Stupid and Doomed

Today I made my last payment on the $65,000 in student loan debt I racked up between 1996 and 2000.

It’s a Wednesday during the pandemic and it’s so hot here in Georgia. Otherwise, it’s a pretty normal day: I made salsa, volunteered at my kid’s school, watched the hummingbirds at the feeder, took a nap. I didn’t feel like working, so I didn’t. The weather reminds me of the day a couple months before I graduated from college when I told my friend Abbi the number — sixty-five thousand dollars — that I would have to pay back once I left school. We were sitting in kayaks, baking on the parking lot that is the Missouri River east of Great Falls, Montana in September. Abbi was insensitive as only 21 year olds can be, and had a rude laugh and was the most fun person I had ever met.

“You’re fucked,” she said. “How did you even DO that? I mean…HOW DID YOUR PARENTS LET YOU?” She laughed her filthy laugh.

Abbi busied herself urinating into her rubber boot while still sitting in her boat — it’s a skill she was perfecting — and I paddled off by myself for a while and cried. I had picked a pretty expensive college and my parents didn’t help me pay for it and I hadn’t been thrifty while I was there. I was stupid and doomed.

But anyway, here I am, 20 years later, making the very last student loan payment of my life, remembering that day that was ruined in the year 2000 by a hot blanket of shame and calamity and embarrassment. And I wonder if I felt that way when I was learning to walk — that it was too big a task, that walking would prove impossible for me. I remember learning how to count by 2’s on a car trip with my mom when I was six, and after I had gotten the hang of it, mom said, “Great! And next you can learn to count by 5’s and then you’ll be able to read a clock!” and I thought to myself, WILL THE KNOWLEDGE AND SKILL REQUIRED OF ME NEVER END?!

But I learned to walk and to tell time and I raised a child to the point past which she constantly tried to off herself all day long for years (that task seemed insurmountable for A HOT MINUTE, I will tell you), in addition to gradually making a thousand other things easier for myself through just paying what it cost to do that thing, minute by minute, every day for years. We all do it — not one of us is free from limitation or the burden of commitment. But how do we make it bearable?

I don’t know, however I might have mentioned already that today I made my last payment on $65,000 of student loan debt. And I wish I could tell that 22-year-old me in a hot boat, realizing for the first time what my decisions were going to cost, that even though I wouldn’t spend the rest of my 20s living in Peru and Nepal like Abbi did, I would be okay. I would work a lot, but there would come a time when I’d click the little, green “Make Payment” button on my phone for the last time. And that day I would have to try hard to find the correct amount of celebration and meaning in that action — on the other end of that 20 years, it would take much more concentration and commitment to feel free than it did to feel doomed.