Maybe you wouldn’t believe it if you spent some time around me (but not a lot of time around me) but I am a pessimist. Especially as concerns myself and my life. At the moment, I am having a pretty smooth patch…no big drama, trauma, financial fuckeditude, or large-scale impending changes, and that’s got me jumpy as a cat on a wet tin roof. I’m just waiting for the other shoe to drop…waiting for some unexpected tax bill to come due, waiting for somebody to smash out the window of the car, thus necessitiating expensive repairs, waiting to get hit in traffic on my bike, thus putting me out of commission for work and necessitating expensive hospital bills. Common theme? Yeah, money worries. I guess this is hearkening back to grad school, and to the period immediately after that, when Todd was out of work, when the economy began its crumble and collapse, when I upped and quit the worst job I ever worked, and took a $2.75 pay-cut to work as a temp. Those days are as behind me as I can get them…I have a steady job that I don’t hate, Todd has a steady job which he does hate, hell, I just got a promotion and a raise.
And this is where the angst comes in. I don’t feel like I deserve the pay I am getting. While my salary is hardly a lordly one, it is more than I ever expected to earn, and it feels excessive for what is basically a high-level trained monkey’s job. I mean, I can finally afford to pay my student loan bill on time, and don’t hold my breath and sweat bullets until the mortgage autodraft clears. I can finally put some money in savings and not have to bail it out again at the end of the month because we’re running the checking account on fumes. We live a modest lifestyle…don’t eat out more than twice a month, maybe go to the movies twice a month, don’t go out to bars, don’t buy many extras, turn off the lights when we leave rooms…but no matter how many corners we cut, how many luxuries we forwent, we were always teetering on the very edge of bouncing a check. So now I can pay the bills and not have to creatively budget for a fortnight if we want to go out with friends, and goddamnit I feel so guilty about it. I feel like I don’t deserve such good fortune, and pretty soon somebody more important and powerful is going to realize how overcompensated I am, and pull that plushy rug out from under my feet.
I think I am going to start donating more money toward various charities and do some extra volunteer work to help share my good fortune.