Debt and Depression
Criminals Were My Role Models
And my credit card debt is punishment for coveting the wrong life.
I am in massive credit card debt, a number comically large for someone with a steady job. I’ve interrogated myself about how I got here many times, which means I lie awake wondering how I can be such an goddamned idiot. This self-flagellation is worthwhile because if I understand how I got myself into this mess, I might have a shot at getting out.
But I don’t really have a shot, at least not for a long time. While the debt is now consolidated over several accounts with a fixed number of payments and interest rates, there are many many months of payments in my future. Twenty-nine months, thirty-six and forty-two.
This reminds me of a jail sentence, which brings me to a whopper of a story, a story about what it means to try to escape your life while accidentally coveting the wrong one. This is also a story about sitting in front of my computer screen while my brain exploded, because everything I thought was true was not true at all.
And this is a true story, even though it sounds like it isn’t.
My childhood was filled with horses, days at the beach, California sunshine, and building Legos with my dad. But there was another…
