So much of this blog has been about my romantic blunders, my longing to find meaning in life, my coming to terms with being perpetually single. But I have a dirty little secret that I haven't shared with even my closest of friends.I am in debt.
Lots of debt. Debt that haunts me at night and makes me wonder why I even bother debt. And I wonder why, of all the things they could be teaching in school, no one taught us how to avoid debt.
I remember in grade nine guidance class spending an hour learning how to put a condom on a wooden penis. I remember each and every one of us in partners, nervously giggling as one person held the penis down while the other awkwardly rolled the slimy piece of rubber down the unrealistc wooden shaft, all of us red in the face and avoiding eye contact.
I do not remember being taught how to make a monthly budget.
I do realize that avoiding debt may not be the school systems responsibility, that household management is something your parents are meant to teach you. But, having grown up with parents so deep in debt that we lived in fear of creditors, that to this day I avoid answering phones, I was doomed from the start.
I know I really shouldn't be blaming anyone, that I brought all this on to myself. No one stuck a gun to my head and said take that trip to Seattle, buy that outfit, take that cab ride home. But society did tell me that I had to go to univerity, that I had to rack up a giant pile of student loans in order to be a functioning adult.
And so here I am, a university graduate with a degree that does nothing but impress people at parties, and a chunk of debt that I will be paying for the next twenty years.
Maybe that does make me a functioning adult. Lord knows I can never be without work, that I will forever be contributing to the tax man as I spend more hours in the workplace than I do with my own family. But maybe debt is an integral part of being a grown-up. Of all my friends, probably seventy to eighty percent of them have some kind of debt, whether it be student loans, car payments, mortgages, or even borrowing from friends and family. It seems debt has become a normal part of living in the privileged first world.
But if debt is so normal, why can't I sleep at night?
I look back at that day in class, learning how to use a condom, feeling so squirmy and uncomfortable in a room full of 14 years olds who were just as squirmy and uncomfortable as me, and I think maybe that time could have been better used.
At least condoms come with instructions.
Money comes at your own risk.
