Every so often, I post this kind of update on Facebook, and am usually barraged with messages from FB friends: “Until what?” “What’s the countdown mean?” “What are you counting down to?” I jokingly reply in all sorts of ways: “Until I achieve world domination.” “Until I get my first Broadway role.” “Until I become Editor-in-Chief of Vogue.” “Until Brangelina becomes Brani.” This kind of thing.
What it really means? Well, not to be too melodramatic (oh, who am I kidding, this is me): freedom.
When I was going to university, I made a number of choices that resulted in considerable student debt. I chose to go live in Montreal for a year on student loans. I chose not to work but to plow right through the last four terms of law school, in order to get-‘er – done, to fly to interviews for jobs in Toronto that I ended up not wanting, and, the biggest kicker of all, I chose to do an obscenely expensive Masters’ program at London School of Economics, and while my tuition was subsidized by the school’s merit scholarship program, my year of living in one of the most expensive cities in the world (and travelling to Italy every month with Edy) was not. My student loans also financed my final “golden summer” of not working, when I moved back to Canada and settled in Vancouver to finish my Masters’ thesis before starting my articling year.
The banks really helped me out with this: they see the word “lawyer” or “doctor” and immediately fork over obscene amounts of cash. More than all of my years of government student loans combined.
And sure, I started paying them back – as soon as I was working, I started making payments, but just what was required, and no more: I was suddenly in a social circle made almost entirely of lawyers and we didn’t think twice about eating out at expensive restaurants, dashing up to Whistler for a day or two of snowboarding, jetting to London for the weekend. So, financially, I treaded water. I was aware that I had to pay back these loans someday, but it was some amorphous day of reckoning in the future, and I imagined that as a lawyer, I would be making more cash in my lifetime than I could possibly burn through, and I’d have no problems paying everything off…someday.
This past fall, however, I found myself thinking a lot about where I wanted to go in life, and how I wanted to get there. I realized the shopping and the travel and the nice nights out were a great “right now” distraction from the nagging questions that were starting to get louder in my head: Where did I want to live? How did I want to do it? Did I always want to be a lawyer? Did I want to do a different kind of law? Did I want to be able to pursue other passions? Both? I didn’t know (and I still don’t). What I knew, however, was the student debt monster looming over my shoulder meant it was not okay not to know. If I continued the way I was going, in terms of making wee little payments and blowing the rest on quick answers to the existential I’m-almost-30-years-old questions I was asking myself, I would never have a choice: I would need to continue to work in big-money, big-time corporate law until kingdom come, just to stay on the student debt treadmill.
I decided I wanted, and deserved, after so many years of working hard and overachieving, the right to “not know.” So – I consolidated everything. I committed myself to huge (really huge) monthly repayments, got myself a scary little budget, and determined to buckle down. The cost of giving myself this future luxury of not-knowing? 1454 days, to repay absolutely everything and save a nest-egg for the future big enough to finance a home of my own, if that’s what I want. Goodbye personal trainer – I can walk or use the gym in my building. Goodbye Holt Renfrew – H & M will have to do. Shoes? Well, I guess I’ve got enough to keep me going for awhile (gulp). Credit cards? Chopped up. Every single one. No safety net. If I spend what I’ve got, I don’t eat. And eating out? Try using one of your eighteen million cookbooks Dani – if you like to cook and bake so much (and squawk about it on your blog) – get to it!
Taking away the “buffer money” I was using to soothe myself after stressful days at the office – the money for clothes, socializing, travel – was taking away a massive crutch. It’s been very hard emotionally, to give up the numbing-but-delicious consumerism that was getting me through. After difficult days, 1454 days (which was the count on Monday) doesn’t seem achievable. It seems too far off. I have dark days where I am frustrated that the freedom to choose what I do next is still so many days away, and I resent living on less money than a lot of students. Even though this entire situation is built entirely of my choices, even though this decision to buckle down is still doing something, the fact that the pay-off (literally and figuratively) will take years makes me feel like a prisoner, that I’ve been robbed of the right to choose, at least temporarily. I feel like I’m just waiting, waiting, waiting. And that these 1454 days (which, in case you’re counting, will take me to June 28, 2014) will pass with no joy, no fulfilment, no satisfaction.
Clearly, that attitude is not going to work for me. I cannot spend the next, oh, four years, in stasis, resenting my situation, angry and frustrated and unfulfilled.
So, 1454 (well, now 1452) days until I have the freedom to choose – to choose to continue on the path I’m on or not – the important word there is “choose” – and make peace with my choices, whatever they may be. And see if any other doors open - and if I even want them to.
I have to believe that these 1452 days will also be days of growth and happiness and moving forward, even though it feels like I’m standing still. And so I’m committing to chronicling – even if in just a few words – the things that happen on each of these 1452 days, other than the repaying of loans, other than the building of the nest egg, other than the time spent in the office, to show myself, more than anybody, that I’m still here.
