Debbie and Me

Reading the paper yesterday, I perused an article on our current unemployment situation in the United States. Peter S. Goodman of the New York Times writes that job seekers exceed openings by 6 to 1, and it is unlikely that this ratio will improve any time soon. This fact did not strike me as news. However, an interview with a fifty-one year old woman by the name of Debbie Kransky of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, was of particular interest to me.

In the interview Kransky described what it is like being out of work and the struggle to find a job. She talked of how she has run through her life savings of ten thousand dollars and the anxiety she feels at being out of money.

“I’ve worked my entire life,” Kransky said. “I’ve got October rent. After that, I don’t know. I’ve never lived month to month my entire life. I’m just so scared, I can’t even put it into words.”

Obviously, it’s sad that this woman is experiencing this kind of anxiety. She lives in a one bedroom apartment and soon may not even have that. But these aspects of her case were not my primary interest, though they did tug at my heartstrings.

The thing I couldn’t stop thinking as I read her words was: I’ve always lived month to month. I’ve never been ahead of the game by ten thousand dollars. I’ve been upside down financially since the day I graduated – from long before that, in fact. And I rarely give this a second thought. It’s totally natural for me to scrape by, surviving on what the moment provides. And while I haven’t been homeless – truly homeless – I’ve been pretty close more than once. And when these times came, I always had a plan on how I would survive without a roof over my head. It didn’t scare me that much. In a perverse way, I got a little thrill out of the prospect. I’ve always gotten that thrill out of just surviving. I feel like Mike Tyson (see quote from August 25) – “It’s as if I have to live at the top of the world or the bottom of the ocean.” And since I’ve never lived at the top of the world for longer than a night, a week, a short vacation, the bottom of the ocean feels just right to me.

Why the difference between Debbie and me? I could go into the fact that Ms. Kransky is a woman and I’m a man, she by nature a nester and I a hunter, ect. But I don’t think that really addresses the truth of the matter. I think the answer lies in the fact that the functioning addict is always teetering on the brink of destruction of one kind or another. And because this state is the only constant, it becomes a security blanket of sorts, the thing that defines our personhood. So many people say, “If I only had the money, time, space, privacy, I could do X, Y or Z.” I think that, maybe, if I had the money I’d be lost in a way, searching for, artificially creating even, a new struggle with which to balance my life.

So what gives me anxiety, the same as what Debbie is feeling right now? I guess it would be actual destruction, losing the “functioning” part of the title and letting my addictions destroy my life. That’s what I really fear. But it is this possibility that makes the life so attractive and interesting, the only life for me. The other day this guy was reading Eckhardt Tolle to me. I won’t go into the details, but Tolle is very Dao and very much into teaching you to live a more balanced, satisfied, ego free existence. Nothing could be more lost on me. The whole point is this: obviously I don’t want to live a balanced, satisfied existence. I want to struggle with it all and fail or succeed within certain parameters. I don’t want a ten thousand dollar nest that buys me only a fraction of time against the certainties of my existence.

But I’d take a million bucks any day. So go figure.