saying good-bye to my '09 corolla

how the car i've had since high school left a mark on me

Four months ago, I started a new full-time job for the state of California; a path I never thought to choose. After a year and a half of quitting my job at a coffee shop (which I held for five years) and jumping into entrepreneurship, I hit a wall. I ran my savings dry and had to pick up work where I could. As money troubles weighed on me, I started feeling like I couldn't engage in what I was doing without this nagging fear that I might end up compromising my ethics. I didn’t like the feeling of having to depend on something I was building to keep me afloat. I felt compromised. So to keep getting by, I applied to hourly jobs I felt could be a quick fix to my financial struggles. I started and quit three of them within less than three months of being there. And eventually, I fell back into a cycle of survival—oscillating from having weekly panic attacks to undergoing moments of deep depression—up until I realized that I refused to stay on this hamster wheel.

I sold my ‘09 Corolla last month. This was huge for me.