I’m listening to a friend’s online tele-summit at The Happy Healthy Lesbian. It’s my way of supporting her endeavours to leave the rat race behind and forge her own business path. I thought it might be a little naff but I shouldn’t have worried as this friend has a really solid personal integrity that means that all she does is honest and grounded and useful.
Today’s talk that I’m listening to is all about financing your dreams on what you have available to you. Oh boy, do I need to work on that. There’s some lessons in here about budgeting, outgoings extrapolated over the year for some aha moments, and advice about recording of how you feel when you’re spending specific money. You can really pinpoint some interesting habits through examining the feelings attached to the spending of money. It makes sense to me anyway.
Her guest also talked about ‘our script’ that we all carry with us. You know, the one that you trot out when someone says “so, what do you do?” And you have this pap reply. It’s a protection that we often have and it doesn’t always correlate to what we really want from our lives.
I think I’ve moved beyond having a script, thankfully, and into a reality about who I am and what I do that is pretty darn close to what people see of me. It took a while. It took a lot of bad stuff to happen to jolt me out of the spin cycle. I’m glad that it happened. It’s meant, though, that I’ve had to face the reality that my work will never make me rich, or even comfortably well off, I fear.
This makes learning to love your numbers (money not body measurement, that’s another post for another day) more difficult and the task of being gentle with myself more twisted. I seriously don’t see how I can possibly achieve my dreams on my numbers. At the end of three days after my pay has been deposited into my account we are left with the sobering thought of how we are going to get through the next ten days on virtually nothing. That is because, like the good payers that we are, we have paid all of the bills that we have before we then consider food, petrol and fun (what fun?).
I’m having a hard time coming to terms with being working poor. It’s a real blow for an educated woman who has worked hard at working hard and well all her life to realise that her passion is not going to ensure her financial stability. At least there’s one consolation, this masters degree I’m doing will never have to be paid off (Australia has a deferred loan system) as, at this rate I’ll never earn enough to reach the payback threshold.
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