A brief confession
This is a post that I have been very interested in making since before even making my blog. But when it came to making my first draft, I looked it over, and it felt like a cheesy motivational speech.
I am certainly not opposed to motivational speeches, especially if they are delivered cohesively and with some banger ASMR. You cannot look me in the eye and say you didn’t watch the President’s speech in the 1990’s hit movie “Independence Day” and it didn’t make you want to punch aliens in the face (FOR AMERICA!!!) But that isn’t my modus operandi.
I will not dismiss the power of a good motivational speech, however, you can find plenty of them on YouTube. I am here to be your field guide. In fact, look up aforementioned president’s speech on YouTube and come back when you’re done.
Now that we got that out of our system, let’s take a look at our situation. Maybe someone sleighted you. Maybe you were in an accident. Maybe through sheer dumb luck, you were born a certain way. It might not be fair, but that’s life.
This is not to excuse people who have made less-than-ideal decisions – but I already have future posts for that. The fact is, regardless of how you got here, you are here. Now, we need to get you out.
Don’t wait for a hero
Since it was someone else who landed you in this mess, it might be easier to get comfortable, and hope someone will pull you out. While that is entirely possible, the fact remains, you are still drowning now. Even if someone wants to help, it’s far easier to throw a life raft that requires physical effort from you to swim to and grab, than it is for them to physically swim out and grab you themselves. Waiting threatens to make the situation worse. A sinking boat won’t wait for you to get off. But before abandoning ship, it’s important to come up with a plan.
In the next section, I will lay out a few scenarios. These scenarios may not fit your exact situation, but I trust you, my reader, to be smart enough to extrapolate the messages within to fill in any blanks to meet your situation.
Fifteen-Minute Victories
Scenario A: The Depression Room
Maybe you broke your leg. Maybe the love of your life left you. Whatever the cause, life has left you a complete mess for three weeks straight, and now, you’re finally lucid. You glance around, and your room is a complete mess.
Soda stains on the walls. An empty bottle or four of Jack on your night stand, clothes and trash scattered across the floor so thoroughly, you’ve forgotten what color the carpet is. Pizza boxes from every local delivery service stacked in one corner, in the other, dried-up towels stained with – we won’t talk about it.
Then comes the anxiety. It feels TOO BIG. The room is an absolute disaster. You’re ready to take it on, but you frantically bounce from filling a bucket with water and adding Dawn dish soap (because of course it’s a wall cleaner, too. Who says it’s not. You’re not my mom!) To grabbing all of the pizza boxes to only grabbing SOME of the pizza boxes because balancing them is impossible, to grabbing some shirts, especially that Pink Floyd shirt you like so much, to addressing the corner towels of shame, and then, you look at your progress. A bucket now overflowing in the bathtub, half the pizza boxes patiently waiting their turn, shame towels spilling from your arms, and you realize, “this isn’t going very well.”
Let’s take a breath, and try something new. Let’s get a laundry hamper. Now that you have the hamper, you know what your job is: Pick up clothes and linens. That’s all. Turn off your mind to the patiently waiting pizza boxes. They’ll get their turn. Maybe turn off the running faucet in the tub – but don’t worry about the wall stains. There are probably (code for definitely) more stains on the night stand, under the stack of dirty hot dog plates, ramen bowls, and glasses with melted ice and a little remnants of the jack and coke from last night…and the night before. For now, shut everything else off. “I’m here for laundry.” Once it’s done, take a look – you can see the floor again!
You know what to do now – grab a garbage bag. Turn everything off. You only need to pick up trash.
Removing the rest and categorizing only singular tasks makes them feel like smaller, more attainable victories. The laundry hamper, the garbage bag, and the bucket can be your anchor to prevent distraction. It will take FAR less time to clean your room when you tackle it methodically.
Splitting up your larger hurdles into smaller “15-minute victories” is how you retake control, one step at a time. Rome wasn’t built in a day, after all.
Scenario B: The uncomfortable call
The reality is, there are likely a few, or a few dozen phone calls that need to be had. Your landlord wants you to know, your rent is late, your mom probably just assumes you’re dead by now – or at least you’d think so after you glance at your phone and see 32 missed calls over 20 minutes – an hour ago. Another debt collector called. Each of these calls another reminder of how you got where you are.
These are all issues that need to be addressed. That’s the bad news. Here’s the good news. They don’t all have to be addressed today.
Tackling each one has its own benefits and challenges, but your mom just wants to know your okay. Your landlord could absolutely be a hardass – or, he could just accept an update and a partial payment. Credit card companies deal with these issues often. After a call, they will likely just close the account, send you a bill, and say “pay what you can, when you can.” These calls will take their toll on you. So it’s a good thing the only one you need to call today is your mother. (In fact, call her now. Five minutes ago. What are you waiting for?)
Side note: credit card companies just want their money and will give you a really long rope, most of the time. It benefits their business model to be forgiving. However, they also record conversations and are not your friend. This will be your trickiest conversation. Rehearse, and don’t mention other bills if you can help it. The main theme of the conversation should be an intent to pay what you can. Any pushing from them should be redirected to the fact that you are willing to pay but only what you can afford.
Each call puts yet another fifteen-minute victory under your belt. It helps rebuild your road map.
A brief tangent
At this point, I wanted to get into a financial scenario, such as hobby saving and meal planning. But I know from plenty of experience that the time spent field dressing a chicken or making your own homemade tofu, while is absolutely cheaper in the end, is a luxury efficiency. When you have to dedicate so much time to survival, maybe you don’t want to spend what little time you have left making homemade chicken broth. These are absolutely good practices to get into, at your own pace. Until then, you can revisit the field guide, “Escaping “Survival Mode”” for a broader deep dive into that topic.
In Conclusion (With a bit of insight)
I’m just a guy on the internet. How much experience do I REALLY have on this issue?
Well, in 2017, my house caught fire after a hurricane killed the power. I lost a beloved pet during the experience. A day later, after spending the night cleaning a scorched house to find nothing worthwhile survived, and trying to find a place to sleep for the night, I left work exhausted, and should have just slept in the parking lot. I didn’t. I drove away and fell asleep at the wheel, before waking up upside down in a ditch filled with water.
Fortunately, only my pride was hurt (wear your seatbelts, kids.) But that also means that the last remaining stuff I owned was ruined, along with my only transportation.
This triggered a three-year doomspiral. Capturing it here would make your jaw drop. It really is a “How can it get worse?” situation that bears not talking about. In a nutshell, multiple vehicle failures, $40,000 debt, PTSD related to the crash (I still can’t sleep in a moving vehicle), and two years of homelessness. Needless to say, I know a thing or two about rock bottom.
I’ll spare you the “You can do it” mantra. You know far better than I do what you are capable of. Whatever the case, there is no looking back. The damage is done. Now is the time to raise your head up and, in the wise words of a hyperactive blue fish, “just keep swimming.”
