Time to Start a Diary, I Guess

Content warning: financial hardship and brief mentions of the political climate in the USA

I've been feeling a lot lately. I'm tired; I'm angry; I'm sore; I'm anxious; I feel defeated. It sucks. One of the worst parts (because it's difficult to pick just one worst part) is that I haven't been able to write. I've written maybe two actual pieces in the past year.

I have a hard time talking about this stuff to people close to me. Maybe it's a millennial thing, but I've always had a much easier time venting to strangers or "the void," especially online. Last night I couldn't sleep, and I was trying to think of where I could vent without "consequences." I ended up doing so in a Discord server where most of my friends "aren't," as opposed to the Discord server that contains all of my closest friends. I vented to acquaintances who probably won't respond, and it helped a little. And then as I was starting to finally wind down, I thought of Vocal.

There's no reason not to vent out-loud here. At the very least I'll have forced myself to put some words in order as an exercise. It doesn't matter whether anyone reads it. If anyone I know (like my parents) reads this, it effectively saves me the struggle of trying to articulate my worries one-on-one. And that's really what it's about: articulating the worries. It's not the act of asking for help that bothers me, it's admitting there are problems.

The current internal calamity is this: The credit card payments were finally approaching the threshold where I wouldn't be able to keep up. During the last few months of last year, I started telling myself that after I did our taxes, I'd get on a debt management plan through a reputable nonprofit. And I did! I did that a couple days ago.

It came together more swiftly than I anticipated. The plan had been to put my information into the website and schedule an appointment with someone. While I was putting that profile together, the website decided not to cooperate. It insisted I stay stuck on Step 2 of the process when I had already tried to fill it out several times. So, I hopped on to the online chat hoping someone could fix it, or maybe just manually move the process on to the next step. It turned out that the person I connected with was able to complete the whole process right then and there. I probably should have waited, but the opportunity to get this done without having to speak out-loud to a human was too good to pass up.

The plan looks really good on paper. The credit cards will close and I'll pay one amount to this program every month. The payments are about $300 lower than what I have been paying. The full debt will be paid off in about five years instead of about eleven years. Yep, that all sounds great. Only problem is that I don't know how I'm going to make ends meet without robbing Peter to pay Paul.

I've just committed to having the monthly payment (as well as my rent) physically in my checking account by the end of every month, and that number is... a little higher than what I actually bring home in a month. This means that if I don't find a way to get more income into my checking account, EVERY other bill (food, electricity, internet, other little things) will have to be covered by my partner's income. On top of not knowing what that's going to look like numerically, we need to figure out how to do that logistically. For the five years we've lived together, I've just been having them throw several-hundred-dollars onto the credit card every month and taking care of everything else myself.

What options do we have? Our rent is probably more than we can realistically afford, but we won't find anything else this nice for this price or less. I don't want to move. I love this apartment. It's comfortable and it's perfect, and if we leave I'll feel like I've lost. So, please, not that.

Can I boost my income? Everything I can think of feels so exhausting. I had a second remote job for a while doing transcription work, but I wasn't putting in enough hours to stay in their Pro squad. Even if I can still pick up jobs there, it's not steady and honestly stressful work. I keep toying with the idea of donating plasma again, but that would be a huge disruption to my routine. I'd have to drink way more water, plan meals more carefully, and physically get to and from a plasma place on a regular basis. I'm just not sure I'm up to it anymore. I could sell things. I crochet and cross stitch, I've just picked up knitting, and I plan to try repainting toys. But I'm so shy, I don't want to talk to people in order to sell things myself. I don't know if there's some easy way to consign crafts on a casual basis. The last few times I even had offers on Facebook were just scams.

So, it comes back to writing, and back to Vocal. I do miss that year-and-a-half or so where I was writing the most I ever had in my life and actually making some cash from it. But I've been so beaten down the past year or so... I'm tired. I'd rather work with my hands than my brain. The ideas won't come. The energy won't come.

No matter what avenue I choose, I'm afraid that the energy won't come. I'm watching my country struggle against fascism and keeping plans in the back of my mind in case we need to run. I'm weighed down by the knowledge that there are people "out there" who absolutely would kill people like us if they could. How am I supposed to find stamina underneath this? Even if the political situation in this country went back to "normal," that normalcy is exactly what put me in this position. The systems are designed to keep me poor and stressed and feeling like it's my own personal failings that keep me here.

I am incredibly lucky. I have supportive family and friends if I need them. I have a VERY stable full-time job that I could take with me to Canada if shit hits the fan. We still have some (mostly unused) credit cards if the only way to maintain status quo is to perpetuate the toxic cycle. We will be okay, but my God I wish we could be more than okay.