The third in a series about money and depression (but mostly depression).

Martha Kaplan: So, tell me where you are, Logan.

Logan Sachon: Physically I am sitting on the couch in my living room. Mentally I am … sitting on the couch in my living room.

MK: Well, I am at my desk at work, but I brought up our respective locations because I’m supposed to be at your apartment later tonight, and I’m not sure if I can be.

LS: Can you explain why? Like, I know why, and I empathize, because I have been where you are. But other people do not know.

MK: When I am feeling, um, not great—I hate using the word “depressed” because it sounds both like a joke and way too serious—so when I am feeling really not great, like today—today was like, physically bad, I felt kind of underwater. Like under a lot of water, where you can feel the pressure on your body. And I didn’t feel like talking, really at all. Anyway, when I feel this way, it’s really hard for me to interact with people I’m close to. Co-workers, etc. are actually easier, because you can just front. But it’s hard to have real conversations with anyone who cares about you / who you care about, when all you’re thinking is “ow ow ow ow ow.” The other option is seeing someone who you really trust, and just being your grossest self around them. But then afterwards, you feel guilty for subjecting them to the crying or the moodiness or whatever. So that is why I am not sitting across from you while we chat.

LS: And I understand that. Though as your friend, I wish I could scoop you up and put you in bed and give you a stack of magazines and movies and puppies and make you dinner and play you music and just give you a safe place where your physical needs are taken care of—sometimes it’s so hard just to take care of your physical needs, getting a cup of water can be so difficult—and just let you breathe.

MK: Physical needs is a big thing. I’ve been talking in therapy a lot about how the main thing I want but don’t have is someone to hold me, which, ugh, it makes me uncomfortable even typing that sentence out, but I just want to be cuddled like an enormous baby. I don’t want a relationship, or I don’t most times. There are some exceptions, like when you’re at an engagement dinner and it’s just couples. Anyway. Mostly I do not want a relationship, because I feel like I would be terrible to date right now. But I do want someone to take care of me in this really basic way. And in some ways that’s all I want, and it’s making me a terrible friend. A terrible, needy, no fun to be around friend. This terrible afternoon with this weepy human was brought to you by: depression.

LS: So thinking that you’re terrible, needy, and no fun to be around is part of the disease—that’s not reality. Obviously we all prefer it when we and others are healthy and not depressed—but mostly because it’s hard to see your friends in pain, not because we only want to hang out with our friends when they’re having good days.

MK: I just feel like friendship is supposed to be give and take, and when I’m not doing well, I’m just taking.

LS: And then you give when your friends are not doing well—just a few weeks ago (last week?? what is time) I was having a dark day and you bought me a salad and let me camp out in your office and decompress and talk too much even though you were very busy. That was me taking and not giving. But it turned my whole day around.

MK: Well, I’m glad to hear that. I guess our friendship is more balanced because we’re both in tough spots kind of frequently. But there are other people that aren’t, and whenever I’m awful or sad around them, I feel guilty. I spend a lot of time apologizing to people for being distant at parties and crying in bathrooms and stuff. (This is also narcissism, obviously.) (No one cares about you—me!—that much!) (Except me.)

LS: Well that’s true for all of us in all relationships, or it should be. But yes, apologizing for existing is something that depression brings out. I think it’s in the DSM. “Do you apologize for the space you take up on this earth? y/n” I hate that word too, actually. I think that may be something that we bring up every time. That DEPRESSION is a dumb word. And yet. Taking it back, etc. Did you finish the last season of Girls?

MK: No. I’m some episodes behind.

LS: Well spoiler alert—Hannah had OCD when she was in high school and “it’s back.” And I think giving her OCD was a really smart choice, because it just sounds more clinical than “depression,” which is this wavy nebulous thing (I mean, not really, it’s also in the DSM, but like you said, it could mean anything from having a bad to day to you know, feeling like you are physically underwater).

MK: Yeah, I definitely think that’s a stronger choice than depression. That word has just become part of our normal language. So that you have to say “clinical depression” or “unipolar depression” or whatever just to stop people from assuming you’re just cranky or something.

LS: I’m excited for you to see those two episodes. “Excited.”

MK: Yeah, me too, if I ever feel like seeing humans again. I feel like I’m shutting down. I think actually one of the secret awful things about being depressed and having friends is that sometimes they don’t help. And it’s awful feeling 1) depressed; 2) like you wasted your friend’s time / ruined their day with your whining; and, 3) angry that you’re still really unhappy because your friend is just another human, not a cure for your legit mental disorder. And then you feel guilty about 2 and 3, and that just feeds into 1, and the whole cycle continues.

TWO MONTHS LATER

LS: The last time we spoke, for public consumption, we talked about anxiety and depression and how it affects relationships.

MK: Yeah. I think we didn’t fully explore that? I mean, basically, I’ve been thinking a lot about how much I ask of people I’m friends with, what’s fair and what’s not fair, how much another human should be allowed to demand in comfort / forgiveness / understanding when the reason you’re doing it is just, “I feel bad.”

LS: I think about this a lot too, but I don’t really have a concern about my friends so much as my working relationships. One in particular. (HI MIKE!)

MK: I basically keep it together at work; we’ve talked about this. I guess that’s a thing I’m pretty good at—pretending that I’m okay among colleagues. But I have a hard time trusting friends and once I get to a point of trust I worry constantly about abusing it which I know I do because there are so few that I would be a complete mess in front of. And then I feel guilty .

LS: Though we talk about this stuff frankly, I’m not in that inner circle of people—for you. You step back rather than reach out to me when you’re down.

MK: Inner circle of hell! Well see here’s the problem, the inner circle of people are two people: My best friend (who lives across the country) and another human with whom I have a … complicated relationship. We’ve known each other so long—and I’ve been unhappy for so much of that time—that there’s a level of trust that built up. But our relationship is, as I said, complicated. Plus we deal with feelings very differently. But mostly: this is just one human. It’s unfair to be dumping all your shit on just one human who is obviously going to fail and / or disappoint you in some way.

What makes you able to show people this side of yourself? I think it’s probably healthier. I wish I was able to more, spread it around.

LS: I don’t know about that. You are still respected in your place of employment! I use my therapist, when I have a therapist, as my person to lean on the most. Not that I don’t do it to other people, but my depression is really more just self-loathing and inability to do anything, and no one wants to hear you talk about hating yourself, so it’s pretty easy to keep inside. I think? My friends are reading this are like, “Girl, you’re delusional. You’re always talking about this.”

MK: I guess I should be able to do that with my therapist but I can’t because I feel like we have a professional relationship.

LS: Professional in that you pay her money to talk about your feelings. Work that.

MK: I have some interest in making her believe that I’m not a nutjob. Which I know sounds crazy. It’s not about her, even. She’s a great therapist! I just think I would have to get to such a point with someone like, it would take years. But I do feel like you’re more able to share with people about how you’re feeling. Or am I wrong about that?

LS: Yeah I’m pretty open about it, but again, I don’t know how good that actually has been for me in my life. Sometimes I wish I was more reserved, especially in working relationships. I mean, Mike is one of my best friends in addition to my partner in this website endeavor so maybe it never could have been strictly business there, but I do wonder, if I felt I had to front to Mike and hide this part of me, would I be better at my job? Do I take advantage of the fact that he knows and loves me and cares about me? Like: Am I actually incapable of getting out of bed and doing my work sometimes, or am I only giving into the feeling of incapability? Like, if there were more consequences (beatings???) would I be a better worker? And my great weakness is actually self discipline and not some wonkiness in my brain chemicals? I don’t know! But I sure do stare at the ceiling for long periods of time when I should be working trying to figure it out.

I make fun of myself a lot, that’s one way to acknowledge this mess to other humans. And you’re very good at that. Master of the self deprecating joke.

MK: I’m good at that with you, but with other people, the people I’m open with, I just want them to see I’m not okay, and I want them to help somehow. But you’re right, there’s no way, really, for anyone to help, which is why this is so hard. You have to keep so much of yourself tamped down, and it’s painful. In many ways I think it’s easier for me to be alone. I’ve been spending a lot of time alone recently, and it turns out I like it. I mean, I always knew I liked being alone, but maybe that’s my natural state, how I feel safest. If there’s no one around, there’s no one disappointing me by not helping me (even though I know that’s impossible). It also makes me really sad in a whole different way, the idea that I might just be, like, built for loneliness. That maybe all the jokes I make about not liking to have fun are … not jokes.

LS: I think spending time thinking about how you like spending your time and experimenting with different ways to be are good—I also think these things ebb and flow. You’re also so great in social situations. No one better at a dinner party. I like having you around.

MK: I think I am the worst, but thank you. But being alone just feels like my fate, because of how my mom is—a human who works a ton and has a single friend, and I really don’t want that. But what if that’s happiness for me? Is it possible to be comfortable and unhappy about THAT?

Sometimes I just feel like I’m burrowing, and I don’t want to be a mole person. But every time I pop my head up, it’s like, ugh, disaster. ANYWAY

I am hogging this chat in a grotesque way, please SPEAK YOUR TRUTH.

LS: Okay, one more thing about you though, and this is some Mama Pat Sachon wisdom about to get dropped: These things you’re saying about yourself, about being a person who needs to be alone, they are true of you right now, but they are not true of you as a person. We are all constantly evolving and changing. I tend to extrapolate that a bad day means I suck at everything and always will, but really: A bad day is a bad day. And yes, it’s more complex when there is mental illness contributing to your bad day, but, you know, not to sound like a prozac commercial, but there are tools and ways to work though. Which we’ve talked about.

MK: Mama Pat Sachon knows what’s up.

LS: So we have sort of inverse problems with relationships. Opposite. Different. I feel like I’m constantly failing at work because I’m “sad.” I know that I should be able to just Hunker Down and Do My Work, but I have a really hard time with it, and sometimes just don’t do it. Which is weird. When I have had jobs where I had to be somewhere each day, I always got out of bed for my job. Always. But my job now is more flexible, at least in my head, there are no immediate dire consequences, so a lot of me Getting Things Done is dependent on making myself Get Things Done, which is hard. Like Monday I said I’d do four posts and I did one.

MK: What happened?

LS: A lot of it is, I really hate myself a lot of the time, so I don’t feel like I have anything worthy or interesting to say which makes it hard to write blog posts for people to read. I spend a lot of time in my head, talking myself in and out of various things, then it’s 20 minutes past when my post is supposed to go up and I have to apologize to Mike. And then it starts again with the next post.

Every night I have this plan to “do all the work” and have a million things edited and posts written, but there is always a reason it doesn’t happen. And mostly that reason is, I sit down to do it and … I just want to go to bed. And I always let myself go to bed. Self care or SELF DEFEAT?!

MK: I feel like that happens to both of us or, like, it’s a bad sign that it’s happening less to me like I’m becoming less human. Also have you seen this:

http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2010/06/this-is-why-ill-never-be-adult.html
I think it sums up many of my problems: CLEAN ALL THE THINGS! Anyway, I feel like that a lot of the time; right now maybe I’m cresting the “do all the things” wave. I just hope it lasts until after I move.

LS: You are moving! Yes. Another way to deal with depression. Just change some huge thing in your life, like your job or where you live. And yes, wherever you go, there you are, but at least slightly altered logistics are distracting for a minute. When is the move?

MK: Memorial day.

LS: So great.

MK: Or a huge mistake! Who knows. Okay I’m going to get back to hanging out with this cat. Best cat.

LS:
http://thebillfold.com/2013/05/why-i-hired-an-esteemed-cat-photographer-to-take-photos-of-my-cat/

MK: Okay. Second best.

Previously

My brother and I have been standing in line—we are the line—for 10 minutes while the man in front of us sets up his payments for four otter pops and one sucker.

He is paying with Tashlumim. Real old-fashioned credit. There are tons of little stores like this all over the country—single owner, providing a few blocks with 16-, 20- or 24-hour access to fundamental groceries: bread, hummus, milk, cottage cheese. And yes, otter pops and suckers. These stores are neighborhood institutions, neighbors helping neighbors. Hence the Tashlumim.

After it’s been settled, with a “Shabbat shalom, hamud,” we’re up. we pay for our chocolate milk with cash, but we don’t have to.

I grew up in the United States, where revolving credit is the norm. Revolving credit as a functional financial tool only took off in the 1940s, and by the time I’d arrived to college and had to navigate whether or not to get a student card, the concept was pervasive. In fact, I’d never considered a world in which such standards of lending didn’t exist. Being behind on payments, having absurd interest rates—those were the rules of the credit game.

It took me a while to get a student credit card, and then I got a second one. I often used up all of my available credit every month, but then I made sure to pay it down immediately. I’m not sure why I didn’t just use the money in column b for column a in the first place. I guess it just wasn’t how it was done.

I have lived in Jerusalem for a year. My checking account comes with a “credit card.” In Hebrew it’s called כרטיס אשראי (cartis ashrai, lit. card of permission, or trust—Hebrew’s a pretty compact language.) I use the card to make purchases, and the full balance of the card is deducted from my account each month. There are no minimum payments. The minimum is the balance. To determine the balance I was given each month, a banker looked at my income and did some funny math in her head and gave me a “frame” of 2000 shekels ($500). Every month I have 2000 shekel with which to pay, and on the 2nd of the month, my bank account is debited by the card issuer, and we start over again.

My frame is low. People who make real money, or live in two-income households, have HUGE frames. I’ve heard of people with 60,000 shekel frames. It’s acceptable to go into minus here—how much into the minus they let you go is another number determined by your banker—but people don’t think of it as carrying debt, even though there is interest charged. (Though I found it impossible to discern from my statements what that interest rate is.)

The best part of the Israeli banking system though, is Tashlumim, or payments. You can put anything on installments. The price might increase by a hundred shekel, or your bank/card issuer might charge you 50 shekel to do this, but then you can divide the price across as many months as they’ll let you! At the furniture store, this is a pretty good deal—interest-free credit, guaranteed to be paid every month with your monthly cartis ashrai bill. But it’s available everywhere—the corner shops, grocery stores. You can pay for your bread and cheese in three payments. And maybe people do.

It turns out a lot of Israelis need that, and I’m turning out to be one of them. Between the monthly living stipend I get from my school and money I take out of savings each month, I’m living off of 1.5 times the minimum wage. I run out of cash on hand about three days into the month, between paying rent and bills, like my cell phone, and of course, my cartis ashrai bill. But even with no cash, I still have that 2000 shekel to get me through … until next month when I can start it all over again.

The thing about Tashlumim is that it seems really weird. But it’s just installment credit. Forever, basically, before airlines and/or department stores invented revolving credit with banks, people received installment credit from the local pub, from the king, from whomever. In good hands it’s a very stable and safe way for everyone to benefit—I know what I’ll get for my meal or my work; you know that I’ll pay up. In America, revolving credit has ruined lives. But here it seems to work.

My first Tashlumim payment was to the gym. I wanted to join, but I did not have the 1200 shekel upfront. So I signed up to make four payments of 300 each month. I did the paperwork, and for the next four months, 300 shekel were taken out of my account at the beginning of the month. It felt just like how we’re used to doing that sort of thing in America.

Until I ran out of credit a week and a half later. Though only 300 of the 1200 would be debited from my bank account that month, the Tashlumin “blacked out” the full amount of the membership on my card. I started at 2000 and then “bought” 1200 shekel worth of gym time. I had thought I would only be on the hook for 300 that month—and I was. But the full amount was deducted from my available credit. The next month, 900 was still blacked out, then 600, and then 300. This month I made my final Tashlumim payment. Now I’m free.

Tashlumim is a way to pay for things when you don’t have the money. But it also seems really silly to me. Nobody benefits from the money sitting there. The bank isn’t charging me interest, because I’m not outstanding. I’m not getting to use all of my available credit, because I sort of am outstanding. The gym doesn’t get paid fully for four months. Many Israelis use Tashlumim for everything. I tried it once, and now I’m sticking with only buying what I can pay for. It may not be very American of me, but it feels good.

Abraham Benson-Goldberg lives in Jerusalem. Image by sgmerle

My parents always described our family as being “comfortable.” I was friends with people who were way more than comfortable (private jets) and people who were way less than comfortable (constantly moving due to being evicted), so I perceived us as squarely in the upper middle class: We could afford riding lessons, but we couldn’t afford a horse.

I appreciate just how comfortable we were more and more each day. As a young child, both of my parents worked ridiculous hours at their respective law firms. My brother and I had a parade of nannies until we were old enough for school, and then we each had a variety of extracurriculars to keep us busy until they got out of work. I had expensive hobbies: ballet, piano, and riding lessons throughout my youth, travel and other costs for cheerleading one year, basketball, softball, and swimming, the occasional day or sleepaway camp.

If I put value in something, I trusted that my parents would provide for me. So when I decided to go to boarding school for high school, I didn’t consider whether or not we could afford it. It was something I wanted to do, and they made it happen. I now know that my parents paid probably around $20,000 a year for that school. I made it through two years of boarding school before they told me I could have my last two years there, or they could pay for college. I chose college.

We never had chores or an allowance—though here were a few things we were expected to do (keep messes contained to our rooms, tidy when the housekeepers came twice a month), and we were given money as needed. My mom and I went on shopping sprees twice a year to the big city (we still do!), and I didn’t really need to buy clothes in between those trips.

They gave us so much, but they also gave us a future.

My mom sat my brother and me down separately to walk us through paying the bills when we were around 16. I remember not paying attention. She constantly stressed the importance of staying out of debt, something both my brother and I have disregarded in varying degrees throughout our lives.

I was given a credit card when I went to boarding school, and I believe my brother was given one around the same time. I used mine for things like tampons and maybe once for a dress for a dance, and my brother probably used his for gas and pizza. We had to submit receipts for every purchase. My parents were obsessed with keeping things square between us; my mom grew up in a huge family with significant “fairness” disputes about what her parents had given each child. We each got a used car when we turned 16, insurance and gas was paid up until we were 18, and both of us had an IRA started for us when we were 18 with a $1,000 balance.

My mom even helped me get my first job. She drove me to Applebee’s and made me fill out the application while I was there, and then drove me there once a week until they finally gave me a job as a hostess. It took six weeks of visiting, and it was embarrassing at the time. But I learned how to get a job, and I’ve had a job ever since.

My parents also paid for our college education, which included tuition, rent, spending money. We had our cars already, but had to pay our own gas and insurance. I got a job at In-N-Out my freshman year and constantly overdrew my bank account. I didn’t understand the concept of a checkbook, or why the balance reflected in the ATM wasn’t the “actual” balance that was available. I got my first credit card that wasn’t with my parents my freshmen year—it was an Express card, which I used to get 10 percent off a jacket that I still have nearly a decade later. I paid off that $30 as soon as I got the statement and had no debt until a year after I dropped out of school. Which is when things got interesting.

My parents funded a move to Seattle, where I got a job at a bank and learned a ton about money management—including how to use a checkbook! Working at the bank is where I really learned the most about personal finance, and eventually I became a personal finance nerd and started reading personal finance blogs blogs obsessively. They also helped me move to San Francisco, where I worked a variety of jobs while I went to City College full-time (tuition and partial rent paid), and then they helped me move back to my original school, where they paid tuition and partial rent.

It was in San Francisco that I got into serious credit card debt: $10,000 at its highest. I got serious about paying it off after I broke up with the boyfriend who had helped me run it up. I worked four jobs and paid it off in 18 months.

My mom recently told me that there were a few years when we were growing up during which my parents had $80,000 in consumer debt. This put that time period into a whole different light, because it meant that they couldn’t always afford everything they were giving us. I had assumed that every “no” was a lesson in needs versus wants, that my parents could afford it but were choosing not to. Not so much, apparently. I think it took them a several years to pay down that debt, and I didn’t know about it at all. But it explains my mum’s obsession with keeping my brother and me out of debt. I’m sorry I didn’t listen.

Here’s where I am with my money. Debt: I have $415,000 for a mortgage (split with boyfriend); $22,000 for a home equity loan (mine, all mine, as the boyfriend paid back his share already); $13,000 for a car loan. (I cycle through credit cards based on rewards, which I pay off in full each month). Savings: $2,000 in checking, $1,000 in a liquid savings account, $15,000 in my 401(k), $5,000 in a Roth IRA, $4,000 in individually held stocks, $1,000 in Lending Club.

I would not be living in this house if it weren’t for my parents and my boyfriend. But my boyfriend and I split everything 50/50 when it comes to the house, and my parents aren’t contributing anything toward me on a regular basis.

My parents provided most of the down payment for my house. I constantly discuss things with them and ask for their advice. They know exactly how much I make and how I spend my money. My mom still buys me one or two things on our shopping trips, and both my parents treat whenever we go out to eat, but they don’t really make contributions to my budget.

I just asked my mom if she would consider funding a yoga teacher training (something she has funded in the past, as she promised to fund tuition for secondary education—I argued that it was secondary education in that would lead to a job, which it has).

She basically said, “Um, no, I think you can afford it now—you’re 29. I’m spending my money on me now.”

I was glad she said that, because she’s right. My parents have given me more than enough. They’ve given me money, and all the life lessons I’ve needed to become a responsible adult. I can figure out a way to afford it.

I’m in the city and I’m hungry and I want some internet, so I go to Pret. I always get the same thing at Pret—the cheddar and tomato—so I grab the cheddar and tomato and take it to the counter. One employee is behind the counter, one in front. The one in front is stacking little brownie bites, or maybe packages of nuts. The one behind is watching her, and talking to her. It’s not so much a conversation as it is a series of statements being made by one person in the general direction of the other person. The statements are: I don’t know who is going to do that work, but it’s not going to be me. I don’t know who is going to do that other work, but it’s not going to be me. They could have done that work, but they didn’t, and now they’re gone, and I’m not going to do it.

I’m paraphrasing.

She sees me and stops making statements in the direction of her coworker and instead smiles and makes a statement at me: “I can take you right here.” I put my sandwich on the counter and ask for an iced coffee. “What size?” “Regular is fine.” I root around in my bag, find my debit card, and hand it to her. She swipes it, then turns around to get the coffee—grabs a large cup, fills it with ice, then coffee, puts a lid on it. She comes back, sets down the coffee, and looks at the screen.

“Can I see your card again?”

She says it very nonchalantly. There is nothing accusatory in her voice, in fact, I’ve found my card again and have handed it to her before I say—”Wait, was it denied?” But even as the words are coming out my mouth, I know they’re true. The email this morning that I couldn’t erase fast enough: “You payment has been—” Delete. “Received” was the last word of that sentence, and if I clicked through I would have seen that it meant that $100 had been taken out of my bank account that only had $69.81 in it. This is fine, I have overdraft protection, the bill was paid, I just don’t have any money in my account until I get paid again. She’s already swiped it again, when I say, “It’s not going to go through.” “No, it’s going,” she says, so chill, so relaxed. For a minute I think, okay maybe it is. Maybe I was wrong about that email and I still have $69.81 in my account, and I actually am going to buy this lunch right now. I’m hungry.

Alas. “Oh you’re right it didn’t go through,” she says as she hands me back my card with a slight shrug. Still cool, still relaxed.

And me too, mostly. This is not the first time this has happened to me. I’m not actually as mortified as I feel like I should be. But I’m worried she might be mortified on my behalf, or maybe the person in line behind me is mortified on my behalf, and really I just want to get out of this sandwich shop. “This is really embarrassing, I’m sorry!” I say with a half laugh. I am hoping to project an air of the truth, which is that I’m okay, just scatterbrained, and that I will not starve. She shakes it off. I go on, “I don’t have another card.” (I don’t have another card, anywhere.) “I don’t have cash.” (It’s in my room, so I can’t spend it on sandwiches and iced coffees.) “I can’t pay for this.” (Right now, not ever.)

She says, “Girl, don’t worry about it,” and I smile and say sorry again, and go to turn, to leave, and she says, “You can take this, go ahead.” The sandwich and the coffee are on the counter, where she put them, and she’s nodding at them with her head. “Take it.”

I wish I could remember if I paused here, if I said, “really?” If I just took it. I think I must have just taken it, because if I’d paused for a moment, I would have said, “No, you don’t have to do that, no thanks. I don’t need it, I’m fine.” But instead I grab the bag with the sandwich, I grab the coffee, I start to walk out. I say thank you, but not in a meaningful way. I don’t stop and look her in the eyes and say, “Thank you.” Maybe I should have. But there is food at my house and money and a Trader Joe’s gift card and this whole incident isn’t about me being needy but instead about me not doing math.

I walk out the door, but first, I stop to put milk in the coffee. Even as I’m doing it, I’m thinking, this is ridiculous that I’m doing this. I just accepted charity and now what am I doing, thanks for the free coffee, now let me also take your free milk, ha. Top off, whole milk, top back on, grab a straw.

I walk out, don’t look back.

A block away I stop by a ledge to put the sandwich I didn’t pay for in my bag, to put the straw in the coffee I didn’t pay for, to take a long sip. I think about the woman who gave it to me. She has been broke before, no doubt. She works a sandwich shop in New York City, how could she not. She could also be a planner, she could budget, she could do math. But I feel like she knows what it’s like to want a coffee and a sandwich and to hand over your card hoping that it would work out. And have it not work out. It wasn’t hers to give me, that’s true. The coffee maybe, she would have thrown out anyway, but the sandwich could have gone back. Unless there’s a rule that once it’s in the bag, it’s “used,” and she would have had to throw it out anyway. Maybe that was the rule. Maybe she works for a company that gives her autonomy to do what she did. I don’t know.

I stood on the corner and ate half my sandwich, my charity sandwich. I saved the rest for later.

Photo: king huang

The first opera I saw was “Cosi Fan Tutte,” by Mozart. It’s about two dudes who disguise themselves as Albanians to trick their respective girlfriends into sleeping with the other dude, to test how (un)faithful they are. Then they whip off their mustaches and say AH HAH! And then basically they all shrug, laugh, and depending on the production either swap back, OR NOT. It’s a comedy. Allegedly. The title means “They’re all the same.” “They” being women.

I went to opera school anyway.

Saying you want to be an opera singer is like saying you want to be an astronaut, in terms of actual job prospects. There is one full-time repertory opera company in the United States—the Met in NYC. The other top U.S. companies—Houston Grand Opera, San Francisco, Chicago Lyric—all do between four to six shows a year, total. And the same soprano is going to headline most of them, since they don’t overlap.

The thing about opera is that it is really, really expensive. It truly is an elite art form. It costs $100 to $200 to audition, and you have to bring your own pianist, who is $40 an hour. At conservatory, we were always taught to take taxis to auditions, never the subway. We were also expected to do at least one summer opera program each year, in Italy, Germany, Austria or Belgium. These programs ran $3,000 each. Most of my classmates would do two or three each summer. We were taught that we should “rely on our financial buffer” after graduation, and were advised not to get jobs. A job will distract you from opera singing and make you tired, they said.

The operatic voice isn’t fully developed until your mid- to late- thirties. A 22-year-old soprano is sort of a pointless fetus, not worth anything. You’re expected to spend your early- and mid-twenties doing pay-to-sings and grad programs, and then go into a Young Artist Program (YAP). YAPs are essentially residencies with regional opera companies, where you sing small mainstage roles or cover principle artists. You usually get paid like $10K for the entire year, and maybe they cover your housing or something. It’s not an opportunity I could ever afford to do. They’re also insanely competitive, and one of the very few paths to becoming a professional opera singer.

To be an opera singer, you have to be rich. And I’m not. I wasn’t, and I’m not, rich.

I am an incredibly good singer. I’m just gonna put that out there, because it’s true, and I don’t figure there’s any point in being coy about it. In music school, my sophomore year I was the lead in the musical, my senior year I was a supporting role in the opera, and my senior year I was the lead. But I didn’t go on to grad school like 90 percent of my class, because I couldn’t take out any more loans.

After I graduated, I fell into a job in marketing, and I worked there for three years. It was not my dream job—my dream job was being an opera singer—but it paid all of my bills, gave me health care, some stability.

While sitting at that desk job, I checked out playbill.com for the first time, where they post all the Broadway/Off-Broadway/Off-Off-Broadway/Whatever audition notices. And I saw an audition posting for Phantom of the Opera, and I saw that the minimum starting salary for the very lowliest chorus person on Broadway was $1,642 a week. A WEEK. (Now it’s $1,754.) That’s like… $91K a year before taxes? (The stereotype of the starving Broadway hoofer is completely false. If you work on Broadway, you make incredible money. It’s all the time between shows that you have to watch out for.) I made my decision that very moment that I wouldn’t even try to pursue opera, and instead, I would throw myself back into musical theatre.

I love the musical theatre world because it’s a business. It’s the Business of Show. There are 40 Broadway theaters constantly employing actors, every night of the week, and then dozens of Off-Broadway houses, and hundreds of regional theaters, all paying gigs. In musical theatre, you NEVER pay to audition, and they have a pianist there ready for you. Everything about it makes sense and is fair—at least compared to opera. It’s about hard work, and talent, and luck, and showing up.

I’ve been pursuing musical theatre since then, and I never looked back. I still love to sing opera, equally as much as I love singing musical theatre, but I’m very at peace about my decision. It feels more like musical theatre chose me than the other way around.

C.L. lives in New York.

College Green, Iowa City, Iowa, 1999
My first residence out of college was a single-room sublet with a communal bathroom and kitchen in a giant old house. My roommates and I were in a band and we recorded an album in the attic. I was underemployed, temperatures hit record highs, and I was in the midst of a protracted, summer-long breakup with my college girlfriend. Of course I have fond memories of the place.

Any elisions in this timeline represent long stretches without unpleasant interactions with landlords, and uneventful tenancies make boring stories. I rented many apartments throughout Iowa City and Chicago before my first full-scale landlord-induced meltdown, which set into motion a series of motifs I’d revisit over the next eight years:

1. The Initially Nice but Later Incompetent and/or Crooked Landlord;
2. The Lost Forwarding Address;
3. The Unhinged Phone Call and/or Letter;
4. The Fuck-Off Money;
5. The Admittedly Unwise Decisions on My Part; and
6. The Ineffectual Legal Half-Measure.

Northeast, Minneapolis, Minn., 2005-2006
Shortly after I was accepted to grad school in Minneapolis, I rented a place sight-unseen via email; an alum of my program needed a roommate. Our apartment was the ground-floor unit in a large, extremely neglected house. We were burgled once (the back door was rickety enough that the culprits simply forced it open); the shower was a cold trickle, the bathroom floor was missing tiles, and there was a two-inch gap between the window pane and the frame in my bedroom window.

Our landlord was a single mother who lived on the second floor and was working on a Ph.D. in American or maybe Gender Studies. She was sweet, but when we asked her to fix the shower or the windows she told us she’d “already done everything [she] could” (Motif #1). I will call her Martha Nussbaum, despite my affection for her namesake’s work.

When we moved out, Martha called us to say she’d lost our forwarding addresses (Motif #2), that she was withholding our deposit, and that we owed her even more money to fix up damage to the apartment (damage that had undoubtedly been there for years before we moved in). We each sent her letters pointing out that because more than 21 days had passed since we moved out, she actually owed us our full deposit plus late fees, according to state law. Martha responded with Motif #3, sending us each extremely long letters (mine was seven single-spaced pages) enumerating the ways in which we were terrible people, had ruined her heretofore pristine property, and had put her daughter’s life at risk by allowing our apartment to be burgled. With mine, she enclosed a check for $7, the fuck-off money she’d decided I deserved according to her mysterious calculations (#4). I never cashed it.

Yes, it’s possible that we could have cleaned the place better when we moved out (#5), though with such derelict properties it’s hard to tell where mess ends and decrepitude begins. I can’t claim complete faultlessness, but, in a dynamic that has become unsettlingly familiar over the years, there is a great leap between me neglecting to take care of some basic tenant-maintenance matters and an adult, in some cases decades older than I am, maligning my character and screaming at me.

I went to the University of Minnesota’s free legal-advice service and met with a woman who told me I had a pretty strong case. She called Martha and, after getting an earful, got her to agree to giving me $55 (#4 revisited), which she never paid. In retrospect, I should have just taken her to court (#6).

Lowry Hill, Minneapolis, Minn., 2009-2010
This was a tiny unit in an old brick building in a nice part of town, which justified the relatively high rent for closet-sized kitchens and a sinking foundation. The superintendent was a man whose actual name was Michael Jackson. The unit I moved into had been painted garish colors, so Mike kindly bought me paint and my girlfriend and I had a grand old time painting the rooms together.

Mike was nice enough, but after a few months started offering the tenants deals where we could get rent reductions if we paid him in cash (Motif #1). I foolishly took him up on this offer (#5) until I began having qualms, which was also around the time the landlord (whom I’ll call Bill O’Reilly, for reasons which will soon become apparent) found out about the scheme, fired him, and replaced him with an affable hipster who was probably younger than me.

After I moved out and three weeks went by without any returned deposit, I called Bill. He told me that the new super had never given him my forwarding address (#2), then told me I was “a nice enough tenant but a horseshit painter,” and that he was withholding funds for re-painting. I’d left the walls as they were because the super hadn’t raised any objections about them during our walk-through. If anything, I felt like I’d done Bill a favor since my colors were much more palatable than the previous tenant’s.

I pointed out to Bill that none of that really mattered, deposit-wise, since it had been more than 21 days since I’d moved out and that he now owed me my full deposit, plus a fee, etc. I even cited the Minnesota state Tenant’s Bill of Rights, a pamphlet I’d picked up during my Ineffectual Legal Half-Measures with Martha, hoping to give my words a patina of formality.

This was a mistake. Bill, screaming now, told me that “that Bill of Rights is a bunch of liberal bullshit [I] can cram up [my] ass,” and that “[I] could go ahead and take [him] to court, because [he] wins those cases 99 out of 100 times.” He then hung up, preventing me from asking him why he’s been to court 100 times.

I sent Bill a letter officially asking for my deposit back, plus fees, or I’d take him to small-claims court. He wrote back, calmer now, and despite his early confidence in a courtroom victory, suggested that surely there must be an amicable solution. He offered me about $300, which was too much to be fuck-off money but still considerably less than my deposit. And, in keeping with Motif #6, I accepted, because conflict makes me physically ill and I just wanted to be done with Bill.

Hamline-Midway, Saint Paul, Minn., 2012-2013
After Amanda and I got married last summer, we wanted to rent a house where we could have a dog. Unable to find such a place in Minneapolis within our price range, we did the unthinkable and moved to Saint Paul. To certain partisans of either Twin City, moving to the Other One is an act of betrayal tantamount to going from Mac to PC or voting for the Other Party. We had our doubts about crossing over, but we were reasonably happy with our surroundings, and any misgivings we have for our Saint Paul spell have nothing to do with the city and everything to do with our landlord.

Our new landlord lived literally across the alley from us; for reasons we never deduced, he’d moved his family into a new house one hundred feet to the south and was renting out his old one. He was a personal-injury lawyer, so let’s call him Robert Kardashian. Robert loved us at first; he told told us we were ideal tenants. We told him we had a cat and wanted to get a dog; he said he’d allow pets with a pet deposit. When we sat down to sign the lease, our first red flags went up: he wanted a pet fee—not a deposit—of $50 a month, per pet, non-refundable. This would amount to an additional $1,200 if we lived there for a year, kept our cat, and got a dog. We signed the lease anyway (Motif #5), and he said perhaps we could renegotiate the pet fee when and if we adopted a dog. We were charmed enough to believe him.

Robert was often visible through our rear window, since the lease he’d drawn up allowed him to continue gardening in the backyard and using his/our garage. He already felt too close for comfort, and we couldn’t help feeling like he was ripping us off. Our conversations with him were amiable but strained; he had a way of hijacking any discussion by free-associating aloud at great length before finally delivering his bad news or nonsensical ultimatum. When we informed him we were planning to adopt a rescue dog and asked if he was still willing to renegotiate the pet fee, he held forth about how he was already doing us a favor because he’d researched the rental market and should be charging far more for rent, and wished we didn’t have any pets at all (both things he should have expressed before we ever signed a lease), before finally announcing that we still had to pay an additional $50 a month. A simple “no” would have sufficed.

This additional $100 a month on top of our already steep rent, and our burgeoning resentment toward Robert, is what truly catalyzed our decision to begin the house-hunting process. We figured it would probably be at least a year before we even found, much less closed on, a place we liked. Instead, thanks to an amazing realtor and a favorable market, we found a newly renovated house back in Minneapolis almost immediately. We talked to Robert about leaving the lease early, and he agreed to let us if we found new tenants, which we immediately did. We confirmed our closing date with our realtor and informed Robert of our move-out date.

But of course nothing was ever that simple with Robert. The amended lease was accompanied by a letter that began in very officious legalese before lapsing into run-on sentences about news stories he’d heard regarding widespread delays in closing dates due to irregularities in the housing market.

(Robert’s correspondence, like his speech, throbbed with first-draft sloppiness; I had to read his letters multiple times to decoct their meaning. His sudden shifts from the elevated diction of his profession to informal and meandering non-sequiturs made his correspondence sound like it had been written by a Yale 1L on peyote. I feel sorry for his clients.)

The apparent upshot of his letter was that even if our closing date was delayed, we still had to be out of the house, and he would not let us stay a day longer. Okay, boss.

Despite Robert’s expert real-estate analysis and Dickensian ultimatums, we closed on the house with zero delay or hassle. Having learned my lessons with past landlords and internalized all the motifs (or so I thought), I gave Robert our forwarding address in writing. I had the house professionally cleaned. We even agreed to vacate a week early so that Robert could do some maintenance; we thought maybe he’d even refund us that week’s rent. By now we should have known that was a very naïve hope.

Longfellow, Minneapolis, Minn., infinity and beyond
The day after we’d vacated Robert’s house and turned in our keys, he sent us an email dangerously close to embodying Motif #3: a litany of ways in which the house was apparently still a mess, including the memorable phrase “the whole house smells like a cat,” which Amanda and I have adopted as one of those grim one-liners that couples invoke in times of much-needed levity.

Amanda and I freaked out, because, in keeping with Motif #5, I hadn’t done a walk-through after the cleaners left, because I’d had very good experiences with the company in the past. But it was possible they’d missed some things, and I was willing to pay whatever it took to end our tenancy amicably, so I called the cleaning company and arranged for them to return to the house, do a walk-through with Robert, and clean absolutely anything he wanted them to, at our expense. They did so, I paid for it, and we assumed all was resolved. (Spoiler alert: it wasn’t.)

Exactly 21 days passed before we received a letter from Robert containing our deposit, minus deep deductions for cleaning tasks he’d decided to perform himself. This meant we’d paid for all this cleaning twice: once when the cleaners did it, and once when Robert did it. (He paid himself $40 an hour for rudimentary tasks like wiping off the windowsills; we theorized that because he’d been in the professional sector for thirty years, he thought $40 was now the minimum wage.)

And please don’t forget about the $600 in non-refundable pet fees we’d paid. Robert used $425 of this sum to ostensibly make the house smell less like a cat, which means he pocketed $175. He also took $125 out of our security deposit to change the locks, an unnecessary procedure not covered by damage deposits, according to state law.

In keeping with Motif #6, we decided to challenge Robert on only one point: the $125 for changing the locks. We sent off a very polite letter asking for that sum, and waited. A week later, Motif #4 came hurtling into our mailbox in the form of a lengthy screed (three single-spaced pages, this time) that, in keeping with Robert’s rhetorical style, was one-third legalistic obfuscation and two-thirds hysterical grousing. On the first page he informed us that he wasn’t going to refund us the money for changing the locks because we moved out early, but offered us $27 in fuck-off money. This made no sense, but was airtight logic compared to the next two pages, which were mostly devoted to telling us what disgusting people we were (his actual charge was that we “lack basic hygiene”) because he found some cat litter on the basement floor, and his broken toilet, which remained broken even after he’d come over and “fixed” it, wasn’t flushable. (“It is standard practice to flush a toilet after use” is a sentence he actually typed.)

As I read Robert’s crazy letter, all the other motifs descended on me like angry, estranged relatives. My face grew hot, my stomach contracted, and I became paralyzed with impotent rage. I am not prone to flashes of temper; I don’t scream at people; I’ve never hit someone or threatened to. I don’t belong to a boxing gym or go to a firing range, so I don’t really have any of the stereotypical outlets for my anger. I can only silently fume and then look for legal recourse.

There is a tenant-advocacy organization in Minnesota that provides free advice over the phone. They told me I probably had a strong case, but an in-person consultation would cost $75 an hour. With very little money to begin with, and an uncertain outcome in court, we dead-ended at Motif #6.

At this point you might be experiencing a certain nagging skepticism that usually manifests as two utterances of paternalistic devil’s advocacy: 1. Maybe the author keeps having bad luck with landlords because he’s just not a very responsible tenant; and 2. This guy sounds like he has a real axe to grind and can’t let it go. He should shit or get off the (broken) pot.

Both of these points are fair, to some extent. In response to the first, I will point out that I rented nearly a dozen apartments that aren’t on this list, because everything turned out fine. But in the cases I’ve described here, Motif #5 does apply: There are wiser, more responsible choices I could have made along the way; damage and irregularities I should have documented; sketchy scenarios I should have avoided; walls I should have repainted.

My beef with Martha, Bill, and Robert isn’t so much that they found me at fault: in every instance I acknowledged my errors, and my complaints would still have merit even if I’d done everything perfectly. My exasperation stems from the fact that that, as soon as they were challenged (politely, reasonably), Martha, Bill, and Robert immediately went from 0 to 100 on the Hysterical Childish Behavior Metric, rendering reasonable negotiation impossible. In every instance, I was the younger, ostensibly less empowered party, yet I maintained a dynamic of professional decorum; they were the ones who tipped their hands by having epistolary and telephonic meltdowns that, while undoubtedly genuine, are also strategic: They’ve learned that they can get their way if they just kick and scream enough, derailing the argument and exhausting the other party. What I did wrong or could have done right becomes immaterial.

The International Law of Mansplanatory Fault Finding still dictates, however, that at least one person bang out a comment thusly: “I can’t believe how naïve you were. Here’s what you should have done. ADMONITION THE FIRST …” etc. We see this tendency to second-guess the complainant and side with The Man in everything from customer-service interactions to wrongful arrests. It’s a weird impulse that causes strangers to give violent criminals, financial institutions, and overzealous law enforcement the benefit of the doubt, concluding that because the victim didn’t do everything completely perfectly, his or her grievance is not legitimate.

Not that I consider myself a victim. To do so would be gauche and insulting to actual victims, which brings me to my hypothetical reader’s second point, that I have an axe to grind. Another fair point—after all, the thousands of words I’ve just devoted to Robert certainly suggest as much. But I’ve dwelt on Robert here only in a clumsy attempt to impart a larger cautionary lesson to those patient enough to keep reading: that, even when our axes cry out for so much more grinding, it may be time to give the old grindstone a rest.

I have to choose my battles. I am older and (marginally) wiser than I was earlier in my rental history, and so very, very tired. I didn’t take Robert to court; I didn’t accept his fuck-off money; I didn’t seek any sort of redress or revenge. More tenacious or litigious readers might consider this a failure of character, but I can only speak for my desire to forget the whole incident. Initially, I wanted to keep fighting, hire a lawyer, humiliate Robert. But I could see that my crusade for justice was already stressing Amanda out, even scaring her a little. I apologized and asked her how she could be so calm, why she wasn’t seething like I was. She said that if we didn’t turn our backs on Robert right away, and permanently, he’d gain more ground than he already had. She said she hated Robert so much that she didn’t want to allow him one more second of rent-free metaphysical residence in our heads or home. She said the best revenge was living well, without Robert in our lives. (I was wise to marry someone smarter than I am.)

So weep not for me. My complaints are petty, my axe already ground to slivers. Weep instead for the tenants, great in number and multiplying every day, who live below the poverty line and risk eviction every month; who lack any sort of advocacy or legal representation; who might not be fluent in English, much less legalese; whose education might have stopped in high school; whose access to shelter relies on the mercy of truly corrupt slumlords who make Martha, Bill, and Robert look like Mother Teresa. Owning a home is often a pain in the ass (and I would know), but renting an apartment is a rigged game where the winner is the person who yells the loudest. I feel a hundred times more empowered dealing with a clogged sewer in a home I own than I ever did dealing with Martha, Bill, or Robert. They are bullies, and you can’t truly win against bullies. You can only walk away, and fight the fights that really matter.

Previously: Adventures at the Intersection of Homeownership And Sewage

Jake Mohan is a writer, teacher, and musician who lives in the Twin Cities. He is on Twitter.

I grew up with money, but I’m bad with money. Right now I’m the kind of bad that has collection agencies calling. The kind of bad that has trashed my credit score. The kind of bad that leaves me feeling like a Rockefeller if I have more than $50 left in my checking by the end of the month—something there hasn’t been a single instance of in my working life so far. The norm: Daily alerts from Chase that I have $3.50 in my account the week before a paycheck. And I have a well-paying job.

I have no excuses. Growing up, my family had money. I half assumed we did, in fact, have a money tree growing out back. My father made the money, a lot of it, and my mother spent it, a lot of it on me: figure skating lessons, summer camps, horseback riding lessons, eventually a horse.

The family money meant I haven’t had the roadblocks to financial health others have. My family paid for my education, gave me money to spend during school. After graduation, I was able to live at home with parents in New York while I looked for a job. When I found one that paid but not enough for rent, I stayed longer, and I even received a generous allowance from my father. He wanted to help me out while I was getting on my feet. I was profoundly grateful, but I squandered the gift.

I saved exactly zero dollars. I managed to blow through all of it—and then some. I maxed out and then ignored statements from one credit card, then two, racking up $2,500 in debt. I try to see a silver lining: If I’d gotten a card pre-credit crunch and actually made payments, the evil overlords might’ve increased my limit to $10K (as they did for many of my friends) and I would end up in a deeper hole. For that I’m thankful for my wrecked score.

My spending was about feelings. I felt like a failure for living at home, and going out to dinner and bars and shopping and taking cabs made me feel like less of a failure. Cabs and dinners and cocktails allowed me to pretend to be one of those very busy and important adults I saw everywhere. Adults spent money, and I was determined to behave like an adult. So I did.

I’d convinced myself I was behaving responsibly by spending with wild abandon. But it made me happy to be able to meet my friends who worked in finance or consulting out for drinks, to buy a few rounds of $15 martinis. It felt like my peers weren’t leaving me quite as far behind. So I kept up with them, and spent all my money. When I finally got a job with a higher salary, the kind of salary where I could get my own place, I still had to ask for help: I needed yet another loan from my family for a security deposit and first month’s rent. I got it, and then I still kept spending. More clothes, more drinks, more dinners, and now rent.

And then, an empty bank account and a trashed credit score before me, I decided to make some changes. Last month, I sat down with my checking and credit card statements and highlighted where most of my money went. The culprits: eating out, ordering in, online shopping. I resolved not to online shop or order in at all for a month, and to keep careful track of every single dollar I spent. And suddenly I began to appreciate the value of a dollar.

Now I’m the friend who insists on waiting 18 minutes for the C train after midnight instead of taking “only a $12 cab home.” It may be awhile before I’m good with money, but I want to be decent, at least.

Kate Louis lives in New York.

My dad and I talked to John Hockenberry from WNYC’s The Takeaway yesterday, and here is our little convo. I was very very wary of Speaking For Our Generation, so it’s all about ME.

But though my own inability to think about retirement is largely influenced by smaller crises of my own making, I wish I’d emphasized that This Terrible Economy has really retarded all of our abilities to earn and save and plan. So just pretend I said that.

More from me and my dad here and here.

After many years of paltry minimum payments, I finally paid off all of my credit card debt. One last payment, and it was gone.

My parents raised me to fear the plastic, and for that reason I was always shameful of my credit card balance. But I still managed to rack up a couple grand in debt. It was for plane tickets, clothes, concerts—whatever else I had to have in the moment that my paycheck wasn’t going to cover.

But I always made payments. Minimums, mostly. Big ones, sometimes. It was easier to make payments in large chunks, like when I got birthday money or a tax return check. For me it was all or nothing with paying it down: huge payments or the minimum. I couldn’t bring myself to actually set up a real budget that would allow me to whittle it down regularly. That would have involved facing the amount of money I wasted each month.

I was abusing the credit card, and I knew it. I couldn’t seem to—or didn’t want to—break the cycle.

But then I wiped the slate clean.

A recent confluence of events have changed my financial situation. I got a new job with a higher salary. I’ve been having steady freelance income. An unexpected gift from my grandmother and cashing out vacation days at my old job buoyed my account further. I no longer have to live paycheck to paycheck. It’s a strange feeling.

But still, the credit card balance sat for weeks before I touched it. I was so hesitant to make that final payment. Part of it was that I was scared that I would run out of money for the month after I parted with such a big dollar amount. What if something happened, and I needed it? But that anxiety was familiar—it was the anxiety I’d had every month for the past six years. Every month I feel the pangs of fear that I would run out of money before my next paycheck, because sometimes I did.

This was the first month I didn’t have to worry, but I still couldn’t shake the need for a monetary security blanket. I am more financially stable than I have ever been, and it scares me.

Despite the relief this financially security has given me, it means something. It’s a milestone. I can support myself, live comfortably, and actually save more than a hundred bucks a month. I can be an adult, financially speaking.

Paying off my credit card signified a major point of growing up for me. It feels like I pushed past my youth and can never go back.

No more odd jobs. No more waitressing. No more dreading the dentist bill. Not having a credit card balance, having enough money to pay it off—it meant stepping down from my 20-something, life-is-short, collect-every-possible-experience-even-if-it-means-draining-your-accounts lifestyle. I’m done spouting life stories from the underbelly of stunted adolescence.

I knew I couldn’t hang on to that credit card balance or my financially unstable youth any longer. But that last step towards adulthood was scary. So like an unprotected left at a busy intersection, I just did it real quick, before I had time to change my mind.

Heather Sundell lives in Los Angeles.

Success is a matter of luck. Right place, right time, right economy. Serendipitous opportunity begetting more of the same. It’s also nose-to-the-grindstone hard work and relentless ambition, but, without luck, that exertion might amount to nothing, no matter how inclined we are to believe otherwise.

You succeed, you thank luck, but you’re secretly patting yourself on the back. You fail, you blame luck, but you’re secretly self-flagellating. We are not the masters of the universe we imagine ourselves to be. We take full credit when we shouldn’t and take on guilt and blame when our actions have not made us complicit.

I know about luck because I am a once-promising 26-year-old without a career—the over-parented, over-educated, under-employed, “entitled” millennial that trend pieces love to wax on about. Some say coddling has made me lazy and weak, akin to a hot house tomato, only able to survive in a controlled environment. Others describe me as self-righteously inert, mired in smug indignation about my inability to carve out a meaningful adulthood.

But, I don’t feel entitled. I feel guilty.

I don’t want something for nothing, I want accolades or absolution. I am not too self-satisfied to submit to job tedium. I’m overburdened by expectation and my anxiety to have real professional work snowballs as a result.

My mother and father dedicated themselves entirely to the mission of giving parenting their all to insulate their kids from bad luck. Insofar as it was in their power, my brother and I would be well-adjusted, well-educated, well-rounded. We would be resilient. Vacations were educationally-oriented. Even the shortest car ride provided a chance to Socratically impart knowledge. Expensive summer camps came before new clothes. My parents even forced their middle-class income to accommodate exorbitant private school tuition to send me to Dartmouth because an Ivy League degree was another way to immunize against diseased circumstance.

While my parents’ dedication to my academic and extracurricular enrichment seemed to be my birthright, their devotion to parenting stood in direct opposition to the way they themselves were raised. Alcoholism shredded family cohesion on both sides as far back as their memories go. My grandparents were consumed by their own problems and failed to provide encouragement or support for their children.

My mother’s academic prowess earned her merit scholarship to business school, which led her to shatter more than a few glass ceilings over the course of her career. Yet, her parents never commended and all but discouraged her bookishness. My father hurdled serious learning disabilities to become the first in his family to attend college. Yet, his father belittled his pursuit of higher education, taking it as a personal affront, an unforgivable one-upmanship. My parents forged their futures on their own and then together, all the while looking forward to the time when they’d become parents that would honor their children as opportunity’s ultimate tabula rasa.

On the day I graduated from college in 2008, my mom hugged me tight and said, “I am so proud of what we did.” A master’s degree and three years of over-worked and under-paid paralegaling later and I fear that those are not words she would utter today.

My parents do not blame me for my inability to become what a 26-year-old should be: a bona fide adult complete with a job that offers decent pay, health insurance, and a ladder to climb. Having also graduated into a deep recession, my parents understand me more than anyone else. After all, they’ve been to this particular rodeo. It was one of the reasons they put so much into parenting, in order to someday avoid watching their children squander their hardest working years in dead end jobs, barely scraping by and failing to establish themselves.

The extent of luck’s influence waxes and wanes. In boom times, luck is less necessary and more plentiful. In our post-lapsarian fiscal climate, luck is more important and subject to resource scarcity. But as it turns out, accepting failure as the result of factors outside our control is just as tall an order as giving kismet credit for success.

And so, I feel incredibly guilty about all I’ve been unable to accomplish in light of all that’s been done for me. Guilty of wasting the tremendous effort, investment and hope put into me by my parents. And because I’ve never been anything but supported and encouraged, if I fail, then I was never capable of success.

If my demographic displays smug disbelief at our fate and appears to earn the pejorative “entitled,” consider the possibility that our ugliness is part of an ungraceful attempt to mask the guilt-stricken panic we feel at the thought of never again having anything to write home about.

Janet Mackenzie Smith is the author of the forthcoming GENERATION SPECIAL.