When I filed for bankruptcy in December, 2006, I thought I was the only person in the world this was happening to. I really did. I went to court for my court date a couple of months later and I still felt alone. The waiting room was full of people of all races and all classes, but still I felt alone. My attorney, whom I’ve known for many years, was the only friendly face in the crowd. I was so thankful that I knew Kevin Judd before I went through the bankruptcy process or I really would have broken down and cried during my court appearance and I’m sure that wouldn’t have been too cool.
To everyone reading this book who is thinking about filing bankruptcy for whatever reason, please let me tell you something that I wish I had known…YOU ARE NOT ALONE. I know it seems so, but really, you aren’t.
This chapter has been extremely difficult for me to write because in order to fully touch on this subject of loneliness, and to really give my testimony, I have to go back to that place of emptiness and sadness in my mind. I don’t want to go back there, but I must in order to fully tell the story. Bear with me as I re-live what happened to me in February, 2007.
Initially I felt relief when I filed my bankruptcy papers. However, as the days and weeks went by, I actually started to feel funny and had trouble getting out of the bed. I can’t explain it, but it was almost like a delayed reaction to a traumatic event. I didn’t have any money coming in, I was unsuccessful in securing any new clients and my major client had completely stopped paying me. I was on the phone or emailing him day after day trying to get the money he owed me, but to no avail. Things got worse and worse.
I hit rock bottom in February of 2007. What people don’t realize is that filing the papers doesn’t make the bankruptcy process a done deal. You have to wait awhile to get a hearing and then you go to court to face your creditors (if they come). Even then, the court may deny your case. So, technically, just because I filed the papers in December to stop the sale of my home, I wasn’t really in bankruptcy yet. I was just in the beginning stages of the process.
During that time, I was near the end of my financial rope. I didn’t want people to know how bad things were, so I didn’t invite people over for awhile. I didn’t have any food to eat, nor did I have much gas in my car. I remember one time being so broke that my car sat parked for a week. I stayed home because I had so little gas that I was afraid if I left, I wouldn’t make it back. Now that is broke!
As I sat around looking at my situation that week, I was in a place of depression that had never come upon me before. Of course I had suffered other traumatic events, and I even struggled a lot going through my divorce, but this time was different than anything I had ever experienced. There were several life-changing events all coming at me at once and I couldn’t handle it. I didn’t feel I had any friends to talk to, the man I was dating at the time dumped me (then it was devastating, now I can see it was a blessing that he dumped me), I had no income coming in and I was barely scraping by, paying my bills from savings. In addition, my phone was still ringing off the hook with creditors because of an event I planned that lost money. Just because I filed personal bankruptcy, the business stuff was still swirling all around me and everyone wanted to get paid.
The morning that I decided I’d had enough, that I was ready to check out of this world and end it all, started off like any other day. I remember waking up and just lying in bed for several hours, going back over my life and reflecting on how I’d gotten to the place I was in. To go from being on top of the world, branching out on my own into the world of entrepreneurship, having a big launch party and inviting 100+ people over to celebrate with me, to just seven months later lying in bed trying to figure out if there was anything in my house I could scrape up to eat was disturbing to say the least.