My Misspent Youth by Meghan Daum

at any given time. I started getting collection calls from Visa, final disconnection notices from the phone company, letters from the gas company saying “Have you forgotten us?” I noticed that I was drinking more than I had in the past, often alone at home where I would sip Sauvignon Blanc at my desk and pretend to write when in fact I’d be working out some kind of desperate math equation on the toolbar calculator, making wild guesses as to when I’d receive some random $800 check from some unreliable accounting department of some slow-paying publication, how long it would take the money to clear into my account, what would be left after I set aside a third of it for taxes and, finally, which lucky creditor would be the recipient of the cash award. There’s nothing like completing one of these calculations, realizing that you’ve drunk half a bottle of $7.99 wine, and feeling more guilt about having spent $7.99 than the fact that you’re now too tipsy to work. One night I did a whole bunch of calculations and realized that despite having earned a taxable income of $59,000 in 1998, despite having not gone overboard on classic debtor’s paraphernalia like clothes and vacations and stereo equipment, despite having followed the urban striver’s guide to success, I was more than $75,000 in the hole.
    There are days when my debt seems to be at the center of my being, a cancer that must be treated with the morphine of excuses and rationales and promises to myself that I’m going to come up with the big score—book advance, screenplay deal, Publisher’s Clearing House prize—and save myself. There are other days when the debt feels like someone else’s cancer, a tragedy outside of myself, a condemned building next door that I try to avoid walking past. I suppose that’s why I’m even able to publicly disclose this information. For me, money has always, truly, been “only money,” a petty concern of the shallower classes, a fatuous substitute for more important things like fresh flowers and “meaningful conversations” in the living room. But the days when I can ignore the whole matter are growing further and further apart. My rent-stabilized sublet is about to expire, and I now must find somewhere else to live. I have friends getting rich off the stock market and buying million-dollar houses. I have other friends who are almost as bad off as I am and who compulsively volunteer for relief work in Third World countries as a way of forgetting that they can’t quite afford to live in the first world.
    But New York City, which has a way of making you feel like you’re in the Third World just seconds after you’ve thought you conquered all of western civilization, has never really been part of the rest of the world. In that sense, I suppose it’s foolish to believe that one can seek one’s fortune, or at least one’s sustenance, through rational means. I suppose that part of the city’s magical beastliness is the fact that you can show up with the best of intentions, do what’s considered to be all the right things, actually achieve some measure of success and still find yourself caught inside a financial emergency.
    I have to be out of my sublet by September 1. Even if I tried to assume control of the lease, the landlord will renovate the apartment and raise the rent to $2,000. I told a friend about this the other day, hoping she would gasp or give me some sort of reaction. Instead she said, “That’s cheaper than our place.” A two-bedroom apartment down the street rented for $4,500 a month. A studio anywhere in Manhattan or the “desirable” parts of Brooklyn will go for an average of $1,750. West 104th Street is totally beyond my means. Worse, 104th Street is now beyond the means of most of the people that made me want to live there in the first place. The New York that changed my life on that summer night when I was seventeen simply no longer exists.
    Now, having taken all of this apart, I am