I Tried to Buy Self-Worth and All I Got Was Credit Card Debt

My mother and I were in her car, on our way to buy my wedding dress, when I confessed that I had over $25,000 in credit card debt. I’d amassed the sum quietly over a decade, trying to keep up a glittery life on my entry-level salary, swiping to buy the New York twenty-something experience twenty-something-me thought I deserved, and sure I’d figure out a way to pay it off later. But later was now—I was thirty-one, with a wedding on the horizon, to a debt-free man whom I suddenly understood I was about to sweep up in my money mess. The debt was getting itchy in my conscience, and quicksand tricky to get out of. I had already told my soon-to-be-husband what I owed—less like a confession and more like a shameful aside—and he took it in stride, loved me just the same; my debt was a mistake of youth, I would pay it off; he had faith in me; he knew I’d changed. But I had to have faith in me, too, and if I told my mother, I knew she’d shine the light in my eyes and make sure I didn’t dig deeper.

How much could it be? My mom asked. $10,000? she guessed. $11,000? I said no. $12,000? When I told her the number, which was then at its peak, she didn’t move her face, and I thought for a moment she was motionless because she wasn’t horrified and shocked like I expected her to be. But then she silently pulled into a parking space right off Park Avenue and shut the car off, turned to me slowly, and said: you have ruined your life. I heard it in slow-motion so it sounded more like yoooooouuuuu haaaaaaave ruuuuuuuuuiiiined yoooooooooour life.

I was sobbing by the end of the sentence. I knew she was right.

You are making a rich man richer through interest!

What did you think would happen?

We were so proud of you.

She had angry tears in her eyes, but she didn’t let them spill over, which is a type of control I envy. I said nothing, just let her words pierce my skin. I deserved to bleed. Then she said clean yourself up, you look like a total mess and I pulled down the sun visor and looked at my blotchy, streaky face in the tiny car mirror. I wanted to go home and figure out a repayment plan, but it was wedding dress day, so I pinched my cheeks, dried my eyes, took a deep breath, and said ok, this is the happiest day of my life. My mother gave me a hug. I was still shaking, and still had my seatbelt on, but she was already out of the car and putting quarters in the parking meter.

It’s easy to get into debt. I dug my hole trying to keep up with a social calendar I couldn’t afford, which is often what happens when you feel like you don’t belong on the social calendar to begin with. I wanted to do what I wanted to do when I wanted to do it, and privilege made me believe that wanting and having should be one and the same. I didn’t swipe my card to buy a car or jewelry to pass down to my daughters one day; I did go to Paris when I had an unpaid internship (girls’ trip!), and joined a share-house in the Hamptons (two summers running), and went out to dinner (too much) and bought eighteen-dollar cocktails (regularly) and said yes to spa splurges and group gifts and kept my manicure fresh. I went to concerts and took taxis across the Brooklyn Bridge probably a thousand times. I hated saying no; I didn’t want to miss out; I thought spending might prove my worth, might buy me the life I wanted. Meanwhile, I was making $28k a year and living in my parents’ house in Brooklyn, convincing myself I was saving money and sacrificing my adulthood by sleeping in my childhood bedroom. I never spent on shoes, or clothes, or bags, or coats—I spent on experiences, which somehow seemed more justified than stuff, though I sometimes now wish I’d gone for the stuff.

I didn’t look at my bank account or credit card balances for years; I just let the debt pile up. I think I knew deep down that looking would mean accepting, and accepting would mean panic, or horror at the least. I paid the minimum due each month and glossed over the accumulating interest (17%). But in my late twenties—sometime between getting engaged and adding $128k of graduate school student debt to my tab—I had a recurring dream that my teeth were falling out. In my sleep, I could feel my teeth loose and wiggly, and if I touched them with a curious finger, they’d plop out slick and bloody into my palm. I’d look in the dream mirror at my toothless mouth and wake up with the image of that empty yawn. My internet research diagnosed these dreams as financial distress. I’m bleakly impressed it took so much and so long for the anxiety to bubble up. I turned the words over in my mind. Financial. Distress. I thought of my grandparents, Cuban immigrants, who’d navigated real financial distress (not self-made spoiled-kid financial distress like mine) and I felt a kick of shame.

My grandparents arrived in this country with two children, five dollars, and one suitcase (that’s a family refrain: five dollars and one suitcase). They left everything behind to flee the Cuban Revolution and rebuilt a life from scratch. In Cuba, they had money—not rum money or sugar money, but middle-class money earned by the doctors and judges and pharmacists that peppered our family tree. In the US, for a while at least, they had nothing. My grandfather (a teacher and a chemist in Cuba) picked tomatoes. My grandmother got her first job, making alterations in the back of a dress shop. My mother explains their early American life like this: We were never hungry, but going to the doctor was a luxury. My mother, the neediest in her third-grade class, was given the school Christmas tree for her family to use as their own. Her takeaway was how kind her teacher was. But all I think of when I hear that story is my grandmother’s certain shame. My grandmother was, and is, a woman always trying to prove she’s more. Delusions of grandeur, my mother calls it. I understand her delusions completely—I have them too.

But my grandparents lived within their means. They didn’t overspend. They earned; they saved; they made a life. My grandmother always looked polished, but she never lost the habit of making sure it all added up. She covered notebooks with frenzied addition and subtraction—squiggly nines and wobbly twos. I’d watch her hand, shaky with age, as she filled the blank corner of the newspaper with addition, or her address book with subtraction. Years spent adding and subtracting, multiplying and dividing, just to make certain the math worked. At Christmas, she would give her three grandchildren twenty-five dollar chequicitos, and scratch-off lotto tickets, and there was always a moment when we would all hold our breath and wonder if this was the year we were going to make it big. When we didn’t, she’d say Ave Maria with the full force of her voice, and then we’d all throw our lottery tickets in the trash can.

My parents had more than her. They started with a little and they never had to leave it all behind. They were responsible and forward-thinking, budgeting to send me to private school in old-money Brooklyn Heights with kids who were shuffled home via car service, and others who lived in brownstones walking distance from our classrooms with views so wide you could see New Jersey and the Empire State Building in one blink. They bought me entry into an elite world, close enough for me to get to by subway, but from a young age I could feel my comparative lack, and I wasn’t solid enough not to care. I lived too far out in Brooklyn, according to classmates; my allowance wasn’t enough to buy lunch every day; my grandparents were immigrants; my phone was always old. These were facts but I felt them like shame; like secrets to keep. Hang-ups formed in tweendom tend to stick around; money was mine.

When I went to an ivy league college, where money looked easy to most everyone else, I made the mistake of confusing those people for me. I wanted to live rich—who doesn’t? And I turned wanting into deserving, and deserving into doing. Group vacations, and events that required formalwear, and dinners in town with heavy menus and heavier price tags. I made it all work with frequent flyer miles, and saving what I earned from babysitting and summer jobs, and my chequicitos. Money felt key to maintaining the social life I wanted, which felt key to maintaining my self-esteem, to prove, perhaps, that I was enough and what I came from was, too. The money-shame grew the more expensive it got to play along, but I also hit on what I thought was a truth: Friendships, in their crudest estimation, are maintained with money. Friendships in college were fortified on trips, were made on nights out—if I didn’t have the money to put in the time, then I wouldn’t have the friends. If I didn’t have the friends, then I wouldn’t have the life. I had to make it work.

If I didn’t have the money to put in the time, then I wouldn’t have the friends. If I didn’t have the friends, then I wouldn’t have the life.

And then I got a credit card and things became marvelously simple. I could paint a picture of the girl I wanted to be, the world I wanted to enter, and I could swipe for it. Swipe, swipe, swipe. For years it felt easy, but eventually it caught up, and then the dream-teeth started to fall out, and the dread started to creep in, and the hole I’d dug was too deep to escape. Loan repayment brochures started to arrive in the mail, and I felt found out. I’d swipe for a forty-dollar workout, swipe for blonder hair, and think about my grandmother and her math, my grandmother making too little dinner no matter how many people were eating, because once you’ve lived with the fear of never having enough, it sinks into your life in unexpected ways. Swipe for a flight, swipe for a coffee, and think about my parents and how they’d worked to give me everything. Maybe these realizations meant my brain’s frontal lobe had finally formed, maybe I was growing up—or maybe I just looked down the barrel of my future and saw myself eyebrows deep in debt, with a marriage that would inevitably fall apart if I couldn’t get my finances together.

I had swiped to be one kind of person, but to become the next version of myself, the grownup version, the responsible and honest version, I knew had to stop. There were things I wanted that I couldn’t charge for: a happy marriage, a love-filled life, less anxiety, pride in who I was. Those are things you can’t fake with credit cards; those are things that debt makes worse. First things first, I had to admit to myself that I wasn’t rich (probably the hardest step) and that I didn’t deserve to be just because I wanted it. To me, money meant ease, money meant fun, money meant access, but the more I owed the more money meant crying in the car, and handfuls of dream-teeth, and worry, worry, worry.

On wedding dress day, I gave one credit card to my mother so she could lock it in a drawer and keep it away from me. I kept the other in my wallet and used it only when cash was not an option. I forced myself to look at my bank account balance every morning and sit in the reality of what I’d spent and what I owed and what I had left. I got lean with spending and put every cent that wasn’t for rent or groceries or my MetroCard to paying down my debts. I Googled how to make a budget, and then I made one, and didn’t give myself the option of going one penny over. I learned how to say no to things (it’s terrible, especially when it’s followed by I can’t afford to do that). I took on more work. An online debt calculator told me that at the rate I was going, it would take fifteen years to pay off my debt. I realized that if I wanted to start my adult and married life without paying every month for trips I took when I was twenty-four, I had to use every resource at my disposal or the interest would keep me stuck. My soon-to-be-husband and I decided to put any wedding gift money we received toward my balance; our lives would be better without this cloud, we rationalized, and we were right. That money made a huge dent and then I kept chipping. A year and a half after we got married, I paid off my final credit card bill.

I wish I could say I feel a weight off my shoulders now, but what I really feel is the shame and the worry that if I don’t stay vigilant, I’ll just do it again. There’s also the looming student debt that I’m working at now, but that feels more acceptable somehow. My friendships are still solid and I feel foolish for the years I spent thinking I needed money to make them work. The new credit cards in my wallet look enticing if I let them, but then I remember that my husband and I are making a life we can afford and there is worth to that too. So much of what I spent was to prove that I was someone other than me, but I’m me now and that’s just fine. I painted a picture of the girl I wanted to be, but the paint started to run and all that was left was mess.

Now, I do math constantly in the margins. I add and subtract; I multiply and divide, and I try to make enough so that the life I have works. I try to make sense of who I used to be, too—a girl whose life was built on insecurity and want. Going into debt is terrible, but spending money is fun, and I’m not sure I could have convinced twenty-something-me to skip the trip or miss the dinner or just spend less. My only wish is that I hadn’t been trying to buy self-worth: You can’t swipe for that—and the money you owe will ultimately make you feel a different kind of worthless.

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