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I’m eating lunch at my desk again. It’s a textbook-sad office meal of salad and half-mushy grapes, but I find I'm feeling grateful just to have this time to myself. I recently stopped one of my side gigs, writing freelance articles, so that I could focus on my full-time job and spending time with my family. It took years to overcome the fear of losing that extra income, but after I got this new job, and a raise along with it, I cut the cord. The cost-saving act of bringing cheap lunches from home, though, I would need to keep doing. At least that’s what I told myself.
After I take a bite of lettuce, I notice my coworker smiling at me. “You’re so cute,” she says with a chuckle after eyeing my DIY meal. “You packed your lunch!”
“Old habits die hard,” I respond with a smile, proud of a disciplined habit I learned in my youth and solidified in my 20s, when I graduated with $75,000 in student loan debt. But I'm also a little embarrassed.
A few days later, I’m staring at a Zoom screen, my forehead and eyes scrunching in unison, the way they always do when I feel anxiety. I’m in a therapy session, sharing what’s causing me the most stress lately. For this session, one of the topics is money, as it was the week before, and the week before that. I create a budget each month and know I have some money left over, but I made a purchase I wasn’t expecting, and it has left my stomach in knots.
Packed lunches aside, I haven’t been very disciplined. My purchases are relatively inexpensive — a Facebook Marketplace chair here, some things from HomeGoods there — but having recently moved, these purchases seem more frequent. Even before moving, though, I struggled to spend, and then felt like crap when I did — and by crap I mean I felt overwhelming guilt and a sense of looming financial ruin. Sometimes I’d even feel bad for not spending on something that was financially inconsequential because of what I had missed out on: a chai latte on a sh*tty work day or going to a friend’s event because of what it would have cost to get there.
I don’t remember exactly what money issue triggered me during this Zoom session, but here we are again, I thought. Feeling this financial anxiety made sense when I was paying off my loans, but now being in a much better financial place, my internal money stress confused me. I’m debt-free, aside from a mortgage, and have been for a while.
In the fall of 2019, I went viral for “killing” $102,000 in federal and private student loans and celebrating the occasion with a spooky photoshoot in a Manhattan cemetery. After spending the six years since I graduated college in 2013 paying what was essentially a second rent ($1,000 monthly payments on loans that had interest rates as high as 12%), I sped up my journey, finishing off the last $30,000 in under a year. “Ding dong, my loans are dead!” I wrote on the Instagram post alongside a photo of me clad in black and a birdcage veil, holding balloons that spelled out my loan amount. I was beaming, for good reason.
I no longer had to work my more physically taxing side gigs, like babysitting and dog walking, that literally kept me up at night and made my feet bleed as I attempted to speed up the payoff date that estimated I’d be paying for my University of Pittsburgh degree until I was over 50 years old. (And yep, that is a state school.) I no longer had a debilitating fear of getting laid off or had to make dangerous commutes to work from the only neighborhood I could afford. I wasn’t saddled with an overwhelming sense of helplessness and shame because I had the audacity to want a college education and be born to a family who couldn't pay for it. I was finally free.
So why, five years later, does money still deeply stress me out?
According to financial therapists I spoke to, financial fears are common, no matter where you are on your debt journey. “Money strain can affect anyone,” says Chanel Dokun, cofounder of Healthy Minds NYC and author of Life Starts Now: How to Create the Life You’ve Been Waiting For, via email. “This is because when we talk about money, we’re not just discussing dollars and cents — money is about everything else. Money is the physical manifestation of some of our deeper beliefs, hopes, and expectations for life. What is often triggered when we face financial stress is the stress we hold about other aspects of our life (fears about our security, potential, image, status, etc.).”
Student loans can exacerbate this. It can be a form of financial trauma, depending on the person and circumstances, says Aja Evans, a therapist and author of Feel Good Finance. “The thing about financial trauma for people is that it really doesn't matter how much or how little money you have or make, it can still be traumatic," Evans, who specializes in financial therapy and has completed certification programs in the area, tells me over the phone. "And I think that's what we get wrong when we start talking about money.”
She continues, “A lot of times people look at it as, 'Oh, only people who don't have money have money problems,’ and that's not the case at all. If you had childhood experiences where there wasn't enough, or if you have had to really struggle with security or financial stability in your past, that can definitely set you up for feeling like the student loans are a little bit more traumatic to you because it feels like you're putting your security in jeopardy.”
I worried about making payments when I was in debt, and now that I’m not, I worry about losing that debt-free status — like I am just one missed mortgage payment away from foreclosure, or that if I do enjoy spending a bit, I’ll never be able to reel it back in to save again. I’ve had moments when I should have been saving but instead spent out of spite. I didn’t have full control of my money in my teen years and nearly my entire 20s, yet I felt I did now and wanted to reclaim my power. But then the fear-restrict-spend cycle would start all over again. Cue the anxiety-ridden therapy sessions because of something like an Uber ride.
I know none of this is rational, of course. And it’s not lost on me that I’m teetering on a very thin “cry me a river” line when talking about the stress of being debt-free. I want to make this clear: I believe that being debt-free is infinitely preferable — emotionally, financially, physically, generationally — to having debt. There’s not a day that goes by when I don’t say a silent prayer of thanks that I, in a moment of naive defiance as a 21-year-old post-grad, googled “how to pay off student loans fast” and had the income, health, independence, and emotional support I did to follow through.
I live in a house that I contributed to purchasing (even if that contribution paled in comparison to the contributions of my husband, who, without student loan history, was able to spend the entirety of the savings from his 20s for our down payment). I recently paid in cash for a car, have a modest savings account, and no children or family members to take care of, unless you count my dog, Cannoli, who goes to a “luxury” daycare because he has severe separation anxiety. I just bought plane tickets to see one of my best friends marry the love of her life, am still able to save for retirement, and was so proud to gift my 16-year-old sister cash for her car fund.
My life has opened up in ways I could have never imagined, so much so that I advocate for the federal government to forgive student loan debt for others and am vocal online about the need to regulate predatory interest rates from private lenders. But my true student debt story wasn’t complete when I clicked “send” on my final payment or even when I went viral for that photoshoot; this “after” is part of the journey, too, and it’s exactly how I pictured and wanted it to be — and much more complicated.
Not only is there a cost for having debt and getting rid of it, but also in learning to live without it. Stick to a budget, but give myself grace if I slip up. Know where my money is, but also make sure I set some aside to enjoy life within my means. And this applies to those who still owe lenders, and those like me who have made it across the dollar sign finish line and now owe themselves a new kind of financial freedom.
“After you've moved through the financial trauma, then it's about healing,” says Evans. “While you're learning, a lot of times growth is uncomfortable, and that's what you're moving through. The same way you had to move through it when you were first learning about your debt and about money and learning how to function with your debt, now you have to move through into, Oh, it's okay for me to spend this money. What do I value? What's important to me? What's a priority?”
This I can do. And the best part is, it’s free.
Illustrations by Sarah Mazetti
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