For a couple of days, I was walking around filled to the limit with confidence and hope. Finally, I am willing to admit to myself what I've wanted all along. I want to join the Peace Corps. In the past few days, I've been making plans to do volunteering to beef up my experience in health and ESL, emailing a PC recruiter, filling out paperwork, and generally being quite productive in life. My confidence has been further bolstered by my weight loss, which was driven by my relatively recent ethics-based vegetarianism. I'm rightly proud that I've stuck to my guns on that issue for almost two months, and as a result I've reduced both my cognitive dissonance and my waistline.
HOWEVER: enter my financial picture. I wish wholeheartedly that an important concept had occurred to me many years ago, so that I would not be in the mess that I am in right now: Debt enslaves you to a life that you may not want, often as a low wage employee to a company you can't stand. I'm facing the prospect of leaving a part time job I enjoy for a full time job that I know could be a miserable grind that makes me hate myself every day I get up and go to it. Here's the problem: college has me thousands of dollars in credit card and educational debt. The educational debt can be paid through income based repayment and can be deferred easily for Peace Corps service. However, the credit card debt cannot.
I am faced with a decision of remaining enslaved to two big banks and being unable to do Peace Corps service for years because I'd be unable to pay toward my debts while volunteering, or I can choose indentured servitude for a year and get myself together BEFORE I work toward what I really want to do. I need to knock down a few barriers first. It seems to me that I must swallow my pride, bite the bullet, and apply for the one job I've said since childhood that I would not do.
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