Poor is the New Fat

When you talk to people about troubles with your kids, you get advice and sympathetic ears in approximately equal measure. You may also get your share of unspoken judgment, but whatever. If you can’t say it out loud, I can’t get sweaty about it. But my point is this. You get advice, sympathy, whatever, but you are not asking someone to parent your children for you. And no one thinks that you are. And, after you get over the "I hope you don’t feel the need to call social services after this conversation" anxiety, it really makes sense to get input because lots of folks are parents, everyone has or has had parents, and there is a lot of experience out there that you can learn from. Ditto with interior design. If I ask for your take on color, I’m not asking you to give up a weekend to paint or for you to buy me a new couch. But, I do appreciate the advice and ideas of lots of different people in making decisions about that kind of thing.
So, why is it that every time I try to talk to someone about my money situation, I almost can’t open my mouth, I can almost never admit to how bad the situation is most of the time? Because: (1) I think that they think I’m asking them for money; (2) It makes me feel like a loser that I can’t yank myself out of this situation and it seems like everyone else can; (3) It makes me feel like a loser because, on paper, it seems like I shouldn’t have these problems, which means that I must be doing something completely wrong.
And no, this is not going to be a lay-it-all-out-there and ‘fess up to my actual credit card interest rates, outstanding debt, and large bills coming down the pike. Because I don’t think that you combat body shame by walking naked through town, and I don’t think that you combat financial shame by embarrassing all three of the friends and loved ones who occasionally read your blog, and yourself. So, disaster voyeurs begone, you won’t be seeing the cellulite on the back of my checkbook’s thighs here.
But it’s true that if you complain about money, it makes you feel like you are asking for money, which is weird, and I haven’t figured out why it feels that way. And I know why it makes me feel like a loser, and that epiphany has not succeeded in making me feel less like a loser, but whatever. And it’s just money, and I do a lot of things right in my life. I stand behind some of the choices I’ve made, even as others make me cringe and wish for that time machine my daughter keeps promising to invent (although she’s never actually said I could use it -- she wants to be able to unkiss a boy).
Okay, I’m whining. But one more thing. Since when is your credit rating actually the quantitative measure of your moral character? Okay, life is harder with bad credit. So everyone’s answer is to make you so ashamed of your credit that you feel like a loser and also to make it that much harder for you to get your ship righted. And now it seems like you have to have good credit to get a job, join the military or rent an apartment. I mean, seriously. Every credit rating commercial says, in just about so many words: you are a big loser and unworthy of any respect at all, and you don’t deserve anything in life, because your number is low.
It took twenty years for people to start to be able to really talk about whether or not the number on the scale defines you as a person. It’s time to talk about what we are doing to our self-images by ascribing so much value to the number at Equifax. I won’t bore anybody listing all the meaningful and worthy things I do that don’t impact my credit score at all, but it’s worth thinking about the fact that we, as a society, seem to have this need to, literally, "measure" ourselves against everyone else on some concrete scale in order to be sure of ourselves. Bullshit.
I will force myself to think differently so that my kids will not feel the need to subject themselves to financial self-hatred no matter what. I mean, who hasn’t made a mistake in romance? But are you labeled and numbered as a "bad risk" and not allowed to have the good dates? You have to date the losers until you earn enough bonus points back to date the catches. Bullshit. People make mistakes. They learn from them. Engaging in that process should be the only measure of success we need.