I was asked to take a picture of the most expensive thing I own. What is the most expensive thing I own?

My apartment? No, I rent. My car? No, even though I got a reasonably priced used car, I am years of loan payments away from owning that. My laptop? No, I had to take out a loan to buy that, too. My bike? Maybe, but I didn’t buy it: After three years of biking frustration, my boyfriend bought it for me because my cheap, heavy, beater of a bike made it impossible for us to ride well or far. My cell phone? Yes, I think my cell phone is the most expensive thing I own.

I’d never thought of it that way before. It certainly makes me value my cell phone a bit more. It also makes the rest of my material life feel a bit more tenuous, like the performance of a novice tightrope walker — a little too much financial wobble, and down I go. I think that most of my adult life has been spent hanging onto the “tightrope” of financial stability by one hand.

I have had my moments of “free fall,” and can say without hesitation that I have been unable to make important purchases because of debt. At 23, I couldn’t afford rent and groceries month to month, let alone utilities or anything extra. At 24, I was unable to pay all of my bills all of the time, and typically ended each month short by twenty to a hundred dollars. As I near 26, I hoped that this would be my first year of solvent and self-sufficient living. But that was before I took on the loan I mentioned in my first post. Now I’m not sure when that’s going to happen. Maybe in the next year or two or three? If I get a raise? And if I find a highly paying summer job? Maybe.

I am by no means optimistic about paying off all of my debt. By the time I finish grad school next year, the net sum will be right around $90,000. To lay it all out there, this breaks down into: $16,000 in undergrad loans; $6,000 in auto loans; $1,000 in private educational loans to replace my laptop for work/grad school; nearly $16,000 from the family member’s fraudulent loan; $50,000 in graduate loans; and $1,000 in credit card debt.

The undergrad loans are about $10,000 below the national average and the graduate loans will be about $15,000 above. The graduate loans, though, are also funding two professional trainings that I’m doing as part of my program of study. Because I am participating in these trainings rather than courses directly through Lesley, I may be able to receive reimbursement from my university (the school’s decision on that is TBA).

Because I am still in school, I am not yet paying off — but, rather, in the process of accruing — the graduate loans. I have thought about whether or not a graduate degree is worth this new debt. I have ultimately concluded that, in education, the range of positions and salary ranges available to me is very limited without a Master’s. In the same way that people say “pink is the new black,” I think that the Master’s is almost the new Bachelor’s — the new baseline of education desired by employer’s in a very competitive job market.

The laptop loan was unavoidable, as I need a laptop to be able to produce large amounts of written work, in multiple locations, for both my teaching and my studies. The car loan was the only loan I could get through the only dealer (of the twelve I looked at) willing to work with my trashed credit score, courtesy of the unpaid and fraudulent family member’s loan.

The credit card debt is the accumulation of three years of resigned, “I’m short x-number of dollars this month” grocery purchases, usually made a day or two before my next paycheck, but a day or two after I’d run out of food. “X” was usually an infuriatingly small number, sometimes as low as six dollars, that made me feel as though no matter how carefully I budgeted in a spreadsheet, something would always come up to ensure I was in the red.

When you can’t afford groceries, the idea of savings is almost a non sequitur. I did have a small savings account when I graduated from college, but I ate through that within a few months. With so much debt, not savings but simple month-to-month solvency and self-sufficiency become the aim. It’s been over three years since I’ve managed to “save” anything. Having started in the middle of a financial storm, it seems impossible to shore up that recommended six-to-nine-month financial cushion for “rainy days.”

So, do I believe that I will eventually have enough savings and money to fund the lifestyle I imagined for myself? Not for at least another ten or fifteen years. In the meantime, the idea of being able to make a down-deposit on a house — something I would have otherwise wanted to do in the next five years or so — seems like little more than fantasy. For now, I put so much into debt repayment and monthly bills that I can’t save enough to pay first, last, and security on a rental. That being said, I’m not sure that “being able to afford the lifestyle that I would like to have” is a realistic aim. I’ve more less ruled out “lifestyle” in favor of more immediate goals: month-to-month solvency, financial self-sufficiency, and debt reduction. “Lifestyle” comes later.

But I don’t think that an emphasis on “being able to afford the lifestyle that I would like to have” is the most productive way of framing my thoughts about all of this. I want to conclude on a slightly different note this week:

I’ve been mulling over the title of this project, “Generation Stuck”.

I’m not sure how comfortable I am with labeling myself “stuck”. On the one hand, I do feel trapped by a catch-22 in our current educational system: I am limited by my undergrad debt on the one hand, but am compelled on the other hand by the need for the incursion of further graduate debt in order to progress professionally and financially in the long-term. The cartoon below sums up my thoughts about this system:

That being said, even in the areas in which I do feel “stuck,” I also feel confident that I’ve been doing all that I can to ameliorate the situation. And there are many ways in which I don’t feel “stuck.” I am, compared to most of the people I graduated from college with, comparatively settled and established. I’m in a long-term, very healthy relationship with someone older and more financially established, who is generous enough to take care of some of those “lifestyle” concerns that I otherwise have to neglect.

And, while my current salary still leaves things very tight at the end of each month — more the fault of my debt than the salary — I do have a decently paying job that I love.

I think, then, that the issue is not so much that I’m “stuck.” The issue is, rather, that I’m uncertain: about my finances month-to-month; about when, if ever, I’ll be debt free; about my ability to contribute financially to my relationship; about my ability to buy a home; about my ability to eventually provide for and raise children; and about my ability to eventually retire or support myself through old age.

Which isn’t comfortable, but isn’t exactly the end of the world either. Things could be a lot worse.

On an intuitive level, Macalaster was the only school that didn’t feel “wrong” in terms of overall fit. Academically, Mac was rigorous and had strong programs in my areas of interest. Financially, Mac had a 100 percent need-met policy. Culturally, Mac was small but incredibly diverse. Geographically, Mac was as far as I could get from home.

In that last sense, my college experience probably saved my life. Going to school halfway across the country from my self-destructive family — away from the open aggression and silent tension of my parents’ failed marriage, and away from the harrowing ups and downs of growing up with a parent with an un-diagnosed personality disorder — let me, for the first time, live as if I wasn’t walking on eggshells.

Macalester became a safe space for trial and error as I bumbled through the messy process of learning how to live without trauma. My college years became, as they become for many, an incubation period of rapid growth and development. In that sense, my college education is one of the best investments I have ever made.

I’m so intellectually driven that I think I would have gone mad without some sort of further study after high school. As proof: I ended up double-majoring in International Studies and English, and double-minoring in Hispanic Studies and Human Rights and Humanitarianism. Along the way, I found my sense of political consciousness and some of the few, close friends I’ve actively maintained contact with in the busy years post-graduation.

Now, a little over three years after graduation, I am happier and healthier than I have ever been.

So, if I look at my life holistically, I wouldn’t do anything differently.

But, from a strictly financial perspective, I wouldn’t necessarily advise others to do the same.

If you haven’t already gotten a Bachelor’s degree, I would consider trade school. Mostly because I feel that if you have already gone so far as to get a Bachelor’s, a graduate degree is more or less required to succeed in finding meaningful, financially viable employment.

Now, when I was in school, Mac cost less than it does today: closer to $40,000 than $50,000. And the 100 percent need-met policy with regard to financial aid — which continues to this day — meant that it was actually cheaper for me to attend Macalester than it would have been for me to attend one of the many local schools in Virginia, which had no such policy. In other words, the net sum of the debt I willingly and knowingly took on during my undergrad career was actually substantially less than the national average.

That said, it’s still more than I can comfortably handle given my current cost of living, salary, etc.

If I could do it all again, I suppose there is one thing I would change: I would have waited to take the GRE, which turned out just to be a lot of money spent on a test that my graduate school never even asked for the results of.

I do think that getting my graduate degree will increase the range of opportunities and salary levels available in my current career. I also believe that it will open doors to other career paths.

Depending on the path I end up taking or staying on, getting my particular degree may be a horrible decision in the long-run financially. On the other hand, it may also be the key to better financial health.

It is, in the meantime, more than “worth it” to me. I am glad that I didn’t go straight into grad school after college. I wouldn’t have ended up in the field I’m in now, where I find that being simultaneously grounded in a personal practice, professional practice, and academic study has lent an incredible sense of integrity and unity to my life.

I used to say that I wanted to be: a wildlife conservationist; a PR officer for a human rights focused non-profit; maybe even an interior designer or event planner. The one thing I was adamant about never wanting to do: teaching.

If I had followed my dreams and intuitions as a 14-year-old girl, I would have continued dancing pre-professionally and likely joined a major modern company such as Paul Taylor or Alvin Ailey. When I lost that vision, I think I also lost any firm expectations for career paths.

Since then, I’ve been an intellectual wanderer, creating my own path as I’ve gone. My reluctance to pigeon-hole myself meant that I double majored and double-minored in college, and that I’ve since gone on to design my own Master’s degree. Now, if you ask me what I want “to do,” I want to do something that challenges me to learn and grow, while allowing me to use the knowledge and skills that I have to make a direct, human impact.

So, I teach.

I am relatively comfortably employed. In the social realm of the American 20-something — where most of the people I know are un- or under-employed, and many of those who do have jobs are working in fields they never cared to dream of — it is unpopular, even unkind and impolite, to be openly comfortable in one’s employment.

But I live in an in-between realm, where most of the friends I see on a regular basis are in their 30s, and most of the people I work with are in their 40s, 50s, or 60s. In 30-world, people are settling down, getting married, having babies, and buying first homes. In 40/50/60-world, people have grown children, grandchildren, paid-off mortgages, gardens, cancer, and all the other attendants of increasing age.

Meanwhile, as a 20-something, I am still somewhat itinerant, living paycheck-to-paycheck, and not sure I’ll ever be able to buy my own home or retire. Which means that I ultimately feel somewhat like a field anthropologist in both the social and work realms of my own life.

For the first 15 months after college, I was either un- or under-employed. After the first few months of a fervent job search, I stopped telling friends and family what jobs I was applying for. It got too depressing to keep telling people that “I didn’t get the job” that I had been hoping for, and it got too embarrassing to keep telling people that I couldn’t get any job, even for something as simple as scooping ice cream at the local Emack and Bolio’s.

I eventually ended up working part-time as a sales associate at an Ann Taylor store, where I learned that I would rather fold sweaters than wait tables. After quickly working my way into a low-level management role, I also gained more transferable work skills than I anticipated.

Finally, nine months after graduation, I got an email from an old supervisor: a mentor and friend, the director of a school, had an opening in their English department. Was I still looking? If so, I had just 48 hours before the application deadline. I dropped everything, applied, and after two interviews, one on Skype and one on-site, had a job contract by the end of the next week. I then had to wait another six months before the school year — and, therefore, the position and real paychecks — began.

In the end, the vast bulk of my income during that first year out of school came from the same summer job I’d had throughout most of my college career.

Today, three years after graduation, I’m still working in the only position I could find.

That being said, I don’t feel overqualified for my current job. Undercompensated given my educational debt, sure; but not overqualified. I work at a nationally ranked and internationally recognized high school. I have a Bachelor’s degree in the subject I teach, and I had a few years of summer teaching experience under my belt when I started full- time. But I had also, until very recently, never formally studied education.

Honestly, the worst thing about the job is the location: Cape Cod.

Yup, I said it: I don’t like living on Cape Cod. Let me be clear: the Cape is a beautiful place. I understand why you might want to retire or spend your summers here.

But the Cape is a very difficult place to call home if you are between the ages of, say, 18 and 40. Especially if you are, say: unmarried; without children; politically liberal, interested in rock climbing and Latin dance as your main forms of exercise; not interested in shopping, TV, or tanning; and generally a fan of cultural diversity.

If you know of anyone else on the Cape that fits this profile, please send them my way.

In the meantime, don’t get me started about the winters, when most of the restaurants shut down and even the nice weather disappears. Within two months of moving to the Cape, I got so desperate to have something else alive to interact with that I adopted two shelter cats.

Now I compromise by living in Plymouth, the mid-way point geographically and socially between the Cape and Cambridge/Somerville, which still feels more like home to me than anywhere else I’ve ever lived. Sadly, this move also feels like a compromise of my own health and morals, since I now spend the equivalent of a full workday each week doing nothing but sitting and spewing emissions into the atmosphere.

So, why haven’t I left?

The obvious: I need the job, I need the money, the Boston teacher market is oversaturated, and I’m in a committed relationship that keeps me from playing the international teaching card.

The not so obvious: I have a steady job with a stable salary doing rewarding work that I actively enjoy. I work every day with an incredibly supportive administration, some gifted colleagues, and inspiring students. Can I really look a gift horse like that in the mouth?

The question of whether or not I want to leave this particular field is a whole ‘nother monster.

I do feel that I can advance in this field. In fact, I feel that I am advancing already. I’ve recently taken on a low-level administrative role; I’ve helped develop and facilitate some faculty training; I’m involved in multiple special committees — all of which has helped me hone conveniently transferable skills, but which has also enabled me to focus my work on areas of personal interest, talent, and growth.

That being said, I really don’t want a Master’s in teaching English 8-12. It feels too small, too specialized, which seems risky in this shifting global economy. It’s also risky, though, to not get a degree that I’d need if I wanted to maintain my state teaching license. But, I’ve gone out on a limb and decided to pursue a self-designed Master’s of Education in Mindful Education. On the one hand, I’ve stuck myself in a very small niche; on the other hand, that niche is pretty much universally transferable and a nearly ideal intersection of my interests and experience.

So, moving forward, I suppose I am actively working to shift myself into a field that is in the process of inventing itself, with no clear-cut career path.

I feel strangely optimistic about it. My current school has been very supportive of my endeavors, and has — in the name of increasing students’ sense of overall health and well-being — embraced a pilot of a grant-funded program of an established mindfulness curriculum. Meanwhile, at both national and international levels, mindfulness in education is gaining increasing credence in scientific and policy-making communities.

So I think I’ll be alright. And I guess that, by “doing what I want anyway,” regardless of the current economic situation, I’m pursuing the American Dream more than I realized.

I have no idea what that will look like five or ten years from now. Fifty years from now, retirement seems out of the question. But maybe if I can just keep working at things I enjoy doing, it won’t matter so much?

In any event, between all of my work and grad school commitments, I’m working the equivalent of two full-time jobs right now, so: “Heigh-ho, heigh-ho, it’s off to work I go…”

Actually, I looked up the lyrics of the famous Disney tune to confirm the spelling.

The real lyrics: “Heigh-ho, heigh-ho, it’s home from work I go…”

It’s funny which version we’ve chosen to emphasize, no?

When I started my undergrad career in 2005, Macalester was ranked as one of the best liberal arts schools in the nation. When I graduated in 2009, I didn’t personally know a single classmate who had a job right out of college. Today, many of the people I know — myself included — are still working jobs they took two or three years ago because it was all they could find.

On the whole, my financial status that first year out of school, when I was either un- or under-employed, can be summed up by the monthly shamefaced begging of my parents for “one last time … I hope.” It was exhausting for everyone.

My lack of full-time employment had other, unexpected consequences.

Not having health care for a year was particularly fun. I couldn’t go to the doctor for medicine when I thought I had strep throat; later, I couldn’t go to the emergency room when my finger got crushed by a door at work. The one thing that was better was the birth control: Planned Parenthood’s sliding scale meant that I could get birth control that I could afford — ten dollars a pack instead of the fifty dollars a pack I spent under my employer’s insurance until recent legislation made it FREE.

Today, I still don’t know how, if ever, I’m going to be debt free. I’m nearly 26 — entering the years in which I’m mostly likely to buy a house, have children, etc. — and I’m already up to my ears in debt. I put so much into debt repayment each month that I have to take on new loans to pay for things that I could otherwise save up for to purchase out of pocket, like a replacement for my broken laptop or soon-to-die phone.

I also have very mixed feelings about the fact that Massachusetts has a mandatory 11 percent retirement contribution for teachers. I’ll be grateful in forty or fifty years but, for now, there’s a lot I could be doing with that money, like reducing the contribution to 5 or 6 percent and using the difference to pay off my debts.

I’ll admit, though, that I’m lucky. My partner is six years older and established in the still comparatively lucrative tech world, so he makes enough that together we can live pretty well. That being said, there are still distinct differences in how we feel and think about money. He says, “It’s just $100.” I see an overhanging cloud of debt and think, “That’s more than one week’s worth of groceries.” At the end of the day, without his help, I wouldn’t be able to do anything other than pay my bills month to month. With his help, we get to eat out or go to the movies now and then — probably more than we (or at least I) should.

Things have been complicated most recently by the discovery that a family member forged my signature on a $15,000 educational loan. I suppose they assumed they could take out the loan to cover hidden educational/home costs while I was in school and then take care of the repayment quietly. But this family member is really bad with money. I had no idea the loan existed until I started getting calls to collect because the loan was in default. Then, because it was the only way to clear my credit report of the fraudulent loan information, I had to decide whether or not to file a police report against my family member.

I finally made a decision a few weeks ago: instead of risking putting a family member in prison for up to 30 years — and against the advice of the six lawyers and just as many financial experts that I consulted in an attempt to find some way out of this — I am swallowing an additional $15,000 in loans. The trouble is that I don’t have that kind of money month-to-month, nor, on a teacher’s salary, do I see that being a possibility anytime soon. In the meantime, the defaulted loan has trashed my otherwise clean credit score to the extent that, a few months ago, I couldn’t even get a $1,000 loan to buy a laptop for work/grad school.

I also just started graduate school.

We were told we’d get jobs if we went to college, so we put ourselves in debt to go to college. Now we’re told we’ll get jobs — or ones that maybe pay enough or more — if we go to grad school, so we put ourselves in even more debt to go through grad school. Where and when, if ever, does it end? Is there another path or cycle we could be on? If so, why didn’t anyone tell me?

It’s literally my job to prepare high school students for college. But sometimes I wonder if the high school-only graduates or the college drop-outs were/are smarter — if they knew/know something I didn’t/don’t.