13 is the only time I’ve felt truly shaken. This was not the typical bad feeling; it was a dread that penetrated through my skin and rumbled throughout my bones. My sister had come into my bedroom to break the news- Dad just died. She left in tears, as if telling me made it real, but my eyes stayed dry. Instead, I crawled under my blanket and lay there- shook. Now what? I was scared. I was scared not just because Dad passed, but the uncertainty of how my family would proceed. See, I knew Dad didn’t plan for this, and I knew Mom didn’t make enough. With the death of my father came the birth of an omnipresent financial anxiety that would shape my life from that point on.
16 came with working non-stop minimum wage jobs: evenings, weekends, summers. Focusing during school was tough because of that financial anxiety. My grades had slipped, and I lost hope of going to university as I had once dreamed. Many sacrifices had been made in the couple of years I was working, all because I wanted that anxiety to go away. I missed time with friends, school activities, and the carelessness others enjoy at that age.
19 is when I hit a wall. The cost of working non-stop sank in. Seeing my peers go off to post-secondary made me upset, as I had to keep scraping gunk off of floors to make ends meet. More difficult than that as confronting the void in my heart, I finally mourned the loss of father. This zenith of my adolescent emotions left me at a crossroads. I could lay down under the weight of my life’s tragedies, or I could refuse this fate.
21 is where I started to reap the benefits of the latter. Being dealt a different set of cards doesn’t eliminate you from the game, I realized. This meant I could rekindle my latent educational aspirations. Yes, I couldn’t walk on the traditional road, but I could beat in my own path. It was a risk to work a little bit less, but I did it to take evening classes. Thus, a road forward began to form.
24 and working towards a bachelor’s degree is where I find myself today. Although those feelings of dread, sadness, pain, and financial anxiety still permeate from time to time, I persist. These life events rippled from the stone of Dad’s passing, and that stone was heavier due to a lack of financial planning. Having a safety net at 13, be it through savings or life insurance coverage, would’ve prevented this anxiety from forming and dictating my adolescence. Even without it, I’m determined to finish my degree to attend graduate school, and hopefully more after that. Besides this, I’ll maintain the importance of planning things out. I want to make it so those that come after me will never get the chance to be left as shaken as I once was.
