When you stop dreaming-you stop living

It has been another hectic week. My bosses went out of town again and everyone has started marking the calendars requesting time off for the holidays. Me, I did the opposite. I VOLUNTEERED to work any day that needed to be covered-including holidays. The only day I really don’t want to work is Christmas morning. I like to be home with the kids and my husband that morning but as far as everything else-it is holiday pay…why not? So I will be a busy bee probably for the next few months. This is good.

One thing I have learned from all this-is to make goals. I am such a procrastinator and have been all my life. You know the saying…”When you stop dreaming-you stop living?”-well, I truly believe it. Even before my husband and I met-we both had dreams and goals. Well, life naturally throws those little curve balls at you and you lose focus and drive and stop dreaming. I could go on and on about our hardships and the things that we have had happen to us but as interesting as most of it is-this is a debt blog and I would probably bore most people to death with our personal stuff. lol

What I am getting at here is, with all the hardships and lingering debt-we just gave up on it all. We gave up on our dreams and just settled for what we could get. At 18 I had very little debt but by my mid 20’s-well, debt took over. We became slaves to it really. We settled for whatever crap job we could get to pay this debt and put food on the table. We always knew we weren’t happy living like this but insisted that “next year it will be different”. Well, it hasn’t gotten any different or better-as you can see it only got worse.

Here I am at 32, kicking myself in the head for all the dumb mistakes we made because of our debt. Just the other day, my daughter and I had a long talk about college and I made a comment to her that I want her to make something of herself and not end up like me. She said “mom I thought you were gonna go back too and do what you like-what happened?”.  It was then that I realized-I did give up on my dreams. I even read an old blog post here where I talked about going back to school-that was almost a year ago! Why am I not there? Because I have been working 80+ hours a week for my debt. I then came to a realization I could not pay it off even doing debt settlement and decided to file bankruptcy. It has been tough for us to get the money up even to file but… we are close.

Yeah, I will be working a million hours the rest of this year but that is because I made a goal to get this BK attorney paid off and we are so close to it. I am making my next goal now and that is in January to make BIG changes in my life. Starting with enrolling in school. Why January and not right now? Because enrolling right now with this debt still lingering will be hard to do. I can’t possibly focus on anything else. It is too hard for me. As I realize now, I have lost so much time worrying about these things that life has just been passing me by. I want to enjoy it with the people who matter most to me, doing what I love. I am tired of being a slave to debt and being stuck in a rut. I think there are a lot of people out there like me who just accept that this is the way it has to be-it doesn’t have to be! Once you realize that, life gets so much easier. One goal at a time.