The Forever Grind

Money begets money; debt begets debt

Born into a wealth of love.

When I was young, we never really talked about money. I just knew that most of my friends’ families had it, and we didn’t. I knew my friends went to well-lit shopping malls to get new clothes, and I wore hand-me-downs. My friends’ parents had fancy cars, and I could see the road pass beneath me through through the rusted floorboards of my mom’s Chevette. My friends’ parents had vacation homes on the lake, and we would visit them there, sailing in the summer and ice skating in the winter. My friends’ parents had houses with pools and diving boards, and I lived in a second floor apartment with a balcony. I’d jump off that balcony to play on the shared neighborhood basketball court—the one with the goal that never had a net. Once, my mom’s boyfriend, Ron, bought and hung a net for us, and before it rotted from wind and rain and snow and sun, we neighborhood kids fancied ourselves NBA stars—the Kings and Queens of the apartment complex.

When Mom didn’t have the money to buy me the shoes I wanted or the Twinkies I craved, I’d say, “Just write a check, Mom.” To young, uniformed me, it seemed so simple. Mom thought my nonchalant solution to our money problems was hilarious.

Just write a check.

My mom didn’t have money, despite working three jobs while solo-parenting two kids to make ends meet. My wayward father didn’t, either. It wasn’t until my mom married my stepdad, Bob when I was 14 that I began to understand what a middle class life looked and felt like. But still. I never have and never will receive an inheritance. There is no trust fund, no family money coming my way, no stocks, no bonds, no property to sell. The upside of this reality is that the recent stock market dives didn’t mean anything to me personally. When you start with next to nothing, you have little to lose.

I didn’t have the luxury of parent-provided house down payments or higher education or cars or trips. Every six months or so, when I was in college, my uncle would send me a $50 check. It was a fortune. Everything I’ve had since I left my childhood home for good has come from my own hands—my windfalls and my debts.

I divorced my husband in 2018, and historically, that’s been proven to be financially devastating to most women. The truth of the matter is that when I was working, I typically out-earned him. But with four kids at home, there was never much money left over to save or invest or sink into a retirement plan. And let’s not even talk about the amount of loans I took out to help send my kids to college. I wanted them to have the power and perspective that education provides, and I didn’t want them to be saddled with tremendous debt from the get-go. But I will be paying those loans off 20 years after I die, and that will just be the interest—the principal will remain. That’s how the government and the banks make their money, after all.

The poor pave the way for the wealthy with higher interest rates and overdraft fines and late fees and annual credit card service fees and predatory loans with your junky car as collateral. God forbid, you default on that loan because you need to pay the doctor to treat your feverish kid, and the bank takes your car in the middle of the night. When you wake up the next morning, exhausted and reliant on caffeine and a quick hit of sugar to begin another day of slogging away at a job you hate for the sake of survival, you realize you can’t get to work, and you ultimately lose the job you despised but desperately needed. It’s a downward spiral. Next time you’re on a water slide—one of those fully contained tubes where you twist and turn your way down, sloshing from side to side—try to stop yourself in the middle of the ride. That’s how it must feel when the financial dominoes begin to fall.

If you can’t pay for things up front, you pay more for them in the long run.

It’s expensive to be poor.

Having taken time off to care for my kids when they were little (which is a huge privilege, I know, but one that I will now, literally, pay for for the rest of my life) means I missed years of salary increases and job promotions, my retirement savings is paltry, and my social security is far less than it could have been.

And at 55, I’m starting to get a little tired.

There is no end in sight for me. No “only ten more years until I can retire” because I’ll never be someone who gets to retire. I think on a gut level, I’ve always known this. I mean, I didn’t major in English to get rich. But I thought in my older years, I’d make my money writing books or working in a quaint little bookstore with a coffee bar. I didn’t realize when I was young and starry-eyed how very little there is to be made in writing books—unless you’re Colleen Hoover or Stephen King—and I had no way of knowing that at 55, my back would hurt so much there’s no way I could stand for a 6-hour shift doing anything, even sorting and selling the things that bring me the most joy in life: Books.

So, I have to (I know, Andi, it’s a “get to”) keep grinding in Corporate America as long as I can. And Corporate America doesn’t really want me, either. When I lost my job in 2023, I was unemployed for a year and a half. One year and then another half of a year with just a few freelance gigs every other month or so. Imagine what that does to your savings and your high-interest credit cards. One is decimated, and the other skyrockets. I’ll let you guess which is which.

Then the whole cycle of climbing out of debt begins again. Wash, rinse, repeat.

I am lucky enough to have people in my life who helped ensure I didn’t become homeless, and I now intimately understand how most of us are a couple paychecks away from living in the streets. But I’ve never wanted to rely on the generosity of others to survive. That’s just not who I am. Julie kept me afloat during that horrible time by paying my bills and keeping a roof over our heads, and I will never be able to repay her while I’m alive—literally. I’ve taken out an additional life insurance policy with her named as my beneficiary so I can settle my debt after I’m dead. It’s the only way I know how.

We joke about “when the movie rights sell,” but that’s just a pipe dream for an author. We’d be just as likely to win the lottery.

From January 2023 - September 2024, I sent out more than 500 resumes. 500+. That’s not an exaggeration. In fact, it might be an underestimation. 500+ carefully crafted cover letters. 500+ resumes adjusted specifically for the opportunity. You know how many interviews I got? Even with friends and internal candidates recommending me? Zero. Zilch. Nada. I couldn’t get past the gatekeepers anywhere. How’s that for a kick in the nuts? No one wants an experienced white-haired woman when they can hire a recent grad who’s eager and cheap.

Sexism? Maybe. Ageism? Absolutely. I have no doubt in my mind.

The wonderful creative agency I’ve been with for decades has found me freelance gigs here and there—enough to keep my head above water most of the time. They say I’m one of their top go-tos because my temporary employers rave about me. But the key word is “temporary.” My agency found me my current gig—a 12-month contract, the longest one I’ve ever had. Decent pay, but no benefits, so I have to shell out an extra $800 a month for healthcare. And then I get to shell out another $4,000 to meet my deductible. That takes a pretty big bite out of my pretty decent pay.

But the worst part of this gig is that there is a definitive end to it. My contract is up at the end of 2025. And then it’s back to the hunt. Will I spend another year wracking up debt that I just paid down and relying on the generosity of others to survive while I send out yet another 500 resumes to a working world that no longer wants me?

People might be inclined to tell me to just pull myself up by my bootstraps, but do you know what actually happens if you try to pull yourself up by your bootstraps?

You fall on your face.

That irony is not lost on me.

It’s important to talk about these things because growing up “poor” makes you feel less than. It’s hard—mentally, physically, and emotionally. It seeps into your bones and makes its way through your bloodstream. Eventually, your beating heart is moving your poor blood through your veins. Like many core childhood memories, income inequality shapes who you are and who you become and what you think about yourself. When you measure your existence against the existence of others, and yours falls short in comparison, it leaves you searching, always searching. It makes you wonder why you have always had less, why you have not been able to catch up to others. I had a deep embarrassment for who I was and a deep yearning for what I didn’t have when I was young. I always thought there was something wrong with me, or that I was doing everything wrong.

And yes, I made many financial missteps as an adult, but I was learning as I went—the first one in my family to go to college, the first one to have a corporate job, the first one with the ability to invest in a 401k, and zero preparation for any of it—and a few mistakes shouldn’t relegate you to a lifetime of inequity. Hard work and a steady income should have enabled me to recover much more quickly.

But the system is rigged against those of us without means.

When you’re struggling to put money into savings to begin with, any setback—an infant’s NICU stay, braces for three of your kids, a job loss, an unpaid maternity leave, a spouse’s career change and salary cut, a car repair, a furnace that decides to stop working in the middle of a brutal winter—these things can rip that perceived cushion of safety right out from under you and then kick you in the face while you’re bleeding on the pavement.

I was doing everything I could to survive in a capitalistic society that rewarded my work with more work while the rich were rewarded with more wealth.

Work until you die, isn’t that the Protestant ethic way?

I’m wondering when my share starts trickling down. What say you, Ronnie?

And please don’t get me started on the current administration’s rampant destruction of our most beloved and valued institutions, their insatiable greed, their never-ending corruption, and their Rich White Man Rewards.

No child in this country should go to bed hungry. No human should have to live in the streets—and be criminalized for it. Not when our sitting President is so out-of-touch and ridiculously wealthy, he quips about “groceries” being a beautiful, old-fashioned word as he unapologetically continues to line his pockets on the backs of the poor and the working class.

And please explain to me how someone like Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg can amass the kind of wealth they all hold and not feed our country’s children or home our unhoused or figure out how all those with air in their lungs can have free healthcare. What kind of human heart believes that colonizing Mars is a better answer than putting their resources toward saving this planet and its people?

How much is enough?

How much money?

How much privilege?

How much power?

I will never understand.

It shouldn’t be this hard to survive, should it? In a country with so very much? I can vividly remember being in my 20s, sitting on the floor with my newborn baby in my lap, surrounded by a pile of bills, crying. I would scratch the drop-dead due date in red pen on each envelope and subtract that amount from my then husband’s teacher salary or my entry-level technical writing job salary, and there was never enough to cover it all. Not with rent and utilities and student loans and daycare expenses and credit cards that I’d used to survive on in college.

There was never enough.

There still isn’t.

Physically, I can no longer sit on the floor in a pile of bills and cry. Luckily, all my bills are online now, so I can just sit at my desk and cry.

I mean, I have enough now to cover my day-to-day expenses, but what happens at the end of December when my contract expires?

Living with that fear and uncertainty is soul-crushing.

What happens if there is no social security when I turn 67? What happens when that social security isn’t even enough?

I’ve always wanted to see the world. There is a wanderlust inside me that can’t be quelled. But I’ve never been overseas. I always said that I would travel once the kids were grown. But they’re grown now, and I still haven’t been to Paris.

It was my mom’s dream to travel to Europe. I wanted to give that gift to her. I promised to give that gift to her before she died. But I never had the extra money, and Mom never got to see the Eiffel Tower. Perhaps my fate is the same.

When you don’t come from money, when there is no safety net, it’s damn near impossible to get ahead, no matter how hard you work. And I have worked hard my entire life. I started working when I was sixteen, and I haven’t stopped.

I will probably never be able to stop. Is that our American dream? I don’t mind working—I just thought it would be different now. I thought maybe I’d be working because I wanted to—because I wanted to make a difference, because I wanted to contribute something to society, because I wanted to create art and entertainment.

Not because I had to.

But I will have to work until the day I die, and that doesn’t feel quite right to me. A chance to travel, to rest, to breathe—I thought that’s what my later years would bring.

Not in America. Not when my healthcare is so outrageously expensive and the loans I acquired to help my kids have better, more prosperous lives than mine will follow me to the grave and beyond.

I’m a college-educated professional, and surviving is a challenge. Thriving is just beyond my reach. I can’t imagine how hard it is to make it in this country when employers fail to pay a living wage. When prices continue to skyrocket and the minimum wage remains stagnant. When young people must work three jobs to make rent and keep the lights on every month. When so many don’t have a safety net, they must live their lives in a constant state of fear and free fall.

If this is the American Dream, I’d like to wake up now.