Free

Today, 16 months after I began work as a corporate lawyer, I paid off the last of my law school loans.

Over $80,000 I owed my law school and the U.S. government are now off my books. I am in the black.

I'm early. I originally planned for this to take 2 years. 104 weeks. 730 days. (It actually took 490.) It helped that I came here, to Hong Kong, with an expat package that's looking more and more obscene as the days pass and the global economy goes from bad to worse. It helped that I went through hell and high water to find a subletter for my apartment. It helped that I don't have a taste for expensive clothes or accessories. It helped that my grandmother gave me a graduation present of enough cash so that I had a rainy day cushion already.

There's a line from an Eliot poem that I only know because in college, BC had it printed out and stuck on her wall: "But our beginnings never know our ends!" The beginning of this race to pay off my law school loans could never have guessed all the twists and turns of the course, the most twisty and turned of them occurring in the last four months, what with the economic meltdown, the U.S. election, my and my brother's moves across the world, my aunt's Alzheimers and subsequent institutionalization. (If the list of those events sounds haphazard and incongruent, it's because they are that way in my mind.)

The beginning could also not have known the extent to which I did not hate my job, or the strange way in which Hong Kong expat life worked in tandem with my repressed response to my aunt's dementia to suddenly free me. I've been good for a long time. Cautious and careful and responsible -- a good girl. But life doesn't reward you for being cautious and careful and responsible, for being a good girl. It doesn't reward you at all. It just is. It's up to you and me to find our own rewards, and our own joys, and never more so than in the tough times.

So, just as the world economy starts disappearing into the toilet, just as the Middle East goes haywire yet again, just as my firm starts laying off people in New York and other cities, just as my aunt's brain began to melt down, just as my aunt and uncle's hopes and dreams of a quiet and joyful retirement are irrevocably and utterly dashed -- at the same time as all that, I find that I'm having the time of my life here. In the past four months, I have acted and sung and danced and drunk and flirted and hiked -- sometimes all in the same night! -- far more than I did in the past four years. I feel awake. Free.

So, as Mrs. Esq very wisely asked me 470 days ago: Now what?