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Paycheck to Paycheck.
Now that I don’t live that way, I can talk about it.
When you’re inside a tunnel, way deep in there, where the lights are dim or absent, sometimes you wonder if it’s an illusion and there really is no end to the enveloping tube. When you’re in there, it’s tough to imagine the light and beauty you’ll see when you exit. But you will exit, one way or another, and it will be lighter out there.
For much of my adult life, I felt like I was traveling through just such a tunnel. I could see a glimmer of the end of the tube, a light beckoning me toward the outside. Every time I thought I might emerge, though, the tunnel had a curve and the light was still in the distance.
I left college after my sophomore year. It was a good decision — better than staying, anyway. Of course now I look back and think it was foolish. If I had gotten a degree — any degree — my financial life would have been much, much healthier. But I was floundering, especially after my father’s death, and I was wasting money at college.
Having grown up in a very small town, there wasn’t much to offer me there. Plus there was the inherent embarrassment of being a once-promising high school student who was now flopping around like a fish out of water looking for her purpose.
