No, not my brightest title, I’ll admit. Still, it’s honest - I’m making plans, and they’re for my future (immediate, near and distant), they’re pretty big in terms of the whole “life narrative” thing and yes, they can be scary sometimes.
If you know me and/or have come from that blog where I was considerably more popular/infamous/vilified, you’ll know already that just under six weeks ago, I got engaged to the funniest, kindest, most openly lovely person I’ve ever had the chance to meet (who also happens to be a total hottie and shares a lot of my interests). All good so far… except this is a little complex.
My partner lives over in the good ol’ U S of A, and I’m stuck here. So in addition to the whole thing of, you know, planning a wedding, there also some stuff with visas that we need to sort out, which means that there’s also some stuff with me figuring out how I’m going to support myself (and, until she finds her feet in a big new country, my wife oh wow that sounds cool to say).
And turns out, there’s a lot of stuff to learn! Being a full-time student, whose job never rose above minimum wage, I’ve never paid income tax or council tax before and had no idea how it worked. I’ve never insured my belongings (besides an iPhone, which turned out to be a waste of money). I’ve never been the lead tenant of a property. I have had the odd official paycheque here and there, though they were largely for short-lived work - working on enrolment at my Mum’s college, auditing room occupancy at the university, that sort of thing.
So, you know, it’s scary, but only until you put everything down on paper. That’s the thing - money tends to be this big source of stress for people, but I find it hard to see it that way. Maybe it’s because I’m a privileged middle-class idiot. I’ll accept that risk. But I’m not so sure. When you consider that I spent an entire term pretty much living off sandwiches so I’d have the cash to visit Arden for the first time, and it didn’t bother me (I can make a killer sandwich), I think I have a rough idea of what living on a basic income entails. I’m living in what used to be a box room at the moment, and while I might have gone a little stir crazy in those early weeks, now it just feels familiar.
Money issues, for me, just become matters of problem-solving. Some people put off looking at their bank balance because they don’t want to know what it is, they conveniently “forget” to pay their taxes because they don’t want to think about how much money they’re supposedly losing (although, as long as you agree with the concept of taxation, that money was never yours to begin with), and it ends up coming around to bite them in the ass. I tend to get pretty methodical.
In the last few days I have learnt the methodology of income tax and how much I can be expected to pay; a rough idea of the council tax bill I’m going to face; how much of my student loans I have to pay off per month; my liability for Arden’s student loans (none, which is good); and the cost of living, all those weird costs included, for two people in a little terraced house or a studio apartment.
And you know what? It’s not scary. I’ve also been looking at jobs - though admittedly not applying for many, because I need to get my references in order - and the salaries of all but one or two are more than what we’d need to live comfortably. Not much more, admittedly, but we wouldn’t suffer. Getting a job is another matter, but I’m going to throw myself into it - if every job is supposedly applied for by around 38 people, I should end up with at least one offer if I apply for a hundred. And at the very least, I know how to be persistent.
What’s the point of all of this? Ah - maybe this. I’m seeing in my less-than-mentally-great friends at the moment something we might call “graduate paralysis” - this fear of starting, of getting on some sort of path, whether it’s to wellness, or a career, or even something as simple as creative ambition. And the thing is, that sounds so familiar. I consider myself lucky to have so strong a motivator - that at the end of this, I get to live with the person I love for the rest of my life. Others, I understand, don’t have that - the motivation is usually in the work itself, or for the sake of getting better alone, with a blank space after that first achievement. The key, though, is that actually doing that stuff feels good, but only once you’re doing it. Taking that first step can be hard unless you have someone behind you nudging you in the right direction.
Needless to say, I feel wonderfully, remarkably nudged.