Some changes on a Tuesday...

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Well kids, it happened. I went too far in my Manhattan city life. After a handful of months of being very negligent and irresponsible and paying off my credit card bills with my savings instead of staying within budget, too many months of drinks with friends, of gifts to those back home celebrating momentous occasions, of welcome-back-from-vacation dinners, and Birthday dinners, and New Studio drinks, and You're Moving To A New Apartment drinks, and after several trips to purchase several outfits of new, better-fitting work pants and appropriately demure work blouses, I have hit my limit. Literally. I have run out of liquid savings. Completely. Me. Anal-retentive moi is experiencing the one thing I swore would never, ever happen. Not to me. I would not move to Manhattan - as a nearly-30-year-old professional female and spend my savings. And for a long while I didn't. I even added to my savings, replenished some of what had been spent in the cross-country move. And then I moved into my own studio, and brokers fees and first-and-last-months-rents and storage systems all came at once and took quite a few thousand out of my hard-worked-for-savings and going out took on new significance because who wants to stay home alone all the time? And I just paid off my credit card bills with my savings. I kept thinking it would be replenished, no problem, later, later, later. Well, later is here and the wall has been hit and there are still credit card bills that need to be paid off. And I can't do it in a reasonable-enough amount of time. Because I am living too thin in Manhattan. Because I am paying an entire paycheck for rent and there isn't enough wriggle room in the other paycheck to make dents in the bills I now have. And so, I must move. Into a bedroom in someone else's apartment in a cheaper neighborhood - I'm thinking Brooklyn where I've been wanting to try living anyway for a time now - but I am embarrassed to have fallen so far.

I am embarrassed that my cousins and family who are coming to visit me in November and who expressed such excitement to see my own Manhattan studio will have to be told that there will be no more studio. That I made too many arrogant decisions and that now I have to take responsibility for those irresponsible decisions and move out of the little Manhattan home I have created for myself. But the stress of these bills is too much, and I need to pay them off sooner rather than later. I have already taken my credit cards away from myself, tucked them away - sans one card with an extremely low limit for dire emergencies - and have begun warning friends that I will be a little MIA, a little "let's take a walk tonight rather than go for drinks..." for a time. Just until the bills are paid, just until I have some savings to work with should disaster strike. Because all decisions have consequences and bad decisions have bad consequences. And I must bear the weight of the repercussions of my decisions. I may have hit a patch of irresponsibility, but I guess at least I'm adult enough to know cut-backs have to happen and things must change if my current ways of doing things aren't acceptable, hm? There's always an upside, even if it's just that facts are facts.

Now the truly hard part, trying to get out of my lease. I'm going to have to claim financial hardships...and fingers crossed they care enough to let me out on that alone!