Most of us are all too familiar with the concept of debt. You receive a good or a service that someone else purchased for you. This luxury comes with the little stickler called interest, which is part of the price for having now and paying later. This comes in handy and is a basic part of daily life, but borrow too much and your financial ship is sunk. Third parties track our discipline in repaying our debts and in return they assign us a credit score. Generally speaking, having a high credit score is a sign of good financial health and allows for people to borrow what they need in order to maximize their lives. If your credit score is poor, then you are shackled with perpetually high interest rates which makes it even more difficult to dig out of the hole. Bankruptcy, debt collection attempts, repossessions, foreclosures, divorce... these are some of the severe consequences of overextending our means.
Emotionally, we take on a lot of debt as well and, just like with our finances, we pretty much suck at repaying it. Like financial debt, emotional debt (was thinking about calling it ED but I thought better of it) has a transaction where the debt is initiated, an interest rate, and a credit score. You also have to repay emotional debt or pay the consequences.
Emotional debt is accrued through our sense of obligation, to ourselves and to others. The transaction occurs when we sense that we are obligated to do something like, write a blog post for instance. As a creative-minded person I have always had grand ideas, ideas that seem to push and pull me in every direction. The accumulation of forces seem to balance each other out to the point that I would inevitably remain idle. But the forces remain as strong as ever. They even start to grow, and when something pulls on you strong enough you then decide to take action.
Writing was something that I have always wanted to do but I never actually got around to it, until recently. As an 11 year-old in Ohio I remember telling my friend's mom - a fabulously wise and graceful drama teacher - that I wanted to be a writer. Her response never left me.
"Well," she said, "if you want to be a writer then all you have to do is write. People say they want to be writers all the time but they never write anything. Writers write, wanters want."
How true! For most of my life I had the desire to do many things but the fear of failure has gotten in the way. The sense of obligation that I carried with me is the emotional debt that crushes the spirit. Desires are within us for a reason. They are the pilot lights that stay lit throughout the year waiting for the right time and place to ignite a glorious flame. But desires unfulfilled become a burden on us. They haunt us and remind us that time is short and there are still things left undone, and the debt grows.
In this sense, we can think of time as the interest rate. The longer you wait to get moving on something the less time you will have to enjoy that thing in your life - you will pay a price for the delay. That concept is simple enough and shouldn't be overcomplicated.
So all of my life the interest on my emotional debt was inflating it. Time kept slipping away. Wrinkles started appearing around my eyes. Much like financial debt, emotional debt can send a debt collector to harass you and keep reminding you of the bondage in which you are living. This debt collector can become more aggressive and persuasive until you finally succumb to its pertinacious demands. For our emotional debt the collector is none other than life itself.
Life will continue to call out to you. It will continue to remind you of the opportunities that exist between sunrises. As you witness others paying off their emotional debt and you realize the benefits of it, you begin to consider paying it off yourself. How do you pay off emotional debt? The same way you pay off financial debt - with a plan, over time.
Thomas Jefferson said, "If you want to know who you are, don't ask, act. Action alone will delineate and define you!"
And there it is. All you have to do to pay off that emotional debt that you keep carrying around is take action. This is the most difficult part. Like paying off a gigantic financial debt, there is a strategy involved with paying off emotional debt. I like the Dave Ramsey method of dealing with the most accessible and easy to take care of debt first, thus building confidence and momentum that you can carry on to the next, more challenging obstacle.
I will use myself as an example again. I have several different objectives but for simplicity I will narrow it down to three: be a writer, start making bread, and open a restaurant. As you can see, all three have different levels of commitment of both time and capital. I realized that the easiest thing to do was to "become a writer," or as my friend's mom would say, "just start writing." This requires the minimal amount of commitment, but it still requires one. So I started to write this blog. This is the equivalent to, say, putting $20 a month toward your debt. Since I haven't contributed to it in a while, I felt the need to write grow - my emotional interest rate was taking effect. I tried to write a couple posts, but the words weren't coming. It was forced. But the urge was still growing to make a contribution so when the first viable thought presented itself in the form of this concept, I jumped on it in order to keep my emotional credit score on the up and up (more about that later).
Now that I have tackled the basic task of consistent writing (although still struggling), I have a little bit more emotional debt that I can focus on. The satisfaction of completing the simple task has given me confidence to pursue the next - bread baking. This requires studying, learning, trial and error and continual exploration - more than simply jotting down thoughts. This is like paying off a car loan. Once I prove that I can handle both of these I will venture on further toward a restaurant (of some kind or another). This would be like a mortgage debt. The great part about paying off emotional debt is that it raises your emotional "credit score"- your own self-esteem/self-image.
Equifax and Transunion are two of the most well-known and widely used credit score generators. Creditors tell them how good you are at paying off your debts. The better you are at it the higher your score goes. When you have the highest possible score people can't wait to loan you money. The opportunities available seem limitless and the interest is negligible. You are a low risk for delinquency. Unlike the financial system that has several different hands in the cookie jar, when it comes to emotional credit you alone are the arbiter, the creditor, and the debtor while life is the debt collector.
I used creativity to illustrate the concept of emotional debt here, but the same concept can be applied to anything you have an emotional attachment to, including one another. Other people complicate the equation, however. but you can minimize their influence on your emotional credit score by implementing healthy boundaries. While that is beyond the scope of this post it might be a good topic for another one down the line. The bottom line is this - if you have an urge that won't let you be, if you have always wanted to "X" but "Y" keeps getting in the way, there will be nobody else who can make you start paying off your emotional debt but you, and once you do, you will start to see that you are capable of so much more than you think possible. Netflix and chill? How about Network and thrill!?
