Revisiting the Danger Zone | brokeGIRLrich
A cool thing about blogging for years is that sometimes I write about an idea I have and then over the years I get to confirm, “yes, this is definitely true. I didn’t imagine it.”
Today, that topic is The Danger Zone.
Like seven years ago now, I wrote a post about how whenever I go on vacation, there is a danger zone around it.
My brain preps for extra vacation spending, but in reality, that spending always bleeds into a few days before and after the trip too.
In those days, I was on a much stricter budget, so the extra $200 of spending or so in take-out before leaving or after getting back or in airport spending really made a difference when I could check my finances at the end of each month.
Side note: What even is airport spending? Why does money not seem real in an airport? This happens to me every time. EVERY. TIME. It doesn’t matter if I’m traveling for fun or for work. Suddenly I need to buy a magazine and some wildly overpriced snacks.
Welp.
During the months of February and March, I started thinking about The Danger Zone again in a slightly new light.
My schedule got real weird. For school I had to do a number of random workshops and lectures that often started between four and five AM. Then I would do six to nine hours of digital event producing and then I also stage managed a few things and tried to cram in some final hangouts with friends and family before moving.
School work got crammed in every space around those things, as well as sleep at real weird times.
People with kids, this is probably like nothing to you, but to me, it was a bit much. A pretty big reason (among many) that I don’t want kids is that I can’t not sleep. Some people get hangry, I get… slangry? Sleep deprived angry? Sluless? Sleep deprived useless?
Whatever. More power to the parents, but I just can’t do it.
And so much of life devolved into a danger zone. But I didn’t even realize it at first.
I didn’t even notice it in spending at first, I noticed it with fitness.
I did a real good job losing a bunch of pandemic weight since last May and just working to keep it off since October.
Then one morning, my jeans felt unpleasantly tight, and I hopped on the scale. To note a seven pound gain.
On the one hand, seven pounds is totally whatever. But as anyone who has recently lost a bunch of weight knows, sometimes it’s a major battle to get rid of seven pounds.
I hissed angrily at the scale.
Then I hissed angrily at me. Which in reality was pretty useless.
And then I paused and thought about how I barely made it to the gym anymore and I was largely eating take out and garbage and using food as a reward to keep moving each day.
All the lovely habits I’d thought I’d broken months ago.
And it felt a lot like trying to build up an emergency fund, using it for something less than an emergency, and then forlornly thinking about how I need to put more money back into the stupid thing now.
….not that I’ve ever done THAT.
In that moment, I thought of the danger zone and then thought, oh crap, what does my credit card balance look like right now too?
It was also not at its best.
Far from its worst (just like my weight), but definitely not trending in the right direction.
And I get that personal finance blogger Mel should be like, so I fixed it immediately! Self-control! Determination! Bootstrap, baby!
But I’ve got to level with you.
There was no energy in me to really fix it.
But I did have a think on it. I knew that by April, life would be a bit different. I would be doing meetings and workshops at the very reasonable time of nine or ten AM and working in the afternoons into the evenings.
I was pretty sure that moving to a new country was going to put quite the kibosh on my social life, so that would free up a lot of time. And I definitely couldn’t take any little stage management gigs or cram in extra little freelance things once across the pond, that I felt weirdly obligated to do while I was home.
Another side note: The quickest way to get offered a positively ridiculous quantity of gigs and work is to be in a situation where you don’t really want to take it. They will also all offer just enough money to make you sigh and try to start figuring out how you can cram it into your already overpacked schedule. #firstworldproblemsforsurebutstill
So I did sort of a cost/benefit analysis. I decided I needed to cut some of the random spending (if you’ve been following for a while, you know I sometimes have an issue with targeted Instagram ads and candles), but maybe spend a little more in the grocery store again on lazy, healthy foods like precut fruit and veggies.
I had reached an interesting point in my health journey before piling all this stress on where things didn’t need to be optimized. If it wasn’t the right flavor of popcorn, it was fine enough. I would cut the fruits and veggies. I started actually cooking dinners from scratch.
I needed to back that progress right up and go back to some ideas of healthier instead of healthiest and balancing.
I also needed to stop being on my own case about not going to the gym because I was barely sleeping and that actually mattered more. I am 100% team get enough sleep before worrying about anything else – because my 18-20 hours of awake days were also a large part of overeating sugary garbage problem too.
Essentially, I compromised. A lot. I decided the weight was staying and the goal was just to not gain more.
I sighed at my credit card balance over silly things but essentially decided it was fine, just stop buying random stuff for now.
I accepted that some seasons are just surviving, which is kind of lame after a season of thriving, but it could totally be worse too, so… lets just survive for now.
And sure enough, life has started to course correct, but I am more aware of the need to keep an eye out for danger zones and try to make concessions when they can’t be avoided.
