I Tried to Buy Self-Worth and All I Got Was Credit Card Debt
I dug my hole trying to keep up with a social calendar I couldn’t afford, which is often what happens when you feel like you don’t belong on the social calendar to begin with.
How much could it be? $10,000?$11,000?$12,000? you have ruined your life. yoooooouuuuu haaaaaaave ruuuuuuuuuiiiined yoooooooooour life
You are making a rich man richer through interest!
What did you think would happen?
We were so proud of you.
clean yourself up, you look like a total mess ok, this is the happiest day of my life.
five dollars and one suitcaseWe were never hungry, but going to the doctor was a luxury. Delusions of grandeur,
Ave Maria
too far out in Brooklyn,
And then I got a credit card and things became marvelously simple. I could paint a picture of the girl I wanted to be, the world I wanted to enter, and I could swipe for it. Swipe, swipe, swipe. For years it felt easy, but eventually it caught up, and then the dream-teeth started to fall out, and the dread started to creep in, and the hole I’d dug was too deep to escape. Loan repayment brochures started to arrive in the mail, and I felt found out. I’d swipe for a forty-dollar workout, swipe for blonder hair, and think about my grandmother and her math, my grandmother making too little dinner no matter how many people were eating, because once you’ve lived with the fear of never having enough, it sinks into your life in unexpected ways. Swipe for a flight, swipe for a coffee, and think about my parents and how they’d worked to give me everything. Maybe these realizations meant my brain’s frontal lobe had finally formed, maybe I was growing up—or maybe I just looked down the barrel of my future and saw myself eyebrows deep in debt, with a marriage that would inevitably fall apart if I couldn’t get my finances together.
I had swiped to be one kind of person, but to become the next version of myself, the grownup version, the responsible and honest version, I knew had to stop. There were things I wanted that I couldn’t charge for: a happy marriage, a love-filled life, less anxiety, pride in who I was. Those are things you can’t fake with credit cards; those are things that debt makes worse. First things first, I had to admit to myself that I wasn’t rich (probably the hardest step) and that I didn’t deserve to be just because I wanted it. To me, money meant ease, money meant fun, money meant access, but the more I owed the more money meant crying in the car, and handfuls of dream-teeth, and worry, worry, worry.
On wedding dress day, I gave one credit card to my mother so she could lock it in a drawer and keep it away from me. I kept the other in my wallet and used it only when cash was not an option. I forced myself to look at my bank account balance every morning and sit in the reality of what I’d spent and what I owed and what I had left. I got lean with spending and put every cent that wasn’t for rent or groceries or my MetroCard to paying down my debts. I Googled how to make a budget, and then I made one, and didn’t give myself the option of going one penny over. I learned how to say no to things (it’s terrible, especially when it’s followed by I can’t afford to do that). I took on more work. An online debt calculator told me that at the rate I was going, it would take fifteen years to pay off my debt. I realized that if I wanted to start my adult and married life without paying every month for trips I took when I was twenty-four, I had to use every resource at my disposal or the interest would keep me stuck. My soon-to-be-husband and I decided to put any wedding gift money we received toward my balance; our lives would be better without this cloud, we rationalized, and we were right. That money made a huge dent and then I kept chipping. A year and a half after we got married, I paid off my final credit card bill.
I wish I could say I feel a weight off my shoulders now, but what I really feel is the shame and the worry that if I don’t stay vigilant, I’ll just do it again. There’s also the looming student debt that I’m working at now, but that feels more acceptable somehow. My friendships are still solid and I feel foolish for the years I spent thinking I needed money to make them work. The new credit cards in my wallet look enticing if I let them, but then I remember that my husband and I are making a life we can afford and there is worth to that too. So much of what I spent was to prove that I was someone other than me, but I’m me now and that’s just fine. I painted a picture of the girl I wanted to be, but the paint started to run and all that was left was mess.
Now, I do math constantly in the margins. I add and subtract; I multiply and divide, and I try to make enough so that the life I have works. I try to make sense of who I used to be, too—a girl whose life was built on insecurity and want. Going into debt is terrible, but spending money is fun, and I’m not sure I could have convinced twenty-something-me to skip the trip or miss the dinner or just spend less. My only wish is that I hadn’t been trying to buy self-worth: You can’t swipe for that—and the money you owe will ultimately make you feel a different kind of worthless.
Elena Sheppard is a writer from, and based in, New York City. Elena writing has been published in Vogue, the New York Times, Bomb Magazine, and more. She recently completed her MFA in non-fiction writing and is working on a book about the Cuban Revolution.
I dug my hole trying to keep up with a social calendar I couldn’t afford, which is often what happens when you feel like you don’t belong on the social calendar to begin with.
I dug my hole trying to keep up with a social calendar I couldn’t afford, which is often what happens when you feel like you don’t belong on the social calendar to begin with.
I dug my hole trying to keep up with a social calendar I couldn’t afford, which is often what happens when you feel like you don’t belong on the social calendar to begin with.