Oh my goodness gracious.
I was going to say “wasted,” but I think you could argue that not all of the money I spent was a waste. But goodness, a fair amount of it was.
Before I get into this, I should mention that I am aware of my privilege. I’m aware it’s a privilege to have money to waste. I’m aware that I didn’t have to spend all this money that I did.
[But this is another part of the bigger overarching story of how all this various sexual assault stuff (and consequences after) affected me (specifically). (And financial is a big way people are affected, so I at least wanna touch on it.) So, I’m telling my story, even though this part is brimming with some privilege. And if you don’t wanna read, that’s always totally fine, of course. But, if you do, here we go.]
1) Think. Of. All. The. Ubers. I. Took. [*makes giant, about-to-pop-out-of-my-face eyes*] I never felt like I had any energy…. I guess being incredibly depressed and seemingly never sleeping will do that to you. Also, I had a little bit of a fear of New York – didn’t wanna leave, but also didn’t really want to be here. So, I was just always in an Uber. I can’t even begin to fathom (and I do not want to do the math on) how much money I spent on ubers and cabs.
2) Late fees. Ooooh, this is so embarrassing to admit… Because even though I like to think I’m this “understanding,” or “caring,” or whatever, person who would feel empathy and “get it,” I don’t think that before this happened to me that I would’ve gotten it. I could totally imagine myself thinking, “I know you’re sad and all. But like, can’t you just pay your bills?”
…But I wouldn’t go through mail. And I know many things are paperless, but I wouldn’t go through emails either. And then I’d recognize that about myself, and know that I needed to set up automatic payments for something, but if I’d lost my password to an account, I’d just give up (which I know sounds ridiculous, to not even be able to follow the steps to recover a password, but I was OUT of energy to function… I was a nearly indescribable amount of sad all the time).
And so a [credit card/cable/electric/whatever] company would call me and be like, “where’s your payment for [this card, or that thing etc.]”? And most of the time I would have the money available, I just wouldn’t have the wherewithal to do the teeeeeny teeny tiny bit of work to pay a bill in 2017. I literally don’t even want to look at my credit score. How many late payments did I have this year? I don’t know. And I don’t want to know.
3) Vacations and/or just trips home to LA. There were so many times where it was like, “I just have to get out of here. I have to get out. I can’t be here.” And I understand that feeling. (I felt it soooo deeply in the depths of my bones.) But also, most of the time, I was just paying a bucket of money to go somewhere new to cry. Was that good for me? Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe a little of both. Hard to say. Either way, it was a lot.
4) Deliveries. This sort of falls in line with uber trips. But I hated going outside. So, I had food, or groceries, or other things delivered all the time. And sometimes that makes sense in New York. (I live in a place where it’s kinda hard to lug groceries or laundry etc. through a crowd…. And it’s not suuuper expensive to have some of that stuff done delivery-wise.) But there are definitely times where it was excessive and not necessary (even though it felt necessary to the hungry girl who felt she couldn’t leave her apartment).
5) House cleaning. I’ve always paid for housecleaning here and there – for real, actual cleaning… (I never learned to “properly” clean a bathroom or a kitchen or whatever…. I mean, I’m an adult who I’m sure could learn how, but let’s just breeze past that for now.) The real cleaning has always been done by some sort of maid service… But the general picking up of my room? I can to do that! But not this time.
I hired a service to come and organize my whole apartment, because after I got stuff out of my storage unit, there was just stuff everywhere. I couldn’t get it together. Usually, I love little organizing projects and stuff. But I was like, “I’m too overwhelmed. Help me out here.” And they were super helpful. But that’s multiple hundreds of dollars that in an alternate timeline, I wouldn’t have spent.
6) Missed details. There are times I had a coupon for something, when it felt like way too much work to even find an email, or a text, or a whatever for a coupon code. There were also times where it felt like just too much work to even grab my frequent flier number.
Did this cost me a lot of money? Probably not. I know I flew a lot, but you gotta fly like a lot (I think?) to get frequent flier miles to count for something. Did little coupons here and there really make me miss out on tons of money? Probably not. Enough to where I’m including it, but it wasn’t as big of a deal as some of these other things were.
7) Replacing stuff. I got a new bed. I even moved apartments (though that had to do with many things, not just him…) But replacing my bed with another expensive ass bed – that was all just because of what happened with him. (There were some other smaller things too that I replaced because they reminded me too much of him or something he said, etc. Though obviously the bed – and the cost of disposing of my first bed – were the biggest things. (Ugh. It was so much money.)
[Edited to add from late 2018: 8) I’ve had a lot of career trouble in the last year or two as well – which makes sense when you’re crying all the time and barely keeping it together. It’s hard to say, but I think I probably lost out on some money career-wise that I don’t think would’ve happened otherwise (though it’s not quite as a direct link as some of these other things, I still think it’s probably worth pointing out).]
So, I dunno. Again, other people have much bigger issues. I know I barely kept working (for a while), but some people can’t at all (which I sorta kinda went through too). I got free therapy. I had things better off than many. But goodness gracious, did I still feel the weight of the money issues.
And as disappointing as all that is, it still isn’t magically fixed. As of the writing of this post, I still take Ubers too often. I’m starting to get over my sort of fear of New York, and I’m starting to build back my fitness to hopefully stat walking way more (all the time). But I still get a little anxious about the subway. And I still take Ubers way too often.
There are still things in here that I still need to work on. It’s not all fixed or all better. But I’m going to make a concerted effort to start to fix these things!
[This is part of the sexual assault series.]