Here is a life that trundles along, work to work to waste to work, the same annoying routine over and again. It becomes hard sometimes to remember why. If I had a family of my own, that would be a reason to work so hard, the caring for others and bettering their lives, that would be a reward. But I do not have a family of my own. I am out here on my own. I work two jobs only to dig myself out of debt, to pay for things I don’t even vaguely remember buying years and years ago. It’s hard to keep myself motivated, to drag myself out of my home every day, to undersell my time to pay for the interest on my past.

I am doing the right thing. I am. I have to remember that, especially when I am tired and I want to quit. I am doing the right thing. No bells, no whistles, no pats on the back. I have to be content with that mere knowledge. Sometimes it doesn’t seem enough.

It’s harder, too, when I know that I could cop out. I come from a family of five siblings. Of these five, two have declared bankruptcy. That is always an option, they say. Family members have advised me to do so.

I can’t.

A debt is a debt. You pay what you owe. What’s wrong with people that they don’t understand this anymore? I cannot throw in the towel and say, there, someone else pay for me. I can’t do that and still feel that I have the right to call myself an adult. Perhaps other people can. I don’t know how, but they can. I simply cannot.

So I work the two jobs and I pay closer attention to the numbers. Strange to say, but some horrid twisted good has come of the man attacking me at my nightjob. Taking on the second job, as I was forced to as a result of the attack, has helped me enormously financially. I am finally making some (small) strides in the right direction. When I had just the one job, I made just enough to make it by, paying for the basics, keeping up with the minimum payments, and wasting some money here and there. I made it by, sometimes just squeaking by, but I never even inched ahead. I paid the minimums and never, never, added up all I owed. I really didn’t want to know.

In August I changed. I had been less than careful before, and look where it had gotten me. I’m way too old to continue being that stupid. It took some major life changes but now I follow a plan. I use my dayjob salary to live on, pay the rent and the bills and all the credit card minimums, just as I had been doing before. I make just enough for that and there’s a small bit left over for me to waste on a few frivolous things so I have something to feel guilty about. (I need my movie fixes. I’m a theater junkie.)

The money from my nightjob goes straight to debt. I sat down with all my debts in August and added them up. The total stunned me. I had known that the numbers were bad before then, but I had no idea how really bad they were. Three credit cards and one minor student loan. Each of the cards had thousands of dollars in old debt just sitting there, at interest rates of 24%, 21%, and 13%. Creative accounting was no longer an option. The lower card wouldn’t accept transfers. The summer fiasco of asking Ian for use of his credit at 5% blew up in my face, costing me more money and most of my pride.

Every other week now, payday at the nightjob, I send the nightjob check to the 24% card and, slowly, I am working it down. I’m treading water with the other two, paying those minimums from the dayjob salary. Every day, each and every day, I enter the numbers in a spreadsheet I keep in Excel. I’ve taught myself quite a bit in the program, so that now I can chart my progress with line graphs and bar charts and exploding pie diagrams. It’s important to do it every day, to make sure that little red line is going in the right direction, to take a tiny bit of pride in the incremental gains I make with each check.

Since August, I’ve thrown relatively huge amounts of money at my debts. My cards continue to assess their astronomical interest and fees. The net result is, in six months of exceedingly hard work, I have lowered my net debt by almost $1500. It may not be much, your basic drop in the bucket, but it is something. At this rate, I still have years to go, but it is something. I have to remember that. It would be a lot easier to be muster up a sense of pride if I weren’t so tired most of the time.