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silveradept[The December Days theme this year is "Things I Used To Fully Believe About Myself." Some of these things might be familiar, some of them might be things you still believe about yourself, and some of them may be painful and traumatic for you based on your own beliefs and memories. The nice thing about text is that you can step away from it at any point and I won't know.]
#13: "I Can't See A Way Out Of This"
Even if you saw the content warning in the cut tag, it bears repeating: This phrase was spoken when I was suicidal, and therefore the entire post from this point on will talk about how that came about and why. There's no penalty for skipping this one or any other one.
Yes, you can blame my terrible ex for it. She's responsible for engineering the situation. (I have promised in the past that at some point, I would talk about the bad parts of the bad relationship. This particular year's December Days offers ample opportunities to do so.)
Mathematics saved my life. The fact that I can do sums and calculate their impacts kept me alive during my terrible relationship. Even though the fact that I can do sums and calculate their impacts was also driving me toward considering exchanging my life for being able to solve some of the thornier financial problems.
So it turns out that one of the things that makes me hyper-anxious is whether I have enough funds to be able to cover emergencies and to handle the expenses of daily life. As a newly-minted librarian in my first job, I had selected this job because the financials worked to allow me to pay back all of my student loans and still meet rent and other obligations. And so long as the only expenses I was handling were mine, that was going to work out pretty well. (At least, assuming that my landlord didn't rapidly hike the rent prices or other such situations. But there was always the emergency option of trying to apply for loan forgiveness after ten years, or switching to a different repayment plan if things didn't work out.) Not all that soon after I came out to the Dragon Conspiracy Territory, I met my terrible ex and I made the decision to try and make the relationship work, even though there wre signs right from the beginning that might have suggested that this was not a good fit to someone with more experience. (Or someone who didn't have a need to believe they could make a relationship work, even through the difficult parts.)
My ex, who was living on the investments that she and her late husband had made (he did computer programming for a living), was not good at budgeting and seemed routinely surprised when I was trying to help out with those expenses, since I was spending time at her house, eating food and other such things. I moved in with her as a way of trying to cut down on expenses, and then she used the remainder of the money she had in those investments to put down the money needed to buy the house I'm currently in, as well as to get a car that was a little better on the gas mileage and that wasn't going to try and spring all of its radiator fluid out (again). And there was the RV that got bought that was a bigger one than the previous one, since thre was another person and a few more pets to travel with now, possibly with at least some of the profits from selling her old house to go to the current house. So, as you can see, I was already pretty deeply financially entangled with her in a short while after starting the relationship with her. And, as the single income, especially after the money ran out to keep her credit cards paid off, increasingy more of my money was going toward making sure that expenses were being covered.
Except, of course, that expenses were not actually being covered. Balances were going up, rather than down, and new emergencies would raise those balances faster. Gift monies and raises and the occasional situations where I managed to pick up some extra scratch regularly were all shoveled quickly into trying to keep the balances from reaching their limits. It wasn't enough to do more than engage in a holding pattern and perhaps make a small amount of progress here and there on better months. Some of that was my ex's insistence on organic wherever possible, but still bought in quantity rather than than taking into account the greater expense that accompanied the organic label. Some of it was wanting to have frequent social time with others, that usually involved restaurant dinners, or fueling up and taking the RV to a campground for some time (and the supply run that would happen for that RV, even if much of what was packed in ended up being packed right back out when we got home. Some of it was wanting to give the dogs good food for their eating, and all of the expenses that were involved in their end of life care, and the unexpected death of Gandalf from a heart condition that he was hiding from all of us. Some of it was how much my ex wanted to adopt and provide for any cat that came within our orbit. (Admittedly, many of those cats were really cute and I did like caring for them. But it was still a cost to do so.) There were small things, like buying me gifts or things that I said I had been interested in, but often before I'd done the work to figure out if I could afford them or if that was the thing that I truly wanted. (With what money? My own money, of course.) And the feelings of obligation with regard to gifts to others as well. And sometimes getting into someone else's MLM or their stamp of the month club, with the idea of being able to use those things to make handmade cards or other such things and then market them. (Not understanding the amount of time and focus that it takes to create things and to market them, and there was also the part where the club itself required a certain amount of spending each month to maintain the basics of membership and the license to use their designs in your own creations.)
It was a lot of things, and I was doing my best to keep track of them with my venerable spreadsheet, so that I could see where the money was going and what it was being spent on. The negative trends became pretty clear, and so I tried (so many times) to explain to her that expenses were outpacing income, and that we needed to find places where we could either cut spending, or we needed to find ways of getting more income. Neither of these proposals ever went over well with her. On the spending side, she didn't want to cut back on the grocery bill and buy inferior products because they were cheaper, and she didn't want to cut back on the food for the animals. (We did eventually shift down from the specific expensive food for the dogs to buying boneless skinless chicken breasts and boiling the stock out of them to make them easily shreddable and using the stock for other things. It did make things less expensive, and it did work for helping to keep the dogs healthy with their conditions, even though it did create more work for us to do that.) She was a county away from her friends, so social opportunities were important as well, which did mean fuel costs for transporting back and forth, as well as wanting to use the RV that we'd bought. Cutting back on expenses was basically a non-starter for her.
On the income front, she was equally as resistant toward trying to find work or bring in more money through side businessing or other such. Some of it was that she was justifiably concerned nobody would hire an older woman who hadn't been in the workforce for some time. Some of it was that she believed things would be on balance more expensive if we had to hire out for them, like pet sitting (because there was no way she was going to let the dogs, with their health issues, be left unsupervised for any period of time, and even less so as their health deteriorated near the end of their lives) and cleaning and laundry. So it was better for us if she stayed home and took care of those things. (And because she was particular about how those things were done, I couldn't take on any of that chore burden myself.) That would become a sharpened spear of a point when I stopped suggesting that things needed to change and started inching closer and closer to insisting, instead. And she would throw out unserious suggestions like whether she should really sell the RV and give up being able to take her people and animals with her on trips. The soution that she was working on me with to solve the problems at the time that I finally decided I couldn't make the relationship work was essentially to take out a home equity loan and use the proceeds of that to pay off all of the credit card bills and some of the other expenses, so that we could get back to a good starting point. Which would have certainly kicked the can down the road some, but there was no indication from her that this would result in any behavioral changes, so I knew that what I would be doing was delaying the inevitable, because I was pretty sure we wouldn't be able to stay on budget for the length of the loan repayment. (Because she is the person she is, I ended up taking out that kind of loan anyway. She demanded that I had to give back to her what she'd invested in the relationship since she had given up her house and a great amount of her money for the relationship with me. I wanted the thing done, so I gave her the money she demanded so she would go away, rather than fight it out for what she really deserved to get from me. It'll still be a little while yet before that loan is put to bed and the last reason I have to be salty at her for actively making my life worse goes away.)
During the period before I finally was able to realize that the way out of the situation was to end the relationship and cut myself loose with the hope that I could get out and it wouldn't become financially ruinous, I was desperately hoping for some kind of plan that would allow me to make headway on the expenses. I'd already silently decided I wasn't going to spend on me, unless it was absolutely necessary, because there wasn't budget for it. I was thinking about the possibility of extending my workday to seven days a week by picking up a weekend job of some sort, but that was an exhausting prospect, and also, my ex was already unhappy about what little amount of time she got to see me and talk to me during the week, so if I added more work on during the weekend, it would only make her more unhappy. And that was on the assumption that I could find an additional job that would give me weekend hours only. (These days, one or both of us might have joined the gig economy, but again, that would likely have only made the situation worse, because she would have to leave the pets to do the work, or I would be spending even less time with her, or something else.) The things that I could come up with weren't working, for one reason or another, many of them having to do with her refusal to adjust her behavior or to accept that I would have to adjust mine. Since all of my suggestions were being ignored, and I couldn't construct a working solution to things, my thoughts turned to some more esoteric ways of getting money into the situation.
Specifically, I was thinking about what the various life insurance policies would pay out if they were triggered. My employer had one on me, provided free of charge to me. My credit union had a small amount of coverage on me. I don't remember if there were others also potentially involved, (maybe coverage in the automobile policy?) but my thoughts had turned to the question of how difficult it would be to engineer something convincingly accidental that it wouldn't trip the clauses in the policies that said nothing would be paid out in the event the investigators determined it was not an accident but a deliberate action. If you had asked me whether I was suicidal at that point, I would have told you no, because I hadn't made any plans on how to do it. I was instead just trying to work through the hypotheticals, to see whether the numbers would add up to make it a viable option to consider, or whether it would be wasted effort to try because there wouldn't be enough money injected into the situation to actually create a financially stable situation. Math saved my life. I could not see a way through, even with a perfect hypothetical, where the amount of money disbursed would be enough to actually stabilize the situation without requiring changes, or without collapsing in on itself after some amount of time. And, as the Looney Tunes joke goes, it's a great act, but the problem is that you can only perform it once. The calculations had spoken, and they had told me no. This was not a working solution to the problem. I simply wasn't worth enough. There would have to be some other solution engineered.
The one that eventually worked was to break up, but you can say that I considered pretty close to everything other than that before I eventually went that route. I knew that if I had let myself punt and take the loan, when this situation came up a second time, and there was no equity to borrow from to fix it again, that would provoke something drastic. My ex would probably tell me to file for bankruptcy, as she had done at least once before in her life, and that would fix the problem. She would be wrong about that, as most of the loans I had wouldn't be wiped from that, or if they were, they'd be wiped by calling in the liens and the house would have to be sold, and she was adamant that she needed a house's worth of space to live in, rather than an apartment. (Which is why she demanded so much money from me, so that she could at least potentially purchase a mobile home or somewhere in a senior living community to have a house to live in. She also took all the remaining cats, on the belief that she would be able to care for them better than I would.)
There is a happier postscript to this. There are more humans living in this house than there were when I was in the bad relationship. Fewer cats, admittedly, that I'm being at least partially responsible for the care of. And yes, my salary has increased by gaining more years of service and by whatever cost-of-living adjustments have been made to work with inflation, so I have a little bit more to work with than I did then. But, perhaps most importantly, the humans that I live with are willing to listen when I say no, or to be okay when I say that I'm concerned about the budget right now and I need to look to see if it's actually feasible. And they recognize that we are working within a budget, rather than insisting that the budget has to find a way to work with them, and that budget includes having to set aside monies for other kinds of payments, and for trying to build an emergency cushion. Sometimes the idea that I'm managing to make it work with more humans and less pets is a thing of wonder to me, and sometimes it's a thing that I wear as a badge of honor and a poke in the eye to the suggestion that my ex once made to me: if I was having so much distress about the finances and the budget and where the money would come from for managing that, then she should take over managing those things so I would stop stressing about them. I was not going to let that happen, because I knew full well who of the two of us could actually have a snowball's chance in hell of figuring out the way out, if there was one, but I was sorely tempted to wash my hands of it so that all the blame would fall to her when it inevitably fell apart. (I knew, even if I didn't articulate it like that at the time, that if I let her take control, I was only going to be less aware of what my doom looked like, and where and when it was arriving.)
There is a sizable gap in my spreadsheet of tracking inflows and outflows that corresponds with the period of time that I was most stressed about the finances, where I had come to the conclusion that I couldn't see a way out of it, and where I didn't want to record the evidence of my failure to keep things under control for yet another month. The balances themselves weren't really moving, so my monthly calculations were about how much capacity I needed to ensure I left on the cards so that the next month's planned expenses wouldn't max the card out. That gap is marked as "The Bad Times" as a single sheet with the direction "We do not talk about The Bad Times." Which I have now done at length.
This was the only entry whose position was fixed as soon as I knew what I was doing for December Days this year, and I did choose it specifically because of the associations with the number 13 in USian culture. It would have worked equally well in the four spot for other cultures' numerology.
#13: "I Can't See A Way Out Of This"
Even if you saw the content warning in the cut tag, it bears repeating: This phrase was spoken when I was suicidal, and therefore the entire post from this point on will talk about how that came about and why. There's no penalty for skipping this one or any other one.
Yes, you can blame my terrible ex for it. She's responsible for engineering the situation. (I have promised in the past that at some point, I would talk about the bad parts of the bad relationship. This particular year's December Days offers ample opportunities to do so.)
Mathematics saved my life. The fact that I can do sums and calculate their impacts kept me alive during my terrible relationship. Even though the fact that I can do sums and calculate their impacts was also driving me toward considering exchanging my life for being able to solve some of the thornier financial problems.
So it turns out that one of the things that makes me hyper-anxious is whether I have enough funds to be able to cover emergencies and to handle the expenses of daily life. As a newly-minted librarian in my first job, I had selected this job because the financials worked to allow me to pay back all of my student loans and still meet rent and other obligations. And so long as the only expenses I was handling were mine, that was going to work out pretty well. (At least, assuming that my landlord didn't rapidly hike the rent prices or other such situations. But there was always the emergency option of trying to apply for loan forgiveness after ten years, or switching to a different repayment plan if things didn't work out.) Not all that soon after I came out to the Dragon Conspiracy Territory, I met my terrible ex and I made the decision to try and make the relationship work, even though there wre signs right from the beginning that might have suggested that this was not a good fit to someone with more experience. (Or someone who didn't have a need to believe they could make a relationship work, even through the difficult parts.)
My ex, who was living on the investments that she and her late husband had made (he did computer programming for a living), was not good at budgeting and seemed routinely surprised when I was trying to help out with those expenses, since I was spending time at her house, eating food and other such things. I moved in with her as a way of trying to cut down on expenses, and then she used the remainder of the money she had in those investments to put down the money needed to buy the house I'm currently in, as well as to get a car that was a little better on the gas mileage and that wasn't going to try and spring all of its radiator fluid out (again). And there was the RV that got bought that was a bigger one than the previous one, since thre was another person and a few more pets to travel with now, possibly with at least some of the profits from selling her old house to go to the current house. So, as you can see, I was already pretty deeply financially entangled with her in a short while after starting the relationship with her. And, as the single income, especially after the money ran out to keep her credit cards paid off, increasingy more of my money was going toward making sure that expenses were being covered.
Except, of course, that expenses were not actually being covered. Balances were going up, rather than down, and new emergencies would raise those balances faster. Gift monies and raises and the occasional situations where I managed to pick up some extra scratch regularly were all shoveled quickly into trying to keep the balances from reaching their limits. It wasn't enough to do more than engage in a holding pattern and perhaps make a small amount of progress here and there on better months. Some of that was my ex's insistence on organic wherever possible, but still bought in quantity rather than than taking into account the greater expense that accompanied the organic label. Some of it was wanting to have frequent social time with others, that usually involved restaurant dinners, or fueling up and taking the RV to a campground for some time (and the supply run that would happen for that RV, even if much of what was packed in ended up being packed right back out when we got home. Some of it was wanting to give the dogs good food for their eating, and all of the expenses that were involved in their end of life care, and the unexpected death of Gandalf from a heart condition that he was hiding from all of us. Some of it was how much my ex wanted to adopt and provide for any cat that came within our orbit. (Admittedly, many of those cats were really cute and I did like caring for them. But it was still a cost to do so.) There were small things, like buying me gifts or things that I said I had been interested in, but often before I'd done the work to figure out if I could afford them or if that was the thing that I truly wanted. (With what money? My own money, of course.) And the feelings of obligation with regard to gifts to others as well. And sometimes getting into someone else's MLM or their stamp of the month club, with the idea of being able to use those things to make handmade cards or other such things and then market them. (Not understanding the amount of time and focus that it takes to create things and to market them, and there was also the part where the club itself required a certain amount of spending each month to maintain the basics of membership and the license to use their designs in your own creations.)
It was a lot of things, and I was doing my best to keep track of them with my venerable spreadsheet, so that I could see where the money was going and what it was being spent on. The negative trends became pretty clear, and so I tried (so many times) to explain to her that expenses were outpacing income, and that we needed to find places where we could either cut spending, or we needed to find ways of getting more income. Neither of these proposals ever went over well with her. On the spending side, she didn't want to cut back on the grocery bill and buy inferior products because they were cheaper, and she didn't want to cut back on the food for the animals. (We did eventually shift down from the specific expensive food for the dogs to buying boneless skinless chicken breasts and boiling the stock out of them to make them easily shreddable and using the stock for other things. It did make things less expensive, and it did work for helping to keep the dogs healthy with their conditions, even though it did create more work for us to do that.) She was a county away from her friends, so social opportunities were important as well, which did mean fuel costs for transporting back and forth, as well as wanting to use the RV that we'd bought. Cutting back on expenses was basically a non-starter for her.
On the income front, she was equally as resistant toward trying to find work or bring in more money through side businessing or other such. Some of it was that she was justifiably concerned nobody would hire an older woman who hadn't been in the workforce for some time. Some of it was that she believed things would be on balance more expensive if we had to hire out for them, like pet sitting (because there was no way she was going to let the dogs, with their health issues, be left unsupervised for any period of time, and even less so as their health deteriorated near the end of their lives) and cleaning and laundry. So it was better for us if she stayed home and took care of those things. (And because she was particular about how those things were done, I couldn't take on any of that chore burden myself.) That would become a sharpened spear of a point when I stopped suggesting that things needed to change and started inching closer and closer to insisting, instead. And she would throw out unserious suggestions like whether she should really sell the RV and give up being able to take her people and animals with her on trips. The soution that she was working on me with to solve the problems at the time that I finally decided I couldn't make the relationship work was essentially to take out a home equity loan and use the proceeds of that to pay off all of the credit card bills and some of the other expenses, so that we could get back to a good starting point. Which would have certainly kicked the can down the road some, but there was no indication from her that this would result in any behavioral changes, so I knew that what I would be doing was delaying the inevitable, because I was pretty sure we wouldn't be able to stay on budget for the length of the loan repayment. (Because she is the person she is, I ended up taking out that kind of loan anyway. She demanded that I had to give back to her what she'd invested in the relationship since she had given up her house and a great amount of her money for the relationship with me. I wanted the thing done, so I gave her the money she demanded so she would go away, rather than fight it out for what she really deserved to get from me. It'll still be a little while yet before that loan is put to bed and the last reason I have to be salty at her for actively making my life worse goes away.)
During the period before I finally was able to realize that the way out of the situation was to end the relationship and cut myself loose with the hope that I could get out and it wouldn't become financially ruinous, I was desperately hoping for some kind of plan that would allow me to make headway on the expenses. I'd already silently decided I wasn't going to spend on me, unless it was absolutely necessary, because there wasn't budget for it. I was thinking about the possibility of extending my workday to seven days a week by picking up a weekend job of some sort, but that was an exhausting prospect, and also, my ex was already unhappy about what little amount of time she got to see me and talk to me during the week, so if I added more work on during the weekend, it would only make her more unhappy. And that was on the assumption that I could find an additional job that would give me weekend hours only. (These days, one or both of us might have joined the gig economy, but again, that would likely have only made the situation worse, because she would have to leave the pets to do the work, or I would be spending even less time with her, or something else.) The things that I could come up with weren't working, for one reason or another, many of them having to do with her refusal to adjust her behavior or to accept that I would have to adjust mine. Since all of my suggestions were being ignored, and I couldn't construct a working solution to things, my thoughts turned to some more esoteric ways of getting money into the situation.
Specifically, I was thinking about what the various life insurance policies would pay out if they were triggered. My employer had one on me, provided free of charge to me. My credit union had a small amount of coverage on me. I don't remember if there were others also potentially involved, (maybe coverage in the automobile policy?) but my thoughts had turned to the question of how difficult it would be to engineer something convincingly accidental that it wouldn't trip the clauses in the policies that said nothing would be paid out in the event the investigators determined it was not an accident but a deliberate action. If you had asked me whether I was suicidal at that point, I would have told you no, because I hadn't made any plans on how to do it. I was instead just trying to work through the hypotheticals, to see whether the numbers would add up to make it a viable option to consider, or whether it would be wasted effort to try because there wouldn't be enough money injected into the situation to actually create a financially stable situation. Math saved my life. I could not see a way through, even with a perfect hypothetical, where the amount of money disbursed would be enough to actually stabilize the situation without requiring changes, or without collapsing in on itself after some amount of time. And, as the Looney Tunes joke goes, it's a great act, but the problem is that you can only perform it once. The calculations had spoken, and they had told me no. This was not a working solution to the problem. I simply wasn't worth enough. There would have to be some other solution engineered.
The one that eventually worked was to break up, but you can say that I considered pretty close to everything other than that before I eventually went that route. I knew that if I had let myself punt and take the loan, when this situation came up a second time, and there was no equity to borrow from to fix it again, that would provoke something drastic. My ex would probably tell me to file for bankruptcy, as she had done at least once before in her life, and that would fix the problem. She would be wrong about that, as most of the loans I had wouldn't be wiped from that, or if they were, they'd be wiped by calling in the liens and the house would have to be sold, and she was adamant that she needed a house's worth of space to live in, rather than an apartment. (Which is why she demanded so much money from me, so that she could at least potentially purchase a mobile home or somewhere in a senior living community to have a house to live in. She also took all the remaining cats, on the belief that she would be able to care for them better than I would.)
There is a happier postscript to this. There are more humans living in this house than there were when I was in the bad relationship. Fewer cats, admittedly, that I'm being at least partially responsible for the care of. And yes, my salary has increased by gaining more years of service and by whatever cost-of-living adjustments have been made to work with inflation, so I have a little bit more to work with than I did then. But, perhaps most importantly, the humans that I live with are willing to listen when I say no, or to be okay when I say that I'm concerned about the budget right now and I need to look to see if it's actually feasible. And they recognize that we are working within a budget, rather than insisting that the budget has to find a way to work with them, and that budget includes having to set aside monies for other kinds of payments, and for trying to build an emergency cushion. Sometimes the idea that I'm managing to make it work with more humans and less pets is a thing of wonder to me, and sometimes it's a thing that I wear as a badge of honor and a poke in the eye to the suggestion that my ex once made to me: if I was having so much distress about the finances and the budget and where the money would come from for managing that, then she should take over managing those things so I would stop stressing about them. I was not going to let that happen, because I knew full well who of the two of us could actually have a snowball's chance in hell of figuring out the way out, if there was one, but I was sorely tempted to wash my hands of it so that all the blame would fall to her when it inevitably fell apart. (I knew, even if I didn't articulate it like that at the time, that if I let her take control, I was only going to be less aware of what my doom looked like, and where and when it was arriving.)
There is a sizable gap in my spreadsheet of tracking inflows and outflows that corresponds with the period of time that I was most stressed about the finances, where I had come to the conclusion that I couldn't see a way out of it, and where I didn't want to record the evidence of my failure to keep things under control for yet another month. The balances themselves weren't really moving, so my monthly calculations were about how much capacity I needed to ensure I left on the cards so that the next month's planned expenses wouldn't max the card out. That gap is marked as "The Bad Times" as a single sheet with the direction "We do not talk about The Bad Times." Which I have now done at length.
This was the only entry whose position was fixed as soon as I knew what I was doing for December Days this year, and I did choose it specifically because of the associations with the number 13 in USian culture. It would have worked equally well in the four spot for other cultures' numerology.
no subject
Date: 2023-12-13 04:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-12-13 05:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-12-13 05:46 pm (UTC)Very very good that things have improved to the point that the Bad Times can indeed be talked about.
no subject
Date: 2023-12-13 05:59 pm (UTC)The Bad Times can be talked about, and will be, and they will likely be talked about more as the fallout from them recedes into the past and gets paid off.
no subject
Date: 2023-12-13 06:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-12-13 06:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-12-13 10:34 pm (UTC)I'm sorry she was pressuring you that badly, and I am thankful that you did the math, since it helped save you. (And I'm so glad the math didn't work out.)
no subject
Date: 2023-12-13 11:21 pm (UTC)I suspect it was more obvious to the people who knew what to look for, but I was trying to hide how I was feeling about the whole thing because she liked to escalate on that subject very quickly.
no subject
Date: 2023-12-13 11:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-12-15 02:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-12-15 05:07 pm (UTC)