are a living history of my downfall. Obviously, the simple answer is that I spent more money than I have, but that’s not really it at all. My credit card statements tell a story, they are a flotsam of little artifacts demonstrating how how stupid I can be (yes, stupid), how lazy, how delusional, entitled, petulant, how hopeless and hopeful at the same time.

Pouring over my credit card history, I’ve come up with three categories of spending that led me down this path: 1) unavoidable expenses (these, I have decided, are “not my fault”); 2) expenses that result from not knowing how the world works because no one taught me how the world works, so I just stumble through it like a toddler, and 3) expenses I incurred because I am lazy, entitled, delusional, undisciplined, a brat, both aspirational and yet hopeless.

These categories are totally subjective and evershifting. When my dog Millie got sick in March of 2021 and I was wailing in the emergency vet’s office, I handed over my credit card and told them through snot and tears to do whatever it took to save her. That was $6,000. She died anyway.

I had no choice in this, and I would do it again, even if it cost $60,000. I would even do it for that little twerp Fish. But apparently there are other people who manage to make fiscally sound decisions in the face of their dog dying, even if they want to die right along with them. So while I consider this a “not my fault” expense, of course it’s my fault. There was a choice, even though I pretend there wasn’t.

I got a colonoscopy, because everyone says you’re ‘sposed to. My out-of- pocket expenses were $900. I considered that an unavoidable expense too, but now I’m not sure. I could have just not done it and endured the shaming my primary care doctor. Heck, I could have stopped going to the doctor to save on co-pays. There are hundreds of expenses I’ve incurred because of rules I think you’re not allowed to break, ranging from bridesmaid dresses and wedding presents to family reunions across the country, from charitable donations to friends’ causes to contributing to the office holiday party.

I don’t even think about these costs, I just zombie along and pay them, which is why they are uninteresting. They just show I am unengaged and have no boundaries. The more fascinating expenses are the ones that pull back the curtain and show me who I really am: a child, pretending to be an adult. A delusional adult. An aspirational adult. But a child/adult combo no matter how you slice it.

I’m essentially a child because at 51 I still don’t know how things are supposed to work. Exhibit A: a lot of my debt comes from car repairs, that were confusing because I bought a new car and why do new cars need so much work? It was only later that my friend explained I should stop bringing it into the dealer for maintenance, because they “fuck you so hard at the dealer” he said, staring at me like I was slow.

Who can blame him for thinking I’m an idiot, but then again how was I supposed to know that? It’s like knowing that infants can’t have honey — who tells you these things? It’s just a random fact that some lucky winners know and some don’t. Likewise, I’ve paid an obscene amount of money to a fancy electrician company, because why not use the one that has a commercial on television and their own trucks? Then I found out through a kind contractor that I was being charged something like 400 times the going rate. But again, I ask you, how are you are supposed to know? No one ever sat me down and told me about car maintenance and electricians, or movers or all the other things adults just seem to know.

Because I own a house, the list of “I have no idea how the world works” expenses gets even longer. I spent $2,500 to insulate the attic/crawl space to save money on heating bills, yet I’m still freezing. I pay for various alarm systems that I don’t use anyway, because Fish takes care of this now. I tried to fire my gardener but he begged to come back and I caved. The garbage disposal broke a few months ago and the plumber said I needed a new one. Who am I to argue with him? As my grandmother would say, What do I know from garbage disposals? $650.

Then there are the expenses that show me the darkest recesses of who I really am, beyond just a ditz who doesn’t know how to handle her car or her house. I can’t plead having no choice or ignorance regarding these decisions; these are the decisions I made because I felt sorry for myself, because I can be petulant, lazy and depressed. Because I engage in absurd magical thinking, that somehow more money would be in my future, even though I have a predictable salary. I apparently thought someone or something was coming to save me.

Sifting through these expenses is painful. It hurts to look back on decisions made due to unhealthy impulses. Current me is angry at past me, but also feels sorry for past me. The hardest to accept, and also the saddest, is the money I spent trying to get people to like me. Specifically men. I’ve spent a lot of money trying to get men to like me.

When I first started dating Preston, who I dated off and on for ten toxic years, I took him to Vegas for his fortieth birthday. At the time, I thought you should go big birthdays for the person you’re dating, because how else do you express love? I paid for more trips like this, to the wild Madonna Inn, to drink wine in Paso Robles, to Point Lobos, to Palm Springs. I paid for these trips in the hope that Preston would someday do something for me, on my birthday, on our anniversary, but he just never did.

My theory that being obscenely generous would have a boomerang, reciprocal effect was not just a miscalculation. It’s proof that I suffered from a delusion that the way you treat people changes the way they treat you. It doesn’t. Kind and generous people will always be kind and generous, and selfish people will always be selfish. There is simply no quid pro quo.

And if I dig deeper, the truth is I wasn’t really being generous at all, because I expected something in return. That’s not generosity, that’s bean counting. I have a long history of doing this with men, especially when I felt like they were slipping away. Months before Marty and I broke up — a breakup that still feels, thirteen years later, like it ripped open the fabric of the universe — I could feel him becoming more distant. So naturally I bought him a $600 mandolin for Christmas.

Except it wasn’t Christmas. It was November when I handed it over to him, claiming that I was just too excited about the gift to wait. I gave it to him early because I knew he was going to leave me, and somehow I thought an expensive gift would make him stay. Spoiler alert for no absolutely one but me: the mandolin didn’t make him stay, and he left me in February. Perhaps the mandolin bought me some time, I don’t know. I do know that he now plays it for his wife and son.

Beyond the costs in attempt to keep boyfriends around, there are the expenses that flow from a tangle of wanting people to like me, feeling sorry for myself for missing out on things, and some strange notion of what altruism looks like. In 2015, I joined the board of a horse rescue that eventually shut down after intense online harassment. (I write with a fake name in part because the harassment got so bad). Before it shut down, I decided to throw a fundraising gala. I had never had a wedding, or even a Bat Mitzvah, and I felt my time was running out to have a celebration where I got to get dressed up and have a DJ and hors d’oeuvres or whatever happens at these things. In short, I felt sorry for myself, so I fronted the money for the whole thing, thinking that I would break even with ticket sales.

I did not break even, and ended up losing $8,000. Pathetically, this wasn’t the only money I spent trying to fill a bottomless void. When I first returned to Los Angeles from New York and was in despair, my friend Elise suggested I do something nice for myself, to show myself that I valued me, to show myself that I have some self respect.

Did Elise suggest something transformative, like a walk-about in the desert? No, she suggested buying a Louis Vuitton bag. And I did it, because I had no center and had no idea what would make me happy. Maybe she was right that I was acting as if I didn’t value myself; I never wore makeup, hadn’t yet discovered Botox, and barely brushed my hair for dates. This, for Elise, was hard evidence that I was circling the drain.

So, I bought the bag at her urging, hoping that it would somehow spark a rebirth. It now sits in my closet collecting dust. $900.

Despite this lesson, I’m still often lured into aspirational spending. If I travel to a small touristy spot near the beach, or in the mountains, and walk into one of those stores with white wood floors, pillows made of blue ticking, and locally made olive-oil soap, I am fucked. I start to believe that if I just buy yet another cookbook about local ingredients, or homemade boysenberry jam, that I too will be able to live in a small pretty town and have a peaceful existence while dressed in cotton linen shirts. Those shops are Satan’s work, convincing you that there is a separate beautiful life you for the taking, if you would just buy a local handmade wooden toy, or a bundle of sage.

And speaking of aspirational, let’s not add up all the money I’ve spent on beauty treatments: alpha peels; scrubs that burn your skin off; some sort of electric doohickey I’m supposed to zap my face with every night but never use; Botox (finally discovered that); electric-current facials that didn’t make a difference in my looks but did activate my shingles nerve pain. I bought these things not because I thought they would work, but rather because I thought they showed that I was “taking care of myself,” and if I was “taking care of myself” my life would improve just by virtue of that vibe. But the opposite was true. I dug myself into a financial hole that so deep it keeps me up at night. And all those skin products don’t even work anyway.

Finally, and most embarrassing, there are the expenses related to things I think I “deserve” which is, at its core, a completely meaningless word. I’ve been exhausted from taking care of my elderly parents, so I recently spent two nights at a fancy hotel in the desert, because I “deserved” it, because I needed a break. And I do need a break, but where did I get the idea that I deserve a fancy break?

I don’t know where I got the idea, but I do know it’s insane, made even more insane because I know it’s insane. And yet I keep doing things like this, even though now at age 51 I’m finally starting to realize that no one can save me from this idiotic behavior but myself. No one is coming to the rescue. There is no fantastical situation on the horizon where it all just somehow works out.

So slowly and surely, I’m sifting through my old decisions, berating myself, yes, but also giving myself a little pep talk that goes something like this: even though the mountain of debt is overwhelming, that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t try to move the needle in the other direction. Even if I fail, the attempt to move the needle would also be an attempt to confront the worst sides of me, the sides that remain petulant and spoiled and untethered from reality.

I’ve had some wins and losses with my new method. I’ve stopped shopping, because I have a closet full of clothes and I don’t go anywhere anymore anyway. That part was actually really easy. I told Elise of the “get the bag” fame that I couldn’t go to Cabo for her birthday and spend $600 a night on a hotel, and that quickly ended our friendship. And strangely that was also easy, even a relief.

Now the hardest part is my laziness, a laziness that comes from depression that comes from walking around with the feeling that you are trapped under something heavy. I know, for instance — intellectually, logically — that cooking for myself at home could save a lot of money. But I’m so tired, I can barely stand up to boil a pot of water for pasta. Or so I tell myself.

So instead I lie in bed and order in food. At the beginning of the pandemic I justified this by deciding that I was supporting the local economy, but I no longer have that excuse. Now, I do a mental calculus: hungry + tired = UberEats. Later, when I pour over my credit card bill and see the embarrassing amount of money I’ve spent this way, I get enraged at myself, which is exhausting, and makes me more depressed, which makes me more tired, which makes me more likely to order in food. Endless loop, which begets an endless credit card balance that teeters on the brink of the unmanageable.

Sometimes I think should sell my house and pay off all my debts. A clean slate seems so energizing. But when I try to imagine what it would be like to be debt-free, I somehow can’t see it. My programming is so entrenched, I know I would end up in this position again and again, until I learn that there is no such thing as “deserving” something like a fancy vacation, until I learn that even the most tired among us can pop open a can of soup, until I learn that buying aspirational tchotkes won’t change my life at all, until I learn that I am an adult, that should start acting like one, and that no one is coming to save me.

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