Reflections

Standing Still Means Moving Backwards

• By fannieb
• September 18, 2015
• No Comments

If you are not moving forward you’re moving backwards. Yes, even if you are standing still in your hopes and desires little pieces of you are fading into the distance behind you and get trampled because the world continues to spin and the time you have left to make your mark, feel accomplished and good about yourself just got shorter.

I have a friend who has a list of things that she wants to do that never seems to get completed. She finds herself puttering her weekends away, lazing about watching TV, napping, and feeling glum. It’s a laundry list of things whose sheer length is part of the problem. As the days pass, she finds more that needs to be done – clean the refrigerator, switch out summer clothes for winter ones, shred old bills, update resume; so the list grows, becoming more and more daunting. And she begins to feel more and more discouraged. She lingers there thinking about what she feels she should be doing instead of actually taking action and doing them. Then she feels even worse about herself. The vicious cycle continues.

I used to feel a similar way when I was over my head in debt, paying bills late, and overdrawing my bank account. I had overdraft protection on my account to minimize the impact of bounced checks but this only led me to dreading going to my mailbox. I feared those notices from the bank. This overdraft feature was offered on my checking account and allowed me to avoid doing what I had on the “to do” list in my mind – balance checkbook, create a budget and follow it, consolidate and close credit cards, and stop spending money I don’t have. But the overdraft protection only added to my credit card balance. I felt horrible about the lack of control I felt in my life and I felt confused and angry. How was it that I was able to earn an MBA, but was not able to manage my finances? How could this be possible? How could I have made such a mess of my finances?

This feeling of despair and anger chipped away at my true self and left me vulnerable to negative self-talk. I became apathetic and listless. And the true person I knew myself to be, the person who had been at the forefront of my life in my 20s was only a vague memory. She was a stranger to me at that point in my life.

Only after finding myself unemployed was I shocked into action. If I chose to remain standing still (doing nothing differently), I would risk losing everything I had worked for, my home, my car, my independence, and any sense of dignity that still remained to me. But I chose otherwise and my journey out of debt began. It was time for me to face the music even though I knew I would not like what I heard. It was difficult, but taking the first step forward – assessing the problem and being honest with myself about the damage I had done, as sickening as it was, allowed me to make a plan and fix it. Standing still avoiding what needed to be done only made me go deeper into debt, but what was worse was the collateral damage to my psyche in the form of low self-esteem and a very negative outlook on my life.

In my climb out of the abyss of debt I learned to apply discipline to my life and finances. This discipline helped me see that I was trying to satisfy myself by buying stuff that I wanted as soon as an urge hit me. And the things I’d bought were not bringing me the happiness I thought they would. In fact, these things actually caused me to be very unhappy.  Disciplining myself was easier (though at the time it seemed harder) than trying to satisfy my ego. Through it has come a peace in my life that I had not known existed.

Photo Credit: The U.S. Army