The Absurdity of Student Loan Debt
It was easier to have faith in myself after I accepted my expensive but human error
When I was getting my MFA in creative writing, a professor asked us to write a list of our regrets. While I could easily conjure up regrets from my past, I was in the midst of the most shameful of them: that I was borrowing $44,000 for this degree. I’d read a guidebook about MFA programs that made the analogy of borrowing money for an MFA to borrowing money to finance a car.
“Yeah,” my mother said. “But where’s the car?”
Living inside a regret was awkward. I loved my MFA, but how I chose to finance it began to haunt me. I was a recovering alcoholic who understood what it looked like to bottom out on my drinking, but bottoming out on debt was more nebulous.
When drinking, I fooled myself by always finding friends whose drinking appeared worse than mine. I dated a woman who could knock back 14, 15 beers in one evening, which surely made the eight or nine beers I consumed nightly looked manageable. In this same way, I tried to compare myself only to people who had more debt than I had. My debt consisted of money borrowed for my undergraduate degree, a credit card that yo-yoed between being maxed out and being nearly maxed out, and now, the money borrowed for an MFA. Friends…
