The first of the month makes me consider my captivity under the capitalist system.
Depending on how the previous thirty days went, I either felt relief at beating the system (somehow making rent and being able to pay all my bills) or a sense of failure and dread (I barely made rent, and my bills, so my next two paychecks will go towards playing catch up).
I didn’t get into two of the four artist residencies I applied for.
I didn’t get one of the two grants I submitted.
I did, however, apply for a position that reads like the dream job I’ve been “Manifesting” for the last two months, but it is very likely, that I may not end up with that dream position.
As much as money is, theoretically, unimportant to me, it colors every contour of my life: I can’t afford the apartment I’m currently living in, which means I’m not renewing my lease, which also means I have to sign a new lease somehow with bad credit and a job that pays me $1,200 a month which does not qualify for the three times the income of any apartment I’d consider livable and worth laboring for every month.
I have? Health insurance? I’m not sure because I have provisional Medicare but I’m not entirely sure why it’s provisional. I’m just happy to not have to pay the $5 out of pocket to go to my PCP because I often don’t have that $5 after barely paying rent, my bills, and doing groceries. When I first got to Chicago, I spent a lot of time berating myself for not “thinking ahead” and saving “more money” until I realized it’s not normal to constantly spend your entire life thinking ahead for a potential financial crisis.
I completed my undergrad degree in 2009 and every year of my adult life since, the economy has been in some form of recession, layoffs have become a common occurrence for laborers of my specific generational cohort, and industry is dying with no sign of resurrection. I’ve just gotten used to this as a normal state of being when it is a completely abnormal state of being.
“I gotta figure shit out,” I tell myself. “I gotta get to the bottom of things.”
This is how my brain works: there are patterns, there are reasons things happen the way they happen, and I gotta sort out the reason why. I’m certainly old enough and therapized enough to know I am not to blame for the systemic misfortune that befalls me. I’ve learned how to externalize that which is not mine and, equally, to hold myself accountable for that which I’m responsible for, so when I started the month of February navigating my dear friend’s ongoing separation from her partner of over a decade, I realized several weeks late that I was beginning my second year of being divorced.
I’ve learned a lot in the last twenty-four months about that relationship in retrospect, and so in sharing with my friend, the overlap of her experience and mine have continued to reveal more about that partnership I just couldn’t see through the fog.
I’ve thought about how the weight of finances fell solely on my shoulders—I managed the savings, making sure rent and bills were always put aside before anything else; despite being a 1099 laborer and my partner a W2 laborer, it was always my income that was relied on to take care of immediate expenses like rent and bills; I was the person who applied for food benefits and health benefits, and because I worked from home, and thus “wasn’t really working”, I was responsible for faxing any necessary paperwork to prove how poor we were to receive those benefits, on top of actually working, caring for a pet, maintaining our living space.
I was the person who decided we should rent strike in 2020, the person who after my spouse found us an accountant to help us better manage our finances, paid off all their debt despite being told explicitly we should aid in helping one another pay down our at the time joint debts since we were recently married. I was told with unvarnished annoyance and anger that I would not receive that financial help our accountant told us would help benefit us in saving.
Somehow, I’m the one now with terrible credit.
On three occasions, we lived off of my meager savings and when we separated, a sizable chunk of my income went to being the poverty stopgap for my partner—a decision for which I am still terribly angry with myself, if I am being honest.
When my partner was just beginning to make a little over $35k (and never actually did as he left that job about ten months into it due to stress) and I was making significantly more, I never stopped hearing about how stressful my freelance career was making our lives and how I needed to consider getting a reasonable part-time job, instead.
There was never any meaningful discussion about how my partner’s habit of leaving jobs after being there for less than a year affected our finances, nor his inability to even attempt to save money.
The problem was always me, and so I had to figure out the solution.
I used to think I was being a good partner, acknowledging how stressful laboring was in general and being willing to pick up the additional slack when, inevitably, he quit a job, never really considering how the financial burden fell on me, yet again.
Love was about picking up the slack, and anyway, I’d be homeless and on the street without the support of an additional income, no matter how historically unsteady and low the income was. No matter the fact it was my efforts keeping me housed and fed and secure.
I gave myself a lot of excuses because I didn’t know how else to survive, and telling myself those excuses and falsehoods prevented me from seeing how capable I had been of taking care of myself as the years of poverty and homelessness I spent before entering that relationship caused me to have an extremely warped sense of my capacity to care for myself.
For a time I lived in a studio apartment with a relative, sleeping on her floor, while I interned for no pay, then on a friend’s couch in his studio, and then in the spare room of a friend for a few months before she moved to New York. I lucked into a job as a nanny that happened to come with housing before I actually ended up on the street, or back “home” with my abuser.
I thought I was a failure in the deepest sense of the word.
I had gone to college and I had barely completed, thanks to a debt accrued during a semester abroad when my family lost our home to foreclosure and the money that was meant to pay for the credits I needed to graduate had been stolen by the person who first introduced me to financial abuse, my mother.
I started college with terrible credit because my mother used my identity to open up accounts under my name, or bullied me into using my emergency credit card to buy shit she then ended up selling when she could no longer be arsed to work, feeling entitled to not having to suffer and survive despite her horrendous misuse of money my entire life.
I always felt embarrassed and marked by that financial abuse in a way I still can’t entirely describe. I felt like you could smell the secret poor on me. Most days, I still feel that way, but it’s especially heightened during the first of the month.
In my senior year of high school, we were living in the home that ultimately got foreclosed. A two-story, built from the ground up on a golf course, within driving distance from the now infamous Mar-A-Lago. Situated on top of protected wetland in West Palm Beach, Florida, because fuck nature and the Earth entirely. There was barely any furniture in the house by my senior year of high school as it had been sold off. I was often food insecure, opening what used to be a once robust pantry, to rummage around to find a few cans of tuna or some instant mashed potatoes.
For years, I could not eat canned tuna without feeling a lump of hurt bubble up in my throat.
The water bill was always behind, so we went without water, using buckets of pool water to flush toilets until somehow the money was begged out of a relative or a church member from my mom, or finally some inventory was sold. The electric bill, was also, constantly behind, so sitting around with candlelight was a common occurrence. There was always enough loose change around the house for my dad to take me and my brother to get some hamburgers at McDonald’s.
When I’m feeling particularly poor and sad about it, I crave McDonald’s hamburgers but I’m currently boycotting McDonald’s and I live in a city with significantly better cheeseburger options, so I have one to help sate the sadness of poverty.
I carried that sadness and that shame with me. Why was I so bad at life? Why couldn’t I just be better at living?
I blamed my poverty for the vitriolic racism from my partner’s family, for his constant frustration and stress with how we were living. Like a good little abused boy, everything was always my fault, and like a good little caretaker and mediator, everything thus had to be fixed or saved by me.
I robbed myself of agency because capitalism and trauma were robbing me of agency.
I wasn’t holding anyone accountable for how they were absolving themselves of responsibility until I became estranged from my abuser. The two most important decisions I’ve made as an adult have come from severing my two most formative relationships. In the severing, I was able to regain agency, and in regaining agency, I also gained clarity. Clarity has helped me to harness telling the truth, because when you lie by omission—when you don’t tell the whole truth of your life—that’s when shame takes hold of you and festers.
Shame also robs us of agency.
When I was blessed with the specific miracle of pandemic unemployment, I paid off that undergraduate debt that had been hanging over my head for over a decade. I put aside a couple of months of rent and bills, and about three weeks later, most of that money was gone—I cannot say I recommend the idea of joint accounts or joining finances with a partner at all, these days.
I can’t tell you where the money went exactly, sure groceries were purchased, and supplies for pets were procured, but I wasn’t able to buy anything I wanted or needed for myself with my money, and in just a few months, the cycle of financial instability would start again because I wasn’t able to put the entirety of rent and bills needed into the joint account to make sure I wouldn’t be in crisis mode again in less than 90 days—Right before those 90 days were up, we were separated.
I often don’t talk about the details of my life out of respect for the folks who are or were a part of my life, but in the last several weeks of trading notes with my best friend, I see how we fail one another when we don’t talk about what we are navigating with as much candor and honesty as we can muster.
My best friend and I bonded initially because of a shared history of abuse.
Over the last decade, we’ve become platonic partners to each other — the love and support we attributed to our partners, often in the hopes of actually receiving that love and support, we provided to each other.
We’ve built careers alongside each other, assisting one another, caring for each other emotionally, supporting each other financially by hiring one another, championing each other in the rooms we enter, and providing money to each other in tight situations. We’ve held each other through mental health challenges, through navigating racism and sexism, through the madness of being in transparently abusive relationships we were both too deeply in to see as such. We’ve loved and adored each other, despite our shame and embarrassment at who and what we come from.
It’s because of that friendship, and many others, that I don’t hate myself nearly as much as I should every first of the month, but I have to admit, I just don’t have it in me anymore to try to find solutions to my captivity by myself and I don’t want to, anymore.
I hope I get that job I applied for because I straight up need the money that comes with it. I’ve worked hard to make a lot of other people’s lives stable and fruitful, and I’d like the opportunity to work to make my life stable and fruitful, too.
I owe myself that much.
What do you owe yourself, right now?
Like the entire nation, nearly half of Chicago renters are spending too much on rent and utilities, with more than thirty percent of our incomes going to maintaining the basic need for shelter and housing.
After I sign my next lease, it will be my final year of living alone as I need to share the burden of housing with other people. I don’t know what that will look like. I just know I need to be taken care of, to be cared for, in the way I’ve taken care of and have cared for others around me. For once in my life, I want to be a burden, I want others to be responsible for me.
I deserve that and I desire it, too.
I am living paycheck to paycheck, I can’t save, and I’ve accrued debt with friends I am struggling to pay off. This the realty in which I orient myself each day, and especially when writing these missives, as they are primarily a means of collectively processing my life.
Mutual aid has saved my ass consistently over the last year and a half. Sometimes I do still have to fight the shame and embarrassment that comes with this stupid idea of being unable to take care of myself, but lately, I’ve had to consider how my labor has primarily taken care of others, to my own detriment. It’s a learned trauma response I am working everyday to end so I can honestly care for myself in meaningful and loving ways.
Have an honest, revealing conversation with someone you love over the next few weeks and see what opens up for you.
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Thank you for being safe enough to share this with. See you next month. x O
i related to so much of this & feel less alone by reading this, even though i wish it wasn't a part of our story at all - sending you so much love. 🩵
I’m holding space for you, shouldering some of the shame and difficulty with you. I grew up with such a similar story, my love. Capitalism and trauma truly rob us of agency. We must resist as much as humanly possible. I’m so proud of you! Sending you love and support. Thank you for this beautiful writing.