house or home?

A house is a structure of walls, a home is what lives inside those walls. I was looking for something special when I bought my house. I eventually wanted to turn it into a home with laughter inside of it and love growing in it each and every day. I had a long way to go considering that I had grown up in a home where the attitude was to persuade the people who entered that we were great people that had everything together. BUNK. My parents had a hard time allowing people to see the truth. They assumed that if people saw what we were struggling with then they would think poorly of us. We rarely remained friends with people for too long because we couldn't let anyone in. My parents hadn't cultivated a relationship where there was much in common other than remaining alive for the day and where those people chose to rest their heads after said day. The address was what made them victim to the same environment each and every day. I swore to myself I would not create such a place for me to rest at the end of each long day and call it a "HOME". MORE LIKE A HELL HOLE IF YOU ASK ME. There's nothing worse than being a victim to a place where no one believes in the power of working things out. I started out with just one kitty cat in my new place so there wasn't an abundance of life running around, and since I didn't have much furniture there wasn't much to piss on & destroy while I was at work. My cat hadn't been neutered and was still able to mark his territory. He didn't like it too much that I wasn't home much. Little did he know that was my life from here on out. As a stylist there's never much time at home at all. You're always meeting the need of someone else above your own. I am an extreme people person and desire to make people feel good and most importantly feel like they can open up and talk any thing through. It's special to do someone's hair and all the while talk life and work it through to another level of intimacy in the community. But....when I came home there was something that I wanted. Something I wanted to discover, to be a part of and maybe that was family, maybe it was that I really needed a roommate or even that I needed to be able to be home without any expectation of my own about what it should be or feel like. The minute you get in your head that you need something money is bound to be spent, maybe not in large lump sums, but spent. I wasn't strong enough to fight the urge to walk around the local Walmart at the other end of town, after work late at night and gather up whatever I thought I needed to make things work at home for me. I started to rack up debt on my credit card that I had and soon it became my go to piece to swipe out of my purse to cover the needs I had. I was always aware just how much I was putting on credit and every time I used it, it hurt inside where no one else could see. It never kept me from using it. I can remember buying shoes for the gym on it and swiping the $165 for the white Nike shocks that I thought I so needed to be cool and uber workouty at my gym later that week. I ended up paying 7 times what I paid for them originally when it was all said and done 5 years later when I wanted to pay my credit card off and never again own one. Yes, you saw it correctly. In a total of 5 years I had managed to rack up debt that had accumulated to $10,000 at 30% interest each pay period. The interest kept growing as the total had not been added to. I was racking up debt to the tune of $250 a month. Some people don't pay that for a car payment. I was sunk. Or it felt like it. I was putting things on my credit card that I did not need to survive yet I continued to purchase them anyway. This is the time in my life that I wish I had saved that money and just learned to understand not all feelings needed to be acted on, rather I should have tried to fill that void with giving back instead of finding more trouble for myself. I began to feel connected to the spending, as if it was a part of me. I needed to go back into counseling to figure out what exactly was my issue with my choices. I naturally paid cash for my counseling visits and asked her what could make a girl like me, that was so head strong, struggle to make the right choices when I could see the outcome so clearly in my head??? I wanted the rational side of things to be stronger than the emotional side of things. I wanted to act in a way that allowed me to be in control of my choices. I wanted to behave in a way where men and money were not my go to. I would eventually beat the battle of the debt and men but it wouldn't be for a few more years. I would learn in the end to control my spending and to not act on every urge I had just because my age was telling me I had interest to buy things. I value now not purchasing everything I see or pick up. At the time it was par for the course to learn my behavior was coming from a side of me that had not been mentored or developed to see all the choices and all the consequences. I am grateful for the hardships I was going through because they have made me the women I am today. I just wish I would have been able to discover her before the consequence of $1500 payments a month on my debt became my reality......