I am sitting down to a lunch of chicken breast and a baked potato, but this meal was nearly lost to me.
I have found myself cracking a little under the weight of the world. It occurred to me that I am caught in a financial Catch 22. Each month, I spend more money than I make. This is a problem. But it is not a problem of poor planning or lack of fiscal responsibility. This was, in fact, part of the plan... maybe it was poor planning. About 18 months ago I left behind the cozy paycheck I was receiving as a Driver's License Clerk for the State of Iowa for a new career at ACT. I took a $10,000/year pay cut so that I could do work that I hated less and go back to school with the hope of one day doing work that I didn't hate at all.
As the journey began, I was promised a new life full of opportunities and advancement potential. I never held back that I was not going to be a customer service representative forever. I managed to keep myself from telling my interviewers that I was destined for greatness, but I might have hinted at it a time or two. They reassured me again and again that I could move up the ranks within the organization and quickly recoup the salary difference. I'm sure that you can guess, given that I'm writing this now, that is not how this story ends. I faced constant scrutiny when I applied for higher paid positions. There were even elements of light sabotage against not only myself, but other go-getters in the department. When I applied for positions in the natural progression, I was turned down because I was overqualified. When I applied for more advanced positions, I wasn't taken seriously because of the low position I was in.
After a year of working full time, going to school, and making ends meet by taking out student loans, I finally advanced in the company. My salary was raised by a whopping $2000/year. "I would offer you more, but my hands are tied by company policy..." This is a line that I am getting familiar with quickly. Everybody would love to pay me enough to live off of, but the "company" just won't allow it. Meanwhile, I have racked up about $20,000 in student debt, and I'm running out of money to pay my tuition. I would stop going to school, but I realized that I would have to start repaying my loans, and that would actually be more expensive than covering the difference between the actual tuition and ACT's laughable reimbursement program.
For some time, I have chosen to handle this by whistling in the dark and just pretending that there was nothing scary out there. I realized that at some point, I would have to do the math. And then I did. Boy, do I wish I could turn the light back out. The situation is mathematically impossible to resolve. The outs exceed the ins. There seems to be not way to increase the ins, at least not in this company, and I'm locked into all the outs, as well. As there is still some student loan money in my account, I can pretend for a little while longer that everything will work itself out, but ultimately, the system will collapse. The money will be gone and the ins and outs will have remained the same.
Wait, wasn't I talking about a baked potato? Where am I going with all of this? Oh, now I remember. When my brains comes upon a problem, it cannot stop working until it finds the solution. This is usually one of my strengths, personally and professionally. But there is a catch. When a problem doesn't have a solution, my brain won't let it go. It continues to feed the same information in and hope for a better result or new breakthrough. This cycle happens again and again until my little neurological CPU shuts down and ceases to compute anything. You can recognize this state of being by my inability to finish sentences, my misidentification of common objects (i.e. calling a pencil a banana and then laughing until I cry), and my deeply furrowed brow.
So, this is the state in which I found myself last Friday evening while trying to prepare to leave for the weekend. I knew that I needed to start with dinner. It's one of my rules for prevention a complete mental breakdown. When you're not sure what you should do about anything and you don't know why and you're standing in the middle of the living room starting blankly, you should try to eat something. It helps. I made some chicken breasts and baked potatoes. I even had the foresight to make an extra of each for a lunch on a later day. Look at me go, I got this life thing down. I ate my little home-cooked meal, rinsed my dishes, and started to put away the leftovers.
Then something happened. A catatonic event. Perhaps, a wormhole or fold in the universe. Maybe even an alien abduction. I only know that was folding some laundry when I was struck with a feeling that I might not have finished a previous task. I walked back out to the kitchen and saw a lonely chicken breast on the counter. Yes, that was it. I was putting away the leftovers. I must have put away the potato and forgotten the chicken. I put the chicken in a container and put it in the fridge. But something looked strange. There was no metallic bundle sitting in there waiting to be reheated. The potato... was gone. Just gone.
Hrmph. Where could a potato go? I searched all 904 square feet of home sweet home and found nothing. I looked on all the counters and the coffee table. I thought I might have carried it with me into a bedroom, so I searched the side tables, the ironing board, the computer desk... bookshelves? Why not, I looked there, too. I was out of ideas, anxious to leave, and totally paralyzed. I stood in the unidentified space between the kitchen and living room staring blankly feeling like I was losing control over my life because of a single baked potato.
Then I saw it. Shining in the early evening sun. A foil-wrapped potato sat in the middle of the living room floor. I shook my head and fought the urge to scold the potato. I put it in its rightful place in the fridge and took a deep breath. I was free to live my life as planned. Free to leave for the weekend without fear of a potato rotting in some dark corner of my home. To top it all off, I was confident that I would have lunch for at least one more day.
So, here I am. Sitting at my desk, still making a ridiculously small amount of money, worrying about how I will keep going. Still trying to solve this problem with no solution. Wondering how I got here, how many wrong steps led to this place. But for today, I am grateful. For today, I have what I need and I am enjoying a satisfying meal of leftover chicken breast and a baked potato. I came so close to going without, but I dodged fate this time.
Sometimes when a problem has no solution, and you give up and stare blankly at the living room floor, you find exactly what you need. So, don't worry if your load is so heavy that you're cracking up, just go with it and be grateful for every single potato.
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