It’s been 4 years since my foreclosure. Six years since the process began. The emotional and physical overwhelm that I experienced has been tempered by time. I’ve forgotten what it’s like to be in the thick of it. It’s an emotional roller coaster of powerlessness, hope, and overwhelm. I was reminded of just how debilitating this can be by a friend who is currently embroiled in the process of trying to keep his house.
His days are spent compiling documents, filling out forms, making phone calls, and mailing and faxing reams of paperwork. He might get a break for a day or two, possibly a week, only to have to do it all over again because he’s received yet another phone call from his “support” person at Wells Fargo saying that he didn’t provide exactly what was needed, he didn’t do the right form, or that there is yet another step in the process of being able to keep his house.
Months into this process my friend’s support person left a message that said he was missing a very important document upon which the whole process hinged. If he didn’t get it to Wells Fargo within 45 minutes his application and all the months of paperwork he’d completed would be canceled or denied. Of course my friend didn’t get the message until the 45-minute window had expired. He had to start the whole process over again. When he asked if he could get a new Wells Fargo support person, he was told to contact a supervisor. He left several message, none of which have been returned. He is still working with the same guy.
My friend is not willing to give up. He’s owned his house for years, but the cost is weighing on him. It’s become more than a full time job of organizing, tracking, listing, and copying all of the phone calls and paperwork he exchanges so when the support person says, “I haven’t received anything from you for weeks,” he can pull out his fax record and say, “I sent a fax to you on this date, this date, this date and then again on this date, all within the last week.” Even so, he still just received three different mail correspondences all signed by the same support guy, all of which had confusing and contradictory information—one being a new application packet all together.
“I’ve been in many different situations in my life where I’ve felt powerless, but I don’t think I’ve ever been in a situation where the people I am working with are so heavily invested in my failure,” he said in a recent conversation.
“You have to be able to find power in this landscape of powerlessness, “ I told him. “It’s the only thing that saved me. If you don’t not only will your house be taken, but also all of your power.”
The root of the word debt is “to have away” or “to give away.” Just because we are in debt doesn’t mean we have to give all of ourselves away. Reclaiming power can be as simple as consciously choosing to step out of the crazy making, the fear and worry to take a walk. Bike rides became a regular part of my foreclosure process. They didn’t save me from losing my house, but they saved me from losing my mind. It may seem like the last thing that you have time to do, but exercising your conscious authority to not hand over all of your physical, mental, and emotional energy along with the pile of paperwork can open a small door of light, relief, and strength.
In the same conversation my friend told me that the night before, while doing dishes and listening to a baseball game on the radio, he’d found a moment of respite. For a few minutes he was free from the stress and worry of his housing situation and was simply enjoying being at home. Then the game was interrupted by a Wells Fargo commercial extoling their commitment to help people succeed, singing out the tagline “Together we’ll go far.” He jumped up, grabbed the radio and held it in the air. He suppressed his urge to smash it to pieces and instead set it back down (with some force) and changed the station until he was sure the commercial was over. It was another violation, another moment when his home was not his own.
While talking to me he decided that he would make a phone call to the radio station and write a letter to his team’s franchise and tell his story. “Perhaps if they heard what was happening to me, they might think more about what’s going on,” he said. Taking this action was a way to reclaim and hold on to his power. He knew that his phone call or letter would likely be dismissed or ignored, but the thought of doing it excited him and gave him an energy that he hadn’t felt in months. This was power. This was hope. It was also the power of connection.
No one can know what will come of such actions. It doesn’t matter. What matters is doing something that reminds us that power and hope live within us. Our house, our time, our job, our things can be taken away, but that doesn’t mean we have to hand all of ourselves over with them. Each situation, each moment however challenging, offers us a pathway to something deeper within ourselves, a pathway into possibility. It may not be rational or logical, but it contains an opening, a way through. This is power. Not the power of violence or rage, but the power to find our seat in the middle of a disempowering situation. This is also how we come home to our lives and ourselves as they are. In the process, we might just stumble into something that never occurred to us before, something that lifts us back up and into being alive and that being enough.