Allison Vesterfelt

Trapped By School Debt

Allison — May 22, 2013 23 Comments

Photo Credit: Ángelo González, Creative Commons

I can’t tell you how many people I meet who want to live a life of meaning, want to do something that matters, but they feel like they can’t because they’re racked with school debt.

I wish I could say I have no idea what that feels like.

But I do.

Just to be totally transparent, I have just under $50,000 in debt after graduate school —

and, according to American Student Assistance, I’m in the top 10 percent for students with my level of education (needless to say, I’m curious how many of the people in my 10% have a degree they’re not using — because that’s me).

I’m a huge advocate for education (my graduate degree is in education) but I also find the conversation about the debt we so willing take on to get our degrees (with the promise “it will be worth it”) really compelling. I’ve had my fair share of moments where I’ve wondered if my debt was “worth it.”

I guess there are some things I wish I would have known before I took on my debt.

I wish I would have known school debt cannot be compartmentalized to one part of my life.

When Darrell and I first started talking about getting married, I hadn’t told him about my loans yet (we were only dating, after all, and I rarely told anyone about how much debt I had). I was actually nervous that, when I told him, he wouldn’t want to marry me.

Of course, my fears were unjustified. When I finally did admit to him the size of my total debt, he barely blinked. But the point is I didn’t think about how debt would impact other parts of my life —

My relationships, my day-to-day work, and my ability to do things like travel, or change jobs.

I wish I would have known how a degree isn’t the only way to get an education.

I don’t know that this would have changed my decision about how I got my education, my undergraduate degree at least, but I wish I would have thought about how far $1000 could go at a bookstore, or for online courses, or for an apprenticeship.

I wish I would have taken into account less expensive options.

I was so set on going to “the best” universities (relatively speaking) I didn’t think about how/if my choice of institution would really impact my long-term career goals. I don’t know if I really thought about my long term career goals (I know, that sounds crazy, but I also know I’m not alone).

I just wanted to get a degree for a degree’s sake.

I’m just not sure I would do it the same way over again, given the hindsight I have now. I’m not sure if my degree has paid for itself.

I wish I would have known this was not Monopoly money.

I came from a family culture where everyone just goes to college. My dad was highly educated, and education was a high value for my family, so there was never any question if I would go to college or not.

And there was never any question about where I was “allowed” to go. The sky was the limit.

On the one hand, I’m indescribably grateful for that mentality. I can’t imagine what it would be like to live without the unconditional support of my parents. On the other hand, sometimes I wish I would have thought more practically about what it actually meant to take on that much debt.

I wish every time I received a statement, I would have thought about it as actual dollar bills, rather than just numbers on a piece of paper. I wish I would have thought to myself:

This is $20,000 real dollars I will actually have to pay back later.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. Mostly because I’m thinking it too. You’re thinking, “All this hindsight is great, but it doesn’t do me much good if I’m already in debt.”

“What am I supposed to do now?”

What if I’m in a dead-end job I hate that’s promising to pay off my debt in 10 years? Do I have to stay?

What if I want to go to Africa and work on a clean water initiative? Should I defer my loans?

What if I want to quit my full-time job to start my own business? Do I have to wait?

What if I want to move overseas and teach at a school? How am I supposed to do them with this debt looming over my head?

These are questions I’ve asked myself, too, and I keep meeting people who are wondering the same things. I wish I could just wave a magic wand and get rid of your school debt for you so you could go do the amazing things you want to do with your life.

(Okay, I guess I wish I had a magic wand for mine, too).

But unfortunately it doesn’t work like that.

I’ve tried all kinds of different options.

I’ve worked a job I didn’t like that promised to pay my debt (I only lasted three years). I deferred my school debt to go on a crazy year-long road trip. Now, I’m trying something new. I’m actually paying it off (revolutionary, I know).

I’ve felt so trapped by my school debt in the past, I’ve tried to find ways to skirt around it, to duck out from under it, or to just get a break from carrying the heavy weight for a second.

But the thing I’m finding is that the best way to get rid of the debt is to get rid of the debt — FAST.

That’s the only way I won’t have to carry it anymore.

So I’m taking jobs I don’t really want to take. I’d rather be writing or working on something creative, or starting something of my own. Instead, I’m taking a realistic look at the assets I have (a graduate degree) and using that asset to pay off my loan.

Also, Darrell and I are living under our means.

We could move into a bigger apartment, but we don’t. We could buy new furniture, but we don’t. We could update our wardrobes, but we don’t. I’m not saying this to brag. I’m saying this to paint a realistic picture of what it looks like to attack debt fast.

Gazelle like intensity. That’s what Dave Ramsey calls it.

And I think, for the first time in my life, when it comes to my school loans, I might actually have it.

Do you have that? What are you doing about your school loans? To reply, Click HERE.

In Growing Up, Life, Packing Light

The Insane Risk-Taker Inside of Me (and You)

Allison — May 20, 2013 8 Comments

Photo Credit: epSos.de, Creative Commons

“Do you ever feel like you’re trying to be cautious, and it’s costing the Kingdom of God something?” — Donald Miller

Darrell and I just got back from Bob Goff’s Love Does Stuff conference in Tacoma, Washington and the experience was incredible.

The day started off with donuts and coffee, then a bunch of blow-up kitty pools filled up like ball pits, then of course a bounce house (because why not?), a drum line, a MILLION balloons, a slam poet (Propaganda) and then Bob himself, explaining how if you walked into this room and didn’t wish you had a pellet gun you aren’t alive.

There’s no one in the world like Bob.

Then Donald Miller shared why he thinks most of us (himself included) don’t do the stuff love tells us to do.

We’re scared.

I’ve been thinking about that ever since. I’ve been thinking about how I’ve spent most of my life trying to be cautious and about how, if anyone who knows me well read that last statement, they would laugh out loud, because they’ve spent most of my life trying to reign me in, get me to slow down, sit down, calm down, and have a realistic perspective about how dangerous the world really is.

I’ve always had this insane risk-taker living inside of me.

And maybe that’s why I’ve spent so much of my life trying to be cautious, because I was scared to “learn the hard way” like everyone said I would, scared to fail and prove them all right. I was scared to live out the ideas that came into my head, scared to take a crazy risk and have it come back void.

And also, I think, I wasn’t exactly sure what I was risking for.

Risk-taking felt like it was this innate part of me, like something I had to stifle and subdue (if I were going to be the “careful” person I should be), like if I were left to my own devices, without discipline, it would come spilling out of me —

But it also always felt sort of empty.

So as I grew up I learned to put it aside.

I learned to sit down, calm down, stay in the country, plant roots, and (“for heavens sake”) put a buffer in my bank account. But you know what’s really weird? Being cautious felt shallow too.

Being cautious actually felt like I was costing the world something, like there was this important part of myself I had put to sleep because I was scared of what it would become. I didn’t have words to say it that way, but the minute Donald Miller shared those words I knew what he meant.

The question I’ve been asking myself now is, “so now what?”

Do I just start taking risks?

How do I measure them?

Am I just supposed to start doing things that make me look crazy?

Here’s the thing. I’m don’t think taking risks just for the sake of taking risks is as glamorous as the movies make it seem. I guess sometimes it can be a good thing. I jumped off a waterfall in Costa Rica once, despite the fact I was terrified, just for the thrill of it.

I lived to tell the story.

Sometimes risks have intrinsic benefits, like a courage muscle we flex as we lead up to the bigger risks life brings.

But ultimately, when we take life risks, the kind of risks where we put everything on the line, I think it matters what we’re risking for.

Jumping off a waterfall is one thing. Selling everything you own and traveling across the country is another.

Adopting two special needs children from another country is still another.

Love will cost us something, and our willingness to take risks, I think, is equivalent to our belief that what we’re risking for matters. We have to want something more important than just ourselves.

I think most of us are risk-takers at heart.

Some of you may cringe at the term, or think I’m wrong. Maybe your whole life you’ve felt scared, or people have blamed you for being too cautious, but I believe we were all made to take risks. I jump off waterfalls and sell my things and move across the country, but maybe you’ve been faithful to the same people or thing, in the same place, for a decade.

That’s risky.

I think, deep inside of us, we all want to be a part of a more important story being written, a story bigger than us.

But I think before we can really understand our role in the bigger story, we have to know ourselves, know what matters to us, to know what we’re committed to, no matter what. We have to know what keeps us and grounds us when everything goes to hell because, when you’re taking big risks, everything will.

Are you a risk-taker? What are you risking for? To reply, Click HERE.

In Life, Packing Light

God, Will You Make It Stop Hurting?

Allison — May 17, 2013 27 Comments

Photo Credit: A.Futlilini, Creative Commons

God, will you make it stop hurting?

This is the simple prayer I prayed a hundred times at least over the past six months, sometimes a small, gentle whisper at the end of the day — the last breath I have to give before fading into sleep. Please God.

Other times a bit more aggressive, a sort of desperate raise-of-voice to make sure he’s heard me say it.

“God, will you make it stop hurting??”

The pain started just before Christmas, right abound the time everyone was setting up trees and wrapping up presents and completing obligations for weeks off of work to hunker down and spend time with family. At first I thought it was just a strained muscle, and then maybe a pinched nerve, but then when the pain lasted, and lasted…

I didn’t know what it was.

I wonder if the fear, the confusion around why my body was betraying me, made it hurt even worse.

And see, the thing with chronic pain that should seem sort of obvious is that it’s chronic. As in, it doesn’t stop. It doesn’t take a break so you can finish your deadline, or respond to that e-mail, or move across the country, or because you’ve had a rough day. It’s commanding like that, all-consuming. It’s relentless.

I reasoned with God.

This is really not a good time for me to be in pain, I told him. There’s too much happening, too much work to do, too much going on. I need to be healthy so I can write books and travel and help writers and publish content at Prodigal Magazine.

How am I supposed to do that if I’m in pain?

God, will you make it stop hurting?

You start to see a new side of yourself when you’re in pain — a desperate side, a selfish side, a side where every thought, all the time, revolves around you. At least I did. Anything to make it stop hurting.

Pain changes things. It changed me.

I started doing stretches, and yoga, and then going to acupuncture —

which taught me what a crucial role we play in our own healing, and also how we can’t do it alone. It taught me that sometimes, to get away from pain, we have to relax into it, submit ourselves to it.

It taught me how sometimes, our bodies betray us. Sometimes our nervous systems need rewiring.

I praised God for the way he used the pain to teach me.

But even after all of that, the pain didn’t go away.

It was better. Manageable, even. With a handful of iburpofen and a little bit of aspercreme I could make it through the day. But each time I tried to imagine living another six months, or even (heaven forbid) years of my life like this, my heart would race and I would keep praying:

God, will you make it stop hurting?

Finally, my body is nearly back to normal.

As I type these words, I feel nothing more than a small kink in my neck, and even that feels like it is daily getting better. It wasn’t one thing that healed me. It was a dozen little things, a small army of people and techniques I have to thank for feeling better.

But the one thing that tipped me over the edge was this: vacation.

I just stopped, for two weeks.

I stopped striving, stopped trying, stopped tweeting and facebooking (mostly) and blogging.

And thinking back now it makes so much more sense why, even when I begged God to make it stop hurting, he didn’t answer — or he answered with “no.” Because pain is meaningful, it’s useful. It’s our body’s signal telling us something is wrong.

And in that sense, pain is a good thing. We can’t ignore it (it won’t let us).

We have to keep listening until we figure out what it is saying.

Healing is complicated. And if you’re in pain, I can’t promise there is one thing to fix your problem.

There probably isn’t. For me, it’s taken several months and several different approaches and, if you want to know the truth, I don’t know if my right shoulder/arm will ever be the same.

It will probably always be a little more vulnerable, a little more tender than it ever was before.

But pain is not arbitrary. You can’t ignore pain. It won’t ignore you.

What’s the worst pain (physical or otherwise) you’ve ever experienced? What did it teach you? How did you find healing? To reply, Click HERE.

In Life

Why I Write (And Blog)

Allison — May 15, 2013 24 Comments

Photo Credit: jjpacres, Creative Commons

Months ago, a blog reader asked me a question and it has stuck with me ever since. She asked:

If everyone stopped reading your blog, would you keep doing it?

It was a good question, good enough that I hadn’t thought about it before, and good enough that when she asked I wasn’t sure what to say. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more my answer would flip-flop back and forth, like a fish fighting for air on dry land.

Would I keep writing?

Why do I write anyway?

The simple answer, I’ve decided since, is this: There’s a difference between writing and blogging. No matter who read or didn’t read my blog — no matter if blogs even existed — I would write. Not every blogger feels this way, but writing is like oxygen to me. I can live without it for a short time, but soon I start to gasp for air.

But what about blogging?

My short answer doesn’t really answer the original question, if you look closely. Because the question was about blogging, not writing. Would you (would I) keep blogging if no one read it?

It’s an important question, I think, because those of us who blog know how much time and energy blogging takes. And asking ourselves why we do what we do helps us uncover motives, which (I love what my husband says about this) are the driving force behind everything we do, and if we don’t understand them, may unknowingly be steering us off course.

This includes our motives for blogging too. So I hope you’ll bear with me for a second.

I want to share my motives for blogging — the good, bad and ugly

I’m shooting from the hip here, trying to be as candid as possible. So please have grace for me and these words. Here it goes.

Power. Blogging gives me a sense of control where it may or may not exist. I’ve found words to be powerful in my life and blogging affords me the opportunity to channel my words toward a cause, a subject, or an idea I think is important.
Space. Blogging for me has always been a little bit about owning a little bit of space on the Internet, a space where I could speak up, say what I thought mattered, be myself, and not have to apologize for it (ironically, this has always been an area of anxiety for me. ie: “What will people say/think about me when I’m honest?”).
Conversation. One of the unexpected “rewards” of blogging for me has been the way people respond to what I write. When I first started blogging my favorite part of the day was reading and responding to blog comments (it still is, in some ways. I just tend to get overwhelmed by it at times).
Connecting. I met my husband because of blogging. I found my church because of blogging. Some of my favorite people and closest friends are those I’ve met on the Internet.
Understanding. One of my biggest insecurities in life is “no one understands me.” I’m not sure exactly where this comes from, or if I’m alone in feeling this way, but blogging has helped me feel like I had a way to explain myself — explain why I act, feel, or think a certain way so no one would misunderstand (unfortunately, seeking approval through blogging in this way has set me up for disappointment and even more insecurity, because there are as many opportunities for misunderstanding in blogging as there are in life.)

So would I stop writing my blog if everyone stopped reading? Based on the list above, maybe.

It’s not a bad thing, necessarily, but maybe it does explain some of the frustration I’ve been feeling with blogging lately. Maybe it’s an opportunity for me to check my motives and alter my course.

That’s the hard thing about making a list like. It reveals all of the selfish, and unhealthy, motives behind why I do what I do (and is probably why I’ve avoided it until now). But the good news is it gives me a chance to notice motives, which would otherwise remain unconscious, and to adjust them so they don’t steer me off a cliff.

I’d encourage you to make a similar list yourself. Why do you write? Why do you blog?

Or if you don’t write or blog — why do you do what you do? To reply, Click HERE.

In Writing

Learning How to Eat

Allison — May 13, 2013 30 Comments

Today’s post is from a dear, sweet friend Emily Wierenga. She is a beautiful writer and mother and has the kind of sweet spirit you can sense even through a computer screen. She also just released a book called Mom in the Mirror: Body Image, Beauty and Life After Pregnancy. I’m so thrilled to share her words with you today.

Photo Credit: Ollie Crafoord, Creative Commons

I never wanted to be known as the girl with the eating disorder.

And now I’ve got a book with chapters and paragraphs and sentences stating that I am that very girl, the one who starved herself from the ages of nine until 13, and nine? People ask. Why so young?

But I tell them, I didn’t feel nine. I felt very, very old.

And sometimes it’s hard to remember (as I put down words like Hospital and Calories and Mirror), that I am more than that now. That I have always been more. That we are all more than our reflection.

But you couldn’t have told that to the girl with the mushroom cut and the big plastic glasses who stared into the long mirror in the dim-lit hallway while Dad typed away in his office, the door that was always closed because he was a pastor, and why do churches keep their entrances locked?

And Mum in the kitchen cooking supper in her apron.

I really don’t think it had much at all to do with eating, and does it ever? Do we sneak bags of chips or cookies or bowls of ice cream because we love food? Or because we hate ourselves?

And I think it’s because as women, as, mothers, we put ourselves last so often, that we don’t believe we deserve goodness. We feel we don’t deserve beauty or gifts or to sit down and enjoy a good long meal with a glass of wine because there are children to be bathed and put to bed, and clothes to be folded and toys to be put away and, and…

And this is what I saw stretched across my mother’s face, as she stood weary by the stove in her apron. And she tried to love us the only way she knew how: by homeschooling us and dishing up heaping plates of food and sewing us clothes, but all I wanted was for her to hold me and tell me I was beautiful.

But she’d never had anyone do that for her, not her mother nor her father nor my father.

We all need someone to be love, incarnate, , so we can put our faith in it.

My husband leans in on the pillows and I ask him to tell me, just one more time. “But why?” he says, this farm-boy that walked me through my relapse when I was 23.

“Don’t you know?” I shake my head.

“Tell me again,” I say.

“I love you.” He pulls me close. “I’ve never stopped loving you,” he says. “And I never will.”

I let him kiss me then.

And I’m learning to stand up for myself this way, to treat my body with kindness. And I know it has nothing to do with me. I know it has everything to do with me being a product of God’s genius. His hands molding dust into skin into breath.

He’s the one who makes me beautiful. So I sit boldly at the kitchen table in the afternoon light and eat a bowl of ice cream, my sons beside me, eating theirs, because we need to do this together, this life. This learning to eat, this learning to be gentle with ourselves and others.

Because lies can’t grow in the light.

And light is love.

***
I’m giving away a copy of my new book today, Mom in the Mirror: Body Image, Beauty and Life After Pregnancy, co-authored by Dr. Dena Cabrera, and foreword by supermodel Emme.

Here’s an excerpt from the book:

Giving birth produces life in more than one sense. It’s the baby powder, milky-breathed spirit found in the softest limbs you’ve ever felt, and it’s the respect a man feels for his wife as he watches her give up her body for another.
And it’s the deep-rooted soul satisfying feeling of knowing you were born for more than the mirror. That you were born to see the face of God in your child, and to know, you yourself are a miracle.

I want you to have this book! Tell me ONE thing that you love about yourself, and you’ll be entered into the draw! To reply, and enter for your chance to win a copy of Emily’s book, click HERE.

Otherwise, you can order it through the book’s website, here: www.mominthemirrorbook.com.

_____

Emily Wierenga is a mom to two beautiful boys, wife to a handsome math teacher, and author of Chasing Silhouettes: How to Help a Loved One Battling an Eating Disorder (www.chasingsilhouettes.com) and Mom in the Mirror: Body Image, Beauty and Life After Pregnancy (www.mominthemirrorbook.com). To learn more, please visit www.emilywierenga.com

In Life