Ever since I got fired from my lab job (still not a bad thing), I’ve had trouble finding my financial footing again. The last few years I was there, I made pretty good money. Good enough for me. However, I was miserable and when I got fired, it was actually a relief.
That was almost five years ago and since then, I’ve struggled to figure out what I want to do next. I worked in herbal manufacturing. While that seemed like a dream opportunity, the owner’s vision for her business and my vision of what I wanted for myself were very different, so I left.
After that, I flitted around from job to job, all the while getting into major credit card debt.
I had been blaming Omaha for my happiness for twenty years, so I moved to Colorado, thinking it would solve my problems, but as my grandmother always said, “Wherever you go, there you are.” I worked very part-time for seven months before I landed a job as a gardener. However, what should have been a dream job became a nightmare. The job itself wasn’t bad, but the toxic environment in which I worked almost drove me into the ground.
I was highly underpaid, but I had the belief that the owner was retiring and that I would have a much bigger role in running the company. I finally started making enough money to pay all my bills and to start reducing my debt in March of 2019. I felt safe for four months. Her last day was supposed to be July 7th, but at the last minute, she decided she didn’t like the way the manager and I were running things and that she wasn’t going to hand the business down to us. The manager quit and I was left with the owner. She was the toxic part of the business and I felt I would die – literally – if I had to work for her again, so I quit.
Since then, I’ve worked part-time for the former manager of that company, who started his own landscaping business (and that’s another shit story I’ll have to tell you some time), while I’ve been half-heartedly looking for a job. With my work history, just the thought of getting another job makes me sick to my stomach.
I had high-hopes of having several revenue streams, which I actually do, although they’re not as lucrative as I had envisioned and now, with winter fast approaching, I’ll have to find a real job. For a normal person, it would be just another job. For me, it feels like trading one prison cell for another, as I’ve already done over and over again.
Having lived (stupidly) on credit cards for a year, I am in a lot of debt. I can’t just run out and work at Home Depot again and call it good. I need a lot of money in order to pay all my debts. Job prospects are slim in that salary range and I’m scared.
I’m not sure what is stopping me from working my ass off to find another job. Probably two. I don’t have a choice really. However, I am totally at a loss as to what to do. I’m not a nurse or an accountant or an IT person. I’m a generalist with lots of experience in many things, but not a lot of experience in one thing. I’m overqualified for many jobs and under-qualified for many more. I’m stuck in job limbo.
So while I am sick at the idea of yet another horrible job, I have a fear that is even bigger than that and that is the fear of being homeless. Now, I know I have family who wouldn’t let that happen to me, but it is a really big fear nonetheless.
I’ve had this fear my whole life. I’ve never felt safe, not even as a child. I felt like I had to do everything by myself, even though, as Dad liked to point out, I had a roof over my head and food in my belly. I think we were okay financially, but he always acted as if we didn’t have enough and we were always on the brink of disaster. As I got older and made my own money, towards the end of the pay period, when money was low, I’d go into a panic. Several times in my life, I’ve had to go through my cabinets and write down all the food I had, so that I’d know I wasn’t going to starve. I had to assure myself that I had enough.
Living in Colorado Springs, which has a very large homeless community, the fear of being hungry and homeless are staring me in the face every day. I look at those people with all their belongings in a grocery cart, sleeping on the street in the middle of winter, and I know that I would rather die than have to live like that.
People might find it strange that I have this fear, but both my parents were actually in this same situation at my age. My mother was homeless, although she had my grandmother’s house to stay in. She had no electricity, no food, and no money, as well as being severely mentally ill and incapable of helping herself. People told me that they saw her eating crabapples from the trees around town. She had family, but she didn’t want our help (you can read that story here). She died after just a few months of homelessness.
After she died, my dad basically became homeless as well. He had a job for a while, but he quit. He was in a huge amount of debt, because he and mom had lived off of credit cards for a while. He lived in my brother’s basement for quite a while and then he lived in me and my sister’s basement. He didn’t work much. He was, for the most part, dependent on us. Finally, he decided to go back to his sister’s place, because he didn’t like Omaha winters.
I didn’t realize it until today, but they were both my age when they were homeless. Perhaps that’s where this huge panic is coming from. I have no desire to be like either of my parents, yet here I am.
This story has no happy ending. I haven’t figure anything out, other than I’m just like my parents. Fuck. I guess the only bright spot is that I know it and maybe I can do something to change it. I haven’t quit like they the both of them did. I still have hope that I can turn things around, but being 55, I’m running out of time.
the power of one 