When I finally hit bottom...
When I finally hit bottom with money and debt, it felt like I was drowning in an ocean of shame. I had been spending and borrowing compulsively for most of my life, but now everything was much worse: the business I had opened less than two years earlier was in desperate shape and taking on water fast. By the time I finally let go I owed the IRS, the state, the state employment commission, the man who'd loaned me the money to start the business, a former employee, and my parents. And those creditors, naturally, weren't the only ones -- I also owed money on four credit cards and an ancient student loan, left over from yet another vocational path I hadn't ended up pursuing. The total was about $120,000. I owned nothing besides a Hyundai that hadn't even been paid off. Whoopee! Welcome to hell.
I had joined DA about a year earlier, in June 1990. Even though I hadn't been willing to immediately close or sell the business when I started to fall delinquent in payroll taxes, or to stop taking on more unsecured debt, I went regularly to meetings and started recording. At first I drove to Washington, D.C., even though a man with many years in DA in New York had moved to my town and started a group -- that was back in the days when I steadfastly believed in putting personalities before principles. In the fall I switched and instead began driving to a large city 80 miles away; at some point I saw how ridiculous I was being, and started attending locally. When he moved away a year or so later, I could honestly say that I missed him.
By then I'd sold my business for a small amount and begun the process of being granted an Offer in Compromise by the IRS. They settled for $5,000 on a total of $42,000 in principal, penalties and interest. In 1994 my parents not only loaned me the money for that and the lawyer's fees, but they paid my unpaid state payroll taxes as well. Obviously, I still wasn't ready to go to any lengths and face my situation without taking on more unsecured debt from my parents, who'd been enabling me for many years. Terrifying as that prospect would have been, I now see that not only would I have survived, I would have prospered. Instead, I took the easier, softer way.
That wasn't all I did, however. In other areas I worked a much cleaner program. I got a pressure-relief group in the summer of 1991, declared a six-month debt moratorium, and contacted my creditors when I had said I would. With one exception, the payment plans I offered were accepted -- some grudgingly -- and I began regular payments.
The exception was the man who had loaned me the money for my business; we had met when he was assigned to me by the Service Corps of Retired Executives (SCORE), where I'd gone for advice on starting the business. He responded to my moratorium letter by getting angry and being very punitive. I was so desperate to make him leave me alone that I complained to the Small Business Administration, which oversees SCORE, and learned that volunteers were strictly forbidden to get involved financially with clients. Although he had resigned as a volunteer by then , I assume he heard, through the grapevine, that I'd complained; that must have been extremely embarrassing for him, and I've always had mixed feelings about how I handled the situation. In any case, it was clear that he wanted no more contact with me, and I assume he wrote me off as a bad debt. At one point I began sending $5 monthly checks to him, which, several months later, he returned. I then wrote and asked him to name a charity I could send them to, but he never responded. In November 1996, I began sending small monthly donations to the general scholarship fund at his alma mater.
In the spring of 1998 I paid off my last credit card. In April 1999 I'll make the final payment on my oldest debt, a student loan I took out in 1978. I send small amounts monthly to a former employee (to whom I started out owing $1,000) and my father and stepmother (to whom I owe $52,000). Several years ago I asked that they arrange their estate so that what I owe them will be subtracted from my part. That makes me feel somewhat better, but I also know that the actual amount I owe them would have to include tens of thousands of dollars in interest that, because of me, my sisters and their children will never see. I let my father, and other men who stood in for him, rescue me for many long, sick years. The best thing I can say here is that I haven't incurred any unsecured debt since March 1996.
That's the nuts-and-bolts part of my story. Now for the part that really makes me happy to recount, because it's about what it feels like to wake up, at midlife, and begin at long last to blossom. First, however, I need to give you some context for my renaissance.
In 1969, when I was 17 and had just returned home to Kansas from my freshman year at the University of Wisconsin, my mother died of cancer. I had had emotional problems for most of my life, which rapidly overwhelmed me after her death. The following Christmas I had a severe nervous breakdown and agreed to enter a private psychiatric hospital in south-central Kansas. Although on the surface it looked good, in fact it was a shaming, punishing place. I quickly fell into a kind of self-sabotaging warfare with the staff and, instead of healing and getting out, got sicker and more alienated from myself. Finally, in the late fall of 1970, I was locked in a small room for 12 weeks. The following May I was released for good.
The 25 years that followed were full of unfelt pain and terribly frustrating. I tried college a couple more times, dropped out, and proceeded to bounce from one ungratifying job to the next -- 38 in all, between 1971 and 1992. I emerged as an alcoholic and marijuana addict. I went from being very promiscuous to two long-term and extremely unsatisfying relationships with men who enabled my compulsive debting and codependency. Finally, after the second relationship ended in 1988, I retreated into total isolation from men.
The most frustrating part of those 25 years, however, was that my creativity was almost totally blocked. I had been writing freely before being hospitalized, with small successes that were tremendously important to me. After my passage through that small room, however, the ability to write with ease and not paralyzing fear quickly receded, buried under an avalanche of grief and rage. Occasionally, at the expense of great stress -- or, before I got sober in 1982, when I was high -- I would manage to write something. Overwhelmingly, however, I was silent.
I did manage to take two important steps during that time, in addition to getting sober and clean and joining Overeaters Anonymous: In 1982 I moved to a lovely university town, where I hope to live for the rest of my life, and in 1985 I finished my B.A. in English.
Finally, on Easter Day of 1995, I put down the last substance I'd been using to avoid facing my life and my feelings -- food -- and got abstinent in OA after 10 years of regular attendance at meetings. The pain I'd been trying to numb for so long immediately began edging to the surface and demanding to be felt. I was working as a mid-level word processor at the university medical center, and anger over my neverending vocational impoverishment was beginning to peak. My job performance steadily declined as I alternated between depression and the struggle to accept my situation: I was underemployed, deep in debt, and almost insane with frustration over my writer's block.
In February 1996 -- a little less than a year into my abstinence -- the volcano of rage I'd been sitting on for most of my life finally exploded and I threw a professor out of my office. What followed was the most exciting, scary, gratifying thing I've ever done. I quit my job for three months and confronted the most obvious source of my rage: those 12 weeks of imprisonment. I decided to take 12 weeks for myself and see what I could do to overcome the damage they'd inflicted. What a voyage that was! I worked intensively in therapy, planted my first garden, started learning to cry, lay on my bedroom floor and raged, did artwork, and stared into space.
And during the last six weeks I did the most important work of all: I wrote a 14-and-a-half page letter to the man who had been my doctor at that sad, barren hospital and confronted him with every last unethical, hurtful, damaging thing he -- and the rest of the staff -- deserved to be confronted with (I call this "My Alternate Universe Ninth Step"). That led to an exchange of letters and, on my part, tremendous empowerment. Shortly afterward, I began writing again.
I returned to my job with a very different perspective: First, I have a big, private office all to myself. Second, I rarely have to do any work. Third, they don't care what I do when I'm not doing their stuff. Finally, I make enough to live on, get great benefits, and genuinely like the people I work with. In other words, for a writer who needs a day job, this is exactly where I want to be.
In mid-September 1996, a few months after I returned to work, I began writing a column ("The Fearless Consumer") for a local alternative newspaper. Each week I investigate some bad consumer experience a reader has had, talk to both sides, do some research, and summarize the whole thing in 600-700 words. I soon branched out and began doing in-depth investigative reporting of an unsolved mystery from 1986, in which a brand-new graduate student disappeared from the university -- from the department I now work in, in fact -- without a trace. His family has assigned me exclusive rights to the case, and I've written extensively on it, so far only locally. I'm ready, however, to begin freelancing parts of the story to larger markets.
I've now added two more unsolved mysteries (one of which I investigate with a partner), and have decided to make a career out of unearthing old murders and scandals -- like most places, this bucolic little town is loaded with both.
For two years in a row my writing has won awards from the state press association, which sends my gratitude reading off the charts. After all those years of frozen, rage-filled silence, I'm finally doing work I love, being published and paid for it regularly, and making up for lost time in a very gratifying way -- and not just in terms of creativity and prosperity, either. I'm finally ready to confront my Last Frontier, the avoidance of intimacy, and am very happy to report that being the local Nancy Drew turns out to be a great way to meet men.
I kicked off 1998 by getting a room on the ocean and doing Steps 6 and 7. That spring I did Steps 8 and 9, most of which were drenched in shame and fear; the results were beyond my wildest expectations. The man who had loaned me money for my business wrote to say that he was glad to be in touch, and looked forward to following my column; he also suggested two charities I might consider instead of sending my payments to his alma mater. This was more gratifying to me than I can say. I now send donations and, occasionally, baby blankets I've knit to a shelter for abused women in Kentucky. And after years of dreading an accidental public meeting, I actively hope that someday I'll look up and see him coming my way. Other amends led to relationships being revived as well; in every case, I felt more and more psychic weight being lifted from me, and the relief was exquisite.
So that's my story. Recently I thought about the slogan, "Happiness isn't having what you want, but wanting what you have," and realized that I want what I have -- passionately. For that I credit my Higher Power, Debtors Anonymous, and every one who's ever come through the rooms. Thank you!