Thursday, July 10, 2008

High Angst

<Update at 11:15 AM EDT 7/10/2008>
Good news: Prospective buyer signed.
Bad news: Prospective buyer signed.
Another day older and deeper in debt.
<Update end.>

I'm in a state of high angst. The thought of being over $100K in debt because of house sales and credit card debt incurred while carrying two houses is daunting. I want to cry.

Pair that factor with having uprooted myself from Tucson, leaving lots of good friends behind, friends whom I could call and say, "Meet me at Rio for a drink". Yesterday I walked into the lunchroom at noon with my little lunch of brown rice and black beans. Five of the women, with whom I'm developing friendships, were having a birthday lunch for the receptionist. Once they saw me, they invited me to join them. But why couldn't they have invited me from the start? Of course I wanted to cry.

In the afternoon I received an e-mail from last summer's beau. "Don't think this e-mail means I'm trying to start anything again," he wrote, suavely. He wanted my address to be able to send me a jazz CD from a performance he had heard on my birthday. He had thought of me and wanted to express his appreciation for all the piano guidance I had given him last summer. Nice, but ya can't hold it while falling asleep. Of course I wanted to cry.

Yesterday Tyler and I bought Fareed Zakaria's "The Post-American World" on Audible. I was listening to it on the way home last night, after a day of waiting to hear from my prospective buyer. I had to turn it off. It was way too depressing for my current frame of mind. Of course I wanted to cry.

I switched to "The Splendid Table" podcast.

I'm hating starting over at 58. I'm hating not having my own place. And then a six-year-old comes down at 7:30 a.m. and says, "Grandma, do you want to go for a walk?" And I LOVE my life!

3 comments:

Tyler said...

Of course the glass looks half empty from the bottom of it.

You're loved and admired, in big and small ways, by everyone around you. In this post, you're just finding ways to tell yourself they're not loving you enough. Is that productive?

You're certainly entitled to feel sorry for yourself, but when I look at the situation, I see: no more mortgages; reducing a few hundred thousand dollars in interest-calculating debt to around one; stanching the increasing credit-card debt so you can start paying it off.

This is the first step, albeit a painful one, to a new life. If you don't find a way to embrace it, after a while you're the only one who's going to pity you. And that will be a lonely place indeed.

Jan Crews said...

What a blessing to have a kid who's so smart.

Tyler said...

Or at least who thinks he is