Salvaging What I Can From A Life Wasted

I awoke around 3am last night.  This has been happening quite frequently to me lately, and while I'm an early riser by nature as I grow older, 3 in the morning is a bit on the ridiculous side.

What awakens me, often in a mildly depressive panic, is the knowledge that I've wasted a good portion of my life.

I guess I'm wise enough today to know that lamenting or rehashing events in the past is pretty much a moot point, not to mention a complete waste of time.  I can hear the voices of friends, family, counselors, peers, colleagues and ghostly whispers of countless faceless authors of self-help books whispering to me that I should let go of what's long ago done, stop worrying about the "if onlys," the 'woulda, shoulda couldas," etc, etc, etc.

Most of the time I'm good with letting the sleeping wolves lie, but those 3am moments of reflective clarity, when most of the rest of the world is asleep and I'm left with a VIP hotline to the collective conscience of the universe,  I can't help but feel that I've squandered a damned big portion of the most precious gift any of us ever receive in our entire time here on planet earth. 

There is some small consolation that I don't have to accept full and complete responsibility for the wastefulness.

Don't misunderstand me here, I take mega-responsibility, to be sure, and it's what flings me awake at o'dark-hundred in the wee hours of the morn, tripping on the stupidity of tossing away not just years, but decades of the only life I'll get to experience here on Ma Earth.

I get away with saying that I don't have to accept complete responsibility because, contrary to the wonderful dream they taught us in school about us being able to be "anything we want to be in the good ol U S of A," I've learned over the years that this is true only for a very small portion of the people who hear it.

For the rest of "We The People" who are lucky enough to find jobs, we're stuck with dead-end employment that borders on involuntary servitude.  We're locked into these jobs because they keep us just barely afloat and we know to miss even one day of work could mean we're out on the street.

We're compelled to decide each month between paying the rent and feeding ourselves, which often entails buying the cheapest - and often most unhealthy - groceries we can find.  As it stands today, there is not one county in the entire United States where a person earning minimum wage can afford a one bedroom apartment.

The garbage we're forced to eat as a direct result of our budget is loaded with fat, preservatives and chemicals, which then causes us health problems we don't have insurance for.  We work ourselves to death all day, then hammer a few more nails into our coffins at night with the junk-food that sustains us.  If our kids are forced to eat it, we now know lousy nutrition causes a host of issues that affect their physical, mental and emotional growth.

We don't have the time or energy to try and exercise because we're too busy working as much as possible to add a couple of extra bucks to the paycheck. We eat the worst food imaginable for our bodies because it's often the cheapest available to us, and we live under the constant stress poverty places on us.

Many of us turn to the cheap form of medicine for our anxiety, frustration, worry and stress; alcohol and/or drugs.  This self-medication often causes its own health issues, both physical and mental, and exacerbates some of the chronic stuff we're already dealing with because of our lifestyle and food mandates.  I'd like to say "choices" here, but the fact is, we're really forced into what we're able to select because of our limited budget.

Because we can't afford - or have been denied - health insurance by companies more concerned about their bottom line than our overall health, we're then forced to use emergency rooms for non-emergency needs because no one else will serve us without that plastic card. In one study done back in the 90s, it was found that "charges for all non-urgent ER care in the United States is $5 to $7 billion (Baker & Baker, 1994).   And you can bet that this amount has risen substantially since the 90s.

Hmmm, forgive my digression here, but maybe hospitals ought to just take that $5 billion and use it to increase the minimum wage a bit, then subsidize some health insurance for those of us who can't afford it.   I'd wager they'd more than make up the difference in savings on health care expenditures with fewer ER visits by those of us who currently have no other alternative.  Ah, but what do I know, anyway.

Many of us can't begin to pay the bills associated with our health care.  Since we can't afford preventative or corrective health care, by the time we buy the medicines we're prescribed by the ER docs to band-aid our chronic illnesses, we're left with damned near nothing for everything else.  Most of us simply go without the meds in order to feed the self and the family and try to keep the lights on.  Meanwhile, the bills come in from the ER visits, we can't pay them so we ignore them, and we end up putting the final nail into the credit coffin. 

Now the fun really begins for us.

With bad credit, things folks take for granted, like getting utilities turned on, having a phone, or obtaining a bank account, become off-limits to us.  If we've got jobs, we're forced to use check-cashing services - with hefty fees for the service - to get the white paper turned into green paper.

We can't rent many motel rooms, forget about renting a car, and we leave ourselves open to losing everything from a robbery because we're forced to carry cash everywhere we go. 

Those of us with lousy or nonexistent credit know that we pay premium prices for everything we want, and most of the stuff we are allowed to buy is crap.  Most folks with credit would never consider spending the criminally ridiculous cost to"rent to own" furniture, appliances or vehicles from one of those joints or the "buy here, finance here" car lots, yet for those without credit, this is about the only viable option available to us.  Often the merchandise is substandard and the final cost, after all the "interest" is paid, would make a loan-shark green with envy. 

The life of the poor is hard, damned hard, and one of the biggest bummers is that most folks don't realize they're on the trajectory to abject poverty until its waaaayyyy too late to do anything about it.

By the time we members of the "hairnet and nametag" crowd figure out we should have stayed in school and gone to college, we're so locked into the "poverty-wheel" of working every available minute in order to keep our heads above water that we literally have no time left to try and learn a trade or obtain a degree from a college.

Many of us, having been out of school for years, sometimes decades, can't even imagine ourselves returning to school and are terrified at the prospect.   Frankly, most of us wouldn't know where to begin even if we could somehow manage to find the time - and the money - to take a class for a trade or a degree.

So we resign ourselves to the lives we're living and keep pushing pushing pushing ourselves into an early grave in order to keep a roof over our heads and enough food in our bellies to keep us from starving.  We keep our fingers crossed that we'll be one of the lucky ones who hit the poor man's retirement fund - the lottery - and pray to God, Allah, Shiva, Buddha, the Higher Power and anything else we think might help change our destiny.

Then one day, we get sick, or fall down and break a leg or arm, can't go to work, lose our job because there are ten thousand other unskilled laborers standing behind us to take our place and the employer can usually get them at a cheaper rate then they've been paying you.

In the blink of an eye, you're living under a bridge somewhere, hitting the soup kitchens in donated clothes and wondering what the hell happened to your life....

The saddest part of this is the fact that there are actually some who wish they were never even born into life because things have been so bad for them for so long, they don't recall - and frankly may never have had - a life worth living.

I know this existence well.  Not only have I lived it, I've been working with hundreds, thousands of folks who're living it now.

It's why I lay awake at night thinking I've wasted such a big portion of my life.  I wonder, during those late-night hours, whether I could have made a bigger difference in my life, the lives of my family members and of those I work with every day.   Would it have made a difference if I had gotten some direction, some guidance, some mentoring, some real help, back when I needed it the most; before I made decisions that forked me again and again down treacherous roads instead of jumping on the Easy-Street highway?

I'll never know the answer to that, but I do know that today, I understand the woulda, shoulda couldas in a way that allows me some peace.  This lived experience, while hard to cope with on a personal level, provides me with an opportunity to tell my brothers what I saw.

In the end, if I can do that and help just one other person along my life's path, I've found redemption from a life wasted....