Feeling Depressed About Personal Debt
August 21, 2011, By Craig J. Heimbuch 0 comments
You see the headlines all the time. Houses in foreclosure, people jobless. The nation struggling with its debt and how to pay it off. It's been a big fight and one worth having. Truth is, we all handle debt a little differently. Some people are comfortable with owing, others aren't. It's not always about politics, but circumstance and tolerance. Some people are opposed to owing because they have a stand to make, others because debt makes them cringe.
It's easy to take refuge in the headlines because they are usually about a world apart—those other people who are in trouble. But it's harder to understand what it's like to be under the crush of owing. It's also easy to write debtors off as spendthrifts, irresponsible, unreliable. They've got what's coming to them. Fact is, it's not always that simple. It's not always that a person couldn't control their impulses. Sometimes it's about circumstance, and those circumstances can be absolutely brutal—a perpetual and unrelenting grind from check to check, bill to bill.
The average US household has $15,799 in credit card debt for a total of $2.43 trillion in consumer debt across the country, according to the Federal Reserve's G19 report on consumer credit. Chances are good that you know someone who has, is or will struggle with credit card debt. And you might not even know it.
I can speak from experience when I say that credit card debt can make a person retreat into a shell. My wife and I once struggled making ends meet. We were young, not making a whole lot of money and trying to do right by our first-born child. We were in over our heads, and it was hard enough to admit it to each other, let alone to other people. We put up a front, avoided questions, hid the fact that we were in deep. It wasn't about pride; it was about shame.
Personally, I felt like a failure. Even after we signed up with a non-profit debt-management company, there was a weight on my shoulders. I would wake up in the middle of the night, short of breath and sweating and spend the rest of the night staring at TV informercials wondering what had gone wrong with my life. I was distant and aggravated. I felt constantly on the edge of tears or shouts. Even the moments that should have been the most joyous—the birth of my children, holidays—were tinged by the constant fear that the phone would ring or that we wouldn't have enough money for food and gas.
I began having panic attacks, these blinding flashes of pain in my chest, a clenching of every muscle and straining of every nerve. I would hyperventilate and have an overwhelming need to just go. Anywhere would do. Anywhere but where I was. There were nights when I roamed the aisles of our grocery store, no money to buy anything, just to keep busy. I would go through periods of manic optimism and crushing pessimism. I wasn't leading my household, I was burying it. And true, I was doing all the right things to make things right, but it never felt like enough. I wanted to wipe the slate clean. There were times when it felt like paying things off was the wrong thing to do. I once spoke with a mortgage broker who recommended we declare bankruptcy rather than continue paying off our debt. I couldn't understand it. I wondered how it could possibly be better to run than to stand up and do the right thing. My wife, too, was on edge. She was nervous and angry all of the time. Our relationship suffered for it. It almost ruined us.
