Remember last November when I came out of the debt closet?  Well, as many of you know, I’ve been plugging right along (actually, moving closer to warp speed) since then and last week I hit a milestone.  I paid off my second of three credit cards.  I’m at the half way point to being debt free.  In the last eight months, I’ve paid off $10,000 in credit card debt.

I always have a difficult time saying that I’ve worked hard, because I know I could have worked harder and I know that there are so many hard working people out there who haven’t had the advantages I have.  But, I’ve worked my ass off for this.

Something just clicked for me in November and I became a million percent determined to do this.  I am still as determined now as I was at the start.  Perhaps even more so.  I’m on track to be out of debt by the end of this year, which is so close I can feel it.

It’s not that I hadn’t tried before.  I’d made a few half-hearted attempts, but it was so overwhelming.  I was 25 and $20,500 in debt.  I was getting by with avoidance and counting on someone or something to come along and save me.  It took me too long to take responsibility for my debt, because I just couldn’t believe I had fucked up so terribly.

But, something changed in me the minute I decided to get serious about my debt and it has changed my life.  That’s why I’m writing this on my personal blog.

I really don’t know how to describe it.  I guess because I was doing something I felt more empowered and in control of my life than I ever had before.  I guess because I wasn’t hiding this big dark secret, I felt more authentic than I had before.  I guess because I’d discovered I could handle big challenges, I was no longer walking through life terrified and waiting for an anvil to drop.  I guess because I realized things could be another way–I didn’t have to live with the burden of debt–a whole new future opened up to me.

For as many people as there are who overestimate the importance of money to life, there are also a lot of people who underestimate it.  Debt was crushing me and stressing me out and making me wonder if I could really do all the things I dream of doing.  It felt like I could never get the upper hand, because every month there were new bills and growing interest.  Fighting back has taken a lot of work and I’ve had to sacrifice the comfortable lifestyle I’d grown accustomed to, but this is so much better than that.  This is living authentically.  And this is being so close to freedom you can taste it.

You can read all about my journey out of debt on A Story of Debt.

I often have this weird feeling like adrenaline is coursing through my body.  I can’t keep my feet still or my eyes.  I remember feeling this way as a kid, but then I hit middle school and I got serious about studying and became a reader instead of a girl who spent every moment playing outside.  And then I got to high school and became a mostly apathetic girl who somehow got labeled an overachiever.  Then I went to college and got smarter and found things I really cared about.  Then I started grad school and went crazy.

When I first started college, I reacted against my apathetic high school self by becoming rigid in my goal-making (and in my religion).  I was going to be perfect and nothing was going to stop me.  Living that way was miserable and late in my junior year I gave it all up and was happier for it (not-so-coincidentally, this was when I started studying theology and began to question what I knew before).  I didn’t grow any less ambitious.  I just learned to be kinder to myself and more open minded.  I had the feeling sometimes that I wasn’t doing as much as I could, but when I thought back to how miserable I’d been, I knew that I couldn’t go back to that.

I started grad school and my future closed in on me a bit.  I was walking down this really narrow and expensive path, not sure if it was where I wanted to be.  I questioned myself constantly.  I even took an extra year to decide.  Finally I made my decision to go for the PhD.  I wanted it, but I was fearful and struggled to see beyond my immediate future.  Everything felt out of my control; it seemed up to chance whether it would all work out.

It did work out and so much of that uncertainty that was haunting me dissipated.  Something else changed too.  I took control of my finances, which for as well as I think I know myself, I did not realize was weighing me down to the ground and limiting even my dreams.  No wonder everything felt uncertain when I wasn’t sure how I could pay for any of it, when I knew one bump in the road would put paying my rent the next month into question, when I could imagine no end to my struggle with money.  With the possible exception of starting a blog, no one thing has changed my life so significantly in the last five years.

All of this history has brought me to this weird point in my life where I have this crazy energy to reach for all the possibilities I see open to me and I know I can do it in a way that won’t make me miserable.  My goal used to be perfection.  It was a feeling of I need to change in order to be acceptable to other people. Now my motivation is to pursue the things that interest me.  I couldn’t stop myself from pursuing these things even if I wanted to; I am propelled by some force already.

It’s a strange aspect of the INFJ personality that we have the minds of dreamers, but we manifest that in the external world by being very systematic.  We write things down and put them in lists.  It’s how we calm our minds.  I gave up most of my lists when I came to associate them with failure.  I’ve come back to them now with a different feeling all together.  I am thrilled by the idea of taking my dreams seriously.  I look at my lists with big eyes and too much excitement to keep inside.

Over the break I took from blogging, I developed a list of goals and then I put them all into a 5 year plan.  My first ever.  I never could imagine 5 years into the future and now I can.  I look at it like an outline for a paper.  It’s a direction to head, something to look at when I get lost along the way, but something I certainly will veer from.  Where I end up in five years may look nothing like what I imagined, but these goals are so central to my interests that I cannot imagine them not a part of any life I lead.

Still, I laughed at myself the first time I looked at the completed 5 year plan.  The first thing that came to my mind is that I am so like my parents.  If no one else understands that things like this are fun to me (I know a lot of people who couldn’t think of anything less fun than a 5 year plan), then I’ll at least have two people who understand.  The second thing I thought is that it only takes one step back for perspective to realize I must be crazy.  Here are some things I plan to do in the next five years: get out of debt, earn a PhD, publish a novel, save $20,000, and move to New York City.  I am well down the road to all of them already, so maybe I’m not crazy.  Or maybe crazy isn’t so bad.

People often tell me to stop and smell the roses.  There are a lot of things I need to be reminded of, but this is not one of them.  I have never struggled with making time for myself.  I’m an introvert, so it’s only natural for me.  But, I’m not the stop-and-smell-the-roses type.  I’m more the type to be running along with my head in the clouds when a pleasant smell strikes me and I look down and think, “Oh, roses.  I forgot about roses.”  I’m all for changing the things about myself that make me unhappy, but I’m happy being surprised by roses.

Okay, so I have a secret.  I am in debt.  Like, a lot of it.  Not just my student loans, but credit card debt.  I have never told anyone.  I only really admitted it to myself recently, which I know sounds strange, but I can be pretty good at deluding myself.  Very recently, I decided to stop avoiding my debt and instead do something about it.  My first instinct was to blog it out, but that seemed impossible, because it was way too embarrassing to admit to all of you and the few friends who know about my blog.

So, I started a new blog and decided to keep it a secret.  I figured I would come clean eventually.  Maybe after I had made some real progress.  But, managing a third online identity (real me, blog me, and now debt me) was daunting.  I quickly messed up and left a comment for a blog friend under the debt username, which sent me reeling, trying to decide whether I should shut the whole thing down or just come clean.  My mom has always taught me to live honestly–if not because it’s right, then because it’s easier–and this is something I so want to blog about, so I decided to put it all out there.

It’s hard to tell people about my debt, because I have never messed up this terribly before.  I usually deal with my problems on my own, telling people either never or once the problem is handled.  Admitting to such a huge mistake when I am right in the middle of it is difficult for me and I hate to think of anyone thinking less of me. I guess I would rather be respected for being who I am, though, and not who I pretend to be.

I really never expected to start a personal finance blog.  I am not business-minded in the least.  But, I have so far found writing about my journey out of debt to be not unlike the writing I do on my personal blog.  It’s as much about psychology as anything else.   This is me writing, so it’s more about the kind of thinking that got me into debt and not 3 Ways To Make Your Money Work For You or 5 Secrets to Being Your Own Boss.  I find that all as uninteresting as the many guides out there to using twitter or branding yourself.  I’m not giving advice; I’m blogging my personal story.

I have experienced this huge shift in my mindset and I want to share that with people.  Because I’ve used avoidance as my financial method of choice for so long, I didn’t even realize how big of a burden my debt was on my life.  It’s been this huge thing hanging over my head, overwhelming and limiting me.  The change in my mind happened when I realized that this isn’t too big of a problem for me to handle.  If I keep working really hard and start making some sacrifices, I can be free of debt.

I hope that some of you can relate or will at least find this interesting.  I could really use your support.  I’m relieved, at least, not to be keeping this big part of my life hidden.  If you’re interested in following the blog, you can find it at astoryofdebt.com (or click the picture below).