Fist of Gratitude
I really hate my dental school loans. This is not a feeling that changes when I dig into the twelve different payback models or daily interest tracking spreadsheets I have assembled to assuage my guilt that education loans financially hobbled my family when I thought they’d do the opposite. And really, the hobbling is an emotional feeling as well — not even three years out of school is a poor time to assess the unvarnished facts of an investment in higher education.
It’s what I’ve taken to thinking of as the “earnings floor” that bothers me.
I’ve always lived simply, pursuing few material goods, buying even fewer of them, purchasing for myself two luxuries on a monthly basis: the hosting for this website, and a gym membership. I don’t treat myself with goods or services. My sense of justice, which I guess is some tangle of neurons in my brain nestled near other lizard-like instincts, says that I should be rewarded for my low position on the consumption ladder. And yet, because of these loans, my expenses far exceed my peers. My earnings floor, the minimum I have to earn to make this all work, is very very high, and there is no changing that. So, Mykala and I live the isolation you get from being a minimal consumer (no I don’t want to go shopping, or go to that football game, or drive that far, or see if that movie is any good by paying $20), while also living the stress of unreasonably high expenses. I walk around with a chip on my shoulder, feeling like this:
What I forget to do is punch myself in the face with the Fist of Gratitude. I should be thrilled we can afford the loans! I should be thrilled every single time I post on this website and every single time I get to go exercise at the gym, those are luxuries, right? (Yeah, you just said they were, Alex!) Now, having thought it through as I type, I realize that I hate not the loans but how emotions cloud my judgement about the facts of the loans and about the fine, enviable position Mykala, Essie, and myself are in. I’m a king who imagines himself a beggar!
Franklin: A man down on earth needs our help.
Clarence: Splendid! Is he sick?
Franklin: No, worse. He’s discouraged.
Since it is the Christmas season, you may recognize that exchange from It’s a Wonderful Life, which we watched two nights ago during its annual primetime airing on NBC. The film meant more to me this year than when I’d seen it last. When Jimmy Stewart runs back to the bridge near the end of the movie and yells “I want to live again” he just doesn’t mean it in the sense of he doesn’t want to be a non-extant being who is learning a lesson (that fantastical plot tool is just a faster way to move the story to resolution) no, he means that he wants to feel alive again. You can breathe in and out and test just fine at the doctor’s office, but that is totally uncoupled to whether you feel alive.