Right now, my finances are stretched to their limit, and that’s not good.
It’s bad because it means I am always tense about money and that drags down my mood. My emotional wellbeing is so tied to my financial security that they are practically one and the same, and lately, things have been not so secure.
The nail in the coffin has been Joe being in the hospital.
I shall explain.
With Joe either in the hospital or resting at his parents’ place, we have taken to getting together to “teledine” twice a week, on Tuesdays and Fridays from 8 pm to 9 pm.
This involves us getting together with him via Zoom so we can hang out together and watch some of the video clips Felicity has found for us.
She’s great at that. Brings us the coolest stuff.
The problem is that this teledining event tends to cost me money because Julian goes and gets McD’s for me to eat while we watch stuff with Joe.
And that is $20 a pop, or $40 a week, and that is on top of my other expenses, like groceries and Denny’s.
Here is how my week breaks down :
Start with a weekly budget of $150.
Subtract Denny’s, that’s $40/week. Now we’re down to $110.
Subtract my grocery bill, which is around $70/week. Down to $40.
Then subtract my teledining bill of $40/week and you get zero dinero.
And that’s no good. I need to have some slack in my budget in order to deal with sudden emergencies and, failing those, to be able to have a nice budget surplus that can build up till I can, say, buy a new game for myself or finally get that new power supply that I need or other things like that.
I am a far happier person when I feel like I have enough. Then I can relax and not think about money so much and not feel like I am on the edge of a razor blade all the time.
Yes. that’s dramatic. So am I.
And right now, it’s the McD’s twice a week that is the easiest thing to reduce. As much as I love Ronald’s cooking, I am going to have to make my own dinner for at least one of the two teledining experiences of the week.
And that’s going to be a bummer. Taking away a “treat” is always depressing because your brain was counting on that hit of dopamine and will miss it when it is gone.
The other way to curb my expenses would be to cut back on my groceries, but I am loath to do that because as much as the loss of McD’s twice a week will suck, not having my little pleasures like my cans of pop and the frozen chicken strips currently sitting in our freezer would suck even more.
But I will not give up on that idea entirely. I will continue to brainstorm ways to cut back on the expenses. I want my wiggle room back.
Of course, the other half of the equation would be to increase my revenue by finding some of that sweet, sweet online work.
And I know that would be good for me on so many levels. But when I try to think about the topic, let alone approach actually doing something, that same old unreasoning obliterating brutalizing paralytic fear comes down like the hammer of the gods and freezes the very marrow in my bones until I give up on it.
And I am working on keeping that from happening. But it is going to involve a lot of the kind of deep psychological work that can’t be put into words at all, let alone written about, and the idea of that scares the shit out of me too.
I am hemmed in by fear on all sides. And I can only be happy if I stay in my tiny little box and don’t set off all those punishingly loud alarms.
It’s that, or learn to withstand the fear somehow.
And man is that going to suck.
More after the break.
The other way
The other way I could escape my fear would be to cut it off at the source somehow.
After all, there is no need to cross a river if it’s stopped flowing.
And while I don’t know for sure where all this fear comes from, I have a few potential theories along those lines.
I always have theories.
The simplest one is that it comes from all my unused energy. I know in my soul that I have tons of energy I could be using but it’s all corked up and has no legitimate way of escaping to express itself.
So it ends up backed up and remains in my mind and soul as potential energy, kind of like an excess electrical charge.
And that’s the energy my anxiety uses. In theory, if I could uncork myself and let out all that latent energy, I could starve my anxiety like it’s a fire with no oxygen.
But that’s the usualkind of Catch-22 because in order to release my energies, I would have to uncork that bottle and if I could do that…. you get the idea.
I guess in my loose metaphor, it’s like the backed up pressure inside me is the very thing keeping the cork lodged so tightly in the aperture.
Someone needs to give my soul the Heimlich.
But I know I am slowly breaking down that cork, that blockage, that wall within me. I am letting my real emotions escape confinement and discovering who I really am, id and all, and doing it a little at a time, but constantly, and at an accelerating pace.
My hope is that I will eventually hit a tipping point where the healthy part of me can simply overpower the diseased part of me and send it packing for good.
Right now, I am still torn. Because no matter what I say or do, here or in the real world, the fact is that I have a massive untreated wound at my core, and until I manage to fix that, I will continue to be a cripple in more than just body.
I’m working on it.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.