i should've bought a house in 2007 instead of y'know, being an 8th grader

permanent psychic damage

vibing instead of building up our credit scores (found on pinterest)

as if i didn’t already have enough anxiety i struggled to understand as a kid, my mom was laid off just after i started 8th grade.

my parents coddled me a lot, but i understood much more than they thought i did. being the ridiculous child i was, i spent the rest of middle and high school in a constant state of worry about money and finances. my train of thought went all the way to us losing our house (didn’t happen) and having to ask for help from my mom’s parents for everything (occasionally, probably more than we were told). i felt extremely guilty about needing things for school and whatnot that cost money, and secretly jealous of people who got to keep doing normal things with their family and groups of friends. deep down i was scared of being able to go to college and being in a fuck ton of debt, and that i might not be able to get a job at all… i know i wasn’t special, but i was even more sensitive and unregulated than i am now as an adult.

i’m gonna be totally transparent with you: i still deal with some of those feelings today. i know, ya girl is 30 years old and still has the same problems i had when i was 16. i recognize it’s a pattern and i probably need to work harder on fixing it, believe me. all this anxiety and fear has made me not want to ask for anything from my family or suggest doing anything if it costs money. i’m going to try not to psychoanalyze myself too hard, at least on that front. my therapist has been earning her fees from me lately, i’ll tell you that.

anyway, i think the entirety of my adolescence gave me permanent psychic damage, this being one of the biggest causes. if i think about it too deeply, at least some parts of it, i still get kind of upset. normally i don’t like talking about it because it makes me sound like a spoiled brat; i’m not ungrateful for any of it, i want to make sure that comes across. it’s just been hard because there’s so much i don’t think i fully appreciated or appreciated at all when i was little. it upsets me that i can’t go and do some things over and get a chance to do others for the first time now that i’m an adult. now that i’m not as uncomfortable and stubborn about avoiding new things. now that i know i’d get so much more out of them because i’ve matured. i don’t really regret much of what i’ve done, i regret what i didn’t do.

i can recognize when my anxieties are irrational, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s easy for me to logic myself out of them. as i’ve said in a previous post, i didn’t have a job or start making a salary until i was 26, which meant i also didn’t have a savings account until my late 20s. from the week i got my first paycheck i put aside a few hundred dollars, and my tax returns when i got them for two years straight. the first thing i did with every one was pay my credit card balance (which, by the way, i only let myself use for a certain set of things that feel “ok” to do). now that i’m not working — and probably won’t again until next year at least — i worry about somehow having to spend it all in some kind of emergency. or even worse, i won’t realize it’s happened until it’s too late.

i think i spent so long not really having control over the money i did have that i became super conscientious and careful in ways i didn’t have to be. i don’t want to see myself make mistakes that could be avoided. i don’t want to be seen as irresponsible or immature because i started dealing with my own money so recently — it’s something that tends to be assumed about disabled people, which frustrates the fuck out of me. i worry i’m delusional for worrying, even though it’s kind of been subliminally and blatantly messaged to millennials (i consider myself a young millennial) that we should always be bracing ourselves for some really bad shit to happen. i don’t want to seem entitled or selfish for not wanting to be miserable if i can help it, to still be able to enjoy things. for wanting to be comfortable despite having so many needs other people don’t have that cost more.

i ask myself if i deserve it, because i feel like other people my age have done more and worked harder. why should i get what they have? they didn’t have to quit their jobs to go to grad school. they’ve been working so long that they have tenure already, they do better work and can handle more than i do. they don’t still live in their childhood bedrooms. in all honesty i feel like a fake adult most of the time… i can’t decide if it’s because of my disability or my mental illnesses, or both.

i don’t blame my 13 year old self; i understand how she feels because she’s still in the back of my mind all the time.

(i’m not linking my paypal here because i’d feel like a giant hypocrite doing it on this post in particular.)