Why is it so hard for me to do the student loan thing? I understand that there is a way for me to pay them without having that payment drastically affect my income. I’m having a lot of real anxiety about it. Was just remembering my trip to Oklahoma and my Mom asking me about the whole deal with that. This is something that she has been constantly reminding me of for years. Reminding is also perhaps a bit of an understatement. Whenever my Mom talks to me about the loans, she gets this tone, the pitch of her voice gets really high, and she insists that I need to handle paying them back, but in a way that makes me anxious, as if the fate of my future hinges on paying back the loans. I’ve actually avoided paying them for more than a decade by continually taking jobs where I was paid under the table, or working for non-profits temporarily enough to where my income information was just not obtainable in time for wage garnishing. Until I was at IKEA for more than two years. I have a very sad story about my ex during that time.

Mom’s emotions have a way of coloring my own. I’m sure this is not uncommon for children, especially those who are close to their parents. In a way, after visiting my mother again this year, and seeing her reaction to me finally paying the nearly $500 a month bill, and to hear her say how unfair that amount of money is, and that she can’t believe that I have to pay that much money for school, and for the subject to be just a casually moved on from, as we sit in the Pho restuarant and eat our soup, rather galls me.

Was it that I never could articulate how unfair the who situation feels? My parents never told me about any other options besides going to college, paying for university. My mom said she tried to convince me to go to community college, but if she did I don’t remember her insisting on such with as much bile as she does when she tells me to pay back big uni. Maybe it was lost among the anxiety I was feeling while walking on eggshells in my home around dad, or that I couldn’t wait to get away from him and be queer in a place I knew would be safe(r) than Carson. The constant finals, the hormones and madness of unrequited crushes,hurtling toward the looming abyss of independence and adulthood, heady with dreams of a bright future. Maybe it was the fact that she was five states away, living out her post middle age with her sister and nieces and mother in an apartment, which came with its own conversations, probably more of what we talked about when we spoke on the phone every week.

She has basically one foot in the grave at this point, and she went to school in a time when it was mostly paid for. She didn’t even finish college until 3 years after dropping out because she needed one credit to earn her degree, and didn’t even know.

Speaking to her about the circumstances in my life, sometimes feels fruitless. Helping her understand won’t take away the years I spent dodging the subject because I may have felt too frustrated to explain how I felt my life had been shunted down a pre-scheduled path. I even lied to them for years about wanting to be a veterinarian, because I saw how people beamed with admiration when I said it. But the truth was, I didn’t know what I wanted to be when I grew up. I did know that adults tended to shower just that much more praise and support on children who said as much, and because the earliest parts of my life had been traumatizing and painful and lacking real comfort and safety, I knew that saying so felt safer than not. I think maybe I thought that it didn’t really matter so much, that I would find something eventually. One of those things that seems more like an issue for the older people in my life. I was more concerned with navigating child society, or rather, reinventing myself for the dozens of social changes that occurred during that time.

I resent how my mom got to make me feel anxious because she was too ignorant to know that she didn’t really know what she was talking about, but I must also realize that the reigns are somewhat more in my grasp at the moment. And that maybe that is the most anxiety dispelling realization of all.