Christmas 2015

Traditional dinosaur-, goat-, and heart-shaped gingerbread cookies.

I hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas and holiday season! My own has been sincerely pleasurable. Most of my shopping was accomplished on Saturday, I attended a holiday party on Monday, went on a sweet Christmas date on Wednesday, hosted a small get-together on Christmas Eve, spent Christmas Day with my Mom, and went to another gathering that evening.

After catching up at work on Saturday, Sunday was a whirlwind: I did the house grocery shopping, picked friends up from the airport, fell through my kitchen ceiling running wires across the attic, and went thrift shopping.

Yeah. I totally fell through my kitchen ceiling. Fortunately the fridge broke my fall and I am entirely unhurt, but it was a scary minute that turned into a big repair job. My friend Ambi and I will do that repair on Friday before we leave for the Caribbean.

Oh yeeeaaah, I'm totally going to the Caribbean! Ambi's family is taking me with them for a family cruise! This time next week I'll have spent the day snorkeling off the coast of Cozumel! My mantra for the past six months has been "2016 will be the best year ever...just get through 2015...2016 will be the best year ever." Starting January exploring tropical paradises is the best way to seal that deal I can think of!

What Next?

I've always been fixated by time. Like money, there never seems to be quite enough. The one thing I have sincerely experienced jealousy over is the excessive time. Whereas many adults seem to enjoy some sort of routine that includes sleep, meals, work and recreational activities, my own days were as hectic as they were unpredictable. I used to rack my mind and wreck my body trying to work out how to meet my endless obligations. Often I was too busy to attend a loved one's request, and would get the exasperated response, "You're always working," or "I don't see why you're always doing something for someone else."

In May I started using the calendar app on my phone. Certain this would force my life into working order, I scheduled in hour after hour, event after invitation after request. Something wasn't working. My daily agenda function was displaying overlap that I couldn't get past. There didn't seem to be a way to extend the day....oh.

There are only ever twenty-four hours in a day.

The math was dazzling. Twenty-four hours in a day. Eight hours spent at work. Eight hours to sleep. Roughly an hour to commute anywhere by bus. Which gives me a limited time window for "everything else." A limitation that absolutely everyone on the planet experiences but no one ever told me about. I stared at the little space and my life went into focus.

The next day I started eating, sleeping, working eight-hour days, and meditating. Keep in mind that this was also the last month of my Dad's life, exactly in the middle of my divorce-process, and I was in the throes of a deadly depression. My self-care was weirdly automated: I typed it into my phone and my agenda told me what to do and when.

I did what my phone told me to do because it protected me from the myriad other forces I let run my life before. Whenever anyone asked me to do anything, I pulled up the calendar app and gave an honest response. More often than ever before, the answer was "no." For the first time, "no" did not feel selfish. It was a simple assertion of reality, a reality I was terribly grateful for. I no longer gave excuses, explanations, or even apologies for many of my rejections. Over time, I got fewer arguments and guilt-trips from the relatives who don't know how to interact with my reality-centered self.

As my emotional health improves, my phone is less vital to my day-to-day behavior. It's no longer a crutch and a shield so much as a daily reminder of things I like to make time for. Ironically, this means I miss the occasional meal and forget to meditate a few times a week. I'm no longer robotic in my actions, I no longer look outside of myself to answer the perpetual question of "what next?"

Well and Doing

One day in August I opened my wallet to find a $20 bill. This same bill had been there for at least a week. I'd been spending cash, but not ALL of my cash. It was payday, and I hadn't run out of money. I had slightly more than enough.

I was working a regular job, paying rent, eating well, going out with friends, and meeting my basic needs. Without.even.thinking.about.it. That was a first.

In September and October I went on a couple of weekend trips with friends. Each trip was a novelty in that I could easily afford my share of gas and meals and didn't overdraft my bank account (in fact, I didn't use my debit card at all this year until last month). In the past I would work for two weeks without break, take a weekend off, and go straight back to work another fourteen days to make up for the expenses incurred in those two days. I can't tell you how much more enjoyable these two weekends were for that lack of worry!

In November I went to Ohio for Thanksgiving. I took a week of paid vacation and purchased round-trip tickets. I took a cab to the airport and bought coffee and a bagel after shuffling through security. While in Columbus I purchased a scarf, phone charger, and contact lens solution. I pitched in for groceries and treated my family to a movie. One day I spent entertaining myself, exploring shops and enjoying a quiet lunch in solitude. The day I got home there was more than enough money in my bank account to see me through to my next paycheck.

Surely this all sounds mundane to you guys - It was the Midwest, for God's sake - but this is like a fairy tale to me. Every trip of my adult life has been an ordeal of scraping by and doing without. Visiting someone meant my total dependence on them, which makes any visit lasting more than one meal painfully awkward. Anything forgotten was something I would live without, no matter what, because who has an extra $10 while travelling? Airport food has almost always been beyond my means, even if I was stuck in transit for 16+ hours, making that little packet of peanuts a matter of sheer survival. My traveling has always been laced with guilt and anxiety.

So very much of my life has been laced with guilt and anxiety. In my seventeen years of working, I've never been able to earn enough, budget enough, or save enough money to meet my loved ones' needs. I'd never been able to take good care of Dad, Mom, or Darling. It broke my heart, month after month, year after year, to continually fail at this pursuit. I'm only now learning that it was never my responsibility to meet the entirety of my mother, father, or husband's needs. I'm only now learning that meeting MY needs is a straight-forward and fulfilling task.

Don't worry, I'm not going to be travelling every week and eating ready-made sandwiches forever. I want to develop a fresh focus on frugality and achieve my 2016 Financial Goals. This is just a moment of celebration because I'm doing well. I didn't even know I was capable of doing well until now. I had no idea how far from well I was doing in the first place!

2016 is going to be amazing.

Merging of Languages

Yesterday's post took a really, really long time to write.

I've always been a slower blogger, but yesterday was ridiculous. I typed paragraph after painstaking paragraph, deleting hundreds - possibly over a thousand words - and ended up with...what? Three hundred total? A set of goals.

Maybe I lost touch with my voice in the past couple of years of inaction. Maybe it will just take time for my confidence to stabilize? I never wanted to be the blogger who posted, "nothing to say today, sorry for the lack of updates." My favorite writers can squeeze the deepest meaning out of the most finite moments. I KNOW there is more to my day than, "I craved muffins while I was at work, but didn't want to buy a 7-Eleven muffin. So I came home and baked muffins and then I ate muffins!"

There is meaning there. Depth, empowerment. Somehow.

Depression does this to a body. Collapses a rich and beautiful world, a vibrant life full of hope and opportunity, into the two-dimensional flatness of "another day, another dollar." I struggle against a crushing fatigue that demands answers to questions that can't exist in the same sphere as the answers. But the questions alone seem to have blocked me in, invisible obstacles that make daily life so freaking frustrating.

Why get out of bed in the morning? The answer, I know, is the sound of the wind in the leaves. The scent of coffee. The thrill of being the first one up, the only one up, and hearing the birdsong while the moon still hangs in the sky painted pink by the rising sun. Depression doesn't speak this sensory language.

My depression speaks an internal language, a language of the heart beating, dry eyes, sore throat, chapped lips. It is almost entirely physical in nature, and entirely contained. There is no outside, no birdsong, no color. Only warmth or no warmth, rest, deep sighs, and tears...Not hungry, never hungry. Until hungry now! Very hungry, desperately hungry. Bottomless need, unmet. My vocabulary fails me, my metaphorical mind goes blank, I no longer know how to speak to myself. And time loses its meaning, so that what was is was will be forever.

Making myself write changes the dialogue, forces an answer to the question "why," brings the internal to account for the sensory and vice versa.

The 7-Eleven right next to where I work sells the most mediocre pumpkin muffins. Bland as they are, by noon I just can't get the little carb-bombs out of my head. I ate my home-made soup and just lived with the gnawing craving until I got home from work, at which point I whipped up the most delicious whole-wheat pumpkin muffins with a decadently sweet tofu-cream filling.

I don't recall ever baking myself anything even half as elaborate. Chocolate chip cookies, sure. But before today, every culinary act has been one of nurturing others, meeting the needs - real or imagined, spoken or otherwise - of my husband or family or community. Never just for me. Never just because.

There is meaning in these things, all things, that can be found if I force myself to write it. There is power here in the merging of languages. There may be joy, I think, tucked among my computer keys. If I keep looking, if I keep writing, if I keep asking.

2016 Goals

"Once the grief subsides," my therapist said, "You'll need something to keep you busy. You don't know how much time you've spent every day being sad. You need to start setting goals."

Challenge Goals for 2016

• Resume Tracking and Tabulating All Income and Spending
• Save $1,000 Emergency Fund
• Pay Back Personal Loan ($1000)
• Save 6 Months Expenses
• Create 1-, 5-, and 10-year Plan

My intention is to refer back to this and track progress on a monthly basis. I'm still very raw and anxious about making plans in the wake of my divorce, but the time has come to start moving forward again. 

Reading Ramsey

I'm reading Dave Ramsey!

Before my total emotional breakdown, I was loosely experimenting with the envelope method of budgeting. I wasn't entirely sure what the point was, but I was ready to give it a try. Now I know I skipped a couple of steps of Dave's plan...or at least, a hundred pages Into The Total Money Makeover, it seems I have. Step One is to save a thousand dollar emergency fund!

I can't say I've drunk Dave's kool-aid, but I CAN say that a $1000 emergency fund would have been damn handy a number of times these past few years. And the timing is fairly appropriate: August is the one month I'm allowed to get overtime through my company. I'm doing my absolute best to milk that. I also have a dentist visit, a dermatologist appointment, and a trip to the therapist this month, so it's not like I don't have any other expenses to face....buuuut if I save the money by September 1st, it's very reasonable to assume I can deal with all the final niggling personal debts by October 1st...and then...then what? I can finally and without a doubt be investing in financial freedom by the start of 2016!!!

First Days on The Wagon

I have been tracking expenses! Huzzah!

I made a pilot attempt in the last few days of July. And I fell off the wagon IMMEDIATELY. But, for the past four days I have been very honest and exact in my figures. And I hate it. 

For the entirety of 2015 I have spent my money as quickly as it comes in, sometimes more quickly than it comes in. I get paid twice a month. One check is enough to cover rent, which in turn pays for groceries and bills. There is even enough left over to buys a $62 monthly bus pass, so it's fair to say that one check covers all of my daily necessities. Then I have a whole other pay check to cover "everything else."

Naturally, I forget that "everything else" is pricey and also covers necessities. Dental and dermatology appointments, prescriptions, any hygiene products I care to indulge in...So I happen to spend pretty freely on the incidentals that pop up every month: birthday gatherings, family road trips out of town, new-second-hand clothes, drinks with friends, dates, and a steady flow of snacks...

Long story short: I'm consistently broke. I get my second check, pay a little over half of it to doctors, and spend the rest of it on Tex-Mex and cheap HEB nori rolls. In, like, five days. There are probably ten days out of every month that I have money in my pocket. I do tend to stash some of every check away for savings. But I draw on it to get through the last couple of days of every pay period.

The good news is that my life is stabilizing in every way. One of the reasons I fell into this destructive pattern is that I did not care about anything at all and never expected to again. Now I am coming into what I expect to be the most powerful period of my life, a time of absolutely no shackles and my first taste of personal freedom and autonomy. I get to decide what I want my life to look like. Getting there, however, requires an acknowledgement of what I am about now and how that needs to change. So, yeah, August is a month of opening my eyes, breathing, forgiving, and dreaming.

Bringing it Back

The focus of this blog has been financial freedom. To that end I have spoken on car freedom and freedom from technological dependence. In 2012 I went so far as to explore freedom from almost all property and normalcy while I toured the Midwest on my bike. And this year I learned a lot about what it means to question our most basic dependencies and shackles: what does it mean to seek freedom from our prejudices, our beliefs, the lies we tell ourselves, the lies our families tell us, the lies we tell them? The truths that changed, the understandings that shifted, the realities that refused to budge?

How about we bring the focus back to financial freedom?

I am now a 30-year-old single woman living in close proximity to her siblings and their children. I have a highly technical career, no college degree, fairly good health insurance, and live in a house in downtown Austin, TX with eight housemates (one of whom is a newborn). I love to cook and garden and bake and ride my bike. I struggle with the 40 hour work week. I want to produce and display art, write, play many instruments, and overcome a depression that has become a way of life. I am just a few months away from having a clean bill of dental health and no debt whatsoever. I am car free, my cell phone is free (I'll go into that later), my co-op rent covers groceries and basic utilities.

I originally chose a 20 year timeline because I wanted to be prepared to retire when my older husband turned sixty. I honestly don't know if we could have come close to achieving that goal together. I don't know if we would have come close to accomplishing that goal if I alone had just kept my head down and continued to try as absolutely hard as I possibly could for the next decade. But now...now that it's just me, no man to support or compromise with, no parents to drain me, no...Yeah, I can't go there yet. But, guys...I think I can DO this. I think I can be financially independent by the time I'm 40, if I try really really hard. It seems insane, so much more insane than it did when I had Darling at my back. But I think there's a chance.

Step One: Go back to tracking EVERYTHING. Every penny spent on every bus pass, every soda, every doctors visit. And then I'll report it here to be honest. I'll keep that up through August, do an old school tabulation and graph, and then work out how much money I could be saving a month at my current pay rate.

A Different Type of Challenge

You guys are so wonderful! Thank you for the supportive comments, keeping up with me all these years, and especially to Mel and her "where are you?" e-mail that encouraged me to write back in May.

Dad's last several weeks were very hard. He passed on June 2nd and I am so, so very grateful that his suffering is finally over. The next week I went to court and finalized my divorce. The week after THAT I drove to my Mom's house, gave her truck back, and have been informed that she is no longer interested in maintaining a relationship with me. As phenomenally depressing as this paragraph is...and trust me, if the young woman who started this blog in 2007 could have read this she would promptly have killed herself...There is a freedom to these words. My life is suddenly, terribly, entirely my own.

I've been incredibly self-centered these past several months, the sort of selfishness that only a deep sorrow can engender or justify. Since my last post, I started making good decisions in a spirit of absolute spite. I started taking care of myself, not because I wanted to live, but to prove that absolutely nothing would ever make life bearable. I made dentist appointments, doctor appointments, weekly therapy visits. I saw a dermatologist for my planters warts. I started eating. I ate three meals a day every day in May. I meditated most weekday mornings. I drink alcohol more often than ever, but I haven't actually been drunk in about six months. My relationship with coffee normalized, I slowly learned to work forty hours a week. Once the truck was out of my life, I started walking again, at least a mile a day. I forced myself to go out every week: I saw ballet and comedy shows and art openings and at least a half-dozen live bands of all genres. I went to sports bars, played board games, and even went to a swing dance class. When all I wanted to do was sleep forever, I baked cookies and excelled at work and sometimes remembered to brush my hair. 

I cried every single day. I dreaded waking up every morning. My activity encouraged my friends to congratulate me on doing better. I began to feel like a long-dead star, people saw a shine that had long ago grown cold and dark. But the only thing that supposedly cures this grief is time and self-care. So I kept moving, hating myself, but moving.

Today...today I feel a prolonged respite from pain. The awareness came to me in the kitchen as I kneaded my home-made seitan. I froze, suddenly afraid of moving, afraid of shattering the delicate veneer of not hurting. Afraid that moving again might attract the attention of my dedicated demons. Slowly, very slowly, I finished the seitan and put it in the crock pot. Then I washed my clothes and hung them on the line. Made a movie date with a housemate. Waiting, all the while, for the next wave of sorrow.

I've cried since then, but something shifted. I'm writing again because of that. For the first time in six months, I'm not actively hurting.

I might be happy again someday. Despite myself, I might live through this. 

And total financial freedom is a thing I will think about again, in a completely different context than I ever imagined.

What is The Challenge without my Darling? Don't make the mistake of thinking it will be easier. My husband was my inspiration, my driving force. Without him...It's just going to be different, okay? Just.Different.

And I'm not entirely ready to go there just yet. For now, for today, I'm settling for hope. A hope that I can come back, set goals, move forward, and live a different type of challenge.

The Awakening

It's been a rough year. It's been a rough...couple of years.

On Valentines Day my dad announced his transition to hospice care. The next day my husband and I separated.

Two months later I finally chose to seek medical attention.

I could write a hundred thousand words on those two months. And the lead up to them. And...But no, let's keep it as simple as possible. All you need to know is that I cried until I hallucinated, until my eyes went black, until small blisters and slight callouses formed where I wiped away the tears hour after hour. It was not easy, and it was the culmination of two years of absolute and total Hell. I cried every day for thirty, forty, and then fifty days. I stopped eating and lost fifteen pounds in that first month. I suddenly developed highlights in my hair, a loss of color. My nails began to suffer from stress/malnutrition, to the point that one fingernail and one toenail have started to fall off.

Yet I didn't want to even admit the possibility of depression. Going to the therapist was hard.

So...codependency is a thing. Lizzie suggested it was a part of my struggle roughly seven years ago and I refused to consider it.

Raised in a dysfunctional household, I didn't know any other way to be. Surrounded by sick parents in their twisted environment, one in which fear and danger was taken for granted, I carried that expectation with me into my adulthood. I expected it from my friends, and created a social network of emergency and panic that sustained my worldview during the brief periods of respite from family.

And I created this blog.

And I fed my obsession.

Codependency is characterized by obsession, by the way. As I read Codependent No More (as prescribed by my doctor), I was confused by Melody Beattie's repeated use of the phrase, "person or problem." Sure, I'd been obsessed with a person before, but problem? How can a problem possibly provide the feedback to sustain a real-life obsession? How can an individual really find self-worth and happiness in a problem?

Debt. Debt had been my obsession. I'd lost myself to debt payment, sacrificed everything to it, found my worth in its demise, and as it dwindled...my meaning dwindled. My writing stopped. I made the final payment and it felt like my life ended. And that's about the time everything else in my life - barely manageable up to that point - went totally to Hell.

Obviously I'm not saying debt payment is bad. I'm saying that I struggle with personality traits that made it easy to lose myself to this otherwise good and noble process. And I'm saying that I only recently found myself, and I'm only just now working out who Maya is, who Tread Softly is, and who I will become. I want to keep up this blog, and I miss you guys, but I also need you to know the truth. This has been a blog about spending, lifestyle, sustainability, subversion, and Total Financial Freedom. But it has also been a blog about a codependent relationship, my codependent relationship with debt.

Moving forward, if I'm able to, I'd like to talk about having a healthy relationship with money. I'm committed to becoming healthy again, maybe for the first time. I'd like to help others with the same struggle. I don't know what that looks like. I don't know what will change or stay the same. But I do know that freedom is more possible today than ever before.

Envelope Details

Super-Quick answers to questions left on my last post:

My rent at the co-op includes groceries. Which, of course, brings up our (great-deal-of) additional food spending. There are two reasons we have an additional food budget:

1. Our system was devised using data from three years, one of which we did not live at the co-op and therefore had a grocery budget.

2. Darling and I eat out on occasion. It happens. I live in the city, I work full-time, and I like to eat out. We don't eat fast food, we don't eat out daily, but about once a week we have enchiladas, and that's not going to change.

There was also a little bit of discussion on the "virtual" nature of our envelope method and the trouble of index cards and IOUs. Basically, each envelope has an index card noting how much money should be in said envelope, and where that money is now. It's simpler than it sounds. My phone index card looks something like this:

1/1/2015 +34.15 paycheck
1/2/2015 -34.15 loan to "debt"

And then Debt looks like this:

1/1/2015 +212.00 paycheck
1/2/2015 +34.15 loan from debt
1/2/2015 +50.00 loan from food
1/2/2015 ...etc...

I'm not entirely sure how much cash I will ultimately keep in envelopes. That is currently not a problem, as I have about $15 to my name. But the beauty of keeping that $15 in the envelopes is the tactile reality enforced by seeing that. $10 of that was, in fact, in my entertainment envelope, and taking that $10 to the store to buy (nonalcoholic) drinks to share with a gathering of friends encouraged me to go with the $2 2 liter bottle of soda as opposed to the $6 box of cans. On the one hand, part of me feels kind of lame for bringing so little. On the other hand, thank goodness I have $8 left for entertainment! I know that seems super petty, but I am sooo seriously tired of being incredibly broke all the time.

Envelope Method, Day One

You know what's intense? The envelope method.

I totally understand what turned me off of this budgeting tool in the past. Being happily obsessed with debt payment, any sum of money has always cheerfully been shunted into that category of "spending." Be it $12 or $2,000, I'd make that payment, consequences be damned.

Which is one of the reasons my teeth still suck, among other things. Because, no matter the adulation received for making debt payment, you take from every other element of your life when you focus exclusively on That One Thing.

The envelope method makes this impossible to ignore.

This is my process and resulting thoughts so far:

As previously mentioned, Darling and I used years of data to work out how much, on average, we spend in every category. We happen to have 13 categories. You may have more, you might have fewer. I am opposed to the concept of a "misc." category for numerous reasons, but, again, it took years of analysis to happen upon our specific sets of patterns and behaviors. I didn't just sit down and guess at any of this. Nor did I "project" at all, assuming that our current lifestyle or eventual lifestyle would result to any increase or decrease in spending or income. I've watched our income jump from $0 a month to $4,000 a month and back. Core expenses stay pretty constant.

I converted those number to percentages of income (again, average income, not current). So I now know that we typically dedicate 1% of our income to clothing, 3% to the phone, and 37% to rent.

That was the easy part. I then relaxed for a couple of weeks and let the holidays happen. Yesterday Darling and I both got paid. I took those checks and money left over from last year. My first realization is that we had enough to pay rent and catch up on our back rent! Hurray!

In the past I would have gone to the bank, cut the check, and - more or less happy with the idea that "we're on the right track," gone out to eat, over-spent, over-drafted, etc. This time I sat down and sorted all of that money into the envelopes. 1% into the hygiene envelope, 2% into fees and fines, and so on...

Okay. Now, if we have $1,700, and I want to write a check to the house for $1,600, and there's only $600 in the "rent" envelope, and only $200 in the "debt" envelope, there's $800 to borrow from other envelopes.

Huh.

You guys would have laughed to see me. I was shuffling through my envelopes with insane determination, as though I was going to squeeze $800 out of our clothing and office supplies budget. Well, obviously I can't empty out the transportation or travel budget....Keep in mind that none of this was cash floating around, but index cards noting amounts (we will be working with cash, but the money is still in check form as I write). Still. It was a bit mad.

Finally, I settled with $7 in the hygiene envelope (we need toothpaste and shaving cream), and $10 in the entertainment envelope. Everything else has an index card that says, "$0, debt owes you $x.

Now, with the amount of attention I pay to money one might imagine this wouldn't have been such a breakthrough. But it really, really is. It looked like I had a lot of money. And paying most of it to debt made me feel like I deserved a reward. I was skipping the part where paying my money to debt meant no money for a reward...or to meet other needs, like gas.

I'm still catching up on rent, though.