still sliding

Your Money or your Life will often draw comparisons between learning to change spending habits with learning to change eating habits. I'm a bit of an old saw at the latter, so it's no surprise that I recognize the patterns and problems there.

 

Starting with Thursday and my extravagant dinner, I kept slipping. Another trip to the grocery store here, a couple of expensive cupcakes there. Breakfast out on Sunday. These things are all "bad," for me right now. Not in a judgemental way but in a deeper way that I'm finally "getting" from within the program. Today really stuck out because I bought breakfast at work, I bought lunch at work and I went to a very expensive French bakery and spent the equivalent of breakfast AND lunch on a hot chocolate and some mousse. Staring me right in the face is the fact that I am self-medicating with food again, and I'm medicating a depression that comes from feeling stuck at my job. It's such an obvious cycle and it's just as the book describes.

 

I had a very specific trigger today, so it all makes sense and it all upsets me because one thing I loathe is when I'm "typical." None of us want to "fit the mold" but I feel like I do more often than I'd like. My trigger today was an unusual one, though. My workplace is going through re-structuring and they were offering a buy out plan for employees who were willing to leave before lay offs started kicking in. The buyout was substantial. Probably not substantial enough for someone with kids or a mortgage, but I have none of those things. The cash in hand after taxes would have supported me at least through this year. I have no intention of not working, I just needed a little freedom to find other work with a better schedule and lesser commute.

 

So, today I found out that my position is considered "critical" which means they won't let me go, which means I'm back to square one in terms of my plans to quit my job. Because I'm not a diligent saver, I'm trapped in my current work. It hit me harder than expected because I felt some hope that it would go through. I started having some dreams about what I would do with my time. Most of my dreams involve alternative ways to make money, but on MY terms and in MY time. I'm a hard worker! I don't want to loaf around, but working for someone else on someone else's schedule is not part of my dream.

 

Today was a negative day because I spent money recklessly on food I didn't need. I spent money out of boredom and disappointment, not out of hunger, not even out of desire. A dumb-luck, easy way out of my situation did not pan out, so I'm not in worse shape that I was before, but I'm no better off either.

 

In other news, I've been digging a lot deeper for source material for my paper and research. Hoping to have it all finalized before our next class meeting so I can work on writing the paper and suspend the research.