Death and Taxes

Today I have decided to finish up my accounting in preparation for the inevitable tax season. As you can see, I'm writing instead, indicative that this is a task I find more distasteful than cleaning the sludge out of my refrigerator crisper drawers (see Dancing Around)!

I have long history of financial avoidance. This is an issue I have been working through, layer after layer for some time. There was a time in my life, not really that long ago, where I would actually begin to feel physically ill as I reviewed my business accounts. It didn't seem to matter whether business was healthy or struggling, my stomach would churn, always expecting the "worst". I can't even tell you what the "worst" would be, only that it felt like some primordial fear wired into my body. It would coldly slink and slither through my gut and then grab my throat squeezing tightly while my legs went to jelly. I think my most important discovery was that these sensations remained present no matter what my financial situation. Clearly, it had little to do with money. It certainly had a lot to do with fulfilling my own prophesy of doom and gloom.

Tax season was certainly the most painful period in my life until recently. My husband would generously offer to help and then we would fight and bicker until the damn thing was filed with life retuning immediately to normal afterward. Normal except for the confusion and shame I felt about my uncharacteristic bitchiness in the face of his help.

Taxes came to head for me one year when my husband asked me to come up stairs and help him sort out a few questions he had about entries that had been made on the books. I thought I was having a heart attack, stroke and perhaps the apocalypse had chosen that very moment to begin. The air rushed out of me and I sank weakly into a chair. In those few seconds, with all my attention turned inward, I took breath after breath as all these bizarre sensations coursed through me at lightening speed. What felt like an eternity came to an end 5 seconds later with a wonderful sense of calm.

I still have difficulty putting into words what occurred in those brief few seconds. In its aftermath, I knew that I was not going to be harshly judged, that I wasn't stupid, that whatever boogie man I had been expecting to arrive was never going to come. I calmly and intelligently clarified the few questions my husband had and walked away from his desk on a cloud.

This was the first in a small avalanche of shifting attitudes about my finances. The second followed quite closely afterward and truly reminded me to stay in my body when these big waves of discovery come along. I was driving back from one of my offices that I was struggling to re-launch after my primary referral source had locked up and left practically overnight. Financially, things were certainly not looking good at the moment. I had a plan and it was working well so I also knew the turn around was coming. I was mulling all this over when my thoughts were abruptly interrupted by my ringing cellphone. It was my bank contact asking if I could drop by his office.

I felt like a kid caught with her hand in the cookie jar - totally busted! I panicked, I prayed, I marvelled at how he could already know- the situation was a very new one. I did pretty much everything but breathe and relax into my mounting paranoia. Arriving at his office in quite a state, I barely heard the sales pitch he offered about a new banking product he thought I might be interested in. My brain was busy chanting that I got "away" with something. Saying goodbye, I knew I was nearly unhinged when I heard the tinge of hysteria behind my laughter and noticed him visibly pull back. I could have cared less - I was free!!

I got into my van and went to pieces. Where did this incredible shame and guilt come from. I simply couldn't win. If I was doing well, I was terrified people would think I was greedy, nasty, unfair or that I would be forced to give up the evidence of my hard work to someone else. If business wasn't going well, I was in constant fear of losing it all, of being labelled a failure and being condemned as stupid and lazy. Talk about a rock and hard place - there was no where left to go with this dance but inward.

Alternately breathing and sobbing in a parking lot over the impossible situation I had created for myself and once again what felt like an eternity, lasting likely less than one full minute, was over and I understood. I carried so many rules that weren't my own that they created an impossible set of hurdles.

I believed that if I had something, it meant there was less of it available for someone else. I believed that who I was as a person was inextricably linked to my finances. I believed that it was uncharitable to not give everything away. I had no faith in my own worth and value. I believed every comment ever offered offered that I was lazy and unproductive - even though there were probably very few instances in my life where those words had been uttered. I needed to do well to prove my worth and success- but not too well so that I could be likable and acceptable.

What a confusing mosaic of conflicting beliefs, values and attitudes - and not one of them came from me - they were all acquired along the way. I watched my grandfather do nearly the same dance and upon his death, saw the devastating effects of his carefully crafted illusion of charity when his own home and business were mortgaged almost beyond recovery.

A pillar of the community, he must have struggled mightily to keep his life afloat. He was a generous and mostly self-educated man with multiple health problems, compounded no doubt by the pressures he was living with. I'm sure my grandfather felt his options were severely limited. I'm betting he wrestled mightily with how to walk away from the expectations of the many he employed in the only grocery store for miles around, from all of those he gave free food and clothing too who had come to depend on his charity, from his family who came last when it came to financial care in spite of his deep love for them. I doubt he was aware of how he martyred himself or what the ripple effects would be. Like many of us, I'm sure he hoped every day that something would turn around, that his next gamble would pay off.

I learned his lessons well. They were never spoken but modelled clearly. I was my grandfather's mirror image. All of which was reinforced in my immediate family by an undercurrent of judgement, skepticism and likely envy levelled at my Great Uncle - also a business man but perhaps a more savvy one in that, while charitable, he also was unapologetic for creating wealth. The stage was set for my competing beliefs. Oh what a complicated web of things to be absorbed by a pre-teen.

Add to that my mother's budgeting habits. On payday, she would pay all the bills, grocery shop and set aside a bit of spending money while the rest went into the bank. I never really knew these details on her system until a recent conversation. All I remembered is that my Dad got paid and within a few days, when we kids were asking for something that she deemed frivolous, she would wave an envelope with $20 in it and tell us this is all we had to live on until the next payday. I wasn't that old but I sure knew that you can't feed a family of 5 on twenty bucks!

So in spite of never being hungry or going with out clothes, I lived perpetually on edge, thinking financial disaster must be near. Even more confusing was the fact that my Dad, a police officer in the small community that we lived in had a job that many other families envied for its steady pay. We were well off by most people's standards. I accepted the paradox, like so many other irreconcilable realities of my young existence. Some things are for public display while the truth lived within the walls of our home.

Fast forward 15 or more years later and there I sat in the farthest reaches of the bank parking lot, a mascara streaked mess on the outside with a deep sense of peace moving through me. I didn't have to live by these insane rules anymore! I could pick and choose. Deep in my heart I knew I was taking charge. In the months that followed I discovered some amazing things about the difference about living with a belief in scarcity or abundance, about how they are connected to whether I believed the world was a safe place or a dangerous one. I discovered that although my early years felt filled with secrets and inconsistencies, I wasn't alone and even more importantly, I could decide if I wanted to continue to live like that. And perhaps the most freeing discovery of all, my newly claimed power and capacity to choose for myself - not based on someone else's rules or example, but just for me!

That particular tax season was a death of sorts. The death of a lump of beliefs, values and attitudes that were destroying my health, my peace of mind, my relationships and which had become a tireless loop of holding myself in check while casting furtive glances over my shoulder.

I'd be lying to you if I said it was completely over it, but I can confidently tell you its a minor blip on my radar these days. I recognize the vestiges of those old beliefs from time to time when I feel that familiar slick sensation gliding through my belly - but now I know what it is - a time to make a choice about how I wish to move forward.

Today, as I dance around completing my accounting and getting my taxes in order it is with the same reluctance that I consider cleaning out my overflowing spare bedroom closet - a big, messy task that ultimately rewards me with a sense of order that will last for a month or two before it begins to require my attention again!