defaulting on the debt

I have a bunch of stuff that I want to say in a hurry, which means that it will probably be disorganized. Something happened and it upset me. Sometimes I see something happen, and I interpret it in a frightening way. Maybe my interpretation is wrong. Sometimes, I jump to the wrong conclusions.

I have delusions of grandeur, and I also have delusions of insignificance. I like to fantasize that I'm somebody very important, and that I'm going to do big things that affect the world. Sometimes, it's not actually true, and I don't have the ability to do those things, or I don't have enough resources. But other times, I think that I'm really UNimportant - I think nobody's listening, nobody's taking me seriously, nobody believes me - that nothing I do is of any consequence to anyone.

But suddenly I find out, every now and then, that people listen, people care, and sometimes, people might even believe me. That's really scary! I like to assume that I'm the ONLY person who's crazy, and everyone else is perfectly sane. That means, all the scary stuff I'm talking about is actually just a fantasy, a delusion. The voices, for instance, would be something caused by a screwup in my brain, instead of actually coming from some outside source. Reading about me and my voices would be kind of quaint, kind of entertaining - how odd, the things that she experiences. But every once in a while, I think people might be scared or traumatized because of what I talk about. Or they might have their own experiences, and they agree with me, or they believe me.

I don't like seeing people traumatized or made bitter. I went through that. It took several years before I 'calmed down' and learned ways of viewing this, or interpreting it, or enduring it somehow, so that I could survive. If I looked back at myself, in the very beginning when I started to say 'I'm not crazy - this stuff is REAL'... and if I couldn't HELP that person going through that, it would be terrifying. In some ways, it's worse to see somebody else going through a bad experience than it is when you yourself go through it.

Actually, that fits with how I think about death. The person, or animal, who dies, they no longer feel any suffering afterwards. That's based on the assumption that your spirit disappears and is no longer conscious after your death. I assume that, as an atheist. However, for everyone else who's still alive, the suffering continues. The lost person dies, and everyone else continues to grieve, and lives without them, and has to make changes in their lives to fill the role played by that person. In some ways, you're better off being the person who dies, according to that interpretation - you no longer feel any pain. (That doesn't mean what it sounds like. It's still not good to die! I don't want to, and I hope nobody else wants to, either. I choose life.) When I went through the hell (saying 'I'm not crazy - this stuff is real'), I considered suicide, because I couldn't see how I would endure life while still believing that mind control was real. It scares the crap out of me to think that other people would believe me, would feel the same way, would be traumatized just as badly as I was, and would consider the same 'solutions' that I considered. It scares me to imagine that other people are also harassed and attacked.

It reminds me of Lemony Snicket. I read his books about a year ago. He always gives a disclaimer, saying that these books are very unpleasant, and that the horror just goes on and on without stopping, and that if you want to read something pleasant, you should pick up some other book instead of this one. His books have themes which are very similar to mind control, except that he never comes out and explicitly writes about mind control. He just hints at it. I read the books, and it's true, I didn't feel good afterwards. I felt a sort of bleakness, weariness, and despair. However, I'll say that the final book in the series does have a good ending. The ending reminds me of the things that I'm talking about nowadays: my desire to start a family, and go back to a more natural, less modernized lifestyle.

Well, I am going to switch topics now, all of a sudden, because there was more than one thing that I needed to say. This is connected with the previous topic in a way.

First I'll say how 'they' trained me never to answer the telephone. I'll be brief about it because I'm not really telling that story right now, I'm just mentioning it. I would get harassing phone calls from 'puppets,' calls that were relevant to things that had happened that day, or things I had written about. I did some things to get away, like, I tried changing my phone number. But after my court case, I changed my number, and somebody decided to give me a phone number that used to belong to a lawyer who handled drug-related court cases. It happens that MY case was categorized as drug-related. So it was 'relevant' that I 'somehow' ended up with that particular person's phone number. The harassing phone calls started again, except now they were directed at this lawyer and framed in a way that used his identity to convey the harassment. It's hard to explain and I won't go into it right now. I already explained elsewhere, in a previous blog, that they started doing things to my caller ID, too, so I got rid of caller ID, and stopped answering the phone altogether.

Well, now, I also have old unpaid credit cards. This has been a very painful thing for me. It's impossible to even write about it or speak about it without being made to say things I don't want to say. There's all this involvement with 'the voices.' It's like they want me to say specific things and specific phrases, but it's all wrong and artificial, and I don't agree with their interpretation. I'd interpret it differently if I were able to think about it all alone, without being disturbed.

This is what they WANT me to say: 'I used to respect the financial industry and I used to respect my responsibility to repay my debts; however, things have happened which are beyond my control, and I cannot pay my debts now or in the future. I no longer respect the financial industry and I no longer feel that I am responsible for this debt.'

It's difficult when I ALMOST agree with something but not completely.

It happened again and again over the past few years: I tried very hard to recover, but lost jobs again and again and again. I lost jobs for a wide variety of reasons. Sometimes it was caused by economic 'bust' cycles and layoffs. Sometimes it was a spontaneous quit. Sometimes I got sick. And so on.

I suffered from chronic fatigue and 'depression,' and struggled to get employed again after losing jobs, sometimes for months and months, while my parents gave me money to pay rent while I lived with a former boyfriend, or to pay my own rent when I lived alone, and to pay all my other bills as well. And I couldn't stand being dependent on them, because I respect myself more when I am self-reliant. And when you depend on people, you're vulnerable to them. I had 'strings attached' every time I took money or help from them. I had to make sure that I was spending the money for things my parents would have wanted me to spend it on. And while living with my ex-boyfriend, I had to avoid fighting and arguing with him, since I wasn't strong enough to go live by myself without help, since I kept losing jobs and getting sick. Every time I depended on other people to pay for me or take care of me, I had to do things they wanted me to do, and avoid conflicts with them. The fights and arguments were much more severe, and I felt helpless, like I had no right to demand anything of my own. How could I possibly demand anything, when all I did was sleep all day, or sit in a chair writing in journals or reading? How could I demand anything, if I was too depressed to even go job hunting or filling out applications? Everyone would say, 'You should get out of bed and go do something!'

When I did finally get my own apartment, I still had problems keeping jobs. Even if I had a job, I was vulnerable to 'getting my hours cut,' which I'm sure most people know about. You go through months when they're not busy, so they reduce your hours. But in good times, they can't RAISE your hours to a number greater than forty, because of the !@#$!@$# )(*%^*@#$ wage and labor laws. Over forty hours, they have to pay overtime, so nobody lets you work more. It would be great if you could work sixty hours or seventy hours when they need you.

At McDonald's, I even tried this: I used algebra to figure out how to lower my hourly wage to a particular number, such that it would 'cancel out' the total dollar value of my overtime, so that, if I worked X number of hours, I'd be making the same total dollar amount that I used to make at forty hours. It isn't an equation with only one answer - instead, you have to try out various scenarios. Anyway, I then went to the manager and asked him if he would be willing to lower my hourly wage to this number, and I showed him the algebra. :( There is no nice way to say this, but he simply didn't understand what I meant. When he DID finally start to understand it ('You want to work at $5.65 an hour???' when I was currently at $7.50) he told me that the higher-ups in the corporation would forbid it, because their paperwork would just show 'Nicole has overtime.' They wouldn't care about the total dollar amount that I received - they only cared that the paperwork indicated the presence of overtime occurring. The total dollars meant nothing. Of course, that wouldn't be so easy to do nowadays, because the #^$* $!#$@! fools have raised the minimum wage yet again, forcing the entire country to... don't get me started about the minimum wage!

Anyway. Well, after getting my own apartment, and continuing to have problems earning enough money, I ended up using credit cards every time I ran out of money. I didn't use them to buy 'fun stuff' like a closet full of trendy clothes. I didn't buy millions of unneeded technical gadgets. I do have a small number of things that I bought on credit, always believing 'The future will be better - soon, I'll have a job that I won't lose, and it will pay more money.' But a large part of the money on the credit cards was for things like food, bills, and rent. And then, eventually, for psychotherapy.

Well, for a while, I was trying to pay the debt down. I have a careful record of it all in the other computer, on my laptop. I used to make my monthly payments, however small, on time. But then some things happened that caused me to stop even trying to pay them. I think 'they' were involved - the voices. It was a change in my former pattern. I didn't even make monthly payments at all anymore.

So that's how things are right now. I ignore the telephone, and mostly don't even try to pay the credit cards, and the credit card people call me all the time. I've gone through phases when I started paying them again. But I avoid the phone, because as soon as I start talking to them, I become convinced that yes, I DO want to pay my debt again, and I set up an automatic payment plan, where they take out the money by themselves and I don't have to send any checks or anything. And I know from experience that as soon as I start talking to them on the phone, I'll get convinced again that paying my bills is what I want to do.

This is an extremely conflicted area. I am actually starting to believe that I DON'T want to pay the debt anymore. And this is reinforced by the fact that I started gradually collecting a small amount of silver coins, for the future, as a way of saving. Instead of paying off old debts, I am working to prevent future debts. And I am starting to believe that a lot of the debts were not my fault. But there's another part of me that hates to avoid responsibility. I think that I SHOULD pay that debt and be responsible for it. But there are things that have happened, which keep happening over and over again, that are beyond my control.

And if I were talking on the phone to the credit card people, or to my parents as well, since I also owe them money, and if I had to explain that things have happened beyond my control, things which are not my fault...? I've read stuff in psychology, in books I used to read, books I have a lot of respect for - I read that you have to take responsibility for things. You shouldn't call yourself a victim, or blame things on events that you had no control over. And yet... it IS TRUE that I can't control some of the things that happen. This is an extreme example, and it doesn't happen this way to me personally, but imagine that a 'puppeteer' forced me to go out and buy a bunch of stuff on a credit card, even though I didn't want to, and then I had to pay the debt for all that even though I didn't want any of it in the first place. And meanwhile, I would have to experience all the guilt and the regret from buying stuff I didn't want. And I would feel bad about myself and think I was a bad, shallow person for buying junk I don't need. I would have to tell people that I was physically, literally, not responsible for my own actions, because somebody else was directly controlling my mind and body and making me do things. Well, it doesn't go quite like that for me, but I can imagine it might for other people. For me, it's more like, I have disasters, and they're always expensive, and I lose jobs even when I don't want to quit. Things like that. And I'm starting to think, it's not my fault.

So I would have to tell that to the credit card people or to my parents. I know my parents don't believe it, but I'm starting to wonder if maybe the credit card people already know about this. I think maybe SOME of them DO know about it.

The other thing is, I don't want to start crying. Here's my official position on the phenomenon of crying. I've had experiences where I KNOW that I was FORCED to cry, because I can recognize the physical sensation of being artificially triggered to cry. This is hard to explain, because, in principle, I'm not 'opposed' to crying, and I don't think there's anything wrong with it - I think it feels good to cry - it's a relief. I cry sometimes especially if my hormones are acting up, or if I'm in withdrawal from St. John's Wort. But I don't normally cry very easily.

But there is a particular pattern, which I suspect is artificial, forced on me from outside: I've had times where I had to tell people things, and accidentally started crying, and was humiliated about the fact that I was crying, and was humiliated about the whole event going on in general - just being 'humiliated about crying' or 'not supposed to cry' was the idea. I know this is hard to believe, but there were times when I was sure it wasn't me. I didn't feel that way - it was somebody else.

And this exact thing happens whenever I'm alone, practicing and rehearsing the words that I'll say to the credit card people on the telephone. As I'm rehearsing my words, suddenly I notice that the words aren't my own - they're 'voices' being put into me like a puppet. And then, in the rehearsal, as I'm talking to the credit card people, I suddenly start crying, and I apologize to them, and I'm humiliated, and it's horrible, and I have to get them to believe me, but I'm sure they won't believe a word I say, and they'll think I'm crazy. And the whole thing is wrong - it's bad to default on your debts. It's bad to avoid responsibility.

But I, Nicole, am not quite reacting that way, even though my feelings and beliefs are somewhat similar. If I were meditating by myself, all alone, and rehearsing what words I would say, I think that I would be able to convince myself one way or the other to be firmly committed to what I was doing. I would choose either to continue trying to pay the debts, or else I would choose to default on them, but either way, I would know what I was doing and why I was doing it.

But the choice is unknown: Nobody, including myself, knows the absolute certain answer to whether or not I would choose to continue paying the debt. It's been so long since I was totally alone, thinking my own thoughts, feeling my own feelings, making my own plans, that I honestly don't know the real truth of what I feel or believe about this subject! It's something that I can't even THINK about without being interrupted, without people talking to me, without people trying to force me to do this or feel that.

And after realizing that, I always get angry. I don't like 'giving in' to things that people force me to do, especially if there is the slightest doubt or suspicion that I might have chosen differently if acting alone.

For several weeks now, they've been brute-force bombarding me with voices shouting at me to answer the !#$#ing phone. It happens at random times and it's very disruptive. I'm defaulting 'by default,' so to speak - by NOT answering. I'm defaulting, by avoiding the phone calls.

And I can see it now: I answer the phone, start talking to the person, 'express my feelings,' and as I get the feelings out, why, it turns out that there's no real problem after all! Nicole just wanted to vent her feelings a little bit! And really, we can all work out this little problem! So the person on the line has sympathy for me! Poor girl, she started sobbing uncontrollably - I felt so bad for her! So we made this deal where she just gives us a really small monthly payment. She just needed to talk it out a little bit! In reality, there's no objective reason why perhaps she SHOULD default on those debts, and keep all of her money to herself as much as possible, and save it for the future instead of paying down the old debt.

I was fantasizing, last week, while hearing those bombardments of 'answer the bleeping phone,' that I would answer it, and that I would default (without sobbing hysterically). Then (we fantasized) I would blog about what I was doing - I would blog about defaulting on the debt. I would make a joke: that everyone should get their gold and silver now, because something disastrous was about to happen, and it would be triggered by me personally defaulting on my debt. Like I personally was the LAST person attempting to pay off my credit cards, and when I defaulted, the whole world's financial system would collapse.

It turns out that actually, the price of gold and silver crashed just recently. A lot of journalists were shocked and were saying, 'What the @!## is this?' By my understanding - and I could be wrong about this - the price of metals crashes whenever there's a huge default somewhere. When somebody wipes a trillion dollars off the books, somewhere in the world, and that trillion dollars ceases to exist, when somebody out there says, 'I don't have this money, and I never even had it to begin with, and I'm never going to have it, and I can't pay it back to you, ever,' then all of a sudden, there's a lot less money in the world than there used to be. And the price of precious metals goes down very suddenly. That's deflation.

Actually, then, you wouldn't advise people to BUY gold and silver, you'd advise them to short-sell it, on paper, while keeping the real physical metals for themselves - that's what Antal Fekete talks about, except I don't understand what he means. His explanation is too abstract for me and it depends on understanding other ideas which he hasn't really written about publicly. He says he has a way of doing this, and it also involves futures, and the 'basis.' I struggled to understand some of it a while ago, and gave up.

But anyway, so the fantasy was that I was supposed to pretend that I personally was the straw that broke the camel's back, and that something very noticeable and dramatic would happen to the financial system immediately after I defaulted. I think that 'something' has already happened, when the metal prices crashed, so unfortunately, I've have to be just another average ordinary straw on the camel's back, like all the other straws, instead of being a really SPECIAL straw. I'm like the straw you put on the camel after the camel has already fallen.

(They're warning me that there's some dirty double meaning when I'm talking about this, but I'm going to use the straw-and-camel concept anyway.)

I think in reality when I talk to them on the phone, it won't be as emotional as the 'rehearsals' have portrayed it to be. On the other hand, it's frustrating because I'd like to speak in a clear, assertive, honest way - the way that the REAL Nicole Binns would speak if I were allowed to rehearse it all alone without being interrupted - I would know exactly what I was choosing to do, and why I was choosing to do it. I would explain it by using all my assertiveness training from the books I read years ago. I would think clearly and I would phrase everything in a very simple, direct way.

The concept of defaulting on my debt, and believing that events have occurred through no fault of my own, feels almost sickening, and traumatic. It hurts very badly to admit that yes, you HAVE been injured. When I pay the debt, it's like denying that I've been injured through no fault of my own. It's like denying that I was attacked, denying that I was manipulated, denying that I'm sick. It's like denying that there are enormous, systemic problems in the entire financial industry, and those problems lead people to do things that they otherwise wouldn't do. It's like I'm pretending that things are okay, and they've always been okay, and they're going to be okay in the future. If I just keep fooling myself into believing that my future will get better, then I'll keep paying the debt, knowing that eventually the debt will be all finished and I'll have a clean record and I'll never need to use debt again. But the default, on the other hand, is a horrible scar. It's when I admit that I'm injured. Something very, very bad happened, and it resulted in a default. I'm not happy about it. It's not really the same as quitting or giving up, because in reality, I'm still planning and preparing for the future - I'm saving hard money. I'm still alive and taking action and surviving.

The purpose of defaulting is that I will then have more energy and more money to direct into my activities. (The voices just now said 'prostitute,' and I remembered something: in Garet Garrett's book 'The Cinder Buggy,' Agnes kept a record of her debts to Thane - I loved that book because there are old iron furnaces around State College, and they made me feel like I was in the same town where that book happened. 'Prostitute' has to do with marriage and barter, along with the ordinary meanings of the word. Agnes's debt reminds me of my debt, and it was connected with her marriage.)

Well, the way this connects to the previous topic was that I think that I WILL start answering my telephone. Unfortunately I know that also means I will get the phone calls that I don't want, and I will have to be rude to some of them. It means that I will be under a great deal of stress. I am not naturally rude, but I can't help getting sick of call after call from some random telemarketer or whatever they do. This isn't the time to get on a discussion about how the government monopoly of the telephone system is the reason why we get unwanted phone calls and can't avoid them no matter how hard we try, or the fact that the government itself, they say, is the one who gives your phone number to the telemarketers, or the fact that the telephone system is 'hackable' and is easily used to harass people deliberately. Or the fact that you have no privacy because some people are listening to every word you say on the phone, including cell phones.

Anyway, if I start answering my phone, it might mean that I start ... well, simply enough, it means I will start talking on the phone again. It's been years since I talked on the phone much. Anyway it might make me gradually become more accessible to people, hopefully real people.