It wasn’t my bootstraps that saved me

Ground turkey, shredded cheese, pasta sauce, tortillas, pasta, eggs, frozen vegetables, sliced turkey, munster, bread, butter, jam, chips, no sweets.

This is a grocery list, not a diet.

It was 2009, and I was living on my own for the first time. More than food, the list was a financial tactic. I bought affordable ingredients that had nutrition. I skipped the sweets because they were deemed an inefficient use of my funds.

A year out of college, and I was finally hunkering down to figure out finances. I owed my recently-declared-ex several thousand dollars of shared expenses. Our agreement had been that we would split things down the middle, and we were supposed to square up once a month. But we—I—didn’t.

He earned more than I did, and I had no sense of how much we were spending. It wasn’t something I knew how to passively monitor, and I hadn’t thought to monitor it actively.

But now that I had escaped our daily relationship, I wanted to pay my ex As Quickly As Possible. I needed to be completely free.

My strategy for getting through it was simple: don’t buy stuff.

Routines don’t come naturally to me—but during this time of healing, my evenings were reassuringly predictable. And they didn’t cost much money.

I would get home from work, and say hello to my pet Betta fish, Jeremiah. (He was named for the bullfrog). He would waggle his maroon fins in cheerful greeting, and might even have a bubble nest ready for me to admire.

I’d set my stuff down, get in comfier clothes, and head to the kitchen. Tacos, eggs, or pasta were my regular meals. My favorite was two fried eggs, cheese, and salsa wrapped in a tortilla. I always washed my cooking dishes quickly before I sat down to eat.

Did I eat in quiet, without doing anything else? I might have. Maybe a read a book.

After dinner, I would play Sim City 2000 on the laptop my ex had liberated from the trash heap at his work place. Then I would watch an episode of Doctor Who, through one of those sketchy early Aughts [ check spelling there] websites covered with ads.

Every night, I would take a bath with hot water up to my cheeks, and I would try to count to 20 without forgetting the where I was. At first, it took me many tries to get there. Over the weeks, I could do it more easily. These were the days before we all had meditation apps on tiny pocket computers.

And then I’d get in bed—which was actually a sleeping pad for camping, since it was a tenth the cost of a mattress—and read a library ebook for awhile before going to sleep.

So, besides food and rent, I had no expenses.

If I remember correctly, I paid my ex back in three months, and never looked back.

When I’ve told this story in the past, I’ve told it with pride for how I, independently, overcame a hardship. Pride for how I did it quickly and stoically.

But as I’ve written this, I’ve noticed that I no longer have that perspective. It’s a perspective perpetuates capitalist ideals. It’s the cliché that I “pulled myself up by my bootstraps,” that I essentially used my independence to gain my independence. It’s a narrative that ignores how capitalism and generational wealth actually function—not to mention the basic physics of gravity.

There were so many privileges at work in my debt escape.

I already lived in a city with affordable and widespread public transportation; I didn’t need a car. I had no dependents. I was able-bodied and my work paid for my health insurance, and I already had the work clothes I needed. Today’s inescapable e-commerce was still just a toddler, where the friction of possible credit card fraud kept us from participating impulsively. Digital life itself was slower, primarily email and “browsing” the web, without infinite scroll to fuel our dopamine cravings and sense of doom.

And later, when I started thinking about how to pay off my student loans and the credit card debt that I’d chosen over a financial tie to my ex, I had the research skills to find financial advice that taught me the skills I needed to live sustainably.

I do still look back on my life then with a kind of fondness. It was a lonely time, but also a time when I finally felt safe. I was recuperating. I was living with only my own expectations to fulfill. I feel so connected to that time that even describing that evening routine brings a sense of peace to my heart.

As I succeeded in my UX career (again, thanks to a long, important list of privileges), however, I got to experience the opposite financial situation: where you get to spend without worrying about whether you can afford it.

Experiencing both financial lives has influenced my politics. I believe that everyone should get to move around the world without worrying whether they can pay their rent and without becoming financially dependent on a partner who hurts them.

If you ever—or currently—find yourself in a place where money is an ever looming burden, know that you are not alone. Know that this system sucks, and you don’t deserve to be trapped in its purposeful faults.

Not only are you not alone in the experience, you don’t have to solve it alone. Vulnerable and authentic community—rather than the isolation and stoicism that I chose—brings us together and helps all of us. Along with its faults, the internet has made mutual aid even easier than before. Libraries often have free classes and certainly free resources on financial strategies. If you wanna get really radical, you can try out trading and gifting, whether directly with friends—perhaps cooking meals together and trading child care—or through “buy nothing” groups and dumpster diving.

Community living is not as accessible a lifestyle as I would like—yet. And together, we can work toward it.

No one should have to forego ice cream in order to be safe. We all deserve pleasure. We all deserve safety. We deserve a world that lets us live with ease.

Mentioned in this issue: Sim City 2000. I’ll also share the financial strategy that I found back during the time of this story: Conscious Spending, as described by Ramit Sethi. It’s not community-minded, and it does help navigate the system we live in—and it doesn’t ask you to skip sweets.

Speaking of money, Finding Out is currently my only source of income. If you can spare some of that green stuff (is it green any more now that so many of us so rarely see it?), you’ll help me keep existing in this strange world. You can subscribe directly through Substack or give through Buy Me a Coffee.