What It Means to Be a Grownup—Part 3
The moment I faced and accepted the consequences of a huge mistake
Oh boy. This is a story of shame, desperation, rationalization, and, surprisingly, social validation — even as what I did was entirely wrong.
It wasn’t that long ago. I-paid-my-debt-in-August-2020 kind of “not that long ago.”
I was exhausted at the time. Frustrated because my client/boss wasn’t helping me in the way I needed him to. For whatever reason, these clients had deemed me solely responsible for “editing” (aka rewriting) several hundred horribly-written articles by an author they’d stopped working with.
There was a miscommunication of expectations between us. To me, they were a client. One I hadn’t known how to establish proper boundaries with. To them, I was an employee, but a contractor. Basically, they were gaming the system by hiring contractors, while maintaining traditional corporate hierarchy.
The thing was, they couldn’t demand I work any amount of hours, so I treated them as I did any client; I worked on my own time, as much or as little as I felt like that week. I also pursued more work in other places, juggling various clients and projects to keep myself engaged with my job. They kept asking me to give them more time and focus, but contractual stipulations didn’t allow them to speak on it more directly — they’d signed my freedom into existence by hiring me as a “contractor.”
Clearly, this was a disaster in the making, and only hindsight is able to teach me that.
The devolution began at my missed period. Almost six weeks after my one and only experience taking Plan B, I was still waiting for it. I’d also booked more work and gotten paid more money that month than any month before. I was overwhelmed, stressed, and anxious enough that I fudged some articles I claimed I’d worked on that month.
I hated the writing my client/boss kept handing me. I kept asking for help, but never set any firm boundaries around my rates or my needs. We had a big issue in communication, and the stress of my life at that moment tipped me over the edge of rationality.
When my cycle started up again, two and a half months after taking the morning after pill, I fell apart. I wanted to be pregnant and at the time, there was a definite edge of desperation to it.
My falling apart came with the loss of motivation to do anything. I wasn’t taking care of myself, I wasn’t socializing, I’d somehow decided that it was the right time to start a business with a partner who fought me on charging rates that I could live off of, and I spent hours in back-and-forth debates about that with her. I exhausted myself with my choices and non-action, burned a few old client bridges I had just begun building, and stopped doing any work for the client/boss altogether.
I still sent them a bill at the end of the month, though. Three times, I sent them a bill for work done to the effect of several thousand dollars each, the third bill coming out to a sum almost double my average monthly invoice to them since I began working.
You see, I wanted to get caught, whether I was completely aware of it at the time or not.
I hated what I was doing. Invoicing for work I hadn’t done was highly problematic to me, but I was desperate; I’d just moved in with my partner, who had signed up for an equal division of the financial burden, and our house was expensive enough that I needed to continue to bring some kind of income in, even as I was completely falling apart.
Of course, the client/boss contacted me and asked for the detailed proof of the work I’d done that justified sending them as high an invoice as I had that month.
I completely fell apart when I needed to face the reality of my actions. My client/boss was surprisingly kind about it, and after I calmed down enough to begin owning up to my actions, we agreed on a reimbursement plan.
It took me much longer than we’d initially agreed to, but I paid them back in full for the services not rendered but charged for.
My partner almost left me when he found out what I’d done and how deep in the hole I was at the time, but he also saw my effort to make my wrongs right again, and he helped me face the reality of my bad choices all the more clearly.
The thing is, when I would share this story with friends, they all understood why I did it. The justification of my decisions made sense to them; I was dealing with heartbreak, a mental breakdown, financial stress like I’d never experienced before, and a client/boss who didn’t really acknowledge or respect my work as an editor except that it was good enough to make a bad writer’s content much, much better.
The other thing is, there’s no justification for what I did. I embezzled a client, let’s be honest. I did something wrong. Had I chosen to send them another, cheaper invoice than the one I did, I probably wouldn’t have gotten caught and could have walked away from this whole situation scot-free. But that’s not who I am, and that’s not aligned with my moral compass. So instead, I unconsciously chose to shoot myself in the foot in order to begin paying the price of my immoral decision.
I addressed, faced, and accepted the consequences of a really, really bad decision I made, even if it was made out of self-preservation with “valid” reasons. There is no real validity if it’s out of moral alignment with myself.
That was an important lesson I needed to learn in order to grow up just a little bit more.
