Finances

Poor Me

/ Self Saving Warrior Princess / 4 Comments

This is a Really Real Pity Party Post.

Sometimes my financial situation gets to me. Tonight, I was doing the dishes, listening to a podcast that happened to be about plus size fashion, and it hit me.

I’m never going to be able to afford those kinds of clothes!

Don’t get me wrong. I’m thankful to be where I’m at compared to where I was. Three years ago I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to pay the rent each month and I never knew whether I could keep the lights on. Three years before that I was living in a homeless shelter. But even now, I’m getting help to stay afloat. I mostly wonder if I’ll ever be financially independent.

I’m afraid I’ll never be.

But today that wasn’t what bothered me.

I want more than the bare minimum. I want to be that person who can afford to do shit without worrying about it. Today I’m feeling greedy and I’m honestly in tears because I know that even if I get a degree and get a job and get off disability I’m never going to be “wealthy”. I’m always going to struggle. I will be lucky to ever reach middle class.

I’m in a better place than I was, but I still send a frantic text message asking for money when mobility leaves me and I have to take a Lyft, because that $30 just wasn’t in the budget this month.

I’m lucky to have family that helps me out that way, I appreciate that I have the help, but damnit. I don’t want to need the help. I want to be the person in a good enough position that I can hand out help and not think twice about it. I want to be the person with a house and cars and the ability to travel around the world. I want to be able to see places and do things.

I want to be spontaneous in really big ways and not worry that I won’t be able to buy food at the end of the month because of it.

I want more than poverty and for just this moment, I want even more than middle class.

I want more than I’ll ever have, and tonight, I’m having a really hard time with it. Life really dealt me a shitty set of cards and I played them to the best of my ability, but that doesn’t change where I’m at.

Normally I don’t care about money, so I’m not sure why I’m so upset about it tonight. I’m not sure why it’s such a big deal right now.

It would be nice to live that life though.

And it would have been even nicer to have a life that would have allowed me to get there.

No Cooler Needed

/ Self Saving Warrior Princess / Leave a comment

It’s amazing how much all of the old comes into the new, even when you want to let it go.

I’m not a doctor or a therapist, and honestly I haven’t even talked to my therapist about this, so this may not even be actual PTSD stuff . . but it sure as fuck feels like it right now.

Packing for vacation and I’m So Fucking Stressed.

I see a bottle of water while I’m going through my mental checklist for the 100th time and wonder if we packed the cooler . . . I’m not even taking a cooler on this trip . . . and I realize, I am questioning if we packed the cooler because in every other road trip/vacation I’ve ever taken as an adult, the cooler would have the food to make it through this trip. . . . and if I forgot the cooler, I may not have had food to eat at some point on the road. . . and there wasn’t typically money to buy extra . . .or if I did, it meant scrambling to replace where I took that money from.

In day to day life I’m constantly changing what size purse I carry . . and it’s because for a long time once I didn’t have a car, I had to make sure I could carry everything I might need. It became one coping mechanism of many. Have all of the motrin and the tylenol, and the battery backup, and the headphones, but also something to occupy your brain, and extra change for the bus, and your water, and something to eat because you could get stuck in the middle of no where and then what.

The concept of, if you forget it, you can just buy one if you need it. That’s completely new to me. Not that I didn’t typically have some cash on me. And I always made stupid decisions with money, but every decision I made with money was followed by weeks of rearranging every other financial thing in my life to make sure we still ate, and that the lights stayed on . . . and making sure we didn’t get behind on bills and have to move . . AGAIN.

Or in the case of a road trip to visit family, making sure that we could still get back home at the end, without overdrawing the bank too much more than I had already planned for.

And I still have a hard time leaving my house without my water bottle and a giant fucking purse full of things that I almost never use, because it’s so hard to get out of survival mode.

And how many times have I had to remind myself that I don’t need to pack a cooler this time?