it all comes down to this

I would characterize seventy percent eighty percent of my anxiety as arising from concerns about money. For a few weeks I've been feeling off kilter and aggressive, teetering between low and just plain angry. I realize now that it is pay day, that the fact that i don't have the prospect of two bounced checks hanging over my head, the sense of doom I've been hauling around is lightened. Not a lot, since there are still overdue bills whose checks haven't even been written, but there's a lightness to it nonetheless.

This worries me to no end, the fact that not having enough and not being able to keep up, even with a good job and a healthy salary (not great, it's just not as anemic as the rest of the non-profit world) means that my whole life is going to be like this. I'll always be biting my lip right around the end of the month, always pacing around in my head, entering and re-entering my budget into excel spreadsheets, hoping that some new formatting will make the tally at the end of the column change from a negative into a positive sum.

This, of course, is something I have always known. Something I thought I had accepted many eons and decades ago -- in middle school when my friends had new Espirit bags and not a stained hand-me-down from their cousins or in college when people flew to tropical places to get tans on spring break while I took a two-and-a-half day Greyhound bus from Massachusetts to Florida.

But apparently not. Apparently every few months the enormity of my debt, the hopelessness of crawling out from under it and the utter frustration of a hole in the heel of my boots has to re-hit home.

Still, it's pay day. Which means I got to pay my overdue cell phone bill. And I'll get to make the first of many (late) installment to my dentist. And perhaps a drink this lovely hallow's eve. Maybe I'll even allow myself to buy real gloves this winter -- not the $1.00 thin wool kind I usually get at the dollar store.