sacrifices

I have this money. I call it promise money. It's 100 pounds, in an HSBC bank account in London, and it is my promise to myself that I'll be back in London before too long to spend it on a Tube pass, a few beers and a pub lunch.

This weekend, I slept. I went to bed at 7:30 on Saturday because I was having a full-blown financial mental meltdown, and I felt so overwhelmed, so at ends about everything that I didn't know what to do other than shut down completely. I cried because for the second time, I found a rotten orange in a bag of oranges and knew I couldn't afford to buy any more. Sunday, I slept because I didn't have enough food to eat lunch and I didn't want to get too hungry. So I slept.

And at some point, I woke up, and I knew I was going to have to do what I've been putting off and putting out of my mind for months. Spend the promise money.

This morning I went onto my HSBC account online and set up a transfer to put 60 pounds (about 95 dollars) into my account here in New York, because I couldn't bring myself to take all of it. 40 pounds of that promise money is still safe and sound. It was an especially hard decision to take this money for a bevy of reasons -- it meant admitting just how bad things had gotten for me financially, which was difficult in and of itself, but it also opened the floodgates to a lot of fears and concerns I have about the future, about getting back to London.

I worry that if the New Era calls me up today and offers me this job, I won't have the chance to travel back to London for perhaps another year. I worry that if I get any job at any newspaper that the case will be similar. I worry that I am in so much debt and in so far over my head that I might as well kiss a trip to England goodbye for years. Plural. And since there is still a very strongly lingering part of me that wishes I'd never left, they are hard fears to swallow.

Taking the money just feels like robbing even more from the possibilities.

But I'm not in England now, sadly. I'm here. And I'm poor. And that $95 will buy groceries and pay for bus tickets and electric bills. And maybe for just a few days, a tiny sliver of peace of mind.

Till I start thinking about those pub lunches again, of course.


cheers,
elizabeth