How I Got Out of Debt

When I first began healing from 15 years of debt, I despised the word “patience.”

The fact that it comes from the Latin pati, meaning “to suffer,” didn’t help.  But here’s the thing: that same root gives us “passion,”  which in addition to its erotic conotations, means “boundless enthusiasm.”

When I learned that, I looked at “patience” in a different way.  It wasn’t about “suffering in silence” or “resignation.” It was about deciding to face what needs to be faced with excitement and desire for change.

Now this wasn’t a “New Year’s Resolution” kind of thing, where I let myself off the hook around February 5^th because it was just too damned hard.  This was a “I don’t know how I’m going to do it and I have no clue as to how long it’s gonna take, but I’m going to get out of debt.”

And I can’t really explain what made that difference.  Call it “grace” or “hitting bottom” or just being plain sick and tired of living on the edge.  I think you know what I’m talking about: there’s a different feeling in your body when you commit to a decision.  It’s complete and irrevocable.  Deepak Chopra, in his “Creating Affluence: The A-to-Z Steps To A Richer Life,”  talks about the power of decision as the cutting off all other possibilities so that you’re left with a single focus not countermanded by anything. At first I thought he was a bit radical.  But now I see that it really is a “no turning back” kind of thing.

And while he also talks about how healing can happen “with the flick of an intention,”  sometimes there’s a lag time between the inward decision and the outward manifestation.  And here’s where patience comes in.

It took years between the decision to be debt free and the actuality of it.  To get out from under tens of thousands of dollars of credit card debt I got help from the San Francisco chapter of Consumer Credit Counselors.  They advocated for me and got the banks to stop their collection calls, suspend interest charges, and to agree to a workable payment plan.  My job was to work the plan.  Which I did.  And it took over two years of slow, steady monthly payments.

Looking back on it now, all these 30-something years later, I realized that the healing did happen in the “flick of an intention.”  As soon as I made the decision, I was operating from where I wanted to be, not from where I was.  And yes, it took a few years to clean up the consequences of all those past decisions.  But it all started with “boundless enthusiasm.”