I went bankrupt before I was 30.
Bobby and I got overextended. Then we lost our jobs. Then we lost everything else, which happens faster than you would think once the first domino goes.
The car. The house. All of it.
I was raised to believe that borrowing is fine as long as you pay your debts back. Good rule. Really solid rule right up until the day you can’t pay them back, and then it turns into a thing you carry around in your chest.
I felt ashamed and embarrassed and broke and alone, mostly in that order, mostly all at once.
That was a long time ago. There is a business now, and a house with a garage full of art supplies, and a husband who has made peace with glitter.
But I think about her a lot. That woman in her twenties who thought her life was over.
There are eight things I wish somebody had sat her down and told her.
1. You Are Not the Only One This Is Happening To
I thought I was.
I really, truly thought I was the only person in America dumb enough to do this to herself. I had a picture in my head of everybody else out there paying their bills on time and buying groceries without doing math in the parking lot.
Meanwhile there were MILLIONS of families going through the exact same thing that same year. Millions.
I had no idea.
And the reason I had no idea is the same reason nobody knew about me. Everybody was hiding it. We were all walking around in the grocery store together, doing the same silent math, assuming we were the only one.
That’s the cruelest part of financial trouble. It convinces you that you’re a special case.
Knowing I wasn’t the only one wouldn’t have paid a single bill. But it would have made the whole thing so much lighter to carry.
2. Hiding It Cost Me More Than the Bankruptcy Did
I kept it a secret from my friends.
I didn’t want them to think differently of me. So I said nothing and I made my face look fine and I changed the subject a lot.
The funny part.
They knew.
Of course they knew. My car was gone. So was the house. I wasn’t fooling one single person. I was just spending enormous amounts of energy protecting a secret that was sitting out in the open the whole time.
That energy could have gone somewhere useful. It could have gone into making money. Or into sleep, which I wasn’t getting much of anyway.
Instead it went into performance.
Looking back, I think secrecy made it heavier on purpose. When you keep something hidden, you have to keep it perfectly still. You can’t set it down. And you can’t ask anybody to help you hold it.
Now, you don’t owe everybody your business. There is no need to announce your finances at church or on Facebook.
But tell somebody. One safe person. Shame doesn’t do well out loud, it really doesn’t. It needs the dark to stay that big.
3. The Money Comes Back Way Faster Than the Confidence
This one surprised me the most.
I assumed the money was the wound. It wasn’t. Money is just a number, and numbers can start going up again on any random Tuesday you decide to start.
What took years was believing I was allowed to want things again.
I lost my confidence in that season and I had to go find it. It wasn’t sitting where I left it.
There was this voice in my head for a LONG time afterward. Who am I to want this? Who am I to deserve it? Because now I had proof I was bad at money. Not a feeling. Documents.
When I finally started my little business, people were supportive. Everybody loves an underdog. It almost felt like they had adopted my business as a school project. They were rooting for the kid who finishes the race last, after everyone has gone home and the track lights are already off.
That kind of cheering feels warm and it also keeps you small.
What actually fixed it was becoming my own cheerleader before there was any evidence I deserved one. Celebrating wins that would have embarrassed me to say out loud. Made a sale. Made the bed. Made it through.
4. This Is a Chapter, Not a Verdict
At the time I thought failure was a one way door.
I genuinely believed that if you messed up big, that was it. Game over. You go sit at the loser table for the rest of your life and you don’t get to want anything anymore.
I was in my twenties. I thought life was pass or fail.
It’s not. Life is learning and growing and getting a hundred more tries than you think you get.
I have come to believe I serve a God of second and third and fourth and unlimited chances. He uses broken people. He uses the ones everybody has written off. That’s not a nice sentiment I picked up somewhere, it’s the thing I watched happen to me over the last 20 years.
Bankruptcy is a legal event. It is paperwork. It is a season with a start date and an end date.
It’s not a description of who you are, and it’s definitely not a prediction of what you can build.
If I could talk to that woman in her twenties, sitting there with the paperwork in her lap, I would tell her that one day this is going to be the boring part of her story. The part people skip over to get to the good stuff.
5. Being Broke Was Teaching Me a Skill I Would Use Forever
Before I had money, I had resources.
I knew where every free cookie in town was. I knew which grocery store put out the good samples and what time. I knew about the free wine tastings, which was important for my overall wellness.
When Pixie was little, she knew the routine. Bakery first for the cookie. Then shopping right around lunchtime for the samples. We would basically eat a whole meal by checkout.
I still use a Taco Casa courtesy cup to this day and I’m not sorry.
At the mall there was always one of those coin operated kiddie rides parked outside a store. A little rocket ship, or a horse, or a race car. Instead of spending the money to make it go, I would just let Pixie climb on and sit in it. She had a great time. I stood there feeling like a genius.
She has since informed me that she absolutely knew those things moved. Her grandmother eventually paid for a real ride and blew my whole operation.
I was ashamed of all that back then. I thought it was proof of failure.
It was not.
That was creative problem solving under real pressure with a toddler on my hip. That is the exact same muscle I use in my business now when a venue falls through or a supplier is out of stock and the party is in four hours.
Broke taught me to look at a wall and find a door. You can’t buy that skill. It’s expensive in a different way.
6. Nobody Is Coming, and That Is Actually the Good News
I waited for a while.
Not on purpose. I don’t think I would have described it that way at the time. But somewhere underneath, I was waiting for something to come rescue us. A job. A break. A check. A person.
Nothing came.
Life just kept coming instead. Things happened, and then more things happened.
I remember the shift when I finally understood that no one was going to show up and fix this for me. My first reaction was despair, honestly. It felt like the floor dropping.
Then it turned into something else.
Because if nobody is coming, then I’m not sitting here waiting anymore. If nobody is coming, then whatever happens next is up to me.
That is terrifying, but it’s also freedom.
I stopped scanning the horizon and started looking at my own two hands. What can I make. Who can I call. Is there anything in this house worth selling. Name one thing I can do TODAY that moves this one inch.
One inch isn’t much. But one inch a day for a year is a different life.
7. There Is No Overnight Anything
I wish somebody had told me how long it takes.
Not to scare me. To free me.
Because I spent years thinking I was behind. I would see someone winning and assume it happened to them fast, and then I would look at my own slow ugly progress and feel like a failure.
Every single person you see winning has a past attached to that moment. Usually ten or more years of showing up when it wasn’t working yet.
I remember calling a friend when I was teaching full time and running paint parties on nights and weekends and building the online side on top of that. I asked her, does it have to be this hard?
She said, “Sometimes you just have to suck it up. It won’t be like this forever.”
That sentence carried me for years.
We live in a world that hands out permission to slack off pretty freely. Give yourself grace, everybody says, and I do believe in grace. But I also believe in working hard, and there were seasons where hard work was the only thing I had left to give.
The rebuild after bankruptcy is slow and unglamorous and mostly invisible.
It is also the only thing that works. My overnight success took about 20 years.
8. Learning to HAVE Money Is Its Own Separate Job
Nobody warns you about this part.
I spent all those years desperate to make money. I assumed that once the money showed up, the money stress would leave.
It changed shape instead.
When I finally started making real money, a whole new set of fears moved in. I would check the account three times a day to make sure the number was still there. I sat on money I should have put back into the business. I would talk myself out of a $40 pair of jeans I actually needed and then spend $200 on a pair of shoes that I didn’t need.
I felt like I had to pay for everybody’s meal every time we went out. Like some kind of tax on being okay now.
It was eating me alive, so Bobby suggested I talk to someone about it, which was its own strange thought. Being able to afford that.
She asked me a question that rearranged my brain. If a friend gave you a gift, would you be angry at them? Would you give it back?
Of course not. I would say thank you.
So she suggested I try that instead of the fear. Take a minute and be grateful for it, because it’s a gift.
How was I supposed to be good with money when I had never had any money to practice on? Managing it is a skill. Nobody is born knowing it. You learn it late and a little clumsy, and that’s normal.
The Part I Didn’t Expect
Bankruptcy is not the worst thing that ever happened to me.
It took years before I could say that without flinching.
Losing it all that young taught me money in a way no class would have. It showed me that failing doesn’t end you. And it made me useful to every scared, broke woman who has ever sat across from me and said she wants to start something but doesn’t know if she can.
None of that would be here if it had gone smoothly.
Nobody needs to hear that their hard season is a gift. When you’re sitting in it, that sentence makes you want to throw something.
So that’s not the lesson.
The lesson is that the season ends, and what it taught you stays.
You keep the resourcefulness. You keep knowing exactly how little you can live on, which sounds grim until the day you have to make a hard call in your business and you already know the floor is survivable.
You keep the humility, too. There’s a softness that shows up in a person who has been flat broke and come back. You can spot it in a room.
And you keep a really specific kind of nerve. Once you have already lost the house and the car and the dignity and gotten back up anyway, a scary phone call is just a phone call. A slow month is just a slow month.
I would never sign up for those years again.
But I use what they taught me every single week.
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