I Keep Calculating While Other People Are Enjoying Themselves

Dear Delyara, Debt has made me strange around joy. I can be somewhere pleasant — dinner, coffee, a small outing, even a normal conversation about future plans — and part of my mind is somewhere else entirely, calculating. Adding. subtracting. estimating. bracing. Other people seem able to inhabit moments more fully. I’m still checking the emotional cost of everything. It makes me feel older than I am and smaller than I want to be. What I miss most is not money, exactly. It’s ease.