One of the clearest memories I have from my youth is about money. Money and shame. I was 12 or 13, stopping at the gas station with my mother and my best friend. My friend got an Icee or a Slurpee, it looked amazing, and I wanted one desperately. I must have miscounted the coins in my — this bag I remember so clearly, I think I had made it out of a scrap of fabric, it was probably very horrible looking, but I was so damn proud of it. Anyway, the bag betrayed me, I thought had more money tucked in there than I did; I couldn’t afford it. The girl at the counter was incredibly nice, incredibly so. She told me it was fine, that I could just take it. I don’t remember what I said, I remember looking at the floor, tears swelling in my eyes, my fingertips prickling with hot, burning shame. My mother and friend were baffled by my reaction, and I was too—it was a nice offer, I wanted it, so what was the problem? I didn’t know. I still don’t. All I can remember is how quickly that shame curdled into anger, into a hot, sticky rage. It was so pure and powerful, it scared me. It still does.
There are, I think, two paths a person could take from there. Remembering that feeling, a person could become positively stringent with money; become a person who monitors their accounts, checks them daily and pays their credit card bill off every month.
Or.
There’s me. I have an amount of debt— I say “amount” because while I’m pretty sure it’s not super high, I don’t actually know. I know that I am paying one of my student loans, and that I “should” be done soon. That is about all I know. I don’t think my credit card debt is super high, but I can’t be sure given that I refuse to check.
I don’t know what it is about money that sets this off in me, this cycle of shame and denial and shame and denial, I go around and around, never fixing it, never making myself change. I am only reflecting on it now because I have the time— and because it’s the first time in a long while where I don’t have money coming in regularly, not allowing me to patch the holes in the leaky boat and still keep sailing. At least I can ignore it all day—nighttime is when I lay there and run through all the debts I don’t know about, all the things I’ll need to buy, all the ways in which I’m fucking up. It doesn’t make for restful sleep, turns out.
It’s not something I talk about, not in real life, it’s not something anyone really talks about. I make jokes about being broke online™ but who knows what I mean when I say broke? Sometimes I say it when there is literally twelve dollars in my account, I used to say it when I had…well honestly I’ve never had that much money in any bank account. What I mean is—the definition changes, the state is temporal yet constant.
There’s nothing I am going to do about it now, I’m still jobless and don’t have a regular income and that debut might as well keep building. I live in fear of that shame, that feeling prickling at my fingertips. I think I’ll be forever trying to bury that memory of thirteen year old me refusing that woman’s kindness. I’ve been running from it for a long time.
I wish had just said thank you.